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Forget spaceships; I just want my music

jeffgeerling.com

11–20 of 162 posts

Re: Forget spaceships; I just want my music

#11
There's like not one but multiple microgenres of music you could likely cobble together just out of working musicians' songs complaining about the music industry. In the modern world, probably the by-the-numbers majority of working artists in every medium can effectively self-publish to some degree or another, so as the intermediaries have grown more and more demanding and both creator- and consumer-hostile, they have also become less of a necessary evil for our ability to engage with the works creative people are putting out into the world. Piracy is the most natural and reasonable way to use current technology to consume media, and the massively successful propaganda campaigns to instill a folk belief that it's somehow wrong or doing harm are incredible, given how much quality of life for both the producers and consumers of the actual content is lost in the name of marginal gains in profitability and massive gains in control by intermediary conglomerates that are increasingly unnecessary. It is only by a combination of this mythology and the ever-tighter industry collusion with an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state to make laws to terrorize people who just want their music that this parasitic shape the industry has taken is surviving

To me, the notion that a transferrable market-monopoly ownership of intellectual rights to a creative work was ever about helping creators is the kind of ridiculous farce that people like economists can get away with because we've been trained to believe that fancy experts saying counterintuitive things about "incentives" must know something we don't, but even if you believe intellectual property has value, it is not of value for massive corporations to sit on a chokepoint between human beings and their access to their own cultural touchstones

Re: Forget spaceships; I just want my music

#12
post #4
post #3

At least so far, Bandcamp has not changed after the sale (neither sale). You can still buy music, and try it out for multiple album streams before buying (unless the artist or label disable it, which is rare), and download as FLAC. Granted, not always useful if what you want is from major labels, but still, keep in mind that there are options.

Wasn't there some recent article about how Bandcamp got acquired by a competitor and is more or less being left to rot on the vine? I agree, the FLAC downloads are a major perk of it, and I'll happily buy music there. But I wouldn't trust it to be around long term at this point. It's too consumer-friendly to exist long term in this modern world we live in. :(

Bandcamp doesn't need to change, it can just keep going. That's what I meant with "neither sale", because there were also some (if fewer) doomsayers for the epic sale.

It got sold. Nothing changed. And again, you own the music, if it stops existing that sucks, but only for the future, everything you bought, you still have.

And fwiw, I don't think anything for Bandcamp will change.

Re: Forget spaceships; I just want my music

#14

Capitalism responds to demand. We have to stop paying for convenience and start demanding better. Save your money from Streaming, purchase used and physical only. Force the market to adapt to you.

The more power companies have to regulate their consumers, as well as the information available to them, the less responsive to demand they have to be. We are in a monopolized enough environment across multiple industries that we can't assume the dynamics of supply and demand work anything like an idealized "free market", if such a thing has ever existed

Re: Forget spaceships; I just want my music

#15
The beautifully written but not much known Rune Blades Of Celi ebooks no longer can be purchased, as the small publisher is just gone. Of course, the ones I purchased could no longer be downloaded. But want something bigger? Fine. The Wheel Of Time (is that large enough for you?) Complete Edition I bought for over a hundred dollars also can't be donwloaded any more. (And to be more on topic, one of my favorite artists have disappeared from Bandcamp and so did my purchases. And Bandcamp is better in this than others.)

You can download all these from torrent trackers.

Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?

Re: Forget spaceships; I just want my music

#16

It seems that we've entered the rent-seeking phase of corporate capitalism. Why spend any extra time, money, or energy making new products or services when you can instead make more money doing nothing but using your outsized political and economic power to coerce and extort consumers instead. At this point it's impossible to see how any new merger or acquisition isn't just another step in the wrong direction, handin…

> At what point is a company too large to effectively serve the public interest?

I use the term "maxium tribe size" to describe the human capability (or incapability) of extending compassion and understanding to a group. Companies don't fail. People fail within companies. People fail other people and hide behind "limited liability" and the sham that is corporate personhood.

Every person has a different MaxT. You may not feel the pain of violating this constraint yourself, but lots of people under you will suffer. You may actually feel GREAT, look at all the respect I have gained! I can make things happen, people listen to me... or now I can just ignore them...

You don't care because you are blinded by success.

Money and power are the worst poisons this world offers. It turns otherwise intelligent and caring people into awful piles of human effluence. It is IMPOSSIBLE to gain sufficient power to drive a company and not lose your sense of humanity. The idea that you will not violate your maximum tribe size in this exercise is insulting. You will quickly be insulated from the consequences of your actions, and no matter how depraved your behavior there will be a line of people congratulating and cheering you on because they desperately want to be the next person in line to enjoy the ride you are on.

The people driving enshittification are not human. They may share our genes but they are not part of our society or species anymore.

Re: Forget spaceships; I just want my music

#17
post #2

Yup. Sound right. The time spent re-ripping my CD collection to FLAC, my DVD collection to MKV, etc, has been well spent. I can rapidly enough transcode from that to "Whatever I happen to need for where I'm listening to it," and our vehicles have quite the range of local music and audiobook content for road trips that doesn't rely on streaming anything. You can get CDs for (usually) very little on eBay, same for DVDs…

I remain optimistic that we're in the starting phases of a rejection of the online [handwaves at everything digital consumer tech], and it's going to be aided greatly by stuff exactly like this. Profits and corporate pissing matches over "actually doing something people want to pay money for."

Your optimism is unfounded. Gen Z thinks it's cool to own an album or two, but they're not building collections. Scrap booking is popular right now, but it's not quite the same thing as photo albums. Everything is ephemeral and by and large they're just fine with that.

Re: Forget spaceships; I just want my music

#18
post #14

Capitalism responds to demand. We have to stop paying for convenience and start demanding better. Save your money from Streaming, purchase used and physical only. Force the market to adapt to you.

The more power companies have to regulate their consumers, as well as the information available to them, the less responsive to demand they have to be. We are in a monopolized enough environment across multiple industries that we can't assume the dynamics of supply and demand work anything like an idealized "free market", if such a thing has ever existed

As an addendum to my statement: If the changes in demand do not result in a change in supply, then piracy is justified.

Re: Forget spaceships; I just want my music

#19
post #17
post #2

Yup. Sound right. The time spent re-ripping my CD collection to FLAC, my DVD collection to MKV, etc, has been well spent. I can rapidly enough transcode from that to "Whatever I happen to need for where I'm listening to it," and our vehicles have quite the range of local music and audiobook content for road trips that doesn't rely on streaming anything. You can get CDs for (usually) very little on eBay, same for DVDs…

I remain optimistic that we're in the starting phases of a rejection of the online [handwaves at everything digital consumer tech], and it's going to be aided greatly by stuff exactly like this. Profits and corporate pissing matches over "actually doing something people want to pay money for." Your optimism is unfounded. Gen Z thinks it's cool to own an album or two, but they're not building collections. Scrap bookin…

They're physical things, interacted in the physical world, without any way for the companies involved to claw back the content, or to data-mine the scrapbook, your albums, etc, for listening data and such (though I imagine a smart TV with a mic will try).

That's a good direction to see movement in. They're not doing "online scrapbooks" or something. And given the long standing records of "What you said 15 years ago online is used to ruin you today," ephemeral, or "not online in the first place," makes a lot of sense.

I'm certainly glad my entire school experience wasn't logged in great detail...

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