> Why are you against paying $5/month for unlimited listening of high quality > tracks > from someone like Yahoo Music?
I have repeatedly said in this thread that I think the music subscription services are a good idea in principle. The only thing bad thing to be said about them is that they lock you in to a particular provider, which may or may not put independent producers at even more of a disadvantage. > You know, most people are totally OK with paying Netflix $20/month to > watch lots of DVDs they don't own. Many also pay their local cable > company lots of money to watch HBO, Showtime, pay-per-view, and other > premium content that's also protected and they don't own. We have no Netflix (I'd kill for it) here, no opportunity to get HBO shows (other than torrents). That said, none of this content is protected. I can rip the DVDs and record HBO with whatever device I chose to. > As for lossy music, I'll challenge anyone in a blind comparison to > listen to Yahoo's 192k/bit dual pass encoded WMA tracks against the > original CDs. The point is, that you can't reencode losslessly whenever a new format of choice comes along. Think the current flavour of .wma is going to be around forever? Think again ... It's pretty hard to find the Windows Media V2 codec nowadays. For subscription services, this does not matter, naturally, as long as the streaming players can be updated. > protecting the downloadable/streamable property of artists Since I still refuse to think of content in abstract form as "property", let's just say "rights" instead. Even then, it's more likely the studios that are protected, not the artists - but I got what you mean :) To clarify my viewpoints: Leasing / renting DRMed content == good (There may be other problems with this but the DRM isn't among those) Selling DRMed content == bad. > For those of you who believe all music should be free, I can only say you > must not know > any musicians trying to make a living at it. Do you know any musicians that can make a living on selling copies of their work? Do they have a big-5 contract? If you want to make money as an independent artist, put some of your tracks on p2p, the others sell on your web site via PayPal. Sign up with emusic, post a story to Slashdot or something. People do not get rich via record contracts these days. C. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
