This link has been bookmarked by 124 people . It was first bookmarked on 27 Oct 2007, by Yam Chi-Keung.
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18 Jun 17
kevinoempty
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28 Sep 11
Candice E.Amazing article about file sharing, Oink, and the music industry.
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27 Sep 11
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17 Dec 10
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12 Jan 10
Pranesh PrakashA guy who worked in the music industry and thought downloading was
stealing eventually joined the pirates because he found the industry's
tactics so reprehensible. Here he advises all to stop buying from major
music companies and to campaign against the current IP regime. -
14 Nov 09
rikhard ovigiaFor quite a long time I've been intending to post some sort of commentary on the music industry - piracy, distribution, morality, those types of things. I've thought about it many times, but never gone through with it, because the issue is such a broad, messy one - such a difficult thing to address fairly and compactly. I knew it would result in a rambly, unfocused commentary, and my exact opinion has teetered back and forth quite a bit over the years anyway. But on Monday, when I woke up to the news that Oink, the world famous torrent site and mecca for music-lovers everywhere, had been shut down by international police and various anti-piracy groups, I knew it was finally time to try and organize my thoughts on this huge, sticky, important issue.
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18 Jun 09
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Armando AlvesFor quite a long time I've been intending to post some sort of commentary on the music industry - piracy, distribution, morality, those types of things.
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05 Jan 09
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30 Dec 08
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08 Sep 08
Arne Olav NygardArticle on the record industry, from a designer within
music napster record_company file_sharing mp3 radiohead download
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So it grew, and it grew, and it started to grow into the mainstream, and that's when the labels woke up and realized something important was happening. At that point they could have seen it as either a threat or an opportunity, and they, without hesitation, determined it to be a threat. It was a threat because essentially someone had come up with a better, free distribution method for the labels' product. To be fair, you can imagine how confusing this must have been for them - is there even a historical precedent for an industry's products suddenly being able to replicate and distribute on their own, without cost?
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Control had been taken away from everyone who used to have it
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It led to laughable hyperbole from bands like Metallica, instantly the poster-children of cry-baby rich rock stars, and the beginning of the image problem the industry has faced in its handling of the piracy issue.
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I want to flip through the pages, and hold the CD in my hand... Being a kid who got into music well past the days of vinyl, CDs were all I had, and they still felt important to me.
It's all changed.
In a few short years, the aggressive push of technology combined with the arrogant response from the record industry has rapidly worn away all of my noble intentions of clinging to the old system, and has now pushed me into full-on dissent. -
the rules and cultural perceptions regarding music have changed drastically
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and if I filled my shiny new 160gb iPod up legally, buying each track online at the 99 cents price that the industry has determined, it would cost me about $32,226.
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It's the ugly truth the record industry wants to ignore as they struggle to find ways to get people to pay for music in a culture that has already embraced the idea of music being something you collect in large volumes, and trade freely with your friends.
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They had a chance to move forward, to evolve with technology and address the changing needs of consumers - and they didn't.
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Instead, they panicked - they showed their hand as power-hungry dinosaurs, and they started to demonize their own customers, the people whose love of music had given them massive profits for decades.
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Why? Because freely-available music in large quantities is the new cultural norm, and the industry has given consumers no fair alternative.
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They didn't band together and create a flat monthly fee for downloading all the music you want. They didn't respond by drastically lowering the prices of CDs (which have been ludicrously overpriced since day one, and actually increased in price during the '90's), or by offering low-cost DRM-free legal MP3 purchases. Their entry into the digital marketplace was too little too late - a precedent of free, high-quality, DRM-free music had already been set.
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From personal experience I can tell you that the big labels are beyond clueless in the digital world - their ideas are out-dated, their methods make no sense,
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Trying to innovate with a major label is like trying to teach your Grandmother how to play Halo 3: frustrating and ultimately futile.
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he easiest example of this is how much of a fight it's been to get record companies to sell MP3s DRM-free. You're trying to explain a new technology to an old guy who made his fortune in the hair metal days. You're trying to tell him that when someone buys a CD, it has no DRM - people can encode it into their computer as DRM-free MP3s within seconds, and send it to all their friends. So why insult the consumer by making them pay the same price for copy-protected MP3s? It doesn't make any sense! It just frustrates people and drives them to piracy!
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like with any new industry, it's not the people from the previous generation who are going to step in and be the innovators. It's a new batch.
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Newspapers are a good example:
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And you know what? Now I can get live, up-to-the-minute news for free, on thousands of different sources across the internet - and The New York Times still exists.
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Unlike newspapers, record companies own the distribution and the product being distributed, so you can't just start your own website where you give out music that they own - and that's what this is all about: distribution.
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because they don't make any money off of merchandise, or concert tickets. Distribution and ownership are what they control, and those are the two things piracy threatens
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t's why record companies shove disposable pop crap down your throat instead of nurturing career artists: because they have CEOs and shareholders to answer to, and those people don't give a shit if a really great band has the potential to get really successful, if given the right support over the next decade
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At the top of all this is the rigged, outdated, and unfair structure of current intellectual property laws, all of them in need of massive reform in the wake of the digital era. These laws allow the labels to maintain their stranglehold on music copyrights, and they allow the RIAA to sue the pants off of any file-sharing grandmother they please.
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RIAA is able
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heir latest victim is Oink, a popular torrent site specializing in music.
If you're not familiar with Oink, here's a quick summary: -
In this sense, Oink was not only an absolute paradise for music fans, but it was unquestionably the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known. I
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f the music industry had found a way to capitalize on the power, devotion, and innovation of its own fans the way Oink did, it would be thriving right now instead of withering. If intellectual property laws didn't make Oink illegal, the site's creator would be the new Steve Jobs right now.
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Here's an interesting aside: The RIAA loves to complain about music pirates leaking albums onto the internet before they're released in stores - painting the leakers as vicious pirates dead set on attacking their enemy, the music industry. But you know where music leaks from? From the fucking source, of course - the labels!
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For example, if a record company releases an album online but Wal-Mart won't have the CD in their stores for another two months (because it needs to be manufactured), Wal-Mart gets mad. Who cares if Wal-Mart gets mad, you ask? Well, record companies do, because Wal-Mart is, both mysteriously and tragically, the largest music retailer in the world. That means they have power, and they can say "if you sell Britney Spears' album online before we can sell it in our stores, we lose money. So if you do that, we're not going to stock her album at all, and then you'll lose a LOT of money."
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I never would have experienced otherwise. I'm now fans of their music, and I may not have bought their CDs, but I would have never bought their CD anyway, because I would have never heard of them! And now that I have heard of them, I go to their concerts, and I talk them up to my friends, and give my friends the music to listen to for themselves, so they can go to the concerts, and tell their friends, and so on.
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So the next question is, what now?
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or the major labels, it's over. It's fucking over. You're going to burn to the fucking ground, and we're all going to dance around the fire. And it's your own fault.
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It was able to exist because you controlled the distribution, but now that's back in the hands of the people, and you let the ball drop when you could have evolved.
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Radiohead was "experimenting," releasing a low-quality MP3 version of an album only to punish the fans who paid for it by later releasing a full-quality CD version with extra tracks.
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If we didn't believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD then we wouldn't do what we are doing."
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In any case, the artists own their own music.
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12 Dec 07
Baxter TocherThe death of Oink, the birth of dissent, and a brief history of record industry suicide.
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09 Dec 07
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28 Nov 07
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17 Nov 07
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For quite a long time I've been intending to post some sort of commentary on the music industry - piracy, distribution, morality, those types of things. I've thought about it many times, but never gone through with it, because the issue is such a broad, messy one - such a difficult thing to address fairly and compactly. I knew it would result in a rambly, unfocused commentary, and my exact opinion has teetered back and forth quite a bit over the years anyway. But on Monday, when I woke up to the news that Oink, the world famous torrent site and mecca for music-lovers everywhere, had been shut down by international police and various anti-piracy groups, I knew it was finally time to try and organize my thoughts on this huge, sticky, important issue.
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10 Nov 07
victoria p.Maybe in the hands of consumers, the music marketplace will expand in new and lucrative ways no one can even dream of yet. We won't know until music is free, and eventually it's going to be. Technological innovation destroys old industries, but it creates
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08 Nov 07
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06 Nov 07
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05 Nov 07
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04 Nov 07
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03 Nov 07
sparklydragonIn a few short years, the aggressive push of technology combined with the arrogant response from the record industry has rapidly worn away all of my noble intentions of clinging to the old system, and has now pushed me into full-on dissent.
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01 Nov 07
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30 Oct 07
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29 Oct 07
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Lars ForsbergGreat essay on why Music should be free and how the record industry is in it's death throws.
music mp3 awesome blog p2p art business for:chidealer for:gary_koelling
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Michael Massing'I would have gladly paid a large monthly fee for a legal service as good as Oink - but none existed, because the music industry could never set aside their own greed and corporate bullshit to make it happen.'
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28 Oct 07
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clizzinThis is another amazing article about OiNK's shutdown and the economics of music distribution.
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livethelifeIf I filled my shiny new 160gb iPod up legally, buying each track online at the 99 cents price that the industry has determined, it would cost me about $32,226.
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William WallaceFor quite a long time I've been intending to post some sort of commentary on the music industry - piracy, distribution, morality, those types of things. I've thought about it many times, but never gone through with it...
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Already is the key word, because it didn't have to be this way, and that's become the main source of my utter lack of sympathy for the dying record industry: They had a chance to move forward, to evolve with technology and address the changing needs of consumers - and they didn't. Instead, they panicked - they showed their hand as power-hungry dinosaurs, and they started to demonize their own customers, the people whose love of music had given them massive profits for decades.
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he pirating community continues to out-smart and out-innovate the dated methods of the record companies, and CD sales continue to plummet while exchange of digital music on the internet continues to skyrocket. Why? Because freely-available music in large quantities is the new cultural norm, and the industry has given consumers no fair alternative.
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t's why record companies shove disposable pop crap down your throat instead of nurturing career artists: because they have CEOs and shareholders to answer to, and those people don't give a shit if a really great band has the potential to get really successful, if given the right support over the next decade.
-
At the top of all this is the rigged, outdated, and unfair structure of current intellectual property laws, all of them in need of massive reform in the wake of the digital era.
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Oink was not only an absolute paradise for music fans, but it was unquestionably the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known.
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It was like the world's largest music store, whose vastly superior selection and distribution was entirely stocked, supplied, organized, and expanded upon by its own consumers.
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One of Oink's best features was how it allowed users to connect similar artists, and to see what people who liked a certain band also liked. Similar to Amazon's recommendation system, it was possible to spend hours discovering new bands on Oink, and that's what many of its users did. Through sites like Oink, the amount and variety of music I listen to has skyrocketed, opening me up to hundreds of artists I never would have experienced otherwise. I'm now fans of their music, and I may not have bought their CDs, but I would have never bought their CD anyway, because I would have never heard of them!
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27 Oct 07
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ken ."so this is why CDs cost $18...", please, think of the [lawyer's] children, all them parties, protecting the past, greasing the wheels of industry, BusinessAsUsual, stamping out disruptive influences, cut out the problem - cease, desist, out damn spot!
business cost drm economics fear history innovation legal marketing music p2p politics power riaa technology web
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Asbjørn ClemmensenI don't think I've read an article about this topic that gets anywhere close to the level of this one. This article explains exactly why the record industry is doomed to die a miserable death, and how RIAA is disregarding people's rights.
Page Comments
respond with more lawsuits, and the cycle will repeat itself over and
over until the industry has finally bled itself to death. And then
everything will be able to change, and it will be in the hands of
musicians and fans and a new generation of entrepreneurs to decide how
the new record business is going to work. Whether you agree
with it or not, it's fact. It's inevitable - because the determination
of fans to share music is much, much stronger than the determination of
corporations to stop it.'
for free, it was more than just that. Even though music you downloaded
from OiNK was not technically legal, the idea OiNK created has sparked
a music revolution. As with many other "concepts" we face tody in a
digital world, the music industry has to adapt and change. The record
industries had the chance to take advantage of sites like OiNK and its
ideas, but instead crushed their opportunity--at the same time
inadvertently starting a music revolution that will inevitably win. The
record industry cannot survive without the public, and the public will
win.
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