Oh please, dont be so extreme. Most people don't have the time to sit there
looking for every latest and greatest release on soulseek; people who spend
a lot of time buy a shitload as well, much more then an average consumer. I
can spend a week every night obsessively downloading everything from
soulseek for hours, (I go through these phases) and still I buy stuff I
couldnt find or want more of or is on a certain label i like.
There aren't that many anal fucks who go buy CD's and actually take the time
to rip them and return them, and we all have a ton of music we have
purchased with one or no good tracks that lays there in the dust.
Something seems vaguely familiar... hasnt a discussion like this already
occurred not too long ago? We go in cycles, yes we do. :)
quoted 123 lines From: Muffin <muffin@signmytits.com>
>From: Muffin <muffin@signmytits.com>
>To: IDM <idm@hyperreal.org>
>Subject: Re: [idm] Life after SoulSeek
>Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2003 13:45:57 +0000
>
>Double edged sword innit. If labels believed that people weren't going to
>rip off their music if they put it up as MP3s then they would. [well, the
>numerous independent labels I work with would]. Unfortunately that's not
>the
>case. MP3=piracy is a stigma which exists and which concerns a lot of
>labels
>and artists.
>
>This is niche music we are talking about, not Pop. We should be trying to
>encourage it to behave in a better way, rather than getting caught up in
>the
>politics of major labels. Fuck thinking that way.
>
>When you buy a CD, rip it, and return it it costs the label money. Ever
>think of that? Most record stores don't re-stock them [if they are of a
>decent calibre] instead it is returned to the label and disposed of. After
>a
>certain number of returns [allowed for faulty goods] they are no longer
>written of, and so the label has paid for manufacturing and distribution on
>an item it's not made any money on.
>
>I'm all for previewing of music [I've done a lot of work with labels
>encouraging it] but if a label [such as Warp or Ninja Tune] provides 2
>minutes of RealAudio of 1/3 of the tracks on their releases then why do you
>need to get MP3 versions to 'preview' it?
>
>Encourage the labels to provide previews in a more accessible format. Then,
>if you are honest, you don't need soulseek for 'previews'.
>
>I know I'm going over old ground, but all that happens with MP3 trading is
>that you piss off the people who are genuinely trying to get new,
>interesting music out into the world. There is always going to be a balance
>between those who feel they can give away what they produce, and those who
>want to make money with it. If you have a problem with this why do you
>think
>it is fair to take control of their decisions into your own hands.
>
>How do I hear new music : I listen to Radio, go and hang out in shops, go
>to
>clubs and ask DJ's what tracks are, and have friends into the same music.
>It
>works pretty well for me as I'm not a totally compulsive record buyer any
>more. It seems like there are a lot of kleptomaniacs on this list.
>
>I know the argument that the album format is dead, and I concur. I don't
>like spending ?14 on a CD which has 4 tracks I want on it. But I make a
>value judgement and think "Hell, not everything I do is perfect, but I
>still
>get paid for it". Are all of you 100% grade students or something? If those
>4 tracks are 90% good, and the other 6 are 40% good that gives me an
>average
>of [fuck, maths, ugh (90*4 + 40*6)/10] 60% good. Which is a pass in most
>books.
>
>I mean, what gives you the right to think that you 'deserve' music. As BOC
>said "Music has the right to children". Children can only be brought up
>with
>the right nurturing environment. Spoil a child and it grows up greedy [like
>the major labels], but don't give it enough and it won't achieve anything.
>There is balance in between.
>
>And no, I'm not a proponent of Copyright, or the pricing policies that
>record labels have. I believe in the creative commons [
>http://www.creativecommons.org for those who don't know about it, check out
>the flash animation, it's really nice and enlightening ]. I'm about to try
>releasing my own software works in a new form, which should enable a lot of
>the things to happen that I want.
>
>I'm actively trying to change the way it works, for small independent
>labels
>because I know how hard it can be for them to survive. These are
>marketplaces where 100 sales make a big difference, and where manufacturing
>limited runs is only practical because of cashflow, because the major
>players have been on the playing field for a long time and they've mashed
>it
>up so it's all uneven and slippy for the smaller labels to get used to
>playing on it. All that things like soulseek are doing is making the divide
>bigger, and making it harder for new small labels to survive.
>
>I mean, who's going to contemplate giving their lives to promoting new
>interesting music if they can't afford to eat?
>
>I'd like to look upon soulseek as the new radio, something where people do
>use it to find out about new music and then go off and buy those releases,
>but experience has shown that record sales for the labels that soulseek
>tries to support have gone down. There are many many many reasons for this,
>and P2P software may make an easy target, but to say it has not effect is
>stupid. It has an effect, and we can't tell accurately what that is. What
>is
>assured is that none of the money that is contributed by people for the
>software makes it back to the artists who produce the majority of the music
>downloaded on it. Is this fair?
>
>If you are tech savy enough to know how to rip audio and stuff maybe we can
>all do this ourselves. Maybe we should each approach a record label we know
>and say "Hey, if you give me your CD's I will encode the first 2 minutes of
>half of the tracks an put them up on a web page for you, so people can
>preview them, and direct them towards you for sales." It wouldn't take much
>of your time, and you'd get the CD's in exchange for doing something for
>the
>label.
>
>Fuck it, I'll even build a CMS to manage the upload of this audio if you
>enough of you can get on board. I've got half of it in place already. A web
>orientated contributed musical resource for the promotion of new music.
>That's what soulseek should be about, but because it doesn't involve the
>labels actively it's not favoured. It can then be P2P'd across servers on
>the internet to provide a resource, but kept out of people pockets so the
>labels don't think of it as 'giving away' there music.
>
>There's an angle in this somewhere.
>
>Troll over. Not that I want a fight.
>
>
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