It is of the utmost importance to inculcate the newest generation of media consumers that renting is preferred to ownership.
At the end of the day, the "content" we're talking about here is purely entertainment. You can live without it. And even if the hammer falls, and the copyright holders go backwards, things like Napster and Limewire and eDonkey will rise again.
At 10 years old, I never understood the line in SW EPIV, where Leia says, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." (Seriously, the line haunted me for years.) But it's a perfect allegory for this situation.
Of course, I'm still waiting for the blowback against Facebook, so...
You can live without a lot of things, including drinkable tap water and flushable toilets, however that is not necessarily a reasonable standard to judge things by.
I use music not just to 'entertain' myself, but to focus as well. Besides, why is entertainment and relaxation always treated as somehow secondary/not necessary? I realize many people find purpose in being work bees, but some strive for a healthy work-life balance.
It's not that it's unnecessary, but it's easier to replace. I have my nephew at home for a week, and his mother didn't let him take his console with him. Uh oh. No entertainment then? Well, guess what, we played good old board and card games.
OTOH, not having tap water or flushable toilets would have been a much bigger PITA for him. (For both of us, to be honest).
Let's see how it plays out on the future.
Exactly as you'd expect. Aphex Twin had a CD that included the video on the data portion of the CD (I think it was Windowlicker, circa 1999) - but you had to unlock the video online. After a couple of years, the server shut down, and you no longer had access to the video.
Of course, someone released a crack, and eventually the advent of YouTube negated that particular problem.
I still keep local copies of my music. Part of this is because I have a not insignificant amount of music that I listen to that is not and might never be part of a subscription service. Part of it is because I've experienced early attempts at controlling access to music and video that I purchased, and saw how that failed, and I don't plan on risking that loss again.
But the freedom of finding NEW stuff, when you have access to (just about) EVERYTHING... THAT has been the real eye-opener for me. I've discovered a lot of acts that I would never have otherwise heard of.
That was my (similar - I never went to RAID 5) experience as well. I moved it all up into Google Play and haven't looked back. No more worries about a hard drive taking down my collection (in hindsight RAID 5 may have helped), no more duplicate copies or tracks that were badly ripped so they skipped, no more worrying about keeping a pile of CD's "just in case", just the music I wanted to listen to when I wanted to listen to it.
I initially started using it as a way to easily sync music onto my phone, since it has a LRU of all your played songs, as well as any albums you mark explicitly for download.
http://www.freedomworks.org/content/case-missing-copyright-l...
How times have changed.
Piracy is increasing again because media companies are trying to silo their titles. Consumers want a diverse source of entertainment every month, but can't afford to buy the titles or subscribe to all streaming services. A Netflix subscription can be 1-3x the price of a popular TV series bought directly. I would argue that Netflix has devalued media in general.
The solution to dumb infrastructure decisions, is better infrastructure decisions via communication and thought, not trying to hang on to your tiny scrap of stuff via guns, files on a computer or building a bunker.
There's a reason SaaS took off, just like media streaming took off. Convenience is higher on the list of priorities than ownership. If they take my stuff away, I'll just switch to media that isn't barred from public use.
That's if you treat your media/services as substitutable goods. I don't understand this view. For me, the vast majority of books, songs, movies and games I peruse are not substitutable. SaaS services maybe - but then, they do their damnest to be not substitutable - that's called "having a competitive advantage".
So when a company decides to stop serving some media I used (or paid for directly), I see something of value being lost.
I recognize that is the ideal spotify is striving for, and they're on the right trajectory. But they rest within the boundaries set by (inter)national copyright law, and that just goes counter to some of those features.
In that sense, we may be in an endgame-like situation, but I don't see this game being over before copyright is severely reformed or just outright destroyed by technological means.
Actually, it annoys me how it's widely accepted that MP3 is an acceptable format to pay the same price for as CDs, while you could rip lossless FLACs from CDs. Either MP3s should be cheaper, or switching to FLAC should be an option, (like Bandcamp does it).
So it's a format that takes tons of disk space for no perceptible benefit. Why would it be popular? It's a niche format for niche uses.
I'd agree that in general you can't tell the difference between a well encoded MP3 and FLAC, but there are songs in which it makes a difference! To test myself I've run a few simple ABX tests; I'd encourage to try it out! It's worth noting that this is only at home with a DAC/amplifier and some decent headphones, but if I'm out and about then I have no qualms about streaming.
My collection of music is all wav/aiff or 320kbps mp3. I'd love to say I can tell the difference, but I can't.
It's not just about being able to tell the difference. Remixing is another example of things that require losslessness. Archiving as well.
Perhaps. However my contention is that if am paying the same price for supposedly an 'identical' product, then make sure it's actually identical.
At least ebooks generally are a tad cheaper than paperbacks, even if not by much, but not MP3s? Why? Simply because they can get away with it, I suppose.
I'm not saying you're technically or auditively wrong, I'm saying that's not how the market has ever worked.
What I don't understand about iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play and many others is that they're likely getting the tracks lossless anyway, they're then taking than and downsampling it to their common MP3 encoder settings for all tracks. It seems to me it would be trivial to add a 'FORMAT:' option, (that defaults to MP3), but allows for FLAC for these who know what it is.
Am aware there are specialist lossless streaming services, but I just don't understand the block of making this an option everywhere, including the iTunes Store, which has a massive catalog and Spotify, where the curated playlists etc. are.
If there's sufficient market interest in this (Tidal HIFI is twice the cost of normal Tidal) then the enthusiasts will rally around the service.
It doesn't look like the market cares that much, and I couldn't really hear a significant difference between's Spotify 320k stream and Tidal's masters (using HD800S + Mojo Chord as DAC).
This is my problem, why pay significantly more when the streaming services get the lossless version from the label? I get the extra storage requirements, but that can't be a significant factor for the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google.
As for selling music, Amazon, Apple and Google refuse to even sell you a lossless album, yet charge the same as you'd pay for a CD.
Though I realize that doesn't work for people into main stream music.
I don't want to rely on a song being on a particular streaming service.
The last line from the article hit it home - "I mean, where else are you going to get a copy of The Mr. Belvedere Show theme song?". Today, you don't need P2P for that, YouTube has it. Along with the video.
The biggest issue I have these days is that Apple's smart home stuff is overpriced so now I also pay for an Amazon music subscription to us with the Echo hardware.
That all said I am so uninspired by the Apple hardware offerings these days. The high end Macbook Pro 10 years ago was around $3K and these days its over $7k. 10 years ago it had an expansion slot (ExpressCard) and now it doesn't even have magsafe.
Good analysis. Implicit in this, is that the same fault that ultimately drew users from Napster, the lack of end user anonymity, is inherent in modern services.
There is a broader ethical issue at play as well. Can you fund and develop technology that is in the present moment operating in a legal grey area. Betting that in some possible future, culture and the laws will change?
Those are technical trivialities specific to music, which were being slowly solved through services like Musicbrainz.
My point was more general: in the future, everyone will eventually be free to share any data with anyone. It’s just too easy not to happen, and too hard to police indefinitely. Exactly like printing books - even easier, in fact!
All of those phases have already happened - banning (RIAA lawsuits), control (iTunes), relent (Spotify). We've reached the endgame - it's streaming.
If you want to store and maintain a personal 128GB collection of MP3 files with incomplete titles and data, that's your prerogative, but you're going to be in a tiny minority.