I haven’t listened to any music today. I wonder how much I owe?

I’m concerned about giving more power to the current broken system. In some aspects, it may be seen as bailout authority in the form of taxation. This act and it’s subsequent taxation does not create additional authority to the Government to invest in or further develop the growth of the creative industry.

Point is, it’s not logical in a Democracy. The RIAA and MPAA are not effective, and made some huge mistakes which got us to where we are today. The fact is that you can’t have Taxes created and pushed forward by the entities that are selected by the industry itself.

What really needs to happen is the failure of the RIAA. They have been way too powerful over artists for far too long and steal from the artist.

This all comes from the simple design that most music has been lost to pirating, and now the RIAA feels short changed if they loose additional fees in ANY other area of music.

Evil=RIAA

When is the government going to step in an bitch slap the music industry. Yes, artists and writers need to be paid REASONABLY for their work and not extort money from everyone under the sun. These people from the music industry are all over the place wanting to sue people for everything including a deep breath that sounded like it was stolen from a song. I think it’s about time the government stepped in, put a stop to this crap because obviously the music industry can’t come up with a unified policy that benefits the music makers, players and lovers. Now when I say regulation, I am NOT referring to Obama’s former RIAA lawyer picks who are biased out the waah zooo, I am talking about at least a semi-neutral party who can see both sides with out greed and dollar signs flashing in there eyes. I haven’t bought a song, cd or albumn in years and have no plans to until the music industry stops targeting the people who consume there music and until the RIAA is dismantled.

You can take a piece of sixteenth-century dance music, such as the work of John Dowland

http://www.classicalmidiconnection.com/cmc/dowland.html

and you can run it through a computer program which applies certain regular transformations, ie, making it faster, making it louder, emphasizing the beat. GIMP has “filters” which do this kind of thing for artistic styles. There is no reason why it should not be applicable to music. You might have to use a MIDI editor to hand-tinker with the results a bit, but MIDI “sequencers” have terrifically high productivity compared to conventional instrumental players. Private individuals, unpaid amateurs, commonly undertake major projects such as Bach’s _Brandenburg Concertos_. When you have a false note, you can fix just that note, without having to replay the whole piece. One person can reasonably arrange enough music for the requirements of of a radio station, or a dance club, or whatever.

Funny story: about fifteen years ago, I introduced a classical musician (pianist, church chorus singer, soprano) to Neil Rubenking’s Pianoman, a remote ancestor of the modern MIDI programs. This was before computers had sound cards. You could program the internal speaker to produce a pure note at a specified frequency. The musician listened to the music which came with the program, and said it was dreadful. She wanted to leave it at that, but I showed her the program’s editor window, showed her how the controls worked, and said “make it better.” In spite of herself, she started doing just that, adjusting the timings, the spacing between notes, etc.

I am not a musician or an artist, but I am a cook, and it is just a commonplace that you can modify a dish in certain conventional ways, according to whom you propose to serve it to. You can make the dish more or less hot by adjusting the herbs and spices, or you can increase or decrease the meat and fat contents, eg. using tuna instead of beef, or use Parmesan cheese instead of Cheddar or Mozzarella. You can modify an Indian curry in such a way as to make it an acceptable school lunch.

From this framework, it doesn’t seem particularly shocking to, um, translate old music to make it useful for the way a modern audience uses it. That said, there is a virtually unlimited supply of public-domain classical music, of every possible description. Now, as it happens, sixteenth-century dance music was timed for a woman in high-heels and a crinoline, that is, a hoop skirt. When she moved, it took maybe a second or so before her clothes caught up with her, and the timing of contemporary dance music reflects that. For someone wearing jeans and running shoes, the timing naturally needs to be adjusted. Similarly, the sixteenth-century woman had been taught to play some instrument or another, as a matter of course, so she could listen and pick out the beat without it being louder than the rest of the music.