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After reading your piece I took a ride over to my local record store and I began to think about why I was on my way to actually spend money on music. To alot of folks it may not make sense in this day and age, but I think it does...to a point. It comes down to the fact that I don't want to spend money to find new music!. Out of the 4 disks I purchased today, I had found all 4 of them online via FREE music that they offered. Not only did they let me download it, but they also let me take it, walk away from my computer with it, share it with my friends, and enjoy it where ever I am. That is how you make great fans. Not by embedding a flash player into you website or by offering 30 second song samples. Fans buy music. I don't buy music to listen to something that has already been made and paid for. I buy music (an go to live shows) so a band can continue to make music that I can listen to. Like I said, great fans buy music and without FREE music both artists and music lovers like myseld are losing out on finding each other.
Thanks for the great year,
raff
Thanks for the comments - obviously I agree with you. Have a great 2006!
now if only we could get those music storage sites that techcrunch was talking about, and I could have access to all my music at home and work.
Yep, I'd heard about the supposed duplicate content ban, that's why I wrote this: "And of course there are rumors that Google penalizes sites which contain duplicate content, but I can’t find any evidence to support this (do I get penalized when Bloglines reproduces my blog?)".
Like I say, I'm getting a lot of conflicting viewpoints on how the duplicate content ban actually works - a lot of people already sydicate their content (I syndicate mine to a few blog networks, for instance), but it's possible that Google identifies splogs differently, and drags down the ranking of both sites. However, as with most issues concerning Pagerank, nobody wants to tell me exactly how it works.
I've also heard recently that Google penalizes crosslinking if it's on the same IP address. Surely this would mean that every blog network (with heavy crosslinking between blogs) should be getting penalized.
I recognize that people need to make money when they produce content or otherwise they can't keep producing it or it's not good quality because of the lack of resources, but there has to be some kind of middle ground for consumers to make a choice about how they want to support the content producers.
Since it's currently hard to keep your ads bundled with your content (downloading an mp3 podcast for instance), the producers are having to come up with creative ways to force their subscribers to consume ads. For example, in podcasts, incorporating the ad into the podcast script itself. I'd rather just pay a dime and get it ad-free.
I'm not saying I know how to implement something that would be workable, I'm just saying that I'd like the option and hopefully someone else will figure out how to make it work. It would be worth it to me in many cases to just pay a micropayment (equivalent to what the content provider would get from ad revenue) so that I can have "pure" content.
I know that "micropayment" systems have been tried and failed before but I don't know why they fail, and maybe the same obstacles aren't there anymore and they should be revisited... Or maybe it's just that you can't have payments without DRM? There has to be a solution.
Just one more angle to think about.
Lindsay: Hmmm....micropayments. I dunno - I hear a lot of people saying that micropayments should work as the processing fees get smaller, but I still don't buy it. For content marketplaces (ie. where you're licensing photos or videos to be used elsewhere), then they will work. But charging for access to media (in the way that the newspapers have tried to do) just means that it becomes inaccessible to lots of people. Why would I reference an article on my blog if my readers have to pay to look at it? Short answer is, I probably wouldn't.
Yep - monetizing podcasts is a tough problem, and one that I've been thinking about a lot. Seriously - this issue keeps me up at night. You can insert ads into podcasts ala Fruitcast, but the problem is that they can only measure downloads, since MP3 doesn't support tracking. However, I spoke to the guy who runs Fruitcast (the discussion is somewhere on my blog comments) and he says they have ways to prevent abuse (like downloading your own podcast repeatedly to earn more $$$). The other slight problem with podcast advertising is that making a podcast ad isn't as easy as typing an Adwords ad - you need someone with a good voice and decent equipment to record the ad. This means that it's hard to cater to the long tail of advertisers in the podcasting space. I also wonder whether there will ever be an ad-supported way to pay for music downloads (perhaps similar to the fruitcast model?). Right now, the best route for struggling musicians seems to be live gigs and selling merchandise.
As for product placement with podcasts, I think it will happen. It would be cool to create some kind of service that goes between podcasters and PR agencies to find a good match, but I can't imagine how that will happen. On the This Week in Tech podcast they did a nice parody where they spoke about how they just LOVE Diet Coke and HATE Pepsi, but I wonder if it will start out that advertisers offer free products and services so long as you mention them in your podcast. I dunno - the problem with blending content and ads is that you lose your credibility with the audience - it would be like a blogger getting paid for a good review. If the blogger/podcaster gets paid regardless of whether the review is good or bad then it's a bit less objectionable, but there's still something questionable about it.
I'm also interested in inserting ads in video, ala Revver.
UPDATE: The "Fruitcast Guy" I mentioned is James Archer - his comment about beating fraudulent downloads is here. Here's a short extract:
http://bassistwanted.com/strips/all/2005/11/01/
(That's the first in the series.)
1. Flow of money should happen the same way as it happens with the free to air television channels, they charge their advertisers and make the content available for no cost, several organizations like http://www.google.com (a search engine) already did this.
2. There's another class of information as offered by organizations like http://www.wikipedia.com (a free encyclopedia) which is lready free and relies on donations.
3. Another class of information the targetted offering by earning indirectly in collaboration with the industry giants like http://www.voxov.com (a child safe search engine), in such cases same service of bigger organizations is customized to suit the requirement of a given segment and if offered under an alliance with the parent organization.
4. Lastly organizations like http://www.blog.com are the ones that provide resources to other individuals and small organizations to create content and host it on their infrastructure and make money via advertisements, but the actual content writer is relieved from the botheration of paying for such resources.
...
Priya
There are, however, two problems that I see. The first is that in a transitional state (the one in which we all currently find ourselves), consumers need to be educated as to why simply stealing content is detrimental to both them and their culture. We'll never know, for example, how many unsigned bands of perhaps U2's caliber simply gave up their dreams in this brutish, selfish environment. As Richard Epstein has so eloquently argued in his response to Lawrence Lessig's essay on the MIT Technology Review website, creativity should be rewarded for the benefit of the culture.
Second, there's a coming problem that I've been considering for a number of years: the interchangeability of tangibility. It's the reason I posted my entry last year showing how I could rip 3D data from a videostream, take it into CAD and prep it for fabrication. So while words, music and movies are currently on everyone's mind (I actually have an in-progress blog entry titled "The Intangible Mindset"), there is the issue of pirating real products that looms on the technological horizon. As a product designer, that puts me - and many blue collar laborers who help bring my designs to life - in the same boat as anyone else who creates; from musicians to software programmers. Not today. Maybe not even very soon. But some day.
I provided an example similar to this in an email to Bruce Sterling some time back that might clarify what I'm suggesting (I think it was this example):
Imagine the near future. I'm a toy maker with a rapid-manufacturing system (aka "fabber") and I'm looking for new products to fab and sell. I don't have my own designs and I don't want to pay for any, so I play an online MMORPG that's streaming to my PC. I see something I think would sell so I rip the 3D data from the stream, which - using today's methodologies - would likely be a low-rez 3D mesh. It's not sufficiently detailed like what I see on the screen, but that's no problem. I search my cache for the 2D normal map image (or similar) that the game engine uses to visually enhance the low-quality mesh. The normal map, having been generated by a much higher-quality model of production quality, can then be used in reverse to create an entirely new model from the captured low-rez data (typically a command like "Edit>Convert>Use Displacement Map"). The result is that I now have a high-rez 3D model (much like the original) which I can further manipulate for fabrication and sale.
Who does this screw? Well, if that happened today, it'd be the game developer who gets the shaft. But if virtual worlds continue down the path of Linden Lab's Second Life, where users create the content, it might be some average guy working as a janitor to feed his family and staying up all night designing these things and dreaming of a better life for himself and his family... just like his musician friends.
And of course this goes beyond simple toys. Someday someone out there will laser scan their prize gun and post the 3D data on the net. Of course it might be easier to simply check the cache of a service bureau's rapid-prototyping system for those files.
Yep - I've been reading your blog for a long time now and I have to agree on the huge (huge!) problems we'll face with piracy of physical objects in the future. I've no idea how the microchunking philosophy could guard against it (it seems like it couldn't). I expect there will be a big open source movement in the design of 3D objects, but there will also be commercial ventures. I can't see how you could embed an ad (or a similar monetization method) into a physical object - instead, we'll end up with some kind of DRM. And no doubt the DRM will only work with certain brands of 3D printer, or limit how many times you can print a design.
The printing (and copying) of weapons is even more worrying - clearly every new technology brings with it not only opportunities, but a whole new set of problems.
This has been tried several times with significant success, though in modified forms. Stephen King released a novel this way, but required payments as a percentage of downloads. He promised to complete the novel if he met targets for the first two chapters; predictably, donations fell off dramatically once he was committed to finishing either way, but he netted $500,000 anyway, for a novel that in the end he neglected to finish after all. A less broken incentive structure may have netted more.
Either way, the experiment proves that many people are willing to kick in cash to ensure the production of art they want, even though it's legal for them to freeload.
For lesser-known artists, it can be even better...the basic idea, for this and for less-formal donation models, is that existing files function as advertisements for future work. An artist without a large fan base makes little or no money from CD sales under the current model, and is at the mercy of record-label marketing budgets with limited distribution. Under Street Performer, the artist may not make more money at first, but will have a better chance of gaining a fan base that can provide real support.
If we can listen to music for free on the radio, why should we pay to listen to it whenever we want?
I can go on the internet and listen to music for free, however if I want to put it on a CD I am required to pay a fee.
We live in a time in which electronics play a big part of our everyday lives. CD players are being replaced with I pods, and CD’s are not as popular anymore. Instead people prefer to download music on to their computers and arrange their music by choice. A person is required to pay with a credit card to be able to download a song. To legally own a credit card a person must be at least 18 years of age. Therefore if a person is under the age of 18 they cannot pay to download music. Charging to download music discriminates against underage listeners.
Celebrities are rich why should the average American pay to make the rich richer? Performers should make their money by entertaining. I know that singers work for their money just as everyone else works for a living. The only difference is that entertainers get rich with popularity, and the average American doesn’t. Celebrities shouldn’t be penalized for being rich, but they shouldn’t make money for their music to go from the internet to a CD when the listener bought a CD from a store and took his or her time to download. When CD’s are sold in the store what is sold with the CD is the presentation of it and the authenticity. If people don’t care about that, they should be able to download and listen to it for free. Celebrities make enough money with concerts and merchandise.
To me music is used to attract the listener to enjoy an artist and go see them perform and support that artist by buying their merchandise. It is similar to a business card or a business pen. Business cards cost money to make but is free to the public. It serves as advertisement for people to pay for their service. Similarly a song is played on the radio for people to listen for free so that they can be interested in listening to it live. If they like the music the person will want to see the performer.