For anyone who has been reading my recent rants on sony and drm, I just want to clarify something. I don’t have a problem with paying for music. I think musicians should be compensated for their work. I just don’t believe in supporting overpaid executives and lawyers for big media companies. In fact in recent months (coinciding with listening to podcasts) I have purchased more music than I have in a long time. It’s just that I now get it either directly from artists through their websites or from online stores like emusic.com that sell mp3 files with no drm and give a much bigger share of the proceeds back to the musicians. I have purchased music from Brother Love, Brad Sucks, the Arts and Sciences, the Black Furies, Jukebox Zeros and others. Demonstrate to the world that we don’t need drm. Buy non-drm music and boycott anything that is copy-protected.
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I didn’t think you stole stuff, Sam. On the contrary, copy protection impairs products and diminishes their quality. Music companies, whether hardware, software, download, creative, production etc, ought to be spending their time providing the best quality product. Instead, they spend their time trying to control how lawful purchasers use it. Which is a huge load of crap. I buy all my downloaded music, and thanks to my Mac, I can use it however I like. If it were any other way, I simply wouldn’t buy it.
BTW: did you see this: http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2005/11/the_sony_bmg_an.html
Yeah I’ve heard about this. This is one of the reasons that I have continually railed against drm. All of drm schemes that have been implemented on audio cds in recent years make changes to the operating system or hardware device drivers. Not all of the previous systems have caused security problems like these latests systems, but they have created the potential for system failure. Fortunately I have become very aware of issues with computer security in the last few years. Unfortunately this has come about out of sheer necessity. Frankly most regular users should not be using windows systems unless they are prepared to become very knowledgable in computer network security or are not planning to go online. I’ve got all the windows systems in my house setup so things don’t get auto-installed and potential risks are kept to a minimum. I have also talked to my kinds about the kinds of things that can cause problems online. Home users should really be using macs. Linux is good to, but most of the distributions are just too quircky for the average user to set up.
I really wish I knew of music that I could buy without feeling like I wasted money.
Anything that I can be easily exposed to on t.v. or radio is pure crap…It takes serious effort to find music worth buying.
I wonder how far this other-people-taking-control-of-our-computers thing is going to go before someone steps in. I was glad to see Texas is suing Sony.
As I have said repeatedly here and to anyone willing to listen, check out podcasting. If you have any kind of mp3 player, You can browse and subscribe to podcasts of all kinds. You can also jsut listen to them on the computer or burn them to cd’s There are over 15,000 podcasts listed in the itunes directory now. What I would recommend is to go to the podasfe music network, the association of music podcasting and podcast alley. There you will find links to lots of different music podcasts that play various genres of music. On the podasfe music network, artists upload music that they allow to be played on podcasts. Podcasters who register with the network get to download the songs so they can play them on their shows. Listeners can stream all of the songs on the network and listen to them. You can also preview the podcasts there before subscribing. Most podcasters post show notes on their blogs with links to the songs they play so that if you hear something you like, you can just follow the link and buy the songs.
Based on your speed racer post on your blog, you might want to check out AccidentHash, the U-Turn Cafe and the tartan podcast. If you use itunes when you subscribe to a podcast, itunes will check the rss feed periodically, and then automatically download new shows with no other activity required by the user. If you have an ipod it can also automatically sync new shows to the ipod whenever it is plugged it in. As I have said I stopped listening to commercial radio years ago, and didn’t buy any new music for a number of years. Now I do buy music but none of it is from the major labels. I buy stuff I have heard on podcasts.