[wingsty]

Hi!
The policy of companies that sell DRM'ed content seems to make the customers suffer! I'm iTunes subscriber and taking iTunes audio to the car audio (mp3 player, cell phone etc.) is absolutely impossible for me! ((
How do u deel with this?
I've seen the guide (http://www.nomoredrm.com/) and several progs.
Have u chosen anything to strip audio files? (an easy way)

[boead]

I hate to say this but DRM is a good thing.

In the past, making a copy of a song or album on tape wasn’t as good as the original (except for a very few select audio-nuts) and until the advent of the modern computer copying remained inferior to the original and not much of an issue to the recording industry.

Now that most have accepted the universal downgrade to MP3, copying a song exactly is easy and wide spread, look what happened when Napster came about.

The music recording industry is shrinking, loosing millions upon millions quarterly. Its been going on for a while and its getting worse. In the end we all loose! Record stores close, studios close, musicians don’t get hired, artist don’t get chances to make music – people loose their jobs and we ALL loose. Independent artist generally can’t market to the masses so not many will be discovered, small independent labels have sprung up and many more will but again, they generally can’t do the marketing they need to and usually don’t get noticed but by a few.

The $1 download is part of the problem, its reduces the gross revenue of an albums release. Everyone wants something for nothing and the internet-computer and the youth of the day expect to get everything for nothing online. Those economics don’t work and are the root of the systems demise.

So, sure, go ahead and kill DRM. Get all your music for free and watch what happens to the record industry!


BTW: If you burn the DRM tracks to a CD, you can re-rip them without DRM and do what you please with them.

[sts9fan]

I don't give two shits about the record industry losing money. I don't care if the two-bit "artists" they push lose money. The artists i support are the ones that earn it on the road not with good A&R. Also you can 't always jsut burn a DRM disk that is kinda the point.

[Rob Babcock]

I think there's been some pretty good research that concludes that piracy & downloads haven't really impacted the bottom line.  Yeah, it's controversial I'll grant.  Still, in point of fact, just the act of circumventing DRM, even for purposes that would otherwise be legal without DRM, is a crime.  It's illegal to do what you are asking, and it's not a good idea for us to even allow such a discussion, from a legal pov (no, I'm no lawyer- that's just the general policy most websites have adopted given the litiguous times we live in).

[nathanm]

It's okay, mastering engineers are taking steps to insure that copying won't take place.  Or listening for that matter. 

I still am not clear about what wingsty is trying to do but can't.  You can plug an iPod into a car stereo, you can still burn Redbook\WAV CDs from iTunes and play that in a car CD player, right?  Am I missing something?  As long as you're cool with the "give me convenience or give me death" MP3 paradigm then the easy answer is to let iTunes get bent and use allofmp3.com instead.  Oh sure, it's a little more work, every genre is "Blues" and whatnot, but what the hey it's dirt cheap.(although you can get uncompressed too, but why bother?  To me if it's over 10 bucks I'm buying the real thing)

To help keep everyone's conscience clear in the coming Pop Music Famine I will be starting up a charity to help displaced record executives find new jobs.  Wait, I mean to help the CHILDREN of displaced record executives.  It's all about the children you see, to hell with adults.

[boead]

In the past a studio, even a low end one, had series enough equipment to warrant a skilled and trained operator. Most main stream studios that produced the majority of the music we all listen to had levels of quality for not only the gear but the operators.

Skip ahead to this new world we have now and you will see small low end studios and home based ones that cost a tiny (very tiny) fraction of what it did years prior poping up all over. All you need today is a computer, a couple of hundred dollars in software and some miscellaneous hardware available at your local Sam Ash or Guitar Center. Then add an Audio Engineer want-to-be and you got a typical, affordable, recording studio that more and more of the music we listen to is being produced on. Its crap compared to how it was done 20+ years ago.

Reason? Artistic freedom and all the strings that are NOT attached to it is one. But what’s also happening is that the music industry is not flipping the bills to sponsor new artist and as that ‘bottom line’ shrinks so do the opportunities for new artists that get to use multi million dollar studios. You know, the ones most independent artist can’t afford! The independent artist has not choice but to use Pro tools on a computer in some small low end studio somewhere. Sound quality is affordable, nothing more. Also electronic music mixed by DJ’s is bigger then ever and rapidly growing to heights no one ever expected.  You can make that type of music with a $99 program in Windows on a PC in your bedroom. Again, great for Artistic freedom but horrible for the Audiophile and the music industry at whole.

I think there's been some pretty good research that concludes that piracy & downloads haven't really impacted the bottom line.  Yeah, it's controversial I'll grant. 

Ok, then what’s causing it? Its not a shrinking economy, its MUCH larger then that.

I work as a publisher in the music industry, the bottom line is that CD sales are LOW, lower then ever and continuing to shrink at alarming rates. If research concludes that piracy & downloads aren’t to blame then the only other cause is that people aren’t listening to music as much. But the popularity of the iPod contradicts that. So what’s your conclusion?


Sts9fan, short sightedness is also part of the demise. We live in a vastly interlocked world economy. Everything impacts everyone at some point at some level.

[sts9fan]

Do to your profession I would say you are bias. I guarantee that I spend much more money then the average consumer today on music. I do not use I tunes and I do not buy on line. I shop in a store and buy hard copies of the music I want. Putting this protection on Cd's is not going to stop anything! You will always do to the market have to be able to copy your disk to your mp3 player which then disables the protection. Its a losing battle. The record industry should just be happy with the huge profits they are making and focus on a quality product.

[Rob Babcock]

Yeah, I think that's 180 degrees wrong!  It's the big studios with big budgets that are releasing stuff that sounds atrocious.  Some of the only good sounding listenable stuff is being recorded by small labels and people in their basements.

[Rob Babcock]

Ok, then what’s causing it? Its not a shrinking economy, its MUCH larger then that.

I work as a publisher in the music industry, the bottom line is that CD sales are LOW, lower then ever and continuing to shrink at alarming rates. If research concludes that piracy & downloads aren’t to blame then the only other cause is that people aren’t listening to music as much. But the popularity of the iPod contradicts that. So what’s your conclusion?

I think you're the victim of fallacious logic.  For one, piracy & downloads aren't the same thing.  And I'd say the popularity of the iPod shows you're missing the real point; it's not that people aren't listening to music, they just aren't listening the same way anymore.  Your (and my) paradigm, of pouring a glass of something, turning down the lights and critically listening to a peice of music, I'd say that's dead for the most part.  People now are consumers of music, not fans.  CDs are on the losing end of a battle for market share.  Look at it another way- compare the amount of money spend on DVDs, videogames, consoles, bigscreen TVs, sports /golf equipment, powerboats, jetskis, etc.  Now since the real wealth of Americans, adjusted for inflation, isn't a mulitple of that figure from 30 years ago, you have to conclude we have a similar amount of money now, but it's being allocated differently. 

When I was a kid, videogames were a novelty.  I enjoyed them, but no adult took them seriously, nor was there a huge amount of money in them compared to today.  Do you have children?  If so how many games do they own?  At the height of the original PlayStations popularity I had 100 games, purchased at $20-$40 apeice.  Obviously that's money that could have bought a lot of CDs.  For the record, I have no pirated music and I've never downloaded a commercial pop song, legally or illegally.

The real problem for the industry is that their product is no longer competitive.  As an interesting article in Discover magazine points out, music is getting "blander" and more homogenized.  I'd say that the current attiduted of "me-too-ism" is stifling creativity.  Most CDs of today are sonically atrocious, with rampant compression.  And the pricing just doesn't make any sense at all, at least to a consumer.  Consider that the price of a CD is as high today as it was in '86 (remember how the price was high to pay for all the new gear need to press them?  But it never came down...).  How much does a CD cost to make?  Even a very very expensive one would cost only a couple million.  How much did Lord of the Rings cost to make?  $150,000,000?  I'm not sure how the promotional costs compare between a big movie and, say, a Janet Jackson CD, but I have to wonder why I can buy that movie cheaper than the CD.  And if I have $20 in hand and can only buy one, I have to seriously think about whether I want to give that money to a company that's been suing my friends, working tirelessly to limit how I can use my purchase, all so I can have a mediocre sounding album of mediocre music, crippled with whatever malware that company choses to hide on the disc.

The truth of things as I see them is this:  the Big Five haven't kept up with the times.  They put out an obsolete product at a price point that's not competitive with other forms of entertainment.  They alienate fans by suing them and assaulting us with one odious DRM scheme after another in an attempt to limit the usefullness of our purchases.  Is it any surprise that CD sales are falling, given how hard the industry has worked to make CDs unappealing?