Educational CyberPlayGround ®

Mp3 changed the music industry forever

Music: Free Music Book

Point of order : Everything is a permanent download, if you know where and when to look on your hard drive!

Find Waves, wav, and legal Music Downloads.

Convert your MIDI into MP3 and WAV

How Music Got Free: Dell Glover Changed The Music Business Forever!
In 1994 Glover was a temporary employee at the PolyGram factory which manufactured the new sensation of compact-disk. Glover noticed that the music being played was smuggled music form the plant. In 1996 the first MP3 piracy group emerged. CDA or Compress 'Da Audio's first official release was “Until It Sleeps,” by Metallica. When Tupac's “All Eyez on Me” came through the assembly line later that night Glover was listening to the MP3 of “California Love.” Glover decided to pay younger/temporary employees to smuggle the CD's for him. In 2001 Glover was the King of leaking pre-released music, CD's become irrelevant and mp3's and music streaming are crowned the front runners of distribution. Doug Morris, who ran Universal Music Group from 1995 to 2011 made nearly every bad decision the major music labels made, notably clinging to the CD format for far too long.

At its heart, this is a fight about money, not about morality. We should have the universities collect the cash, pay it to the entertainment industry and let the students do what they are going to do anyway. In exchange, the entertainment industry should call off the lawyers and lobbyists, leaving our nation's universities to focus on the real challenges facing America's next generation of leaders. ~ Fred von Lohmann senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"Illegal music downloading is at an all-time high and set to rise further," citing the 4th-annual digital-music survey by Entertainment Media Research. Forty-three percent of respondents said they're downloading illegal songs, up from 36% last year and 40% in 2005. [1] Meanwhile, fear of being caught has lessened. "This year only 33% cited the risk of being prosecuted as a deterrent against unauthorised downloading, compared with 42% in 2006."

STEALING by Lefsetz

I don't want to steal, but you won't let me PAY! There's no iPod without the Rio. Which the RIAA tried to sue off the shelf. In other words, if you don't test limits, if you play by the rules, the future never arrives.
To try and bring the CD model online is positively nuts. And doesn't work anyway. If songs purchased at the iTMS represent less than 3% of the tracks on an iPod, you KNOW there's a problem.
The iPod. Everybody in the file world has MUCH MORE MUSIC THAN PREVIOUS GENERATIONS EVER HAD! I went to college with way under 100 albums and I had the most discs in my DORM! 100 albums is approximately 1,000 tracks. Kids today have 10,000 tracks in their iTunes libraries. That's what the Net allows, replication and acquisition for almost free.
The replication element, what could be better? No pressing costs! And distribution costs are borne by the consumer. But the RIAA won't let people PAY for the way they get music. They want to sue them back to disc. And statistics say it just doesn't work. File-trading constantly goes UP!
Well, John Kennedy now says he's open to authorized P2P. And Harvard has got a plan, a company called Noank Media (http://www.noankmedia.com/). Noank's going to China first. Licensing universities. For the equivalent of $8 per student per semester. I know, a de minimis amount, but it's better than NOTHING!
Yup, almost NO ONE'S paying in China now. The government can't stop physical piracy. But it and the university system know they've got a problem. So, they made a deal with this company, they're gonna PAY! And Noank is gonna distribute the revenue to the labels and then say...let's go into North America, the rest of the world, charge colleges $100 per student per semester, think of the MILLIONS you'll make! Yup, they've already spoken with the University of Maryland. You see the universities want to pay here too, because of the LIABILITY! If they just add a file-trading fee to the overall cost, they're OFF THE HOOK!
As for the trader, he can take as much as he wants, and he's no longer on the hook, no longer LIABLE!
As for the rights holders... They're gonna make so much money they won't GIVE a shit about the CD. And they'll take it... Has Doug Morris turned down a check recently? Hell, WALL STREET will demand he take the check.
End result, more people have more music and the labels make more money. The problem? Well, I can't THINK OF ONE!
This is what happens when a mass of people who know they're right continue in their course of action, irrelevant of what those in power have to say. We learned it in France during THEIR revolution. We learned it in the sixties here, with the protests against Vietnam.
We rolled over and let Bush invade Iraq without putting up much of a fuss. THAT was a good course of action. Yup, silence. In the face of reality. That equals NO change.
When I say I steal, I'm evidencing SOCIAL PROTEST! I suggest you steal too, it's our only hope to get the RIAA to accept the new reality. If more people have more music EVERYBODY wins. Not only the labels, but the whole TOURING business!
When you trade at a low per month fee, you take more, you get turned on to more. You'd think labels would like this, when they can't seem to get any traction with the conventional gatekeepers.
OF COURSE rights holders should be paid. But they should be paid reflecting the NEW reality, not the old. And until they do, I'm going to continue to steal. You know why? Because I think music is the number one art form, and if more people have more of it at a lower price (can you say cell phone model?) our country will be better off for it.

Recording Industry vs. The People Blog see Are Song Writers Entitled to a "Public Performance" Royalty When a Song is Downloaded?

Open Source Cinema - A collaborative documentary project to create a feature film about copyright in the digital age.

Edward Almasy ~ "Every single one of the torrents on the BitTorrent trackers listed below is 100% legal."
bt.etree.org currently has more than 3,300 active legal music torrents, and it's not just Phish and the Grateful Dead; you don't hear about it much in the popular media (for obvious reasons), but Radiohead, Pearl Jam, My Morning Jacket, Ryan Adams, and hundreds of other very successful artists allow and encourage free sharing of recordings of their work online. linuxtracker.org has thousands of legal torrents available, and it's not just software -- they're also using BitTorrent to distribute educational videos and podcasts. Even clearly suspect sites like The Pirate Bay offer many gigabytes of legal content (e.g. http://thepiratebay.org/user/meetthegimp/).
Traffic shaping or blocking like that practiced by Comcast affects more than just the downloading of illegal MP3s -- it also hinders the rapidly-growing community of people using the technology for legitimate tasks. If this is representative of what we can expect without net neutrality, then I can't help but think that some legal protection for that neutrality is needed."

Giving It Away by Lefsetz
I'm positively stunned at the blowback from business regulars about that chap giving his music away for free. Oldsters can't understand the economics! I'll clue you in, THERE ARE NONE!
This is your worst nightmare. People who can follow their dream on sweat equity. Who with their computer and the money from their day job or mommy and daddy can compete with you. It's like the North Vietnamese, all our military might couldn't defeat individuals who would fight to the death. Same deal in Iraq. It's an eye-opener. That your model is IRRELEVANT!
YOU need to pay the mortgage. YOU need to go on vacation to the Caribbean. But the new musicians? They're willing to sleep on the floor and eat ramen. Hell, they're in their twenties, they're not on the corporate track, they've got different ambitions!This flummoxes the old wave. Especially after the eighties and nineties. You're supposed to go through the usual filters. Get a lawyer and a manager and then shop your demo to labels, who get to not only decide whether to sign you, but what your music should sound like. But the music coming from said majors...it makes the new music-makers puke. So they're doing it their own way. They care as much about the old system as snowboarders care about skiers. In other words, NOT AT ALL! They believe they've got a better system.
Popular music wasn't always such big business. Go back to the press of the British Invasion acts. They were doing it on a lark, they didn't expect it to be a lifelong career. And they got ripped off and underpaid until they survived long enough to work on THEIR terms.Don't forget, the Beatles played multiple sets a night in Hamburg before they had any recorded music success. They did it to get off the docks, to have some fun, to get high, to get laid. But they were so good, that they broke through.
How many of the major label acts have paid those kinds of dues? And are so good that people are clamoring for them? The majors are looking for putty that they can mold and sell to the usual suspects, lame terrestrial radio and TV. Whereas the new musician wants no part of that crap. It used to be the only way to get any exposure, any traction, but no longer. Yes, as the majors are trying to sustain a business selling discs, new musicians don't give a shit about discs. They've got an enterprise. Based on their DEDICATION! They're doing it THEIR way, and if they never break through... Well, they're not willing to compromise, sell out to the man just to make it.
Come to think of it, that's why the old music was so successful. It was uncompromised. It came directly from the heart of the makers. You say kids can't make it giving their music away for free because YOU can't make it. But they can outlast you, starve for years all in pursuit of their art. They don't want an expensive video, never mind a stylist. They don't want to play the game. And, if you don't play the game, I hate to tell you, it just doesn't cost that much.
To believe that the majors will be the logical filters in the future is to be completely ignorant. They're only necessary if you want to reach the masses INSTANTLY! Is that a good thing? Furthermore, as every day goes by, it's easier and easier to reach more people for almost free. Hell, you post your stuff on MySpace, and if you're any good, your friends will tell EVERYBODY! You might not sell "Thriller" numbers, but "Thriller" was twenty five years ago, when we were all beholden to the box, to MTV. Today everybody's scattered in a million different directions. The mainstream is the Top Forty joke of the seventies. It's a dying vine. Hell, just look at SoundScan. The "hit" albums sell ever fewer. And the problem isn't piracy, but the fact that so much of the theoretical potential audience has tuned out, isn't paying attention. Why listen to crap radio when you've got an iPod? Why make an expensive disc and go on a tour-supported trek that has no traction when you can do it YOUR way, making all of your OWN decisions, and have a chance of making it.
You just can't beat these kids. Your only hope is to help them, not decry them or try to reeducate them. Somebody's gonna figure this out. And it won't be an old fart part of the decrepit system. Sure, bands need managers, and agents, even labels. But only if they're honest, only if they can be trusted to help. If you're signed to a major label and you trust it, you're an idiot.

HISTORY
MP3 then MySpace

"MP3Gain" and its competitors allows the user to pre-process the audio gain of mp3 files so that even when played back on "dumb" mp3 devices, the sound volume will be within the range selected by the user. I have used these types of programs for years to enable me to be able to hear mp3's on airplanes where the ambient noise is simply too high. If you are utilizing the outstanding "VLC" media player on your laptop computer, you have even greater control. For example, the VLC player can play back at speeds significantly greater than normal, but _without changing the pitch_, so that you can zoom through boring podcasts & videos at 1.5x or greater speeds. The VLC player also has a "Volume Normalizer", which provides "dynamic volume compression" for noisy environments. See below. It is essential that digital media consumers be allowed to digitally remaster their content to tailor it for their own consumption. In some cases, this can be an advantage for the content creators: e.g., when I set VLC playback to 1.5x, I can consume 50% more content! http://www.ab9il.net/digital-audio/vlc-audio-dynamics.html "Effective Audio compression for Loud or Sensitive Environments.

"The Fad With MySpace Right Now Is To Reject (It)"
That's what Samantha Skey, senior vice president of youth marketing at Alloy Media + Marketing says about the prime college age users of the popular social networking site.

After reading the above Derek Sivers,multi millionaire who started cdbaby.com says: " I wince, though, when I see artists making it their one-and-only website/homepage. Memories of mp3.com : how hundreds of thousands of musicians used mp3.com/yourname as their website, then one day mp3.com shut them all down, and all that promoting of their URL they did, even printing it in their album artwork, was moot. I see new artists doing that again now."

Roger McGuinn started with MP3.

Statement of Roger McGuinn Songwriter and Musician Formerly with The Byrds on
"The Future of Digital Music:
Is There an Upside to Downloading?"

Research on compression of music files was conducted in the 1980s by a team of scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits. Their development, the MPEG-1 Layer 3 algorithm, was first shortened to MPEG Layer 3 and later to MP3. One in five Americans now have MP3 players. (1) Yet, one in five tracks is not sold online. Where are these people getting the music to fill their devices? Sure, some are ripping discs they've purchased, but it appears that most are not paying for the music they're listening to. The average file-trading network has more songs than any music store - by a factor of more than 100. Music fans had the opportunity for limitless choice, and they took it. [2] The mass market is yielding to a million minimarkets. Hits will always be with us, but they have lost their monopoly. Blockbusters must now compete with an infinite number of niche offerings, which can be distributed just as easily. Justin Timberlake still makes albums, but today he has thousands of bands on MySpace as rivals. The hierarchy of attention has inverted - credibility now rises from below. MTV and Tower Records no longer decide who will win. You do. (written around 2003)

FREE DOWNLOADS FROM McGuinn's Folk Den

Hello, my name is Roger McGuinn.
My experience in the music business began in 1960 with my recording of "Tonight In Person" on RCA Records. I played guitar and banjo for the folk group the "Limeliters." I subsequently recorded two albums with the folk group the "Chad Mitchell Trio." I toured and recorded with Bobby Darin and was the musical director of Judy Collins' third album. In each of those situations I was not a royalty artist, but a musician for hire.
My first position as a royalty artist came in 1964 when I signed a recording contract with Columbia Records as the leader of the folk-rock band the "Byrds." During my tenure with the Byrds I recorded over fifteen albums. In most cases a modest advance against royalties was all the money I received for my participation in these recording projects.
In 1973 my work with the Byrds ended. I embarked on a solo recording career on Columbia Records, and recorded five albums. The only money I've received for these albums was the modest advance paid prior to each recording.
In 1977 I recorded three albums for Capitol Records in the group "McGuinn Clark and Hillman." Even though the song "Don't You Write Her Off" was a top 40 hit, the only money I received from Capitol Records was in the form of a modest advance.
In 1989 I recorded a solo CD, "Back from Rio", for Arista Records. This CD sold approximately 500,000 copies worldwide, and aside from a modest advance, I have received no royalties from that project.
The same is true of my 1996 recording of "Live From Mars" for Hollywood Records. In all cases the publicity generated by having recordings available and promoted on radio created an audience for my live performances. My performing work is how I make my living. Even though I"ve recorded over twenty-five records, I cannot support my family on record royalties alone.
In 1994 I began making recordings of traditional folk songs that I'd learned as a young folk singer. I was concerned that these wonderful songs would be lost. The commercial music business hasn't promoted traditional music for many years. These recording were all available for free download on my website http://www.mcguinn.com on the Internet.
In 1998 an employee of MP3.com heard the folk recordings that I'd made and invited me to place them on MP3.com. They offered an unheard of, non-exclusive recording contract with a royalty rate of 50% of the gross sales. I was delighted by this youthful and uncommonly fair approach to the recording industry. MP3.com not only allowed me to place these songs on their server, but also offered to make CDs of these songs for sale. They absorbed all the packaging and distribution costs. Not only is MP3.com an on-line record distributor, it is also becoming the new radio of the 21st century!
So far I have made thousands of dollars from the sale of these folk recordings on MP3.com, and I feel privileged to be able to use MP3s and the Internet as a vehicle for my artistic expression. MP3.com has offered me more artistic freedom than any of my previous relationships with mainstream recording companies. I think this avenue of digital music delivery is of great value to young artists, because it's so difficult for bands to acquire a recording contract. When young bands ask me how to get their music heard, I always recommend MP3.com

Resources