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NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs

mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com

51–60 of 95 posts

Re: NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs

#51
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but songs are 99c on iTunes? Is it reasonable to expect a 20 year old intern to drop almost $11,000 on songs? It would seem being a music lover is an expensive hobby.

Is it reasonable that she has actually listened to all of those songs? That's about 733 hours of music. Assuming she listened 2 hours a day and never repeated a song, she'd be listening for over a year before she heard all of those songs. And you know she has Modest Mouse and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on repeat. This girl is a thief, plain and simple. It's like walking into a Starbucks and just stealing coffee. The margina…

By your analogy, then, if I bought a cup of Starbucks coffee and proceeded to give it to someone else that person is a thief?

Re: NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs

#52
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my issues with this line of thought. For one, why is 99c considered "reasonable" for a song? I feel as though this price point has little to do with the economics of the song-making business and a lot to do with the economics of iTunes/etc. Secondly, what is "convenient"? Why is iTunes downloading convenient, but watching GoT on HBO's online service not? I'm not saying they are equal, I think iTunes is easier,…

At least in the western world, $0.70-$1.29 for permanent, non-drm ownership of a track is within the norms of what people have been willing to pay for the last 60 years for music, inflation adjusted. I consider that historical precedent to suggest that those prices are "reasonable." Itunes (or Amazon) downloading is convenient because I can download almost _any song I can conceive of_ in 30 seconds. I've tried purcha…

Is the notion of copyrights obviously the default moral position?

I think attribution rights probably are. The grant and transfer of long term distribution rights is less clear.

Re: NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs

#53
post #41
post #7

Oh, boy, these threads are going to be a whole bucket of fun. 200-odd commenters competing to see who can most stridently express opposition to the copyright/royalty/license business model of mainstream music, and 5 of us getting yelled at for suggesting that maybe private businesses should be able to pick their own business models, even if they're completely idiotic, and that everyone has the right to simply not buy…

Oh yes, I should be able to pick my own business model! What fun. I know: I'll just pay old investors with new investors' money. That may be completely idiotic, but it works. After all, nobody has to invest in my venture! There's always some risk in any investment, so it's only fair. Now, I'm definitely being too glib. But I think you are as well: it's a complicated issue, and simplifying it down to your view while b…

The problem with your message isn't that it's glib; it's that it isn't logical. "Just pay old investors with new investors" isn't a business model (it is, obviously, the definition of a Ponzi Scheme). "Pay a licensing fee for XXX" is.

Re: NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs

#54
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "the market" when the new channel is based on ignoring contacts and copyrights, any more than it's "the market" that would be acting if I went to my local library, scanned all the books, and then resold them at "Bookio.com".

I'm no economist, but AFAIK market forces are defined by the way people buy/sell goods. Your analogy fails to draw a parallel since you have only one side, the seller. Also, you're talking about reselling here, where the main debate is the sharing of music. However I fail to realize where you deny this is "the market". Consumers are making their demands known by pursuing alternative ways of obtaining a good. Seems pr…

I'm not sure how this responds to my comment, since reselling books I scan from the library seems perfectly analogous to the market you propose.

Re: NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs

#55
post #37

Let's say that a musician goes $50k in debt making an album. They are now given a choice: would you rather be listened to by 50 million people and get no immediate money, or by 10k people and be quickly made whole? Which do you suppose they'd choose? The fact is that celebrity, attention, and "coolness" are more than enough reward for most aspiring musicians. Anyone who gets famous by giving their art away has been m…

Unless the band you create is called Sparklehorse, and you're considered an indie-musician's indie-musician, and you collaborate with PJ Harvey and Tom Waits and Danger Mouse and James Mercer, and tour with Radiohead, and end up destitute living out of your old recording studio too in hock to hospitals to pay for mental health care and then shoot yourself in the chest.

On the plus side: now you're extra famous.

Re: NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While adaptation might be necessary, to say debating this topic can't change the future is inaccurate. I have this debate with plenty of people, and I know at least a few who have changed their behavior as a result. Educating people about the consequences of their actions is important, even when it seems like it has little impact.

I'm not discouraging debate. I'm simply saying that arguing morality will fail to sway market forces, and the fact that record labels believe in the exact opposite is foolish, and bordering on ignorant. The record labels can stand on the side of "good" until they go bankrupt. Pyrrhic victories do nothing for the bottom line.

Oh, I see what you're saying. You're saying "right and wrong don't matter, what matters is what you can get away with". In other words, "might makes right".

Well then! In that case, I have very much chosen the wrong business model. Perhaps I should reconsider. A better business model might be: NO UPFRONT FEES FOR SQL INJECTION VULNERABILITIES! Woohoo! In fact, no upfront anything! We'll just go ahead and find them. But don't ask how much they'll cost after we do find them. It'll... uh... depend.

I often find myself feeling the same way in these kinds of discussions as I do about being a well-off liberal Democrat with good career prospects. In other words, I feel like I'd probably be a lot better off personally if I just shrugged my shoulders and ignored what I thought was right and joined the other side of the argument. Free music! No capital gains taxes! Sounds awesome!

Re: NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs

#57
post #33
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my issues with this line of thought. For one, why is 99c considered "reasonable" for a song? I feel as though this price point has little to do with the economics of the song-making business and a lot to do with the economics of iTunes/etc. Secondly, what is "convenient"? Why is iTunes downloading convenient, but watching GoT on HBO's online service not? I'm not saying they are equal, I think iTunes is easier,…

Why do you get to demand a third choice, besides "Pay 99 Cents" and "Don't Get The Song"? A small bag of M&Ms costs, I don't know, 79 cents? Why is 79 cents considered reasonable for 29 peanut M&Ms? If I object to that price, and instead pony up the marginal cost of those M&Ms and their packaging (more like 13 cents), am I being reasonable or unreasonable?

First, to answer the broader question: we get to "demand" another choice simply by expressing an opinion about the structure of the market, the lack of sensible choices, and the existence of bugs in the legal system that need fixing. At least in this case, I don't think anyone in this discussion harbors any delusions that downloading a song qualifies as legal, but most of the people in this discussion can make a sensible distinction between right and legal; anyone wanting to change the legal system has to have the ability to discuss bugs in that system.

That discussion remains distinct from the question of whether any individual person would choose to (openly or secretly) flaunt the existing legal system and take the associated risks; I don't personally want to take those risks, but that doesn't mean I see those choices as wrong, just currently illegal.

To answer the more specific question: since you've already seen all of these arguments play out enough times to become jaded by them, you already know the entire line of arguments differentiating physical property with scarcity from infinitely copyable digital files. In short, taking a bag of M&Ms means the owner of them no longer has it, whereas copying (not taking) a file leaves the original in place.

Re: NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs

#58

All the same, as consumers we are being punished for either (1) desiring and getting music in the means most convenient and historically accessible to us or (2) desire and getting technology in the means most convenient and historically accessible to us. The historical, political, and mercantile lines draw behind the scenes is a theatre we are not privvy to. Pulling the card "you're actually supporting the big wigs o…

Spoken like a true intellectual. Historically people have stolen photographs and graphics to use on their web pages. Is that cool? Image if someone just ripped off one of your client's advertising slogans and used the same design to sell their products. All's fair when digital right? This "historical" argument is the same argument that people use to explain all manner of social ills. It's a cop out. It was wrong hist…

I'm suggesting the new departure, a new form of problem is this: casually, it is her fault, but this is irrelevant to responsibility. Responsibility involves a conscious acknowledgement of the world around you, and one is at fault, personally, for a lack of consciousness of that world. However, what is the problematic is the presentation of (1) and (2). Independently, they are harmless. We should consume as much music and as much technology as we can, but whether their political, historical and mercantile threads interweave, we are face with a problematic.

I take a majority of this way of thinking from Alain Badiou: the truth procedures of music and the truth procedures of science. What is most interesting to me is that a truth procedure of polity is _seemingly_ determined by the historical presentation of file sharing software and music. I should hope that my arguments do not justify theft, though I may be led astray by my own constructions of thought. But what I am most concerned here is with White's role played as a militant, within the political theatre of piracy; by Badiou, she would be considered a "militant of truth" I believe. One who compels who to witness a "rupture" of the system which _presents_ such a militant. Her superior's condemnation, to me, presents something that might be expected: that we should be compelled by a _person_ to deal with these abstractions which have happened upon our political drama.

People do have a personal responsibility, but at the same time, "personal responsibility" is a function of an social structure. I do not mean to address any "casual" but rather "semantic" description of this "responsibility." What connections (political, historical, etc.) immediately can be drawn from our _decision_ (rather than hypothesis or principle) that White is "wrong"? One conclusion is "education"; but one problem is that a society may very well believe that stealing is "right," like ours. How _might_ one present a counter-indoctrination? From their perspective, this may be how it is presented. We have had decades to mature the ideologies, I believe we are now at a time where we must accept that fact. Some of these ideologies are inherently confrontational. Calling it theft does not entail that any particular action should follow, so it seems that in the absence of one, we might inevitably decide, produce such a _decision_, what those actions should be. I should hope that I am prompting such a discussion.

It _is_ theft. But it is theft born out of a period that allowed dogmatisim to mature.

Re: NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs

#59
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you get to demand a third choice, besides "Pay 99 Cents" and "Don't Get The Song"? A small bag of M&Ms costs, I don't know, 79 cents? Why is 79 cents considered reasonable for 29 peanut M&Ms? If I object to that price, and instead pony up the marginal cost of those M&Ms and their packaging (more like 13 cents), am I being reasonable or unreasonable?

First, to answer the broader question: we get to "demand" another choice simply by expressing an opinion about the structure of the market, the lack of sensible choices, and the existence of bugs in the legal system that need fixing. At least in this case, I don't think anyone in this discussion harbors any delusions that downloading a song qualifies as legal, but most of the people in this discussion can make a sens…

Did you read my comment, or did your nerd brain instantly detect "comparison between $PHYSICAL_PRODUCT and $ENTITY_EXPRESSIBLE_AS_A_NUMBER" and cause you to blurt out this comment? Because I addressed the point you thought you were making against my comment.

I mean this playfully. If we were discussing DOM corruption or block cipher modes I would probably have a hard time carefully reading comments that disagreed with my worldview too.

Re: NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs

#60
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you get to demand a third choice, besides "Pay 99 Cents" and "Don't Get The Song"? A small bag of M&Ms costs, I don't know, 79 cents? Why is 79 cents considered reasonable for 29 peanut M&Ms? If I object to that price, and instead pony up the marginal cost of those M&Ms and their packaging (more like 13 cents), am I being reasonable or unreasonable?

First, to answer the broader question: we get to "demand" another choice simply by expressing an opinion about the structure of the market, the lack of sensible choices, and the existence of bugs in the legal system that need fixing. At least in this case, I don't think anyone in this discussion harbors any delusions that downloading a song qualifies as legal, but most of the people in this discussion can make a sens…

If someone leaves your personal file in its original place I am sure you won't mind some copies around.
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