Flutterby™! : Spam & Music 2002-02-05 16:18:28+00

Spam & Music

2002-02-05 16:18:28+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

The real problem of "permanent September" wasn't the proliferation of "m3 t00" messages, it was the sudden existence of that many people who were willing to accept heavy commercialism in their lives. Spam needs an audience, people who actually want to "Make Penis Fast", without that audience it's only worth doing as flame bait. How does this tie to digital rights management? Well, diveintomark pointed to the Beagle Bros Online Museum reader feedback, which had this note:

I was friends with a fairly notorious cracker. He cracked dozens and dozens of software titles and gave them freely to anyone and everyone. When it came to Beagle software, however, he never gave away copies because Beagle did not copy-protected any of their stuff and actually trusted the users to be honest.

I had the same experience. If, rather than doing open battle with their customers, entertainment companies would start to target customers who respect the work of real artists, we'd have a smaller entertainment industry, but I'd bet we'd have better mass-market music.

...And the entertainment companies would prefer a smaller entertainment industry why?

I believe that the only thing that's going to change the consumer experience with music is massive disintermediation.

Yep. That's the rub. They're willing to trample all over privacy and personal data rights to maintain their monopoly. But as we fight them, we should be keeping in mind the social changes that maintaining a society which allows a free and open exchange of our own data will bring to our culture, and recognize that, despite RIAA propaganda, that's likely to be good.

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50101,00.html has some interesting points about the entertainment biz. Philips is still hitting the music companies about copy-protected (or broken, as Philips prefers to say) CDs. But the Philips patents on CDs start running out this year. And the record companies are probably thinking maybe it's time to start selling music in a different form-factor anyhow, so they can sell a bazillion copies of old Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones on new media.

Then again, with almost half of my 700 CDs, and a dozen or so LPs ripped into MP3s, I don't see why I'd want anything I already have on new media. I think they may have missed their window of opportunity to screw people one more time, and that's (hopefully) got 'em scared.