
The Age of Music Piracy Is Officially Over  - cwan
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/st_essay_nofreebird/
======
marknutter
The artists get 15 cents of every dollar? Fuck. That. I will continue not
buying music until I'm able to pay the artists directly. Someone please tell
me what the record labels have done to deserve 75% of the cut. The majority of
the music I listen to I found on my own either by pirating music or finding it
on my own on the web. We haven't "won" until these middle men are cut
completely out of the loop.

And to be honest, even then I probably wouldn't pay for music. I wlll pay for
t-shirts, stickers, or concert tickets, but not songs these artists couldn't
give away when they were first starting out. One of the most enduring examples
of hypocrisy in this whole music pirating debacle will be Metallica raging
against the very practice that made them popular in the first place - people
dubbing tapes of their music for their friends.

The only thing that makes music worth anything is popularity and the only way
to make music popular is to give it away for free in the beginning. Given that
there's an infinite supply, how does it make any sense that it can be
worthless in one instant and $1 a pop in another? This insanity needs to stop,
and I guarantee that it will some day. The easier it becomes to produce and
promote music, games, movies, software, etc, the harder and harder it is going
to be to justify charging anything for it.

~~~
naz
If record labels do not provide value then why would artists sign with them in
the first place?

~~~
marknutter
Because they are essentially giving into a massive bribe, often at a very
young and vulnerable age. And keep in mind, the vast majority of musicians out
there do _not_ sign with record labels. Furthermore, only a small percentage
of those who do actually become successful. It's essentially like playing the
lottery.

It used to be that record labels provided powerful marketing power in addition
to the initial cash bribe, but these days superstars are born on myspace and
YouTube. I think record labels will be replaced be smaller, more agile
PR/management teams who understand how to nurture viral growth and also manage
the business side of making it in the music business.

~~~
pyre
In addition to marketing they used to provide:

* Access to top-notch facilities

* Access to top-notch talent (recording/sound engineers, etc)

The problem was that in the fine print, _they_ were not paying for all of
this. _You_ (the artist) were. They give you a huge loan with onerous terms
with the expectation that only ~2% of artists will ever be able to make good
on the loan. They loan you money, knowing that you'll never be able to make
good on it.

All of this is done in a fashion that convinces you that it's "no big deal."
"These are the same terms that Nine Inch Nails got, so they're good enough for
you!" The difference is that NIN was able to sell enough records to make good
on the loan; there is no guarantee that you (the artist) will be able to.

------
jrockway
_It’s certainly better than most of the stuff out on BitTorrent._

This is a lie. I have never not gotten 320kbps or FLAC from BitTorrent. In
fact, I've never even seen the option to get lower quality. With people
happily sharing uncompressed Blue-Ray rips, the 300M for a FLAC album is
_nothing_.

I guess it depends where you hang out. I have never searched for music on TPB.

(BTW, fun fact... there are _standards_ for pirated content:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene>. If your torrent isn't good enough
quality, you'll be made fun of or something.)

------
Groxx
> _A few years ago, audiophiles dismissed iTunes’ 128-Kbps resolution as
> anemic, even though it supposedly passed rigid blind testing against full-
> bandwidth CD tracks of the same song. The sound is compressed, connoisseurs
> said. The high end is mangled. Good work, audiophiles: Online stores have
> cranked up the audio quality to a fat 256 Kbps. To most ears, it’s
> indistinguishable from a CD. (Actually, most ears are listening through
> crummy earbuds anyway, but whatever.)_

There is so much wrong with those sentences, I'm not sure where to start.

1) Who the _hell_ did they test their 128kbps on? I can tell the difference,
even _with_ crummy earbuds. With my Grados, 192 is still distinguishable, and
I'm far from skilled in audiophile terms.

The rest of the article seems to miss a major point in this whole affair: how
we got here.

Thank you, pirates and audiophiles, for allowing me to buy high-quality, DRM-
free music. Could you go after the video industry now, pretty please?

~~~
chrisbolt
You have Grados, that puts you in the top 1%.

~~~
jonah
I can clearly tell the difference between most 128kbps MP3s and CDs on my
stock (bose, ugh) car stereo.

~~~
vukk
iTunes sells AAC, not MP3, as far as I know. My _opinion_ is that 128kbps AAC
is about the same quality as MP3@V2.

~~~
jonah
I don't buy music from iTunes because AAC isn't compatible with all my
devices.

It is true as you say that other CODECs are "better" than MP3.

------
brc
>The reason: We won. And all you audiophiles and copyfighters, you know who
fixed our problems? The record labels and online stores we loved to hate.

I'm not sure I follow the logic here. I would argue that the rejection of DRM
systems wasn't fixed by labels. They had to be brought kicking and screaming
to that particular table.

In this whole thing, what's funny to me is that the solution to the whole
issue was known as soon as Napster got big - make all the songs available, and
make them cheap, and most people will stop bothering with pirated music. I
know I got bored with pirated music about a week after starting it.

Personally, in the fullness of time, the record companies will come to love
digital music. There's one less middleman taking a cut, no inventory to worry
about, and new ideas, cross promotions and artists can be brought to market
and tested faster than ever. The biggest losers appear to be the people who
did album art, but maybe with the high quality screens of digital devices,
they'll find new ways to show their talent.

But digital music will always have it's roots in piracy, something that will
end up as a trivia nugget in years to come, kind of like how people talk about
how NASCAR got going because of bootleggers running moonshine. 'For 20 points,
how did digital music become popular and displace the CD?'

~~~
dasil003
If you mean designers and illustrators who refuse to upgrade their skills for
digital production, then yes, they will fade away into bitterness and
obscurity.

------
gacek
"Online stores have cranked up the audio quality to a fat 256 Kbps. [...] It’s
certainly better than most of the stuff out on BitTorrent."

Oh really?

Even wide open trackers have a lot of stuff encoded in 320/FLAC. And I guess
no one bothers with anything less than that on sites that specialize in music.

It's the age of movie piracy now, but music piracy is not dead.

~~~
Zev
_Even wide open trackers have a lot of stuff encoded in 320/FLAC._

And for the most part, the people encoding these rips in FLAC admit that they
can't tell the difference between 320kbps and V0, let alone FLAC and V0.

In other words: 256kbps is _good enough_ for the very large majority of the
people out there. And a file encoded at 256kbps with AAC is higher quality
than that encoded at 256kbps with MP3.

~~~
daeken
The real benefit to lossless encodings is that you don't experience a second
generation of loss when you want to transcode. Going from, say, MP3 to AAC is
pointless and causes considerably more loss than FLAC to AAC. But for most
people, an MP3 or DRM-free AAC file is Good Enough (TM).

~~~
pearle
Exactly -- for me it's all about transcoding and not locking myself into a
lossy format. This is why I rip all of my CDs to flac and not AAC/MP3.

------
leviathant
Incredible. This is first rate trolling. Almost every point in this article is
fallacious or inflammatory. I'd expect to read an article like this in
Billboard, not Wired. Touting that bands (are supposed to) get a whole 20
cents to the dollar in the callout makes me wonder if this is some kind of
overly dry satire.

------
alextgordon
Sadly, if piracy ever did go away, then all those great achievements would
disappear with it. The only reason they exist is because piracy is providing
competition to a market that has none.

~~~
tjr
I doubt that's the only reason. The picketing nerds in hazmat suits were
probably folks from the FSF, and they are opposed to DRM on principle, and I
believe that would have been shouting the same principles whether if pirated
music was available and DRM-free or not.

~~~
pyre
Personally, I think that piracy had more to do with the downfall of DRM than
protesters in haz-mat suits. Do you really think that the RIAA would have
cared about them? Do you really think that those protesters would have stopped
teens and 20-somethings from buying music? Piracy becoming popular among that
demographic did more to achieve this end than those protesters did.

~~~
tjr
I can only speculate. FSF propaganda influenced me as a teenager. I too would
reckon that piracy played a larger role; whatever smaller role things like
protesters played may have been useful in articulating the problems that
prompted piracy to occur.

------
psawaya
How can you call Grooveshark part of a stable new music ecosystem when UMG
threatens them with "legal jihad"? See:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1660645>

And how many thousands of dollars does it still cost to fill up, say, a 64GB
iPod with iTunes music? It's still unreasonable to expect digital music
customers to go entirely legit.

~~~
StavrosK
It's not the music customers who need to change, it's the law. Honestly, I see
your argument about filling a 64 GB iPod, but it's a bit of a straw man. The
average person doesn't even know that many songs, I have 300 GB of music at
home and yet all the songs I want to hear fit in 10 GB.

~~~
psawaya
I agree, the law does need to change.

Sure, maybe you'll spend thousands of dollars to build your itunes collection
over the years, but let's hope you backed your songs up. It may not seem
likely that Apple will shut down the itunes store, but if they ever did, or
changed their redownload policy, you'd sure be pissed to lose all of that
music in a hard drive crash.

Services like Grooveshark offer what users really deserve, which is as much
music as they want for a flat monthly rate.

~~~
StavrosK
I completely agree, I just paid $30 for a whole year of complete music
freedom. Well, I had complete freedom before (for the little I torrented), but
now it's more convenient as well.

Grooveshark isn't quite there yet in terms of usefulness (it can't match the
tidyness and quality of Spotify), but it's very useful indeed, especially with
its mobile apps. For $30/yr, it's a no-brainer.

------
baddox
> _It’s certainly better than most of the stuff out on BitTorrent._

Firstly, "out on BitTorrent" doesn't make much sense. Secondly, it would seem
the author is unaware of great enthusiast trackers like what and waffles.

~~~
robryan
256 is pretty standard for torrenting music, sure you might not be able to
really tell the difference but I think a lossless format like flac would go a
long way to converting some people.

~~~
uxp
Most "scene" releases are still at ~192 VBR (-V2 LAME). I think the second
sentence of the quote is more apt.

> (Actually, most ears are listening through crummy earbuds anyway, but
> whatever.)

~~~
sgibat
hm, in my extensive experience, v0 is the most popular bit-rate by a large
margin. usually releases are offered in a number of bit-rates.

~~~
uxp
I agree, but I was referring to the organized Warez Scene[1], not private
bittorrent trackers which generally favor user-ripped content over "Scene"
content. V0 is the most popular for private users, but the groups still stick
to V2.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)#Audio_standard...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_\(warez\)#Audio_standards)

------
unfug
With services like Rdio, Netflix, and Steam it's actually easier for me to get
what I want legally now. Lots of people don't pirate because of the cost, it
just used to be the easiest/fastest way to get music/movies/games.

~~~
WalterGR
_Lots of people don't pirate because of the cost, it just used to be the
easiest/fastest way to get music/movies/games._

Rhapsody opened in 2001. If it took 9 years for music piracy to be "over",
then I think there's something more at work than the "it's easier to pirate"
defense.

~~~
nkassis
I know it worked for me personally, since amazon mp3 is around, I have no
needed to look elsewhere. I do however find it annoying to have to keep a VPN
going in the US to download music from Amazon in Canada. The restriction is
ridiculous because it provides no real safety because there is no alternative
for users. They will pirate instead. It's just dumb politics.

The Canadian version of the RIAA is even dumber than was originally though
possible.

~~~
WalterGR
_I know it worked for me personally, since amazon mp3 is around, I have no
needed to look elsewhere._

Amazon MP3 opened to the public ~3 years ago. Did you pirate your music
before? What requirement did it satisfy? Multi-platform-available DRM-free
watermark-less high-bitrate MP3s?

~~~
nkassis
That's pretty much the reason(del free, no watermark and quality). I'be used
amazon for at 2 years now and yes I used to pirate music. Started with.napster
and use everything in between untilI discovered amazon mp3.

I guess the fact that I've been employed for the past 5 years and had money to
spend on music also helped change my habits. Hence why I'm against suing
college student who become your customers after.

------
michaelelliot
Another incorrect article by Wired.

~~~
jmtulloss
What, specifically, is incorrect?

~~~
olalonde
Music piracy is not over.[1]

[1] <http://thepiratebay.org/top/101>

------
sp4rki
I recently purchased a subscription to Grooveshark because of a simple reason.
The value I get for buying a song at 64 cents (or 2.99) is not in check with
the use I might give said song.

Before Napster I had to buy a cd because I might like a band and probably
heard a few songs from them, but I'd have pay 15 bucks for a disk with a 10 to
20 songs which I might or might not like. Then came the Apple store and now I
can actually choose the songs I want, but how am I to be certain about the
quality and value of most of the songs, when I have probably only heard the
most popular ones?

With Grooveshark I pay a monthly/yearly fee and I can just try all the songs I
want. If I really want to have a certain song on my iPod to take wherever I
want and in a decent audiophile quality, I'll buy it. I think it's thievery to
pay a dollar for a song and listen to it for a week and then get tired of it
and never listen to it again. Multiply that for an album, and then multiply it
for the couple of artists you might like. This is the way that Tv should work
also. I get to pay for you to stream me shows, and if I actually like a show
enough that I'm sure I'm going to want to either own a digital or physical
copy of the product, I'll buy it.

I have no problem buying a digital or physical song/album to support the
creator of a product I really like, but a I have a huge issue with having to
pay 10 bucks to get an album I'm not sure I want to own, or even listen to
more than a couple of times.

------
lian
I find it strange that Wired gives Grooveshark a shout out for allowing people
to "sample any song you want before you buy," since the "before you buy" is
totally assumed. I love Grooveshark, but it's so good at giving you what you
want for free that it seems a bit like piracy in the cloud. I think the
reality is that piracy and legal obtainment coexist and are a bit more
ambiguous now, rather than fighting for the total extermination of the other.

------
olalonde
Another link bait headline from Wired. Recall "The Web Is Dead"?
<http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1>

------
tomjen3
The only store which sells digital music in Denmark is apples, but then I have
to use their software.

------
AndrewS
The headline "The Age of Music Piracy Is Officially Over" really bothers me
for some reason. It should be "The Age of Music Piracy Is Over According to
Some Columnist".

------
jcapote
"At Grooveshark, you can sample any song you want before you buy." Inaccurate,
grooveshark is a subscription based streaming service not a store.

------
0ffworlder
This Article is crazy. Has demonoid or the private trackers stopped hosting
FLAC torrents? I am cheap, there is a snowballs chance in hell of getting
caught, arrr. That goes for Ugs nx 6, autocad, adobe cs master collection,
server 2008r2, vs2010, everything until a superior open source alternative is
developed.

~~~
smiler
Interesting. Looks like you do some kind of development that you expect to get
paid for? But you are happy to use software that other software developers
salaries are sustained by people buying the software.

You are a terrible double standard.

