Paramount+ Documentary: an Origin Story For Music Piracy - and Its Human Side (forbes.com) 68
Re-visiting the Napster era, Stephen Witt's book How Music Got Free has been adapted into a two-part documentary on Paramount+. But the documentary's director believes "The real innovative minds here were a bunch of rogue teenagers and a guy working a blue-collar factory job in the tiny town of Shelby, North Carolina," according to this article in the Guardian:
By day, [Glover] worked at Universal Music's CD manufacturing plant in North Carolina, from which he smuggled out hot albums by stars like Mary J Blige and 50 Cent before they were even released. For the documentary, Glover spoke openly, and largely without regret, as did others who worked at that plant who did their own share of stealing. Part of their incentive was class revenge: while they were paid piddling wages by the hour, the industry used the products they manufactured to mint millions. To maximize profits on his end, Glover set up a subscription service to let those in his circle know what CDs and movies were coming. "He was doing what Netflix would later do," Stapleton said...
In the meantime, the record companies and their lobbying arm, the RIAA, focused their wrath on the most public face of file-sharing: Napster. In truth, all Fanning's company did was make more accessible the work the pirates innovated and first distributed... For its part, the music industry reacted in the worst way possible, PR-wise. They sued the kids who made up their strongest fanbase. "One of the key lessons we learned from this era is that you can't sue your way out of a situation like this," Witt said. "You have to build a new technology that supersedes what the pirates did."
Eventually, that's what happened, though the first attempts in that direction made things worse than ever for the labels and stars. When Apple first created the iPod in 2001, there wasn't yet an Apple store where listeners could purchase music legally. "It was just a place to put your stolen MP3s," said Witt. Labels couldn't sue Apple because of a ruling dictating that the manufacturer of a device couldn't be held responsible for piracy enacted by its users. While Steve Jobs later modified his approach, creating a way for fans to buy individual songs for the iPod, "that did more damage to the industry than anything", Witt said. "Whereas, before they could sell a $15 CD to fans who really just wanted one song, now those fans could get that song for just a dollar...."
Eventually, the collective efforts of the streaming companies returned the music industry to massive profitability, though often at the expense of its artists, who often receive a meager slice of the proceeds.... Things ended less favorably for the pirates, some of whom now have criminal records. Likewise, Glover served a short prison sentence though, today, he is chief maintenance technician at the Ryder Truck manufacturing plant in his home town.
A Forbes senior contributor (and director Alexandria Stapleton) believe that for the younger generation it may be "their first introduction to why the music industry is the way that they're used to."
And Stapleton says their sympathies are with those factory workers. Stapleton: They were completely underpaid. They were making literally nothing. It's important for people to understand that while the industry was charging $20 for a CD, it cost like 20 cents to make. That's a big profit margin. And to have a factory that was paying barely enough for people to put food on the table, I think there's something wrong with that...
Witt: It's amazing to think about what they were really doing, which was essentially filling the technological vacuum that the record industry was refusing to fill, right? The record industry was not building out the successor technology to the compact disc because the compact disc was just too profitable for them. Instead, a bunch of random teenagers built the next generation of technology for them, and yeah, it caused a lot of damage. But I don't think that teenagers were necessarily trying to hurt anyone... They weren't malicious. They just were fascinated by how this stuff worked. And of course, they were also completely entranced by the celebrity of the musicians themselves.
In the interview Witt adds that a lot of those teenagers "were really kind of traumatized by their experience with the FBI I would say, and they wanted to get that story out there."
The documentary was produced by LeBron James and Eminem, "who rode the tail end of the CD boom to stratospheric heights," remembers a Fast Company opinion columnist. (And 25 years later, that columnist has gone back to listening to vinyl records, which "reignited for me a long-missing air of full engagement... Technology marches forward, except when it occasionally lurches backward...")
In the meantime, the record companies and their lobbying arm, the RIAA, focused their wrath on the most public face of file-sharing: Napster. In truth, all Fanning's company did was make more accessible the work the pirates innovated and first distributed... For its part, the music industry reacted in the worst way possible, PR-wise. They sued the kids who made up their strongest fanbase. "One of the key lessons we learned from this era is that you can't sue your way out of a situation like this," Witt said. "You have to build a new technology that supersedes what the pirates did."
Eventually, that's what happened, though the first attempts in that direction made things worse than ever for the labels and stars. When Apple first created the iPod in 2001, there wasn't yet an Apple store where listeners could purchase music legally. "It was just a place to put your stolen MP3s," said Witt. Labels couldn't sue Apple because of a ruling dictating that the manufacturer of a device couldn't be held responsible for piracy enacted by its users. While Steve Jobs later modified his approach, creating a way for fans to buy individual songs for the iPod, "that did more damage to the industry than anything", Witt said. "Whereas, before they could sell a $15 CD to fans who really just wanted one song, now those fans could get that song for just a dollar...."
Eventually, the collective efforts of the streaming companies returned the music industry to massive profitability, though often at the expense of its artists, who often receive a meager slice of the proceeds.... Things ended less favorably for the pirates, some of whom now have criminal records. Likewise, Glover served a short prison sentence though, today, he is chief maintenance technician at the Ryder Truck manufacturing plant in his home town.
A Forbes senior contributor (and director Alexandria Stapleton) believe that for the younger generation it may be "their first introduction to why the music industry is the way that they're used to."
And Stapleton says their sympathies are with those factory workers. Stapleton: They were completely underpaid. They were making literally nothing. It's important for people to understand that while the industry was charging $20 for a CD, it cost like 20 cents to make. That's a big profit margin. And to have a factory that was paying barely enough for people to put food on the table, I think there's something wrong with that...
Witt: It's amazing to think about what they were really doing, which was essentially filling the technological vacuum that the record industry was refusing to fill, right? The record industry was not building out the successor technology to the compact disc because the compact disc was just too profitable for them. Instead, a bunch of random teenagers built the next generation of technology for them, and yeah, it caused a lot of damage. But I don't think that teenagers were necessarily trying to hurt anyone... They weren't malicious. They just were fascinated by how this stuff worked. And of course, they were also completely entranced by the celebrity of the musicians themselves.
In the interview Witt adds that a lot of those teenagers "were really kind of traumatized by their experience with the FBI I would say, and they wanted to get that story out there."
The documentary was produced by LeBron James and Eminem, "who rode the tail end of the CD boom to stratospheric heights," remembers a Fast Company opinion columnist. (And 25 years later, that columnist has gone back to listening to vinyl records, which "reignited for me a long-missing air of full engagement... Technology marches forward, except when it occasionally lurches backward...")
Ironically (Score:5, Funny)
One day some AI will make a documentary on how AI displaced Paramount+.
Piracy is MORALLY JUSTIFIED (L.R.) (Score:1)
Slipping a bit toward the protection, DRM, etc, problems, there are so many other case where protections are bothering only the "legal" buyer: remember the SONY scandal ? [wikipedia.org].
Or way back in the past: a friend of mine bought The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind [wikipedia.org] but never used the CDs, only the "pirated" version. Why? Because the copy protection software was constantly checking the presence of the proper CD in
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I looked at TFA and other links in TFS quickly and string searched for "torrent" in them. It would be funny if the documentary pretended that was something only occurring in the old days and which is now over.
Then, it took me about 15 mins to find a working PirateBay link and I searched for "How Music Got Free" and sure enough, both episodes were there! Isn't that ironic?
I guess I would have to install some kind of torrenting client to download it but I am not interested. Most people on Slashdot who were ol
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I forget just how much fun working in IT was early on, heh...
In the mid to late 90s I worked for a fairly decent sized ISP. It was fairly normal to see a lot of us as well as many of our bosses be working while also playing svgalib/quakeworld, then later on playing what became very popular for "lan party" at work with stuff like age of empires, command & conquer, and starcraft.
And of course a lot of us would be downloading music, TV shows or movies from the newsgroups while at work including bosses. Heh
Rip. Mix. Burm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also: "It's important for people to understand that while the industry was charging $20 for a CD, it cost like 20 cents to make" is an asinine comment. No-one was paying for the CD, they were paying for the music on the CD. I've no idea the margins and suspect they were still high, but the 20-cents-to-make comment ignores the artist, the promotion...it's just wrong.
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Well, the music industry famously ignores the artist too, for the most part, so arguments being a little fudgy is par for the course. There's a reason why there's no shortage of top-tier artists trying to get out of their early record label contracts. If you know someone who can provide realistic and verifiable accounting insights into that business and would shed some light on the corporate structures and interdependencies, a lot of people would be very interested. The argument doesn't depend on exact numb
Re:Rip. Mix. Burm. (Score:5, Informative)
If you buy an album of mine, thanks - you've bought me a cup of coffee. If you stream an album of mine - also thanks for listening and please continue, but to get the amount of money...only 1,200 or so streams to go before I get that same coffee.
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Music piracy didn't begin in 2000. Who remembers cassette tapes recorded from vinyl albums? Remember when the music industry wanted to impose a pirate tax on all blank cassettes sold? Remember, "Home taping is killing music"?
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I'm too young to remember the RIAA/Metallica trying to tax cassette tapes. But I do remember them crippling DAT and MiniDisc; both of which are formats that should really have peen more prevalent, as they filled use cases not met by cassette or regular CDs, but were marginalized by the malevolence machinations of the copyright cartel. Also, IIRC they actually got Canada to pass a law wrt/ hard drives the the effect that it was going to be assumed that the only reason one would buy a HD is piracy, so they
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From what I recall if there was one writer for an entire album they could expect about $1 per disc sold. The other musicians got a cut of something less than that.
A lot of their income came from touring and merchandise, because returns on CD sales were crap. Most of it was profit for the record label.
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That's a more-than-revisionist view about the iPod. iTunes could convert a CD into MP3 and copy it straight to the iPod.
Even before the iPod was invented, most of the nerds I knew had mp3 collections which far outshone their CD collections. You could get mp3s through USENET, through ftp, through websites, through P2P networks... They were already easier to get than CDs.
I've no idea the margins and suspect they were still high, but the 20-cents-to-make comment ignores the artist, the promotion...it's just wrong.
Most artists get roughly nothing from label CD sales. They only really make money for doing shows, and selling merch and CDs at their concerts themselves. It's 20 cents for the CD, 5 cents for the packaging and a fraction of a cent for the artist.
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Most artists get roughly nothing from label CD sales. They only really make money for doing shows, and selling merch and CDs at their concerts themselves. It's 20 cents for the CD, 5 cents for the packaging and a fraction of a cent for the artist.
Most new artists did not get much from CD sales back then. One major reason is that new artists signed over all their copyrights to the record companies to get their initial record deals. This was the standard practice back then. Established artists (especially those with good lawyers) would get a far bigger percentage. Newer artists like Taylor Swift have changed this by keeping their songwriting copyrights when they sign with record companies these days.
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Also: "It's important for people to understand that while the industry was charging $20 for a CD, it cost like 20 cents to make" is an asinine comment. No-one was paying for the CD, they were paying for the music on the CD. I've no idea the margins and suspect they were still high, but the 20-cents-to-make comment ignores the artist, the promotion...it's just wrong.
One major grievance I and many others had about CDs were they were more expensive to buy yet were cheaper to make. When it was new technology, it was understandable that they would be slightly more expensive initially, but the industry, being greedy bastards, never lowered the prices. CDs changed by the process of making music media by lowering costs in many ways. Yet the industry always priced them above tapes and vinyl.
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the 20-cents-to-make comment ignores the artist, the promotion...
I suspect it ignores everything except the cost of the medium. Aside from the artist and promotional costs, there's also the packaging and distribution costs, returns, and who knows what else.
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Yes, you could rip your own discs. Apple promoted it as such, and even did the whole "Don't steal music" thing on the iPad wrappers.
Unofficially though, you can bet Apple knew damn well most people were not ripping their CD collections full time. I'm sure a lot of owners did at first - they got their shiny new iPod home and ripped a few CDs onto it.
But music piracy was huge by the time the iPod came out - Napster and other P2P services were rampant. And I'm sure Apple knew that a good chink of their users
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It would be a silly argument except that at the time, the music industry itself was claiming that it costs real money to make those CDs and that they charged what they did to cover manufacturing and not hookers and blow. So fair enough to talk about the real manufacturing costs.
CD ripping (Score:5, Insightful)
I had quite a few MP3 players of various types and I didn't download music - I had a large and growing CD collection and some 'ripping' software that would encode the CD music into MP3 and store it to files. Literally everyone I personally knew who used MP3s did it this way with a little file sharing between friends.
I feel like the summary and/or the documentary skipped over a pretty big slice of history here.
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I had quite a few MP3 players of various types and I didn't download music
I pride myself in never having paid a single cent to the labels for music. When I was young, I copied LPs on R2R. Then I copied on cassettes. I recorded the radio on cassettes. I copied CDs on cassettes (not mine). Then Napster happened and I copied MP3. Then Bittorrent, etc...
I invested boatloads of money in good hifi equipment. When MP3 players came about, I bought every single one of them. It's not like I'm a cheapstake: I paid a lot for my music. Just not the labels.
Now there's Youtube, which is institu
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Uh, sorry to burst your bubble but they do actually pay labels for a lot of the music use on Youtube nowadays. Look up "Youtube Content ID". It's not money going from your pocket into theirs, but you are indirectly giving them money.
Goog
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Most of the stuff I listen to is people who ripped some obscure LP or CD and uploaded it with a note saying "This is a low-quality preview - contact me and I'll take it down rightaway" - the trick being, it not low-quality and it's not mainstream enough for anybody to give two fucks.
But even if I listen to bona fide uploads, my bubble is just fine: Google doesn't earn much, if anything, on my back, since I make extra sure they get as little monetizable data out of me as possible. So if they pay someone to l
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Fair enough if you're fine with Google paying, but I was just letting you know, if your goal is to not give the labels money, you're failing.Youtube isn't music theft any more than listening to the radio is.
Side note, if you actually want this obscure music to be
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Side note, if you actually want this obscure music to be preserved, Youtube is a horrible place to do it.
This totally contradicts my experience. I've found more old, obscure and interesting albums on Youtube than anywhere else.
And once I've found them, I download them and put them up on my NAS of course. I don't leave stuff I care about on someone else's server, I'm not dumb.
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I had quite a few MP3 players of various types and I didn't download music - I had a large and growing CD collection and some 'ripping' software that would encode the CD music into MP3 and store it to files. Literally everyone I personally knew who used MP3s did it this way with a little file sharing between friends.
I feel like the summary and/or the documentary skipped over a pretty big slice of history here.
How is ripping and playing back CDs you own "piracy?"
How is not writing about you skipping "over a pretty big slice of history?"
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Re:CD ripping (Score:4, Informative)
Fair Use Doctrine had been around way before CDs (and in some forms, way before recorded audio works at all). For example it was not illegal to buy a CD (or LP), copy it to a cassette, and play that cassette in your car for your own use (ref final codifying of this right in AHRA of 1992). If you sold or gave away copies, that is where you ran afoul of the law because you interfered with the distribution rights of the work's author, which is what copyright laws protect.
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I don't know of anyone convicted for this but I'm unaware of any case where this precedent was set. The music industry was very vocal about the shady nature of 'format shifting' from time to time. I refreshed myself on the topic and it seems like it's still not settled either way in US law.
U.S. copyright law (Title 17 of the United States Code) generally says that making a copy of an original work, if conducted without the consent of the copyright owner, is infringement. The law makes no explicit grant or denial of a right to make a "personal use" copy of another's copyrighted content on one's own digital media and devices. For example, space shifting, by making a copy of a personally owned audio CD for transfer to an MP3 player for that person's personal use, is not explicitly allowed or forbidden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org]... [wikipedia.org]
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I'm unaware of any case where this precedent was set
Sony v. Universal 464 U.S. 417 (1984) [wikipedia.org]
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Re: CD ripping (Score:2)
In Sweden recording labels added DRM to CDs to stop people from ripping them to mp3 at the same time they were paid for private copying from sales of media like CDRs
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You seem pretty young.
Well, thank you, groomer!
In the old days, you couldn't copy your own CDs due to a small thing called copyright law. Same with books, you couldn't just photocopy them (imagine "photograph the pages with your phone"), due to a small thing called copyright law.
Citation needed or just admit you're a RIAA sock puppet and it was never "illegal," just threatened by "the industry." It's always been legal to make a copy for personal use, even if RIAA filed more frivolous lawsuits than you could fap in your mama's basement on a weekday.
People who did it anyway were called "pirates", and when the neighbours dobbed them in they went to court and either paid a fine or went to jail.
Hang on now. Extra u? "Dobbed them in?" Maybe you're from some non-USian country I don't pay attention to or care about. Much as you may not want to hear it, I don't think this story is about you.
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You seem pretty young. In the old days, you couldn't copy your own CDs due to a small thing called copyright law. Same with books, you couldn't just photocopy them (imagine "photograph the pages with your phone"), due to a small thing called copyright law. People who did it anyway were called "pirates", and when the neighbours dobbed them in they went to court and either paid a fine or went to jail.
There notable exception to copyright law is Fair Use. In terms of copies of CDs, those were perfectly legal under certain conditions like backup purposes; however, distributing those copies to others may not be considered Fair Use. Fair Use was cited in Sony v Universal (SCOTUS 1984) [wikipedia.org] where consumers can record copyrighted broadcasts to view them later.
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You should really ask the record companies those burning questions. I was always OK with it as long as I owned the CDs but the law was a little waffle-y on it for a fair bit.
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You should really ask the record companies those burning questions. I was always OK with it as long as I owned the CDs but the law was a little waffle-y on it for a fair bit.
Is this that logic puzzle where I have to ask what the other guard would not say because one of them always lies?
Wait. You probably can't tell me.
How would the record companies not answer that?
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U.S. copyright law (Title 17 of the United States Code) generally says that making a copy of an original work, if conducted without the consent of the copyright owner, is infringement. The law makes no explicit grant or denial of a right to make a "personal use" copy of another's copyrighted content on one's own digital media and devices. For example, space shifting, by making a copy of a personally owned audio CD for transfer to an MP3 player for that person's personal use, is not explicitly allowed or forbidden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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What legal scholarship! You offer me text from Wikipedia.
And you edit it to leave out the next paragraph about personal copying. And don't mention any of the text about fair use. Those are also on the Wikipedia page.
Laws do not mean whatever you think they do. Their meanings (and legality!) are decided in courts.
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Although certain types of infringement scenarios are allowed as fair use and thus are effectively considered non-infringing, "personal use" copying is not explicitly mentioned as a type of fair use, and case law has not yet established otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I don't see how that helps but mazel-tov
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> How is ripping and playing back CDs you own "piracy?"
It isn't but keep in mind time-shifting (and eventually space-shifting) eventually become encoded in 17 U.S.C. Sections 106 and 107. See THE RIAA'S CASE AGAINST RIPPING CDs: WHEN ENOUGH IS ENOUGH [hbtlj.org], Section III.A.2: The Case Law on Fair Use: the Doctrine of Time and Space Shifting and its Limits on page 182.
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Didn't have a big CD collection but had a friend that worked at a used record store so I could bring in a laptop and rip to my hearts content. Then I had the same deal going on with a pawn shop ....
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I feel like the summary and/or the documentary skipped over a pretty big slice of history here.
Early adopters to MP3 did the multiple steps of converting their CD collections to MP3 which included ripping, encoding, getting the metadata, etc.. In the early days, that require two separate programs. However, the popularity of MP3s exploded when the general public realized they did not have to do all of that including buying CDs. Just install this program and connect to the Internet and you can get hundreds of CDs with all the metadata included.
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I forget the software but there was at least one ripper that would connect to ... CDDB? And then rip the entire CD and embed all the metadata and set the filenames and so on. Maybe CDex? Anyway I ripped all my CDs and I'm not buying any more.
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Generally the ripper program would not do that because the intermediate raw audio file like WAV which would be converted instantly to MP3 by the encoder program. The problem is as a separate program, the encoder would not know what the CD was. All it had was the WAV files that may not have any metadata. As these programs got merged, it became practical to connect to CDDB to get the metadata. CDDB was also evolved over time as the first implementations only retrieved the metadata like track, album, order.
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I'm certain that CDex would do it all in one shot from the user perspective but it likely invoked other tools under the hood, and this would have been in the what, probably middle 1990s. It didn't watch the CD drive AFAICR. I distinctly remember it fetching the track metadata and populating a list, and then waiting for the go ahead.
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I'm lacking the sympathy (Score:1)
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The advertising industry is set up to constantly harass people into buying products...
Only if you're poor and can't afford those products, then it's effectively constantly mocking you for not being able to have the latest fashion. This is especially cruel for kids who have absolutely no control over their wealth and it's simply a matter of luck who their parents happen to be. Kids can also be cruel, so the ones with richer parents will constantly mock the poorer kids too.
It's no wonder then that in situatio
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If someone's treating you like dirt and underpaying you then you give them the finger and walk out the door. It's not an excuse for you to be criminal and just steal what you want.
Part of the story should be the questions "What is stealing?" and "Is piracy theft?"
Thanks for bringing that up!
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It's not that the industry forced the name on people. People actively claimed the name, before various industries got hold of it.
I highly doubt, that a CD cost "20 cents to make" (Score:2)
the artist gets like $0.02 per CD sale! (Score:2)
the artist gets like $0.02 per CD sale!
now people don't own music (Score:2)
Mary J Blige and 50 Cent....lol. really (Score:4, Informative)
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You can legally rip your own CD.... (Score:2)
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Paramount+ (Score:2)
MP3.com (Score:2)
The incident that drove me up the wall the most was when MP3.com was sued out of existence. I discovered a ton of music through that site, and I even bought several of their "DAM" CD-R albums, which were print-on-demand releases that included both CD audio and MP3 files.
The most infuriating thing is, MP3.COM weren't even sued over their regular operation, which was all about distributing music that the musicians had uploaded for that explicit purpose. No, it was the new "MyMP3.com" feature they added wher
Sounds like a good watch (Score:5, Funny)
Can uh, anyone point me towards the torrent for it ? :)
Workers Wages and File Sharing (Score:1)
Tape trading made Metallica's career (Score:3)
The only reason the whole band isn't managing 7-11s is piracy, so I always found it funny they were the poster children for the anti-piracy movement.
Interesting moral focus by Mr. Witt (Score:2)
Perhaps the key lesson should have been that it's really nasty to attack your young fans.
Cool, got a torrent link? (Score:2)
Not going to pay for DRM.
About to make some new MP3s (Score:2)
I got a stash of unopened CDs yesterday from a neighbor and later on this week I'm going rip into them and then rip them into MP3s. :D