Well there was this Chinese woman that made a million bucks in Second-Life what did she do?

For starters she used a virtual world and made millions buying and selling virtual land.

One could setup a Music Virtual World where people could see their idols and interact with them, sell virtual clothes and get a cut from those sales.

But you people are just to dumb to think of solutions that work, it is too much trouble to create something new.

Labels are a parasitic industry that is no longer relevant and all that imaginary wealth is going down the drain, whether you like it or not.

But I won’t help you with ideas, you believe you must get paid right? pay others to make something that works, others tried and the industry destroyed them, the industry doesn’t allow innovations to happen and that is why those people will go away.

Piracy on the consumer level is not going away, either they learn to survive despite piracy or we all wait until the current players die off and new ones come about, because there are opportunities to be had is just not recognized or accepted by you people yet, but give it time it is inevitable.

Kicking and screaming you people will be dragged into the 21th century.

http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/index.html

Everyone should go look at the tax from the industries that are complaining and see what they are all about.

As a musician from a least developed country I follow discussions on the music industry, especially when in the context of law, technology and access/costs. I struggle to understand the lip service people give about changing the industry when Governments and those purported to help us do the contrary behind the backs of the musicians themselves. For example, I quote Masnik “…When that backfired, the industry declared war on the tech innovators — the companies who were creating the infrastructure and tools to lead them through this. It’s as if the recording industry can’t help but to attack those it needs the most. “

And now industry ‘through the revolving door’ of WIPO, is building an infrastructure that will just increase the cost of accessing music. While WIPO states that the intended objective is to “make it faster, easier, and simpler for those who want to use music for legal services to find who owns what rights in music – and not just in the developed world, but throughout the world.” what discourse have they had with us musicians in the developing world? They obviously have the views of the music industry in the developed world and follow their agenda. I find this tantamount to corruption!

See http://www.internationalmusicregistry.org/portal/en/index.html

If I have correctly read between the lines of the media clippings on the project, the IMR seems to be a personal project of Francis Gurry, especially with industry personalities, such as civil society ‘lobbyists’ such as Nick Ashton-Hart.

If you want the list of companies and names, go to
http://www.internationalmusicregistry.org/portal/en/who_we_are.html

(from WIPO website) – In addition, the following are observers or providing staff support to the Steering Committee (alphabetical order):

Nick Ashton-Hart Secretariat, organising committee
C. Trevor Clarke WIPO Secretariat
FX Nuttall Technical Adviser, D Uwemedimo
Richard Owens WIPO Secretariat
Sylvain Piat Technical Adviser, D Uwemedimo
Victor Vazquez WIPO Secretariat

Well …. !!!!!!!!

Pronoun trouble?

I said do YOUR own legwork, not HIS (or hers).

Perhaps you won’t like what you find.

I understand using the phrases “music industry” vs “recording industry” to clarify different segments of the business. However,I wonder if it isn’t time to refine how, and what parts of the “recording industry” are in trouble. Many of the traditional recording methods have changed, but with more content being created by more people, it’s still being recorded. It has to be, in order to be distributed. Otherwise we would now be overrun with new roving minstriels. The recording industry; i.e., the act of actually recording tracks HAS adapted to new tech and thrived. Perhaps it’s time to be more specific the copyright problem is about “the content aggregation” industry. THEY seem to be the ones in trouble regardless of what medium is used.

Their business model seems more like “music patent trolls”.

You want me to learn???

but millions of people using
technology for unauthorized music downloading doesn’t seem like legitimate competition.

It’s a point, (and peripherally I’d love someone to come up with a better analogy than the horse and buggy one), and the analogy only stretches so far, but there’s a number of counter points there.

First, competition is competition whatever it’s source because you’re not competing with “illegitimate” from the viewpoint of the law, but “illegitimate” from the viewpoint of what people are willing to accept – if you don’t like the horse and buggy analogy try another tired one, prohibition. Again not accurate but the point I’m trying to make is that people will source what they want whether it’s legal or not. If you have a few people doing it it’s “fringe” if legal and “a few criminals” if illegal. If a decent percentage of people do it it’s called “society” and that’s rather harder to change.

Second, an amount of the “illegitimate competition” is only illegitimate because it’s been defined so after the fact (again somewhat similar to prohibition in this limited sense) – people naturally have always shared music, books, video tapes when they came along, and any other content that they have. It doesn’t fit naturally to suddenly start trying to say “well it’s OK to share this record and let your friend tape it” (yes I know that was always illegal but it was never enforced unless you started selling them so that doesn’t count), “but let your friend record that CD (with the same thing on it) and we’ll sue you for a gazillion pounds”. Sure the one causes more “problems” than the other because of scale, but the individual is never going to see that scale because he’s just doing what he’s always done.

Third, a lot of the competition is perfectly legal because it’s not just “piracy” you’re competing with, but now you are competing with the hundreds of other forms of entertainment enabled by the internet age – computer games, online gaming, across internet co-operative play (which far more people are interested in than solo gaming), phones, tweeting, blogging and all the other leisure activities competing for people’s money. You just can’t say “well THIS is our price and f*ck you, you pay it or you don’t get it” in that environment, you have to entice people to pay you rather than say Nintendo.

Forth, to an extent you’re not competing with anything illegitimate at all because the competition isn’t in the production of the music(/film/whatever) itself, but in the distribution method. People want convenience and value and are (generally) willing to pay something for it. Whether “piracy” exists or not, an increasing number of people simply aren’t willing to pay the inflated prices for inferior content. As an example lets take a film:
Currently it’s probably a tiny bit harder for most people to download the latest blockbuster than it is to go order a DVD online. Not much but a bit – Small win for “legitimate”
Downloading it with an average internet connection takes (bit of a guess) about 4-5 hours? Ordering it online takes (lets be generous) perhaps a day on overnight delivery. Small win for “piracy”
A tie so far.
Once you get the film downloaded you can play it on TV, media box, DVD player, iPod, any one of the 3 PCs in the house, you can stick it on a laptop or 2 to take away with you or anywhere else you want it. Once you have the DVD you can play it in one of the 2 DVD players in the house. If you try and do any of the other things with it it suddenly becomes “piracy” anyway. If it comes with a “digital copy”, you can probably play it on 2 of the 3 PCs (assuming 1 is Linux for example) and not a lot else due to the DRM and it’s lower quality anyway. HUGE win for “piracy”.

Now play the film. The downloaded one starts, is (lets take best case because it’s not that hard to acheive) excellent quality and you’re straight in to whoosh-bang hi-def action of Mr Willis (or whoever) blowing up aliens and buildings. Meanwhile the DVD you bought is still busy carefully explaining why you’re a criminal, what happens if they catch you being a criminal, showing you trailers you can’t skip for things you’ve seen or have no interest in, getting into a menu including special features you have no intention of watching… Win for “piracy”

Then price. Download free, DVD ?15. HUGE win for piracy.

Now lets imagine there’s a legitimate p2p route for films – perhaps the distributors seed the original file (without DRM) and host the torrent files and a hashsum check so you can be fairly sure your file hasn’t been tampered with (or whatever technology) for which they charge, lets say ?3-?5 (or whatever the market will bear without driving people off). The extra convenience of a guaranteed quality, safety and the attraction of being legitimate are going to outweigh the small cost. Sure your friends, who know and trust you, will copy your files (as has always happened anyway), but are you really going to download a file created by a total stranger that may be crappy quality and virus ridden when you can get a kosher one for a relatively tiny payment?

Like I said, not competing with the content so much as the distribution method…..

If you count blank media CD sales are at an all time high.

Rich Bengloff is a miserable person and anybody who has been in a room for a second will tell you that. His personel attacks are telling of his character. You don’t like the way the business is going boo hoo adapt or die. It’s people like bengloff that hold back progress. He doesn’t care about music he cares about his own personel gain in the industry and compensating for his small penis

Good point Mike but your spelling is off I would quess you meant honing not horning? I’m a writer myself and definitly agree- If we could copy any thing we wanted without recoarse-Books would be fair game-Company names? Clothes lines why not all this was developed to be shared Why should anyone beable to duplicate someones hard work without paying for it