231–240 of 347 posts
What a headache of an industry to get into. Seeing the direction that Pandora, Soundcloud, and others have gone, I wouldn't touch this vertical with 10-ft pole and a billion in capital.
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For the vast majority of history, musicians were not some of the wealthiest members of society, far from it. Music has traditionally been “near free” and only ceased to be during a brief period necessitated by tech. That period has long since ended. I don’t see that an artificial value placed on music, rather than the previous real value set on its distribution, is necessarily a good thing.
Being a musical artist is not easy business for pretty much every artists except for a few outliers, though we do appreciate and consume music. If you made a graph with the x axis being percentile and the y axis being the amount of money made, on the far right side of the x axis there would be a huge spike where a tiny fraction are making a fortune. (I think) I'd prefer the spike to be smoothed out. What's interestin…
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It’s kind of a gray area, the whole performing/mechanical rights system was obviously invented before streaming. Radio stations pay for performing rights, so the question arises whether streaming is more like radio broadcast or manufacturing and distributing physical copies (e.g. CDs)? Without further legislation, ultimately only the courts can decide that. My guess is that ultimately streaming rights will end up as…
It's also the reason behind ridiculous things like DRM. The idea that there is a difference between broadcasting and copying, and that computers can emulate that difference is a pipe dream; nonetheless shared by most music labels.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
(TL;DR: 'colour' captures those path-dependent aspects of a thing, like where did it came from and why someone is doing something with it. A song legally bought and one illegally acquired may be bit-for-bit identical, but they have different colours.)
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Spotify cleaned up a lot in 2014. They used to be peer-to-peer, and they'd give "free" service to employees of certain big tech companies because they could take advantage of the upload bandwidth of the big tech offices. They culled the P2P tech in 2014 and went to a standard server-client model. https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...
It's sad to see that peer to peer is not utilized more, since it scales so well. The overbearing copyright propaganda has given BitTorrent a bad name, even though it has so many other uses.
This article reads like a press release from the plantiff (Wixen) and took a little googling to unwind. Long story short, it sounds like there's disagreement about what type of license Spotify needs. Spotify has previously claimed that streaming is not "reproduction" and is more akin to "performance"... and they (may) have those licenses. What they do not have (in some cases?) is a "mechanical" license[1], which carr…
It’s kind of a gray area, the whole performing/mechanical rights system was obviously invented before streaming. Radio stations pay for performing rights, so the question arises whether streaming is more like radio broadcast or manufacturing and distributing physical copies (e.g. CDs)? Without further legislation, ultimately only the courts can decide that. My guess is that ultimately streaming rights will end up as…
That could get complicated if labels and artists have clauses to be involved in any new rights management categories. Everyone might have to renegotiate from the bottom up.
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Upvoted because I agree with the sentiment but also not true. Look at how the interpretation of copyright as it pertains to sampling and mashing etc absolutely stifled innovation and continues to do so. For visual art look at how ambiguous the law is around collage, which definitely stifles innovation.
It's simply nonsense to claim that sampling and mashups have been stifled by copyright law. Ignoring a few ancient parody/satire acts like Negativland, samples are made, used, cleared, and paid for with no serious negative consequences. Likewise remixes. There's some extra paperwork, money changes hands, and on the whole everyone is happy. What's been far more damaging is Spotify's insanely exploitative model, which…
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It's also an actual use of you know... A database.
Well sure, but who owns the database? Where is it hosted and who vouches for its accuracy? What happens if it goes down or its maintainer goes out of business? Of course, all these questions can be addressed in one way or another with conventional database tech. But blockchain has some undeniable appeal in an application like this.
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It's also the reason behind ridiculous things like DRM. The idea that there is a difference between broadcasting and copying, and that computers can emulate that difference is a pipe dream; nonetheless shared by most music labels.
It doesn't seem outlandish to claim there's a distinction between a broadcast, where you might hear a song at a particular time of day, and having an on-demand copy of a song at any time. The former scenario could see you, for instance, buying a CD because you liked a song you heard on the radio; that is probably not as likely with Spotify.
1. Clearly on-demand streaming implies broadcasting. 2. Presumably I could turn a broadcast into an on-demand radio stream by setting up a radio station which loops through all songs. Then I get into my rocket ship and travel away from Earth at near lightspeed and return, arriving exactly when the song I want to hear on-demand is being broadcasted. It's possible to approach zero latency for this method, depending on whether I stay in my rocket ship all the time and how fast I travel.
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>"Doesn't having an offline mode run counter to this claim? That's clearly reproducing it." I agree with this. Even if it only lives an encrypted cache you are effectively doing a bit by bit reproduction when you offline sync. They do expire once the user hadn't logged in for some amount of time, I believe it's something like after 30 days of not logging in or refreshing a token. Before streaming when someone bought…
>Before streaming when someone bought a CD they bought just that copy you weren't permitted to make a copy of that CD at any time. I guess it depends on what you mean by permitted, was I legally allowed to copy the CD? Yes, was I also able to pick my favorite tracks and make a custom playlist CD? Also yes. You were also free to rip it to your computer and put it on your iPod. It's called Fair Use and since there was…
That's not how Fair Use works. Fair Use is about making transformative works like "commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, and scholarship" (according to Wikipedia). Not copying entire songs for your personal use.