Now, do we need CD’s? No. I feel that all new releases can be paid for, and downloaded online. The artwork, lyrics, and liner notes can also accompany this download, and be printed out when, and if, we choose. To add to this, the label itself has a webpage devoted to each of its artists. So if we were inclined, we could go online, check out the latest news, see photos, tour dates, and, best of all, meet up with other fans. What could be better?
I remember, in those crazy '80s, I was one of two punks in my high school. Yes, I took a couple beatings for such music choices, but they were all in good fun. Now, characters of every deviant persuasion can find peers to discuss their individuality with online. And, with it, discuss the new music they have discovered. Yes, they still may take a beating, but, at least now, they can share their tribulations with others instead of balling it up into a black hole of hate, like I did.
So, why are record companies still so insistent on physical media? I don’t know. What I do know is that they are holding on to this idea like a pit-bull on a rubber tire swing. Sony BMG tried to implement controls over this leeching, but we all know what happened there. And, I am sure other companies will try to keep secret their attempts to plug the dyke. Their results are still to be seen.
I can see the writing on the wall. It may be in black, streaky spray paint, but the message is clear: technology will always triumph over control. BitTorrent is here, for how long we don’t know. But when it dies, someone like Bram Cohen will be there with yet another way to steal. Accept it.
What the record companies have to do is rely on the capitalist notion that for every technological breakthrough, there is someone out there who knows how to turn it into a profit.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - sonicrystal
As an audiophile and genuine apreciator of all musics, I have to say that I do enjoy having the physically manifest form of music recording. I agree that the music industry can't stamp out music sharing, but why see it as a threat? If the battle plan is maximum profit at the customers expense, then no innovation can really happen, can it? Here's an idea: lower the cost of CD's! Cut advertising costs by digitizing, let corporate radio disband and go back to diverse and individual radio stations. Companies can save millions if they aren't paying to have their songs played on top 40's and instead broadcasting their own top 40 for free online. Remember before Reagan when media companies couldn't monopolize the airwaves? That worked pretty fewkin' good and kept radio an interesting form of social output. Corporations need to go punk and do it themselves. As you say Stoddart, companies should take advantage of this new technology and use it to broadcast their own advertising. With the money they save, they could lower the cost of physical media and be competitive with file sharing businesses, as well as repopularize the idea by making it affordable instead of elite.
2 - T
sonicrystal, I agree with you, and the point of payola squashing. It's funny how radio stations get so much for playing music, well, how they used to get so much. But maybe now, after the crackdowns maybe the industry will even out, but I doubt it.
3 - Mat Brewster
Nice write up. I'd say more but I've currently got two bittorrents going...
4 - The Dude
Great article, I applaud it. It's technilogical law, every time they try and block something or prevent the masses from doing something, there will always be an way around or through it.
5 - T
Dude, thanks. I agree that technology will always find a way. People are insistant that when they find a problem like music controls, they will find a way around it. I love it.
The reality is, good music will always find fans, and crap music, no matter how hard the push, will be judged for what it is.
6 - Bliffle
When I discovered the "House" TV show I caught up on previous episodes with BitTorrent. Several TV shows are available on BT, such as "Law and Order".
7 - T
Bliffle, there are millions of files! Movie, music, TV whatever you want....not that I would know...heheheh
8 - bliffle
Theres a hell of alot more than just that. tv shows are nothing compared to what you can get.
9 - OSX
BitTorrent is great for "popular" file sharing. Good luck finding more obscure titles. You probably would have had a hard time finding those punk tracks had it been around when you were in high school. But you would have been able to download Michael Jackson like lightning! Of course, as you stated, it is still illegal for downloading copyrighted materal.
Should BitTorrent gain ground and implementation with iTunes or whoever so full quality files van be delivered, I'm all for it. Passing off these low quality MP4,AAC and MP3 files for a buck or two is ridiculous. They all have DRM anyway so where are the full quality audio and video files? C'mon it's 2006!
Until legal downloads (through BitTorrent or somewhere else) deliver high quality (meaning HD or DVD video and AIFF audio files) I will continue to buy my content on physical media. Better quality and no DRM is better in my book.
10 - Dave
It's odd that the media companies are losing money. It can't be that they keep trying to sell us the same thing over and over, like "When a Stranger Calls." And they want to keep the price very high. $9.00 is just a bit too much to pay for a remake of a movie that wasn't that good in the first place. Granted sometimes movies come out that are new, e.g. Hoodwinked, and turn out to be good.
I find that the expense of iTunes is prohibitive too. $1.00 per song. Sounds reasonable? It's the same cost as a regular CD so I see no incentive there. If there were a per minute charge, you'd be paying a legimate amount for music that covers all types of music from 1 minute sound clips to 30 minute symphony movements.
As long as it's perceived that the media companies are making "too much" money, people are going to borrow it from whoever has it, like the library.
11 - Rick
The RIAA has finally changed their stance. They no longer think they can shut down every service or user. Not only that public backlash is finally getting to them and they're starting to lose rights they had before, such as just automatically getting someone's name when they want it. Too many old ladies who can barely move a mouse getting prosecuted I guess.
The RIAA is now moving to "We need to prosecute in order to give pay services a chance." By all rights, that's an effective thought process and it's working as pay services are doing fairly well.
Hopefully they've learned that if they do happen to kill a service that they can track, someone will just make something that works just as well and is harder to track. Darknets are already taking off. Newsgroups are back in fashion. There's more to the RIAA's lack of success than just Bit Torrent.
12 - Roomba
I still like to have somthing for my money. If I buy it I need it to sit in my hands. If I never have the original copy, well the hard drive crashes, the lap top gets stolen etc. I'm out of every thing I have spent my money on and would have to start all over again.
13 - bobbob
You certainly have a firm grap of the obvious.
14 - Tom
I love music. It gets me through the day and into the night.
Now that my teenage years are gone, I started to realize what kind of crap I was listening to. Now I started listening to more ambient, classical, all sorts of international music like turkish, greek, etc.
I *love* buying CDs. I love having a collection of music that I physically own. It's like a hobby.
The problem however is that I like mixing multiple songs together. Even the best band don't have *perfect* albums.
Anyway, before I go off topic all I can say is this:
1. Mainstream music in the U.S.A. is HORRIBLE (skeet skeet? my hump? what the fuck?) and is geared towards kids under the age of 18 that listen to the music for personal "image" or to define themselves rather than for the true love of the music.
2. There is a niche to be filled and the music industry refuses to fill it because they are afraid of change.
The fact of the matter is that if the music industry moves from the old style CDs, people will start losing money :)
Sure the corporations will still make the big bucks but think about all of the corporate heads and the manufacturers that they are "friends" with will go out of business or get fired?
They're going to need a whole new branch of the company that will deal with online sales and publishing and they will need to cut corners elsewhere.
So in turn what ends up happening is that these people that *know* they will get fired if everything goes digital start fueling the fire by bullshiting the corprorate heads (who know nothing of the digital world or computers) that making it work would be impossible.
At some point, the old corporate suits will die or retire and new people will take charge that won't be so easily fooled.
As soon as that happens, goodbye CDs and hello huge multi-million dollar online music systems.
I garauntee that they will setup a centralized database of all songs (sort of as big as wiki is now).
It'll all happen.. but only in due time.
As far as BT is concerned, it's not anonymous and can easily be tracked. Anonymity on the net is impossible if you live in the USA (which is the place they truly care about) so as time goes on they will improve their systems and possibly make deals with ISPs.
The goal of ISPs is to drive business and get more customers. They know that a big selling point right is that people are all telling their friends tthat they can download Old Dirty Bastard and his Gangsta West Side Thug Dawgs from torrentspy.com or the latest episode of family guy.
As soon as a large portion of the US population is on broadband, the ISPs will be quick to make a deal with the music industry and the systems for catching internet pirates will be much more automated.
As the system improve, they will enstate some policies that will say things like "if you are caught pirating stuff, you are never allowed to have broadband for 5 years" or some crap like that.
Anyway the point is... enjoy all this stuff while its new. It'll all become regulated soon like every other thing in this country (drugs, tapes, radio, tv, hotbox [free cable hacking], etc etc etc etc)
15 - Tom
oh and the belief that technology conquers all is absolutely infantile..
technology conquers nothing.. the government ALWAYS conquers technology.
most of the people that do all the shit talking are the ones that know nothing how internet works internally. they just think 'it is what it is'.
the fact is that everything has to end somewhere and when all things are said and done.... the internet in the united states is controlled by the government.
the corporations give the most money so that government officials will have more meetings with them and really "listen" to their concerns...
and since the government is always controlled by the people that sponsor it get into power you can say that the internet in the united states is REALLY controlled by the corporations. it just takes time for them to get some influence.. which is what they're doing.
you people are forgetting that they haven't even really came after bittorrent yet. they went after the P2P apps due to their popularity and look what happened -- they completely stomped the entire P2P community into nothingness.
once they go after BT it'll be even easier because they don't need to go through so much red tape with a company log files (fasttrack network logs, grokster network logs, etc) -- they can go straight after the users because their IP addresses are there for the taking.
in fact, there's nothing stopping these guys from giving 10,000 bucks to some guy running a BT tracker and have him give up the log files.
since BT is open source, there could be 15 year old kids running these sites for all we know.
anyway so i wouldnt get all that excited about the whole "technology will overcome" bullshit. no one is doing anything except talking about it... the days have changed. no longer do the true hackers exist... now its just script kiddies who think DDoS attacks are something spectacular.
16 - JAFFA
You've been DUGG! =)
17 - BVP
Well Tom, I think you are wrong. The P2P community is ANYTHING but dead. Many networks have been closed down, but there will ALWAYS be something to replace it. When napster went down, the next wave of P2P just washed over its remains, and music sharing was back! We had KaZaA, Grokster, WinMX and more... Fari enough, some of these got shut down, but more efficient and better mediums for file transfer came along. Now we have limewire, EDonkey(and its variants), Ares Galaxy and of course.. Bittorrent.
There will always be people like Bram Cohen who will drive the community of hackers, crackers and computer enthusiasts to develop new, innovative and efficient ways of sharing files.
Despite the rise of the script kiddy, who do you think writes those scripts in the first place? As long as there are computers, there will be people who use them in innovative and new ways, the true definition of a hacker.
Digg for this article too!
18 - ambush
the artist is not really losing a lot of money form illegal file transfers
they make more money by doing live shows
they cant pirate live music.can they?
if only there was some technology that could give me a live metallica show in my bedroom
it will all be fine if people started listening to real music
not those commercial crap that th eindustry is shoving down the throat of customers
19 - Guppusmaximus
Tom,
That's the reason why "they" want to go digital to have more control over the medium and people will have less "Ownership". Ofcourse there will always be ways of hacking any system...that's inevitable. Large companies always have to play the game to stay afloat but I think you guys are missing a rather large piece of the puzzle.
Fidelity will always play a substanial part because musicians and audiophiles always want a better sounding medium and as much as Ogg Vorbis is a "Lossless" encoding process it still doesn't account for the DVD audio or SACD product that exsists. As much as people want "Digital" they are still trying to get back to an Analog sound without the generational loss.
20 - Guppusmaximus
Oh...and P2P didn't get squashed by any formal authority...It's getting squashed because people don't necessarily want to share. They install these programs(Like Bearshare)so they can download not upload...So less and less material is becoming available. Bit Torrent takes alot of your computers' resources and like most people you have to let it run overnight to get a file. Which isn't horrible but if you already spent the money on a kickass system then you probably already own 3/4 of the stuff these people have available to download, plus,you still have to find the torrents that are being "Seeded" which can be a pain in the ass unless you like the popular sh!t that alot people like these days. In the case of music it's almost impossible to find alot of good stuff(in my opinion)
21 - T
Guppus, i agree. Government does not have control over technology. In fact, they are still struggling to implement laws that were needed ten years ago.
Tom, I have no doubt big business has a vested interest in controlling what happens to intellectual property, but they can't stop joe blow in his basement from cracking the code. They will always be playing catch-up no matter what.
Crap, even internet businesses, who thrive on knowing the latest, are sometimes caught off guard by the latest open source inventions.
I think that serious audiophiles are interested in the clean analog days of old. And, in time, they will have their wish.
22 - Paul
BitTorrent isn't illegal. There are many legal uses for BitTorrent. Downloading lost 1 year before it's UK release of course is not legal but hell if these TV people can't get it to us here in the UK fast enough then they lose out!
23 - T
Paul, I like your moxy. If they didn't want to lose money they would have these distribution systems worked out. I say, smoke 'em if you got 'em.
24 - void
boycot,thats what i did.i havent baught a cd or movie since 98,and i couldnt be happier.let em sue me-whats $15,000 ive downloaded that in video editing software-not like id show up for court any way.
what we need(lissen up crazies) is someone to go on a killing spree and blame it on the riaa/mpaa-than maby the gov would say the riaa/mpaa are a danger to the children
25 - T
Funny enough Void, I think so few people know who the riaa are and would probably buy into the idea.
As for your grand theft, I say, throw a dormant trojan on your machine and blame it on some script kiddie who had control of your machine without your knowledge....and puppy dog eyes wouldn't hurt.