Napster? ? ? ?

[OnAnySunday]

O.K. another dumb question from one of the technologiclly inept.

Music download sites like "napster", are these worth it?

Anybody have experience with sites like this?

Ive been thinking of downloading just the songs i want instead of buying the whole CD's and just burning my own.
My son tells me these sites are a rip-off though.

My AC-DC & Aerosmith tapes are biting the dust, and i'm gonna have to join the CD generation.

(dont laugh too hard please, i still have 8 tracks in the closet)

 

[XRpredator]

Limewire. Download the program and go searching.

I wouldn't want to go and encourage illegal downloading, though.

 

[Phil]

I don't like Napster because they are DRM protected files, at least they were when I last used it. DRM prevents you from moving the files around and being able to play them on multiple devices. Lately I've been using Amazon.com, they have an MP3 download section with high bitrate DRM free MP3's.

 

[IndyMX]

Limewire. Download the program and go searching.

I wouldn't want to go and encourage illegal downloading, though.

If you do plan to download illegal software and songs, Limewire is a really bad choice.

Too many virus' spread thru that program.

I highly recommend you do not use it at all.

DRM (digital rights management) sucks, but if you are doing things within scope of the license you pay for with each purchase, it shouldn't be a problem.

 

[jake760]

Limewire is not worth the risk IMO.
I like playlist, you can't download anything but you can listen to any song you want to for free.

 

[flyingfuzzball]

once you write a song to a CD the DRM is gone. it only still exists on your computer in the song so you just delete it and transfer the songs on the CD back to your computer.

 

[justalonewolf007]

Music download sites like "napster", are these worth it?

Anybody have experience with sites like this?

Ah...I'd say go with ITunes...Yes, they do put some limitations, but hey, you can burn CDs, and they have fairly reasonable prices.

Limewire is evil. Some idiot thought it would be funny to put on my school laptop when I let him borrow it for a few minutes to check his email. I foolishly went to the restroom. On campus, it is strongly prohibited...we've already had a few lawsuits pop up here and there with students who "just don't get it"

I immediately uninstalled the program (he'd been emailing songs to himself...why...why...why.. :bang: ) And deleted all the songs I could find. So far...the university has been somewhat understanding...as they have already dealt with that kid before...(wish I would've known...but it will never happen again). They put a very strong watch on my account.


I am still finding little subfiles and folders titled "Limewire" despite the friendly little message stating that "Limewire and all its components have been completely removed from your computer"

Don't do limewire. It kills your computer no matter how many precautions you take.

 

[XRpredator]

Don't do limewire. It kills your computer no matter how many precautions you take.

okay, don't do limewire.

 

[FruDaddy]

They aren't too bad, although I think that itunes may be on of the more restrictive. Like was said earlier, accumulate 20 songs, burn them to an audio CD, then rip them back to MP3 format and you can do whatever you like with them. I used to use Musicmatch, which was taken by yahoo, and I think Rhapsody owns it now. At 99 cents per song, look for a high bitrate for better sound quality.

 

[Deadohiosky39]

i used frostwire freshman year until i heard about an on campus downloading program. We are in the top five campus' of downloaded music by the RIAA so you kinda got to be careful around here or you can get some big fines. I don't have any idea what you should use. I'm just going to say that for the little time i used it Frostwire never got me into any trouble

 

[robwbright]

Emule. It requires some set up and configuration depending on your connection . . .

BTW, none of this is to be considered legal advice of any kind - it's merely my opinion . . . and I haven't been following this issue very much recently.

However, most or all of the cases of prosecution that I have seen involve SHARING music - not downloading music.

They seem to be more upset with the sharing (allowing people to download from you) than the downloading.

Thus, don't share.

 

[XRpredator]

. . . most or all of the cases of prosecution that I have seen involve SHARING music - not downloading music.

They seem to be more upset with the sharing (allowing people to download from you) than the downloading.

Thus, don't share.

Interesting . . . so I can download as many songs from as many places I want for nothing, and as long as I don't let anyone have any from me, I'm in the clear?

awesome.

 

[robwbright]

Interesting . . . so I can download as many songs from as many places I want for nothing, and as long as I don't let anyone have any from me, I'm in the clear?

awesome.

That's about the gist of how they've prosecuted the cases that I've seen.

I think the whole thing is pretty ridiculous. The MOMENT the recording industry went digital, they lost control of their product. It is likely that they will NEVER find a way to copy protect it in a way that can't be broken.

They should have come up with the pay by the month file sharing services YEARS ago, but they wanted to keep making money the old way. Resistance to change in the digital age is a sure way to find yourself quickly obsolete.

Of course, Radiohead gave away their most recent album and still made a large amount of money off of it.

In fact, Radiohead probably made more. On your typical $15 CD, the artist gets about $1.00. The local retail store gets about $3-$4. The artist makes most of their money on concerts and t-shirts. Do you think the artists are going to complain about increased exposure thru file sharing? They won't complain too hard at only $1.00 per CD in profit. File sharing likely gets more people at their concerts and thus increases their profits.

How much do you think the RIAA is getting on each of those $15.00 CDs?

However, Radiohead's giveaway was a download of the complete album off the internet. The band asked for a donation - if you wanted to. If you didn't want to, you could literally have it for free - you just had to give the band your contact info so they could market to you in the future.

The average "donation" was $6.00. The ONLY overhead was server space.

So lets see - they could make $1.00 per CD by selling it thru a record company, or they could make $6.00 per CD (minus server space).

Which way makes more sense?

The industry threatens people with $100,000 fine per song shared, then settles for several thousand dollars. I know of only two cases where people actually fought until trial - and one of them won the case.

The attorney fees for the recording industry are running into the tens of thousands of dollars per case. It makes no financial sense at all to prosecute these cases.

Metallica ticked me off when they went against file sharing - they admitted that they used to copy their records and tapes and share them with friends. What's the difference? The only difference is the number of people giving/getting the file and the distance between the "friends".

Finally, a $500,000 judgment against a person making $30,000 a year is worthless - you'll never collect it - probably never collect any of it. All the recording industry does in those cases is try to prove a point and scare people.

And BTW, I've got three friends in a band. They cover everything from Skynyrd to Alice in Chains to Avenged Sevenfold to a cool hard rock version of "Brown Eyed Girl". They also do originals (after the bar crowd is drunk).

The band is better than some bands I've heard on Leno and Letterman. Yet, they don't have a contract.

As they develop, I expect the internet and file sharing will make them some money. There aren't any record execs in the West Virginia/Ohio River Valley.

 

[robwbright]

Here's a nice article on the problems inherent in the recording industry approach:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north431.html

The January 27 headline read, "Landmark case spells doom for internet music swappers." Doom! They're all doomed! Doom, we tell you!

Doom? Maybe for the music companies that think they can stop file-swapping by going into court. Not for the file-swappers.

The article was published in The Independent, a British newspaper. Note the key word: paper. Any information source that is tied to paper at the point of origin is equally doomed. How do I know? Because I read the article on the web.

In six months or a year, there will be some story on slash.dot or some other techie website that reveals "startling" new data: the amount of file-swapping is still increasing.

In the meantime, we read:

Civil court proceedings were announced against the music fans in August last year.

Five individuals have been accused of between them making 8,906 songs available to millions of people around the globe.

Today's announcement follows High Court action against two of the five who refused to settle with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the UK's record industry's trade association.

What is the key word buried in this report. There is one. Can you spot it?

The key word is "millions." It is followed by the words "of people."

There is another important word. Did you spot it? It's the word "phonograph." Any industry that is selling digits on pieces of plastic that is still called "phonograph" has a serious market-positioning problem. The word calls up an image of the RCA Victor dog, head cocked, listening to his master's voice while sitting in front of a wind-up phonograph machine. It brings forth this image mainly among people over age 60, for whom it was decades out of date in their youth.

Executives in the British phonograph industry are terminally naïve. They spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to hire a team of lawyers to sue a few unnamed men who downloaded music from the web. They got two convictions. Imagine that! Two whole convictions.

Compare the word "two" with "millions."

WHAT ARE MY ODDS?

The recording industry thinks that millions of file-swappers are as naïve as executives in the recording industry are. First, hardly anyone who swaps files reads newspapers. They will not see the headline about their imminent doom, unless they read it on the web. People who read things on the web tend be way ahead of executives in the phonograph industry, digitally speaking. Second, hardly any of them care. They think to themselves, "They'll never catch me!" They are correct. To catch millions of people and convict them, one by one, is impossible.

The record industry naïvely imagines that people who know enough about digital technology to upload and download music files are not clever enough to figure out that the record industry is bluffing. As for the news article, these people do not know what a "general counsel" is.

BPI general counsel Roz Groome said: "We have been very patient litigators. We have given these people every opportunity to settle.

"Only when they refused to settle did we take them to court, which has now found in our favour. These rulings are a massive step forward in the music industry's bid to fight illegal filesharing.

"We would warn anyone else tempted to illegally upload and download music to cease immediately. The legal penalties can be significant."

Patient litigators, indeed! Any firm can run up a bill of a few hundred thousand pounds in order to take a year to get into a court and get a convictions on two men, thereby having the court impose fines of a few thousand pounds, which the industry probably will not collect. The industry faces a challenge in mass audience persuasion.

Get this message to millions of file-sharers.

Convince them that the courts will be able to extract blood (money) out of a turnip (the income of unemployed teenage file-sharers and young adults, millions of whom who are on the dole).

Convince them that the odds are against them rather than the phonograph industry.

Keep them from downloading files from millions of computers located outside the country.

Convince fanatically dedicated technologists not to develop new schemes that foil the lawyers.

PAYMENT FOR WHAT?

The record industry has raked in profits for almost a century because it controlled record distribution to retail sales outlets. It also controlled the distribution of effective information – promotion – for unknown artists. Today, neither of these technological bottlenecks operates to any significant degree. The web offers retail distribution for free. It offers word-of-mouse promotion for free.

The record industry today comes to the table with an outmoded distribution system that extracts 90% of wholesale revenues from performers, who no longer need the industry's services. It also demands retail payment from consumers who no longer need the industry's services.

It could move from selling digital music on plastic disks to selling live music in concert halls. That is, it could move from the mass-marketing of CD's to arranging concerts for clients. This way, every pirated music file would help build up the audience. This would be a completely different marketing strategy: "Steal this file!" This would take different skills, a different reward system, and a whole new hierarchy of marketers.

The record industry as we know it is doomed, both coming and going. It is a middleman with nothing of unique value to offer either performers or consumers.

Performers make the big money by performing. The web gets them the exposure that leads to performances.

Consumers avoid paying money for services that can be delivered digitally.

Then what can the industry offer? Time. It can save file-swappers time. Sell a CD to people whose time is too valuable to waste on file-sharing. I am such a person.

Someday, the teenagers who download files today will be in an employed adult's financial condition: short on time, long on money. But instead of devising long-run marketing strategies today to gain the loyalty of these kids, the industry threatens them with prosecution.

The industry is clearly run by marketing ignoramuses.

Of course, performers can sell their own CDs on-line. But, on the whole, performers are ignorant of how to sell anything. I have worked with some of them in the Celtic music circuit. Most of them are not interested in marketing. They are interested in playing music, until their wives call a halt to it because there isn't enough money to pay the bills. This is why most music groups disband after five years – ten at the most.

The record industry, scaled down to a barebones minimum, could offer marketing expertise to these musically gifted kids, who know nothing about business. But any skilled marketer can do this. The record industry brings nothing unique to the table.

This is why the record industry is doomed in its present form. If offers no uniquely valuable service to the people it represents: performers and consumers. These middlemen are being squeezed from all sides by digital technologies.

BRING IN THE LAWYERS!

So, in order to terrify millions of teenagers with no money, the industry writes checks to lawyers.

The BPI announced in October 2004 that 28 music fans would become the first people in Britain to be sued by the record industry for illegal file-sharing.

In March last year, it launched a fresh wave of action and announced that 23 of the initial tranche of people had agreed settlements of an average 2,000 pounds.

It is currently seeking settlements in a further 51 cases launched last December.

When any industry must resort to lawyers in order to survive, it will not survive. It will merely subsidize lawyers for a time, and then go out of business. The bankruptcy lawyers then wrap it up – red tape for red ink – and go on to the next victim.

CONCLUSION

Copyright laws worked for as long as what was copyrighted – information – was restricted to formats that could be policed on a cost-effective basis by the state: paper, ink, printing equipment, vinyl, record-stamping machines, and retail stores. Especially retail stores.

As I like to say, copyright has to do with atoms, not electrons. Electrons will eventually destroy copyright. It is close to destroying it today.

Don't take my word for it. Ask the accountants of the phonograph industry.

 

[RYDMOTO]

Read this before you decide to download music for free.There are risks involved.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/

 

[robwbright]

Read this before you decide to download music for free.There are risks involved.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/

Of course there are potential risks involved. However, please refer us to any cases involving prosecution for downloading music.

I'm not saying they don't exist, but I haven't seen one yet.

All of the cases I've seen are for allowing others to download music from you.

Granted, I haven't been following the issue closely, but I am an attorney and see updates on many cases.

That said, that's not to say that it's impossible to be prosecuted for downloading - just that it's apparently not who the RIAA is primarily after.

 

[RYDMOTO]

I agree with what you are saying.I have read enough that the RIAA is a crafty bunch and their tactics have been ruthless.The gamble is do i agree to pay the fines they ask for up front or challenge them in court and risk even bigger fines.I would assume if anybody uses a program such as Limewire that they would argue in court that it is a peer to peer file sharing network and you are on there for that purpose. They do use media sentry in some of the clone songs that they install in limewire or wherever that gos thru your files and sends back to them what you have downloaded.I cannot say for sure from what I have read if they only go after those who download only a few songs or not.I would find it hard to believe they won't go after those who only download and not share.In their opinion it is music stolen from them.The saddest part of all is that the musicians see next to nothing of the millions of dollars that have beenr aised in lawsuits.If you spend some time reading through all the lawsuits in the above link it is truly shocking how they have and use and abuse the judicial system to serve their own purpose.I have always said if these greedy types from the beginning would have only charged 10 or 20 cents a song to download...nobody would have a need to pirate any music and they would have more money than they would know what to do with. CD freaks is another site that has good info on this topic.