youtube, free speech and copyright infringement

If someone's looking to make money as a musician, they're barking up the wrong tree when it comes to copyright. Only a very small percentage of artists signed to a record label ever make money off of album sales.

The only realistic revenue streams for the vast majority of working musicians are tickets to live gigs, merchandise, and commissions (e.g. soundtracks).

On the business side, from the perspective of the artist, recordings of music are really only effective for purposes of building a fanbase. Somewhere along the line, record company hype managed to convince musicians that they should look at recordings as a revenue stream instead of a promotional expense, which is completely delusional.

Copyright as we understand it is a dinosaur that doesn't know it's dead yet. It doesn't serve the needs of the artists. Artists should give music away for free in hopes of building a fanbase who will come see them when they come to town and buy a few t-shirts. Businesses can make money like eMusic makes money - charging not for content but for convenience and organization.

What do you all think of the Apple-EMI deal?

Well as much as I applaud Apple for innovation, it's worth noting that iTunes isn't so much about selling music as it is about selling iPods. Just talking to my father about the Viacom/Google bustup and this came up; Apple estimate that between 15-20 songs per iPod are actually purchased which astounded me at first, I must admit.

This all boils down to money, and whilst I'd like to say that EMI truly are, as CEO Eric Nicoli claims, "embracing change", it's more likely EMI figured out it would make more money this way than by pushing the format of the CD.

iPods account for something ridiculous like 75%+ of all portable media players - hell, you'll find an input jack in BMWs for them, for one - and so in effect, I can't really see DRM being a huge deal though apparently Windows Media Player is the premium choice for music playback on one's HDD.

I'll look into the details some more, get back to you later.

E_S

What do you mean?

You should be able to play stuff in iTunes and on your iPod; you can't use it with Windows Media Player, RealPlayer (lol) et al because of the DRM issue which, at least with EMI, won't be a problem any more.

E_S

Eh finding an arguably better portable player than the iPod isn't hard; the iPod succeeds on brand image. It's still a quality product, but that's not entirely what's selling them.

ES

AAC isn't a "special file type". It is part of the MPEG-4 audio standard, and there are multiple portable players that support it. Look up ISO 13818-7:1997 for its initial introduction as part of the MPEG-2 standards and ISO 14496-3:1999 for the current description of it.

My Palm Treo 650, Sony's Playstation Portable and Playstation 3, and the Microsoft Zune all support AAC audio. Complaining about the music being in AAC format would be like an Ogg Vorbis (another audio codec) supporter complaining about music in MP3 format.

What you are complaining about is the FairPlay DRM that the music studios insisted Apple apply to songs. That is a DRM wrapper around the AAC audio data (in keeping with the ISO standards). Not to encourage copyright infringement or anything, but look up a tool called QTFairUse, which can help you remove that DRM layer (using a similar but faster method than what Apple recommends of burning it to a CD and reripping it to your hard drive).

Kimball Kinnison

want to hear something really scary.

you see more music videos of all your favorite singers on Youtube then MTV, CMT, VHI, MTV2, VHI CLASSIC and fuse combined.

its scary to think youtube has become the new MTV cause MTV said screw you to music.

That's what they get for becoming crap.

What you mean showing 24/7 of shows like Next, Date my Mom and RWvsRR is not good TV?