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Building The Ultimate MP3 Jukebox The Wrong Way
from the this-is-new? dept
The thing that most surprised me about this article is that no one else had done something like this before. It seems like such an obvious idea, that I'd be surprised if others aren't offering similar products. A bar owner in New York City wanted to have the "ultimate" jukebox for his bar, and so he built his own 26,000 song wonder encoding his entire collection of CDs. Since I know you're wondering, he claims that every song came from a CD he owns and that he pays royalties based on what songs are played. I still wonder if that's legal - since folks like MP3.com have gotten into trouble for ripping their "own" CDs for commercial purposes. Apparently, patrons of the bar are addicted to the system which has some nice additional features - such as rejecting requests that have been "played out". Still, reading this story, I couldn't help but think how silly it is that someone needs to create such a jukebox and rip all their CDs to make it work. The internet should be the ultimate jukebox by itself - and it's only the backwardness of the music industry that is preventing this from happening.
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I think there's a difference
Any public establishment that plays music has to pay royalties (thus sucky, low cost, music in elevators and at the supermarket). If he owns the CD's he's entitled to rip them to MP3. Nobody has had an issue with that. And if he's paying the proper BMI (and a whole host of other groups who collect performance revenues for artists) then he's seemingly 100% legit.
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you have 2 choices to pay the bastards.
The 'music industry' works 2 ways WRT bars:
1) Pay a flat rate
2) Note each and every song you play, and when.
#2 makes sure that if you never play metallica/Brittney spears, they don't get a cut of your money.
I applaud the creator. I'd have done the same thing if I had to pay the bastards.
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Back Asswards ...
Its still BACKWARDS !
If the internet was ALLOWED to work as it is SUPPOSED to ...
One could " pull " ANY damn song they wanted @ ANYTIME and the internet would record your desire to pull a copy, thus assuring payments to the Gods ...
Is it really that hard ?
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Nothing new
This is nothing new really, I suppose actually making it accept money is new.
I'm building an MP3 server myself, it'll be headless and running Linux, but still the same.
Most DJ's and radio stations these days just have huge collections of MP3s on hard disk, hey you're not going to notice the loss of quality over radio!
As far as the internet goes, yes you should be able to pull any kind of content from it (and pay for it as necessary) but until corporate America stops trying to run the world, it ain't gonna happen.....
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This is a first?
When I met my girlfriend, she was working as a topless dancer. She has since quit that and now has a respectable job working for a respectable company, but that's not important...
She moved from club to club, and one of the clubs she worked at (for one night only) didn't have a DJ, but a jukebox connected to the internet. They would insert a dollar and could download and play two songs of their choice, but they had to choose them several minutes before they were due to go on stage because of how long it took to download them.
She danced 6 sets that night, which means she paid $6 into the jukebox. She took in a total of $19, so after paying the jukebox and 10% to the house, she took home $12 - the primary reason she never worked their again.
So there are existing MP3 jukeboxes that are connected to the net, and I would assume that there is some sort of licensing agreement between the jukebox company and the music industry.
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Re: This is a first?
Screw the details man ... lets get to the discussion of your girlfriends dancing ability ( grin ) ...
Seriously, I would be interested in know what kind of service offered that. I would think we would have heard about it and I'd like to know more. It would possibly be a very lucrative business investment. Of course, the house could have been having a kid download the songs via Napster/Kazaa etc and using the songs without paying the royalties ... and how nice to have your gf have to pay for the songs to dance ... what a jip !
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Re: This is a first?
Check out E-CAST internet jukebox http://www.ecastinc.com/OOH/products/jukebox.html
The jukebox is connected to the E-cast music library via the Net.
Note I don't work for the company.
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That's my idea!
I had this idea a recently and wrote the software part of it and someone else was handling the music collection side of things. Unfortunately they have seemed to fall off the face of the earth. Any idea where I can read up on the legalities of running a jukebox such as BMI and what not?
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