m3mnoch 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Mark Cuban Remains Confused About Free

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2009 @ 05:19pm

    better lucky than good

    "better lucky than good" is really a fact of life. and that's basically how i sum up cuban's success. i'm sure he's a just-fine business man because it does indeed take skill to capitalize on right-place-right-time opportunities, but just because he's rich, doesn't make him a "thought leader."

    he's not really the type of person i'd take advice from.

    however, take marc andreessen as the counter example. compare his wikipedia page with mark cuban's. who do you think is good and who do you think is just lucky?

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: Can Someone Explain How Video Games Are Worse For Kids Than Plain TV?

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2009 @ 04:30pm

    Re: Wow

    omg. that was the funniest thing i have seen all day.

    dark helmet win.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: When You Can Hold Every Song Ever Recorded In Your Pocket… Does $1/Song Still Make Sense?

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 03 Jun, 2009 @ 06:07pm

    beating up on the defenseless

    alright, alright. i think i'm about done beating up on defenseless folks and their silly comments. i'll stop bullying and making fun of them now, mike.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: When You Can Hold Every Song Ever Recorded In Your Pocket… Does $1/Song Still Make Sense?

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 03 Jun, 2009 @ 06:03pm

    Re:

    "m3mnoch, in your carpenter example, did you take into account the time it takes to record an album. You, time when there is no revenue generated. So it's okay to spend a year recording music while not getting paid, but the minute music is being sold so the musicians make money while their not working, it's a problem?"

    wait. you think they spend a year in the studio? do you have any idea how much a year of studio time would cost?

    song writing can take days to years, for sure. recording tho? it's in and out in a week or less.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: When You Can Hold Every Song Ever Recorded In Your Pocket… Does $1/Song Still Make Sense?

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 03 Jun, 2009 @ 06:01pm

    Re:

    "m3mnoch, the problem with your carpenter argument is a carpenter works for a specific person or company, and provides them with a service."

    i forgot. can you remind me? when bands sign a contract with a label, who does the artist work for?

    if you don't think it's the label, you should explain that to prince... er... i mean the artist formerly known as prince. or. now known, but was formerly known. or something.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: When You Can Hold Every Song Ever Recorded In Your Pocket… Does $1/Song Still Make Sense?

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 03 Jun, 2009 @ 05:58pm

    Re:

    heh.

    "m3mnoch, how is music not a product? It's a form of entertainment. You listen to it to be entertained. There, the artist provided a service, entertaining you, yet you don't think the artist should e compensated for that?"

    so, aside from you actually calling it a "service" yourself, here:

    anonymous coward, how is the opera not a product. it's a form of entertainment. you listen to it to be entertained. there, the artist provided a service, entertaining you, yet you don't think the artist should e compensated for that?

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: When You Can Hold Every Song Ever Recorded In Your Pocket… Does $1/Song Still Make Sense?

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 03 Jun, 2009 @ 07:04am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Something Missing...

    nah. it's not me who's clueless. you "think" you have a handle on it. but, i mean, look at your own example.

    if you 100,000 people pay a performer $1 each, who pays the song writer? who pays the song recorder?

    not "the people."

    the performer does. and none of that changes whether the performer is selling cds or tickets. the difference is the performer actually has to "work" for a living instead of work for a week.

    maybe you think a week's work is worth $100,000, but the market doesn't.

    prior to the 20th century, when did a musical performer only have to work one week a year and still eat? (you said yourself they're not writing songs... all they have to do is sing) it's not pirating music that's the anomaly here. it's trying to sell something as a product that's not a product that's broken.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: When You Can Hold Every Song Ever Recorded In Your Pocket… Does $1/Song Still Make Sense?

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 02 Jun, 2009 @ 09:35pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Something Missing...

    totally.

    you tell that carpenter that he's already built a house. why does he need to keep building houses to get paid? you tell the waitress that she's already served coffee for the day. why does she need to come back and do it tomorrow to get paid?

    that's crazy talk!

    performers are just that -- performers. they are, by nature, work by the hour. performance is not a product, it's a service.

    welcome to the service industry, musicians. you don't work, you don't get paid.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: When You Can Hold Every Song Ever Recorded In Your Pocket… Does $1/Song Still Make Sense?

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 02 Jun, 2009 @ 07:25pm

    Re: Re: Re: RE: Something Missing...

    "You are requiring them to do extra work to make a living."

    hahhahahahhahah...

    holy crap! work to get paid!?!?! perish the thought!

    ...lord, that's funny.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: When You Can Hold Every Song Ever Recorded In Your Pocket… Does $1/Song Still Make Sense?

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 02 Jun, 2009 @ 04:45pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    "You don't get a bulk discount, and if you do, it's up to the seller, NOT you."

    nope. it has nothing to do with the seller. i can try all day long to sell a granny smith apple for something silly like $10 million. there's not a person in the world who'll buy it.

    sellers don't control pricing. the market does.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: When You Can Hold Every Song Ever Recorded In Your Pocket… Does $1/Song Still Make Sense?

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 02 Jun, 2009 @ 02:18pm

    Re:

    "Again, you bring up outside factors. These factors may have a significant impact on price, but the storage capacity issue one is weak."

    hrm.

    well. maybe you can do me a favor. can you explain to me why anyone buys mp3 players with 80 gigs of space?

    if your answer has anything to do with "that's how much music they have" -- regardless of how they acquired it, then you just proved my point.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: When You Can Hold Every Song Ever Recorded In Your Pocket… Does $1/Song Still Make Sense?

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 02 Jun, 2009 @ 01:57pm

    it makes perfect sense

    storage size absolutely has to do with the price of music.

    lemme explain.

    why do you even need that much storage for your music? the answer? glut. if there wasn't so much glut -- so many choices -- on what to listen to, we'd only need a couple hundred megs of space for our music.

    here's the real problem the riaa is grappling with: they no longer matter.

    yeah, that's pretty non-profound on a bunch of levels, but it really boils down to the fact that they are not the gatekeepers anymore. they are not the taste-makers anymore. in this day and age, anyone -- and i mean absolutely anyone -- can become a "musician." there are so many socially relevant sharing mechanisms out there that having a bottleneck to "good music" just doesn't make any sense at all.

    what's even worse for the riaa is, using the standard ugc upside-down pyramid, 1 out of about 100 of these new musicians is actually going to be good. look at it from their point of view. if suddenly, the music industry went from a metered "couple hundred" acts a year coming out to %1 of 85,000,000 people who play musical instruments in the united states (according to the international music products association) can self-promote and self-publish? that goes from something in the neighborhood of 285 acts to 850,000 acts -- in the u.s. alone. pure cacophony.

    the only economy that musically makes any sense is the attention economy. there are soooooo many bands out there -- good bands -- that if you have any barrier to your music? well. people just throw you away and move on to the next song in their thousands-more-bands-because-their-player-holds-that-many queue. and you, as a musician, will never be heard. there is no more "captive audience" nonsense for the music industry to push music at.

    so, to recap, why does huge storage mean $1 a song isn't relevant anymore?

    1) digitizing makes music easier to make and distribute now than ever before.
    2) which means more musicians are able to publish than ever before.
    3) which means the riaa isn't the bottleneck anymore.
    4) which means the riaa isn't the gatekeeper and taste-maker anymore.
    5) which means there's a huge glut of new music to discover.
    6) which means you need huge storage to store and sort this glut.
    7) which means you will have thousands of hours of music but still only 24 hours in a day.
    8) which means any barrier at all between you and the music is too much barrier.
    9) which means if someone has to pay $1 before they hear your song, they won't hear it.

    ergo, because of the huge storage, if you're charging a dollar for a song, nobody will listen to your music.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: U2 Manager: Free Is The Enemy Of Good; And It's Moral To Protect Old Business Models

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 29 May, 2009 @ 03:22pm

    It's Called Jealousy

    yup. it's just plain, ol' jealousy, mike.

    note:

    radiohead's "in rainbows" has crested 3 million units sold. which is damn near the sales of u2's crazy popular "how to dismantle and atomic bomb."

    http://www.zimbio.com/The+Guardian+Entertainment/articles/844/Rainbows+outsells+last+two+Radiohead+albums

    who do you think profited more from their album? u2 who spent a crap-ton of money promoting their album? or radiohead who let their fans promote it?

    and, to top it off, they're just making excuses for the collective *meh* that "no line on the horizon" is receiving in the sales aisle.

    http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/12/business/fi-cotown-music12

    i mean, really. the trainwreck that is britney spears outsold you? c'mon. you're doing something WRONG, paul. i wonder what that is...

    they don't get it.

    there's a glut of *everything* vying for attention.

    the attention economy drives sales, not the "fight the pirates" economy.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: San Jose Mercury News: No One Reads Us Any More, So Let's Start Charging

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 18 May, 2009 @ 08:04am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Irony

    maybe, just maybe, mike is following his own advice.

    your option: cover a lot of broad business topics at a cursory level and eventually lose readers who can find deeper coverage of "incompetence in the workforce" or "unreasonable executive salaries" or whatever topics they are deeply interested in.

    mike's option: cover a handful of related topics to unplumbed depths and successfully fulfill a niche.

    um. so, mike's decision is why this site went from a passing-rss-consumption for me to a daily-hit-the-site required stop.

    maybe it's kinda trite, but, dude. if you don't like the content of the site, why do you feel like you need to whine like an 8 year-old girl about it? "waahhhh... but, but, but, i don't wanna read about that... i wanna read about something else!" do you think mike's gonna go "oh, shit. i'm sorry. lemme write about stuff i don't want to just for you!"

    if you don't like it, just go away.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: Songwriter Claims He Was Exploited By Google… But A Few Seconds Of Logical Thinking Disproves That

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2009 @ 02:32pm

    sales rank data

    from my blog post on his "exploitation."

    okay, tool. lemme explain how this works to you really, really quickly and easily.

    1. for the last 15 years, your song was lounging in obscurity. we're talking "6-digit amazon sales rank" obscurity.
    2. google "exploits"? you with rickrolling.
    3. you can actually see a trend line tying rickrolling with a sales rank increase of "Never Gonna Give You Up? -- yes. sales of the single, not just ad impressions.
    4. in fact, it puts your track at number 77 on the amazon charts selling up to 2500 units in a week. that's money from a sale of your song every 4 minutes.
    5. you are worth ?47 million. ($68 million for those of us in the colonies.)

    just for kicks, let's look at what being 77 on the amazon download store means. as of right now, that's more popular than artists like kayne west, kenny chesney and the killers. all (despite your taste in music) much, much more relevant today than rick astley.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: High School Girl Arrested For Refusing To Stop Texting In Class

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 19 Feb, 2009 @ 02:43pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    um. no.

    the big difference is when you and i were children, we obeyed. you get sent to the principal's office? you went.

    these days, the kids just say "no" because they know the teachers can't physically make them.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: High School Girl Arrested For Refusing To Stop Texting In Class

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 19 Feb, 2009 @ 02:39pm

    Re:

    wtf? you think the cops should be reprimanded?

    i think the kid's parents should be arrested too -- for sucking at parenting. if that were my child, i would be mortified at her behavior and she would have absolute hell to pay when she returned home -- if i didn't just leave her ass in jail for a week or two.

    it's people like you that perpetuate this stupid penchant of today's youth and their rampant disrespect of authority. we're not talking about a few "rebels" anymore. it's systemic and goddamn irritating as a fellow parent.

    if i can get my 4 year-old to behave well enough to where my wife and i get compliments all the time as to how polite, friendly and well-behaved he is, you can teach your damn kid not to text in class.

    goddamn embarrassing.

    m3mnoch.

  • On the post: Recording Industry Looking At Bribing ISPs To Side With It Against File Sharing

    m3mnoch ( profile ), 19 Jan, 2009 @ 02:44pm

    bargaining, eh?

    this is great news! we're finally to stage 3!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubler-Ross_model

    all we've got to deal with now is depression and then finally acceptance.

    whew...

    m3mnoch.