221–230 of 350 posts
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Spotify is a prime example of an amazing service (yet still no FLAC equivalent) offering with a highly developed customer base ruined by the love of money.
Spotify loves money so much it has yet to show a profit in almost 20 years.
But executives loving money is a separate issue from whether the company is profitable or not.
Daniel Ek takes no salary but has filed to sell €165M in stock so far in 2024.
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Spotify is a prime example of an amazing service (yet still no FLAC equivalent) offering with a highly developed customer base ruined by the love of money.
Spotify loves money so much it has yet to show a profit in almost 20 years.
Amazon did the same for a long time. It’s a fine strategy if your investors don’t need the immediate returns.
Napster may have started the file sharing revolution. But the exciting part for me was Gnutella and later Bittorrent, peer-to-peer technology in general, and the realization that we could use technology to liberate ourselves. Needless to say, I was young and naïve. That spirit is long dead, and the only remnants are crypto currencies and the community around them, which has tossed all lofty ideals in favor of blind g…
I still don't think the dream of techno-liberation is dead. Rather the naive bits were thinking the sea change would happen so quickly, and thinking that the same old type of vectoralist hucksters wouldn't seek to corrupt our new systems. In actuality our systems need to be designed with the perspective of all possible gatekeepers as attackers. For example take the End to End principle - it's not sufficient to merely tell the network to not meddle with your communications, those communications must be cryptographically protected to avoid any temptation. Otherwise as you commit an increasing amount of value to your use of the network, it merely becomes a question of when the network operators will eventually try to take advantage of you to extract some of that value.
The big issue these days is there is so much capital funding "startups" that are essentially centralized crud apps running that same pump-and-dump arbitrage playbook. They buy lots of advertising and other mindshare (cf "It is difficult to get a man to understand something...") and generally use up most of the air in the room.
Best part of Napster was searching for that one song you were interested in, and then looking through all of that user's shared files. It was an amazing discovery mechanism which I missed dearly with all the subsequent P2P apps. Spotify now fills this void, but it's not quite the same.
Definitely enjoy browsing a user's shares, and even occasionally checking what's been downloaded from me. Soulseek goes strong https://nicotine-plus.org/
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already, Disney has been censoring past episodes not even based on today's sensibilities but it seems purely based on keywords. there's an episode of the suite life of zach and cody where zach pretends to have dyslexia in order to get extra time in his exams, and near the end of the episode he gets busted and they have a thoughtful conversation about how it's unfair and hurts the people who need the extra time, and h…
Disney is only slightly better about nuking old “offensive” content than other providers. Many times they just gave an unskippable “this is culturally offensive to some” text and call it good. For example the old lady and the tramp has that “we are Siamese” song, which I guess is offensive… at least they still let you watch it. Hulu on the other hand just pulls shit. For example they pulled my favorite it’s always su…
Something I found fascinating about Napster at the time is that it was fiercely difficult to use... but it didn't matter, because what it gave people (access to ANY music) was so desirable that they would learn how to use it.
I also wonder which year it stopped being an acceptable Christmas present to give someone a burned CD.
Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”. I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun. Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an ar…
I remember burning CD's full of 1 minute songs that never completed because someone was always calling our house line, disrupting the internet connection (and there were no resumable downloads). Good times ;)
By the p2p era (which napster was) they absolutely needed to do resumable downloads because a peer could suddenly go offline.
Before that I remember getting mp3s from ftp and irc fserves... Ftp definitely had resume, though not all clients and servers did it.
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What's the argument for file sharing ruining music? I would think more the opposite, that it improved distribution and discovery for lesser-known artists, and so helped diversify music.
Every musician I know says this. Back in the day, you could actually make money selling records, which led to a flourishing of music. New hopefuls would work their butts off, playing gigs and selling small-print-run CDs to make ends meet while they waited and hoped for a major label to give them their big break. And they really had a shot at a big break, too. Then file sharing happened, and if you were any good your…
Musicians at no point have made a majority of their money from album sales. To make any money off an album most bands need to sell tens of thousands of records. Most records never sell anywhere close to that number.
Record labels are basically loan companies. They sign a band on a contract for X number of albums. The royalties of those albums is then divided up among the label, the song writer(s), often the engineers and producers, and then the actual performers on the recording. A majority of the royalties are kept by the labels with the rest divided up among everyone else.
For signing this contract the artist is often given an advance. The label will also front money for studio time, recordings, and promotional work. Most of that fronted money the artist owes to the label so they start in arrears. When an album is purchased the label keeps the artist's royalties until their advance and other "recoupables" are paid back. It's only then an artist actually makes money off their album sales. The only ones that even begin to see money from album sales are ones that manage many tens of thousands of sales. Most artists never sell enough albums to pay back their advance.
Amortized over time an advance for a record for most artists is pretty paltry. In order to make a living with music they need to tour or luck out with a licensing deal.
The money for artists has always been in touring. They get a cut of ticket sales and keep their profit made off selling merch. But like with everything else it's the megastar acts that make most of the money. Many artists make barely above minimum wage on tour.
Music piracy has not really changed the calculus at all. Most musicians barely get by playing music. The megastar acts have always been exceedingly rare.
Napster helped motivate and justify all sorts of nasty DRM and legislation, which has adverse implications for more than just piracy. And at the time of the MP3 frenzy, there were a relatively small number of people saying, "Wait, won't this mean a backlash of adversarial laws and technology that make things bad for everyone?" But that was ignored by the masses of newly-arrived Internet users wanting to take stuff fo…
You're being naive if you think we wouldn't have those laws if not for Napster. If not that pretext it would be another. Floppy disks and flash drives could have been it.
To this day, if you can find a place to buy a cassette tape or blank CD, you will have to pay a tax (bundled into the price) which goes straight to the record industry as "compensation" to offset the presumed loss of revenue due to unauthorized music sharing.
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Steve Jobs was able to use their fear to sign up most publishers on itunes.
And sell outrageously priced MP3 players. There’s no way people were stocking those things with music they paid for.
Like the best Apple designs, the iPod redefined its product category. And it put Apple back on track for ARM-based mobile devices.
> There’s no way people were stocking those things with music they paid for
Indeed. But you could also rip physical CDs, and the iTunes store managed to sell a lot of 99 cent song downloads, as it was legal, easier than messing with file sharing, and cheaper than buying a whole CD just for a single song.
Arguably the music industry messed up greatly by not making CD singles cheap and ubiquitous (and solving issues with 3" CDs in slot-loading car players, etc.)