Musician Forum - Band Discussion Board - BandMix

Dizzizz wrote:Over the last couple days, comedian Louis CK released an exclusive performance on his website. It cost $5. There are no restrictions, no DRM, nothing preventing anyone from pirating it. This morning, he posted here that he's made, over the last couple of days, $500,000. 100,000 people decided that he was worth the $5, even though it was exceedingly easy to pirate.

On the flipside of this stands gaming companies. EA has a game platform called Origin that actively scans your computer. If it finds something it thinks is a pirated game, it locks you out of your account and your games. No appeals. No complaints. You're done. They've also added always-online DRM. This means that even when playing a single-player game that doesn't require an internet connection itself, you have to be connected to the internet so the game can constantly verify with EA that it is, indeed, a legitimate copy. Instead of curbing piracy, this increases it. People, unsurprisingly, want to be able to play their games. For many, many people, a constant internet connection is not feasible.

EA is counterbalanced by a delightful offering called the Humble Indie Bundle. Found at http://www.humblebundle.com/, the Humble Bundle is an offering of games from small developers, packaged together on a pay-what-you-want basis. The games work on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and are completely DRM-free. As with Louis CK's show, the bundles make money hand over fist.

The lesson here is obvious. Piracy isn't about getting things for free. It's about function.

What does this mean for music? I don't know yet. A couple years ago, Radiohead released their album In Rainbows on a pay-what-you-want basis. I can't find how much money they made, but they sold more than their previous three albums combined. This could come from people filling in $0.01 for the price field. And no doubt, that happened. But the massive number of sales suggests something more to me: Even non-radiohead fans believe in the experiment and want it to succeed.


So, where do you see all this going? Could the pay-what-you-want model ever work across the industry?

I doubt it...

Also, I think EA is looking up the skirt of a law suit, and will eventually get sh*t on, by their practice... Basically they are invading privacy... I guarantee they will get sued, eventually (Regardless of whether the pirated games exist or not) .

Radiohead's experiment is not original. Bill gates was turning the other cheek and looking away... as the entire world obtained pirated copies of his DOS operating system. (How else could he push this new thing called 'Windows', which required DOS as the underlying OS, to support Windows functionality?) Jobs didn't think about that one...when he pushed hardware driven apps.

I am still not convinced that it's right for some young, useless punk-ass to download the work of an established artist without paying 'something' for it. NAPSTER was a nightmare, and it actually discouraged many REAL record labels from producing many REAL artists, for fear of losing on their investment through the loss of sales...

In order to get free downloads, you almost have to expect that what they call music today was really just slapped together with no real thought behind it.. If that's true...then the cost to produce is vastly diminished, and thus free downloads are abundant. In short,. we get what we pay for... Its not every day that you get the good sh*t for free.

Internet Broadcasts and (web Cam) performance is nothing new...The market for comedians, might actually be the same group of voyeurs who spy on some chicks locker-room at some university for...10 bucks a month... Its not the act (Louis) ...as much as its probably the fact that they 'Can' view him in a medium that they are familiar and comfortable with..

I would never pay 5 bucks to see anybody on the internet..not even to see myself...

Here's what i do THINK will happen:
Its not implausible for a site to solicit subscriptions for membership. Members can then get all the music they can eat for the low low monthly fee of XX bucks... Premium artists music command premium fees on top of membership fees... Bang! everybody gets paid and the race to be a premium artist picks up to the "tune" of new innovative music, etc... i.e competitive industry. As far as piracy..Its easy to tag or set a stub on a digital sound file that has a member ID and a sound card ID associated to it. Thus if you download music from membership site, the site knows your hardwareID (which you agreed to disclose when you signed up) and writes a custom music file for your system. Thus transfer of the file is rendered useless (hence pirated copy not usable)

just my speculation

lol I saw the pirated version..

He was worth the 5$..I just didn't know it was pirated till the end.