The labels fight back

murbot · June 28, 2002 5:36PM

Damn, check <a href="http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/3560365.htm"; target="_blank">this</a> out.

Snippet:

Major record labels have launched an aggressive new guerrilla assault on the underground music networks, flooding online swapping services with bogus copies of popular songs.

The online music sites know they're under attack. Darrell Smith, chief technical officer of StreamCast Networks, parent of the popular file-swapping service Morpheus, said he first noticed the practice about a year ago, but chalked it up to ``rogue teenage hackers just being obnoxious.

``It's more prevalent in the last three months,'' he said. ``It's gotten real, real, real severe.''

I haven't even tried getting anything online for a couple weeks now... anyone here notice alot of bogus tracks being downloaded? I'll have to try a few and see what I get...

I mean, I wouldn't be that worried if it was just severe, or ever real severe, but real, real, REAL severe?! That's severe!!

[ 06-28-2002: Message edited by: murbot ]</p>

hmurchison · June 28, 2002 5:42PM

Oh Man! That's Bullshit!

the cool gut · June 28, 2002 6:37PM

that's a ****er, man!

junkyard dawg · June 28, 2002 7:14PM

We'll just have to retaliate with our own guerrilla tactics.

Sounds like an IP banning strategy is called for.

ebby · June 28, 2002 7:32PM

My Bro got a song with 5 seconds of VERY annoying, high pitched beeps. The volume fades down, so it is deliberate. Towards the end of the song, so you spent all the time downloading it. Of course, with my cable modem at hand, the other 5 copies downloaded great.

Damn record companies. Boost prices, kill my internet radio station, and now this. And they STILL want me to BUY THEIR CD?!? Is there any wonder why we are pissed.

g4dude · June 28, 2002 7:46PM

[quote]Originally posted by Xidius:

<strong>I got one of the song "stan" by Eminem just 10 minutes ago. a loop of the chorus, on Neo... *sighs*</strong><hr></blockquote>

Same with "without me." I downloaded 10 different ones before getting the real song.

cubedude · June 28, 2002 7:50PM

This is crap, why can't they just figure something else out, that might actually help them? If they started up there own music-swapping service, and just made people pay, say, $15/month to use it, with a full selection, I know I'd be willing to pay. I remember an article with a similar idea from earlier in the week, but I can't remember where.

mac write · June 28, 2002 8:24PM

I am on the record labels side. You are stealing there music, and now they have to put out encrypted CD's which makes it impossible for us Legal users (which I am) to Legally Ripp are CD's to our computer at the highest Quality MP3 (320), so we don't have to use crappy CD players, and can listen to music for hours with out any interuptions or waiting for CD's to change.

I have 80 CD's ripped to my computer legally.

ebby · June 28, 2002 8:43PM

I don't agree. I did not steal music, I bought it. But I also listen to internet radio. The record companies charges the radio station $500 a day to broadcast over the internet. That is more than FM royalties. They deliberately killed internet radio, my only source of new music. I don't want to be hand-fed my music!

I want a music-buffet!

Let me choose my music, and I will buy the CD.

-Damn recording industry! You lost a good customer and you don't care!- <img src="graemlins/oyvey.gif" border="0" alt="[No]" />

mac write · June 28, 2002 9:36PM

Icompletly agree about Internet Radio $1.50 per Thousand listeners+the normal royality fees ouch. They have totaly lost it on charging 100x more for Internet radio over traditional radio

I love Internet Radio

torifile · June 28, 2002 9:52PM

Actually its $.70/1000 listeners now. It was the $1.50 but it was revised.

allenchristopher · June 28, 2002 10:01PM

Think about this: Fujitsu says they are on track to have 360 GB 2.5 inch hard-drives available to consumers in four years. Based on Apple's 2000 songs claim for the 10 GB iPod, that's enough to store 72,000 songs (not considering MP4 and beyond). I imagine that must be enough for at least every popular song written in the past two-hundred years. We're closing in on being able to store every commercially recorded song ever on one device the size of the iPod, and, in the developed world, almost everyone is going to have one. Those worries are WAY past these first feeble steps by the record companies. People will hook these machines to their friends' and gradually "catch 'em all," Pokemon style, because certain a certain encoding of each song will be the one one encoding that spreads from hand-held to hand-held across super-fast connections, and the machines will sync Palm-style, downloading all and only songs you don't already have. There will be software to find close copies. Forget file-sharing services and spoofing. Six degrees of separation means everyone will have every song.

Of course, there may be a little spoofing by moles, but instead of looking on the net for files and downloading them, you already have them on your drive from your syncs. You just go through the potential copies until you find one that works and delete the rest. Not that spam will get very far, because you'll be syncing with friends. Everytime you finish a good recording, you hit a button to put it in the checked zone. It stays, anything that the software identifies as close duplicate goes. Everytime you sync with a friend, his or her checked songs go into the "checked by friends zone." If you want, you can just stay within those checked zones, but you can also sort through everything else, from Louis Armstrong to Gilbert and Sullivan to African drum music that will be on your machine and that you've never heard or even had recommended to you. Very democratic.

This is already possible in miniature. Try just dumping a friend's whole iPod onto your drive, then casually deleting duplicates as you notice them on the list. Easy, and you get all sorts of great things he or she has never mentioned to you. The only part that's inconvenient now is deleting duplicates. That'll be solved soon.

This isn't sci-fi. It's a decade or less away, and it is going to require a new economic model. Even if governments make these players illegal people will build them on their own, or for friends or the black market, and as with the war on drugs the legal system won't be able to enforce it because so many people offend.

My prediction? It won't kill professional music. Professional music existed long before the super-famous and million-dollar sales, since near the beginning of civilisation. Big musicians get their income from concerts because the label owns the rights to the song. Canadian musicians, even most of the very big ones, sell CDs as advertising for concerts and make squat on royalties because our population is so low, but get by on gigs. You can be a musician without the system. The only people who lose out are the lawyers, ad-execs and managers.

[ 06-28-2002: Message edited by: AllenChristopher ]</p>

The labels fight back

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