Is There Big Trouble Brewing?

You'all gotta start looking at the politics involved with all this nonsense. Politics, as in: 1) Congress allowing the radio waves to be dominated by two corporations, thus controlling what music we are subjected to, 2) Recording giants force feeding the masses the dirty joke...rap, grunge, hip hop, nearly explicit sex music videos, violence and the many anti-social fabric messages, and 3) the anti-piracy brigade.

Spank a man's monkey and he'll spoog once. Teach a man to spank his own monkey and he'll spoog a lifetime. Think about it. The music (actually the entire entertainment monopoly) industry has been quite busy catering to our baser instincts. The problem is: instead of buying the material to spank the monkey to, the same industry taught us how to share our materials. Pass the Playboy please.

Geez, with all the dynamic range available on CD's I find it interesting the most compressed music ever made is on that medium. Note that whenever there are gains made in digital storage that the extra space is usually filled with high calorie, high fat, low nutritional fluff. Apologies extended to the small, quality driven artists and engineers.

Connect the dots if you care to do the research. Microsoft, the RIAA amd hardware manufacturers (our beloved high end gear vendors too, not just computers) are joining forces to stop pirarcy. Soon, if the sun, the moon and the stars don't line up inside your playback equipment the music won't be able to come out. And, they don't care one whit about quality of playback.

Lest some bonehead (like Pbb) chime in and attempt to place the blame on the good 'ol US of A, let all know that this is being accomplished by international banking efforts. There are huge dollars, not to mention "control" possiblities at stake with degrading the worlds values. Sure, the control freaks are having problems keeping the masses in line, but understand, they have deep pockets and the will/ability to pull this off. It is our responsibility to correct the problem. My effort is simple. I will forever be vinyl based. I will only pay for music which is at worst, value neutral. I refuse to listen to radio except publicly owned, local stations which are few.

Here's a test for the doubters: find someone in your email address book that has an @MSN address. Record your own voice or your dog barking, convert it to an MP3 file and send it as an attachment to that person. MSN will block the recipient from receiving the file. Maybe that doesn't bother you in the least since you may feel that piracy is wrong. But consider the freedom you have lost in this process.

I'm confident that most readers here will believe I have gone off the deep end and am a member of some radical political splinter group. The problem with being so quick with waving off my statements is that they are covered on a regular basis in the business sections of my two local newspapers (One is owned by Gannett-McPaper, and the other is a Northwest region owned paper) as well as covered in the internet techie news and written about by main stream authors available in hardback at your local library.

As you are reading this your computer is keeping track (and reporting to M$) what you listen to or watch on your Windows Media Player. Web sites are placing spiders to take and report your activities to whomever places the spider. Doubt it? Download Lavasoft Ad-aware and run the program to find out how many snoops live inside your computer. The innocent answer to why is that advertisers can market directly to you based on your habits-without personally identifying you-ha ha. The real reason is that once the industry has bought the legislation they desire, you will be stomped with both bootheels. It won't matter if you have an MP3 of Mothers Day. Your computer will be corrupted or you will be sued. It doesn't matter if you are innocent. You'll still have to fix your computer or defend yourself in court.

I urge you to create a music folder in your computer. Download non-copyrighted materials or make your own. Label these files with names of real artists and real songs that are copyrighted. Play them on your Windows Media Player. Back up this "evidence" to recordable disks. If enough of us do this and we are damaged in the future, some lawyer will sue on our behalf and maybe we can redistribute some of this ill-gotten wealth back to us.

Sorry for the rant. Complaining about the lack of listenable music on one CD is but the tip of the iceberg. Please read a little more than the headlines and get informed.

Wow, I cant' wait to sit down to dinner tonight and listen to an MP3 file and enjoy a nice bowl of soylent green

Bomarc .. I envisage lending libraries where the CDs lent are "special" non-production CDs, either with clever copy protection, or more likely the age-old copy protection of just cutting off the last 30 seconds of each song. That way you are forced to get the real thing to get the whole experience. I'm sure it could be made to work.

Lugnut ... I'm sure you're on the right track, which is why I am loading up on used LPs and CDs at the moment.

Buscis ... great thread. And guess what, I haven't managed to have this thread closed or shutdown yet :-)

Seandtaylor, In regards to closing this thread...Sit by your keyboard, I have this sinking feeling that this thread hasn't even started yet.

Also, opinions such as everyone has provided, are what help to make threads like this "great". Feel free to jump in as this thread progresses. I feel your opinions are very much respected by many of us. Ed.

Just to be clear, I like much of the music today just as I like much of the music of yesterday. Part of the fun of the hobby is to find new music -- whether it's another great 50's jazz recording or Audio Slave. My comment on quality was referring to Sean's earlier astute observation that, for any artist of any time, it is more difficult to record 70 great minutes on cd than 40 great minutes on vinyl.

Regarding the relative cost of the product over time, that's not as easy as it seems. On the one hand, the $3 album in the 70's had at least a buck in pure product cost behind it (pressing and packaging vinyl is expensive). The cd costs less than a dime to physically produce (from all I've read). Considering that alone, the cd should cost about $10 today. But, nobody can just consider that alone. There are too many variables, such as recovering video costs, to draw an easy conclusion. What I have read is that the markups on cd's are very, very large. My personal belief is that illegal (and immoral IMO) widespread copying of intellectual property would be diminished if cd's cost less -- much less. Further, I believe that the increase in sales would compensate for the decrease in margins. If I'm wrong, then we're stuck where we are. If I'm right, this will all take care of itself as more companies start experimenting with price cuts.

Whatever happens, there will be great local studios who will record great artists. These artists might make more money if they could sell to those who illegally copy. But these artists will make some money from those who buy the cd's at their concerts. Support your favorite artists by watching them live and buying their music.

At the end of the day, I don't care if any of the major labels survive or not. That's up to them -- they can improve the pricing and they can improve the format. That should allow them to make it. If they don't, music might be more difficult to find in a retail store but it will be available via the net. Good and great musical artists will always survive and produce new wonders for us.

Lugnut, you are correct that two wrongs don't make a right. If the music industry powerhouses do find a way to block pirating through heavy handed approaches, that hurts us all. Plus, that reduces whatever limited pressures exist to lower prices. It does help to write your local senator or representative. I would urge all to do so.