September 26, 2011

In a strange precursor of the 'Home taping is killing music' campaign of the 1980s and the 21st century concern about illegal downloads, Lennon and McCartney feared that record sales would suffer if the newly devised cassette tape recorder went into mass circulation. Mardas developed an electronic signal that could be added to recorded sound to prevent it being copied. 'It seemed quite possible,' noted commentator Tony Palmer in 1969, 'that within a few years, every single record sold anywhere in the world would carry this device, and thus pay to the Beatles a royalty.'

September 06, 2011

How did you go from lifelong major-label artist to self-releasing Seeds We Sow?

My deal with Warner Bros. had expired. Trying to shop this album was kind of like starting over. I actually started [shopping] with Warner Bros. [chairman] Rob Cavallo, who is a friend of mine and is in this new position over there. Rob liked it a lot, and then he had to go back and deal with the people in Burbank [Calif.], and when I talked to him on the phone, he started talking about the numbers he had to make quarterly, and I thought, "Well, that's the end of that." I did talk to a few independent labels and finally decided that what they were doing was something I could probably just as easily do myself.

I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online. There are just a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet seen by somebody once in a while gets them enough ego gratification that it's okay with them to still be living with their parents in their 30s.

August 26, 2011

Labels: 1980s, 1983, Apple, Kevin Costner

August 05, 2011

The issue may come down to what Napster lead attorney David Boies, who successfully prosecuted the Department of Justice's case against Microsoft, describes as "the definition of commercial or noncommercial uses." It is perfectly legal for consumers to copy music for their own enjoyment--i.e., noncommercial use. Congress has even declared, in the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, that it is legal to make recordings and lend them out to people, provided it is not done for commercial purposes. It is unlawful, of course, if it's done to make a profit. "The law does not distinguish between large-scale and small-scale sharing or lending," insists Boies, who puts Napster's chance of winning the suit at fifty-fifty.

Labels: 2000, 2000s, file sharing, Friday Flashback Fun, Napster

July 27, 2011

July 22, 2011

Labels: Friday Flashback Fun, Google Books, Life Magazine

July 21, 2011

July 20, 2011

Spotify owes a more direct technical debt to file sharing: The very technology that makes it so fast is borrowed from techniques honed while sharing pirated files. Both Ek and, later, two of his engineers say that once you click a button, anything that happens within 200 milliseconds seems directly under your control. To beat 200 milliseconds, Spotify runs not as a Web service but as an application on your computer. (According to Ek, the local application allows the company to supply labels with more granular data than other streaming services as well.) Songs you listen to often on Spotify sit, encrypted, on your hard drive. The application looks first for these; if it doesn't find them, it pulls down 15 seconds of the song from the closest server while it looks for copies of the rest of the song on the hard drives of other users near you.