An Argument Against WGET for MP3 Consumption
Published July 13, 2004
A lot of people are going loopy over this method for downloading mp3s that Jeffrey Veen posted. Basically it's a command line protocol that will allow you to download all of the mp3s a website links without having to actually go to the website manually.
So you point this sucker at randomMP3blog.com and it looks at all the links and downloads all the .mp3 files in one quick swoop. You can even program it to go to 30 CDs every day, scrape the songs, and catalog them on your computer.
Okay, that's sort of cool. Kinda. But I think it totally misses the point of all the sites who are taking the time to actually find these mp3s. The people running these blogs take a lot of time out to write about the songs, catalog them, and sometimes even host them on their own sites. By doing this, you're just blindly downloading everything without knowing the back story.
If that's the case, why don't you just load up a P2P program and download everything you can find? It serves the same purpose. Save the bandwidth for people who actually want the mp3s.
Or take it one step further. Create a program that automatically buys everything someone links to from Amazon.com. You can have your credit card and shipping information automatically in your account for quick ordering!!!
- An Argument Against WGET for MP3 Consumption
- Published: July 13, 2004
- Type:
- Section: Music
- Writer: Robert Duffy
- Robert Duffy's BC Writer page
- Robert Duffy's personal site
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I suspect that purveyors of MP3Blogs will soon block WGET and similar command-line tools via .htaccess rules. As soon as they see their bandwidth bills and lack of commensurate AdSense revenue, for example.
The overwhelming majority of musicians out there are not signed with music labels and quite frankly don't care about people ripping off their songs. (They do entertain hopes of getting signed, in which case they expect to take these songs off the Net).
Webjay is another site that plays mp3's and lets you create playlists. Another product is irate radio.
If Amazon let unsigned musicians have free home pages, let artists upload songs, then people would go to these home pages anyway (for lyrics, tour dates, photos).
What amazon should do: Amazon's honor system lets people put tipjars on their sites. For the free mp3's downloads on amazon, they should put tipjars on the download page, giving the artists an opportunity to receive a donation and amazon.com to get a cut. As long as people can deduce where the band's home page will be (by looking at the URL, googling, etc), then it potentially could be a source of profit.
Robert, the question isn't whether musicians object, it is whether the creators of MP3Blogs object. The creator of a blog gets no recognition if a song is downloaded, only if someone visits the site. Users of WGET and similar tools are clearly not visiting the site.
OK. An artist records a song and releases it into the cloud. A blogger picks it up and posts it. The blogger is acting as a distributor for the music, presumably this is very rarely an explicit agreement between the artist and blogger and is never so between blogger and the person downloading the music. I don't see how anyone can expect any particular behavior out of any of these participants.
In other words, given the small amount of added value the blogger provides, I don't think we'll find much sympathy for their plight - not having their words reads, not having their links followed to generate ad revenue, etc. If you do this because you love to write and share your thoughts then you accept that many, if not most people, won't bother to actually reading a word you've written.
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(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/17422)
The amazon thing, that's actually a good idea.