
BitTorrent Is The New Radio, Says Counting Crows Frontman - evo_9
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-is-the-new-radio-says-counting-crows-frontman-120514/
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oldschooltaper
I think some commenters are missing the point.

For Duritz, who admits he collects bootlegs[1], bittorrent is being envisioned
here as a promotional tool, not a distribution tool. Radio used to be the main
promotional tool. Disc jockeys (once fully human, now often pre-programmed
since radio stations have all been acquired by large corporations) could make
or break an artist. And it's been this way for as long as the recording
industry has existed.

Even if you were lucky enough to get time at Sun Studios in Memphis, if the
radio did not agree to play your songs, "no one" would know you exist. And you
would not become a cash cow for some record company.

No listener has to pay for radio. It's "free".

Duritz is smart. His band is also in need of some promotion. Who is going to
listen to radio at the point when everyone is connected to the internet and
when the internet offers a more flexible way to get music "for free"? The
answer is no one. That point is inevitable.

1\. Assuming he's a reasonably serious collecter that implies he knows all
about distribution of "pirated" content. Before file sharing became easy, this
used to be the postal mail. People mailed cassette tapes to each other. As an
artist, he also sees a side of the "pirating" issue many collectors of
bootlegs (perhaps analogous to today's bittorrent addicts) do not see.

~~~
J3L2404
>Duritz is smart.

Citation needed.

~~~
ye-olde-taper
This made me laugh. Nice one. :)

It's opinion not fact. No citation needed for opinions of the author.

Nevertheless I will rephrase for anyone who might confuse opinion for fact:

In the author's opinion, Duritz is, with respect to this decision, being
smart.

Smart means smart in a business sense.

Time will tell if he is truly being smart in deciding to do this.

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tptacek
Far more likely that Duritz is naive about BitTorrent than that he's right
about its role in his industry.

People listen to songs on the radio and then buy the recording so that they
can play higher-quality versions of their preferred songs on demand.

Nobody rationally torrents a CD rip and then goes to the store to buy the real
version.

Further evidence of Duritz naivete: they're releasing a 4-song teaser of their
new album on BitTorrent. Exactly what is the advantage of holding back tracks
in their official release? It is utterly, absolutely inevitable that high-
fidelity versions of all their tracks will be on BitTorrent moments after they
become available in any form. Partial teaser releases are a pantomimed form of
control and a waste of time. If you believe P2P sharing is a real business
benefit, you embrace it for real.

~~~
InclinedPlane
_"Nobody rationally torrents a CD rip and then goes to the store to buy the
real version."_

Except this behavior is commonplace. Probably _as_ common as people buying
music they've heard on the radio.

Maybe to you it isn't "rational" in some sort of twisted Homo Economicus
model, but in the real world it happens all the time.

~~~
tptacek
Who do you think a comment like this is convincing? Wouldn't you have to have
no real-world friends to believe that people who download music for the
overwhelming most part DON'T go on to buy those tracks? All you have to do is
ask anyone sitting near you to find out how message-board-fake your argument
is.

~~~
sp332
On a live-audience episode of Diggnation, Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose asked a
large audience, "How many of you pirate music and movies over bittorrent?"
They weren't expecting anyone to seriously admit it. But about half the
audience cheered and waved their hands! Then they asked "Well how many of you
suckers actually buy music and movies online, like from iTunes?" and about
half the audience (mostly the same people) cheered again. They were pretty
confused about this (as you seem to be), but the reaction made it clear that
it's pretty common behavior.

They followed up by asking why people pay for stuff when they have no problem
downloading it. The two main answers were: "If I like it, it buy it" and "I
expand my collection any way I can."

~~~
tptacek
I think I'm suggesting not very subtly that people are cheering for what they
_want_ to be true, but not for what they actually do. Ask any 10 of those
people anonymous what the last 3 things they torrented (and, sure, liked) were
and what the last 3 things they _bought_ were, and the sets will be disjoint.

David Lowery would say that recorded music sales stats, especially when
deconfabulated, bear out that assumption. I'd also suggest that common sense
does the same: much of the mainstream market for music can't afford to buy
every single track they want to listen to, and yet the suggestion seems to be
that they have a monklike devotion to doing that when there is no practical
benefit to doing so.

~~~
sp332
I think people have an amount of money they are willing to spend on music, and
they allocate that among bands they want to support. Then they torrent all the
other music they want to listen to. Those are not necessarily the same bands.

~~~
tptacek
I think that's a very credible middle ground interpretation between the poles
of "nobody pays, everyone pirates" (which is what I think) and "everyone pays,
piracy is just marketing" (which is what HN believes).

But, obviously, that middle ground still represents a transfer of wealth away
from the people who actually produce music and towards a new breed of
networked middlemen who capitalize on other people's work and couldn't give a
damn about the future of music. Oops, I let my rant seep back in there. Sorry!

------
oldschooltaper
There was a time in history, when radio was first introduced, when publishers
of newspapers sued radio stations for reading the news over the airwaves. It
seems rather short-sighted now, doesn't it?

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WiseWeasel
BT isn't comparable to radio or something like Pandora or Lastfm. It's more
like the new version of making a dub tape of a friend's music, labor-intensive
and not always convenient or practical.

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psychotik
Err, no. Music streaming services (Pandora/Audiogalaxy/Spotify) are the new
radio. Facebook's Open Graph is the new radio. Background music in ads (Apple
ads, for example) are the new radio.

~~~
guelo
Musicians have been selling their music for ads for almost as long as there
has been radio advertising.

------
oldschooltaper
Perhaps the internet will lead to musicians who are in it only for the music,
the self-expression and the ego boost, not for the money.

Maybe the truth is that it has always been this way. Maybe musicians didn't
ask to be paid for doing what they love. Maybe record companies just realised
they could profit recording and distributing a musician's music. And the
musicians were quite happy to be paid.

But once record companies give a musician this "easy money", musicians are
unlikely to ever want to sacrafice that benefit. Eventually it becomes viewed
as an entitlement.

Digital recording and the internet means we don't need record companies to
distribute music anymore.

Will musicians stop making music? Will the quality of music decline?

These are very weak arguments with no evidence to support them.

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jeffpersonified
As much as I enjoy Counting Crows (did?) I hardly think Duritz is the best
indicator of industry trends.

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paulhauggis
It only works if people know to search for you, like the Counting Crows.

The nice part about actual radio is that it can give unknown artists airplay
(and people will actually listen to it).

~~~
codeine
That's true for bittorrent, although as others have suggested, smaller torrent
communities focused on a particular genre may also act to provide ad-hoc
recommendations.

At Presto.fm we're working on a different solution to the problem, by creating
a way to discover and stream new music using personalized radio stations
seeded with the listener's existing favourite artists or genres. (A bit like
some existing services but with a focus on niche artists and a deep catalogue
of music).

<http://presto.fm>

~~~
paulhauggis
I would much rather see a legal way (with permission from the artist) like
Pandora.

~~~
codeine
Ensuring that artists receive both exposure and fair compensation is important
to us.

Presto.fm currently uses music content from YouTube, which is licensed under
Google's agreements with the major labels and the NMPA, so that artists can
receive royalties from the ads included in player.

Many independent artists also upload their own music for free, just as they do
with Soundcloud, etc, as they recognise it as a great way to reach new
audiences.

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J3L2404
Duritz is a muppet. But hey if your hero is Kim Dotcom then he looks cool I
guess.

