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Music Media

Embedding Ads In MP3s? 243

Posted by CmdrTaco from the what-a-lame-idea dept.
icqqm writes: "According to this Wired article, a company called Digital Payloads is planning to embed small ads into MP3 files to generate revenue for the record labels. The advertisers would pay a one-time fee (since MP3s can't be tracked) and then the file would be relased to be Napster-ized, etc. The company is betting that people would rather listen to ths small ad than go through the trouble of having to remove it." OK conceptually this isn't necessarily a bad idea, but it would take about one hour before software existed to automatically strip it out: and open source gnapster clients would simply add a plugin interface to offer post download filtering before playing... which would strip the ads. I want a way to make MP3s kosher, but this ain't it.
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Embedding Ads in MP3s? More

Embedding Ads in MP3s?

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  • As others have pointed out, at some point in the playback process the audio becomes anlog.

    If you give me a high-quality CD player there is nothing to prevent me from opening the case up and sticking a high-quality sampler right in front of the preamp. Assuming that the sampler is connected to a computer I have an instant MP3 encoder. Whee. Additional low- or high-frequency 'protection'? No problem - either an analog bandpass filter or Fourier transform will do the trick!

    I've thought about this for quite some time. Technically, here is no such thing as pay-per-{view,listen}. Eventually it has to be presented as aural or visual stimulation to the audience's eyes or ears. At that point the content can no longer be protected. Whether the content is grabbed straight from the wire or recorded via videocamera, the content is technically available to everyone.

    Legally, this is an entirely different issue, of course.. ;)

  • embedded, not appended or prepended... (Score:4)

    by evilquaker ( 35963 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @06:01PM (#941727)
    The way I read it, it sounds like they're not just going to append or prepend the ads, but they're going to have the ads over the intro to the song. Here's a quote from the article:

    "It's no more obtrusive than an FM DJ announcing a song."

    Have you ever heard a DJ talk and talk and talk over the intro to a song, only shutting up right before the singer starts the first verse? So that's what this might be doing...

    Therefore, even if you could come up with software which strips the ads (and is able to tell the difference between ads and the "real" music), you still lose the entire intro to the song.

  • give me pr0n and mp3's bundled together, and i will be happy.
  • It's all just recording industry pipe dreams! They need to get practical and up-to-date fast.

    This is what eperlman believes, is it not?

  • Or you could just pay artists to record songs that are nothing but big advertisments. A certain Abercrombie and Fitch song comes to mind.
  • Do you understand the concept of "Better than having a fucking commercial?"
    ---
    seumas.com
  • Is there anything out there the advertisers won't try to slap an annoying ad on?

    No. In some European sports, the teams go in at halftime and come out wearing jerseys with different ads than they had on during the first half.




    ...phil

  • Another point of argument is that some people claim that a lot of downloads are just people getting copies of music they already own because they can't rip the music themselves.

    I really doubt it. I'd like to see numbers that support that, but given the number of ways that downloads can happen, I'll probably not see them. Now, if it read "...just people who didn't care to take the time to rip the music themselves," it'd be a bit more plausable. Still, I think the truth is "...just people who don't have a copy of the CD, don't intend to pay for a copy of the CD (for whatever reason), but still want the music."

    CD's would be distributed with an extra data track containing pre-ripped and encoded MP3s of the music on the album. The artists would be free to decide the quality of the encoding at a level they felt comfortable would present their music well without making the full-quality versions on the CD tracks unnecessary.

    Nope. The record company would be the one making this decision, I'm sure. That being the case, the included MP3s would be 64kbps/22K/Mono with embedded ads. That is, if the mp3's were included at all.

    I think that they'd probably use the inclusion of mp3s to justify (in their minds) the further increase in the price of a cd. Thanks, but no.

    Users would be free to trade the premade MP3s that came with the album with their friends, etc.

    Let's try this one:

    • Users are free to trade the the homemade MP3s that came from the album with their freinds, etc.

    If being illegal was going to stop anyone it would have done so long before this.

  • What this company is also banking on is that if you take an ad-filled MP3 and put it on a big website with lots of traffic and stable servers etc. and flaunt it to everyone saying it's legal, they might not go to Napster. They have the song right there. I'm not saying it will work of course.
  • The MP3 header is in binary, so of course you're not going to be able to just read it straight off the wire and say "Hey look! There's the header!"

  • It seems that there seems to be one big point of disagreement about MP3's, which is whether they hurt music sales or not. One group suggests that they hurt sales by discouraging people from buying the album, while another suggests that they help sales by letting more people listen to the music. Another point of argument is that some people claim that a lot of downloads are just people getting copies of music they already own because they can't rip the music themselves.

    To solve this combination of problems, I suggest the following:

    • CD's would be distributed with an extra data track containing pre-ripped and encoded MP3s of the music on the album. The artists would be free to decide the quality of the encoding at a level they felt comfortable would present their music well without making the full-quality versions on the CD tracks unnecessary.
    • Users would be free to trade the premade MP3s that came with the album with their friends, etc.
    • On each MP3 would be information not just about the album, but also about the artist's web site, where the listener can buy a copy of the full CD version.

    I'm pretty sure that if this version were implemented that the legitimate, artist endorsed MP3s would pretty much displace illegitimate versions. That would guarantee that anyone who copied the song would know where to get the full version, which is exactly the kind of targeted advertizing that's most likely to succeed. Furthermore, the web site could contain information about the same artist's other albums, tour dates, merchandise, etc. providing further income potential.

  • It would be an audio ad, not an ad in the ID3.
  • try searching for "i'm a porn star" or "you're a porn star" one of those.. parody of all-star. has the same annoying ad in all the copies i found.
  • Just throw in some silent noise.. The stuff that is usually removed from an MP3...

    Worse yet...Not all mp3s are music...
    Some songs stop in the middle

    That little trick as a pandoras box waiting to scrap lagit MP3s....
  • I heard a great pigeonhead song on the radio so I bought the CD the rest of the CD sucked.
    I can't tell you how many CDs I have that have one or two good songs on them and rest are junk fillers.

  • Re:An idea I had that might work better... (Score:3)

    by emerson ( 419 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @07:10PM (#941742)
    This is the START of a cool idea, but you'd need some kind of transparent and strong digital signature scheme; otherwise, any wiseass out there could render your MP3 out to a wave file, and then re-encode and re-release it with /HIS/ PayPal information encoded, and the listener would have no way of knowing the difference.

    As soon as you start talking about sending money over the Net, you come up against the same issues of authentication and certification that have us all paying Verisign et al to vouch for the fact that we are who we say we are.

    Nobody has a perfect scheme yet that is both strong/reliable and easy to use for Joe Average. Once that happens, this kind of idea will be cake to implement.

    --
  • They only like a few songs because the radio station that they, their friends, and their whole community listen too only favors them. We wouldn't have this problem if you could all think for yourselves instead of automatically jumping to one side of the boat.

    Rammstein? Yeah, I like hard rock...you know, if it doesn't have that cute little lightning icon next to, I don't listen to it. No sir-ee.

    Christina Aguilara? Sure! Any woman that can't decide on what note to land on, all to imitate imitating singers from a race she might actually be a part of under all that makeup, in a style that was originally created to make up for poor/fewer backup singers, all so she can be the main star is my type! I'm sure glad its not the Christina Aguilara Band, because those others can't sing at all.

    Never stop running
  • This is getting out of hand!

    The common mentality of people offering anything on the net seems to be to support it with advertising! It's almost as if advertising is the fallback multipurpose revenue generator.
    How much more of this do we have to put up with?
    We already have websites plastered so thick with ads that you can barely read them!

    I'll be brave. I'd like to actually question the wisdom to all this advertising.
    If advertising actually works, there would have to be a lot of people clicking on the banner ads, right?
    Yet I talk to people I know and they say that they barely ever bother with them. So for it to average out, there must be one helluva lot of people just clicking on every ad that comes up in front of them!
    Actually, a while back (can't remember where) I saw statistics that pointed toward the fact that IE users click on far more ads than Netscape users!
    So, taking the liberty of assuming that there are more Netscape users downloading MP3's. I wonder if the same applies to MP3's? I wonder if the MP3 using community fits into the same profile, and would reject the whole idea?

    Food for thought!


    "How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge [insurge.com.au] - AK47
  • All that has to be done is to make all the ads slightly different lengths.

    While that would make technical sense, it wouldn't make business sense. Businesses like conformity, and all the ads will be of the same length you can bet.

  • Personally, I don't have too much of a problem with this idea. Most likely you're going to see a crossfade between the advertisement and the intro to the song, so it will be very difficult to filtre out, and most likely there will be a lot of very good songs which are not available in any other format (read: CD) available in ad-mode. Truthfully I think this isn't such a bad idea, particularly if it turns out to make some sort of a profit. Think of it: You can download the free MP3 (and endure the 5-7 second ad for buy.com) or, in 2-3 weeks when the distributors are done doing their dirty business, buy the CD for the latest teen sensation.

    You, I and the average Joe Free Software User don't want this, and wouldn't stand the intrusion. But as a teaser, for the average Teenie Net User, it works beautifully. They'll get their bubblegum early (Have you heard the latest Too-Young-To-Shave Boys single?) and it will probably drum up store business.

    Really, I don't see what the problem is. If everyone here doesn't like the ad-ridden songs (which most likely you won't), don't listen to them! (which most likely won't be a problem) Listen to your CDs or legitimate mp3s or even your illegal mp3s - I don't think you'll be getting Indie bands signing on to this type of business too quickly.

    ---

  • I'm curious; will the software they develop track end-users as music is played? MP3 files are 'untraceable' as they are now (to an extent), but it software is provided to interpret digital signatures/data within the encoded MP3 file, could this software also report statistics or other information to a central database?
  • What if it worked this way:

    When you click on the "Pay Artist" button, a message is sent to a central (trusted) server that says "User with credit card xxxx pay author of song with MD5 checksum of xxxx."

    Whenever an artist wants a new song in the system (s)he registers it with the central database. That way no one can "steal" it.

    -Harry
  • 1. Napster would be nuts to add an option to strip such ads since this would only fuel the flames that already plague them.
    2. Most non-techies use Napster, not gnapster or gnutella because Napster has all the press.
    3. Therefore, it might work.

    One major point is being missed here. Most people aren't going to bother. Just because 90% of techies use mp3s doesn't mean that 90% of the people using programs like Napster are techies. One rule of advertising is that you make your ad as obtrusive as possible without being obtrusive. If it isn't more than 30 seconds long, most people won't even bother to even try to find and option to remove it.

    All that has to be done is to make all the ads slightly different lengths. Now how are you going to make an option that strips the ad without potentially stripping some of the music? This might be a good thing to show that people really aren't downloading music to steal, only to preview it for themselves and maybe buy it on CD.

  • According to David Boies, distributing cheezy mp3 rips of copyrighted music for no money is neither a criminal act or illegal. As long as it's not a commercial act done for money, it's not illegal- and therefore, Napster facilitating it is also not illegal.
  • Buying a CD (hey, weren't they supposed to finally go down in price when we all switched from vinyl??)

    Just for grins, I decided to see what inflation has done to record prices. Taking $17 as a typical price for a CD in 2000, I plugged it into the NewsEngin's Cost-Of-Living Calculator [newsengin.com], and found that my $17 in 2000 was the same as $8.23 in 1980. As I recall, the typical LP in 1980 was in the $8-$12 range. If my memory is correct (some other old fart jump in here), then the cost of buying recordings hasn't changed a whole lot.


    ...phil

  • amp3.net, when they were still themselves and not iuma.com or whatever they are now, would place a 5 second ad at the beginning of every mp3 downloaded... It would add the ad each time someone downloaded it, so the ad's were in constant rotation. This also generated revenue for the artists, as they got 5 or 10 cents for each download because of the ads. I made about $6 while it was still going on. Unfortunately they sooner or later ran into trouble with the company the liscensed the ad adding stuff from. I'm not really educated on the whole situation, but that's the best I can explain it. Oh, and the people that downloaded my stuff that I talked to didn't really mind the ads, as they weren't anything majorly annoying.
  • Noise Records also has a bunch of MP3s

    Huh? What's this? A Noise records-aware slashdotter? Yaaaaaay! I'm not alone. Cheese metal forever :-)

  • A better idea would be to use some reserved area in the MP3 to append the payment info (and maybe some tetx about the artist, etc) into standard MP3s. Regular players that follow the standard would see the reserved bits used and ignore it, new players that support the format would display the new information.

    It's not a big deal to require the user to download a pluggin because anyone willing to cough up some cash will likely download a small pluggin to allow this to happen. And if the pluggin allows more info, where 'liner notes' could go, everyone (paying user or not) would have an incentive to download the pluggin. Then they'd have the option to pay in the future, if they suddenly got the urge.

    The security seems like it'd be fairly easy. You'd sort of CRC the music... strip out a lot of detail from the wave such that any two song rips (of the whole song) will have the same signature. Then the signature of the song is sent in with the payment ID. If the signture isn't listed for the artist (ie, payment for a song they haven't registered) then they don't get paid. And if someone shows up with the same song signature as Metallica, you investigate...

    The whole problem is authenticating the song, some sort of fingerprint that works over lossy channels. (If someone rips a Metallica song off of CD and wants to pay for it, the system should try to match the song signature in the database to find the creator...) And ideally it'd work with existing non-watermarked media.

    Then you could napster to you heart's content, sampling everything and paying what you want to keep.
  • The first day after this comes out, there will be a utility to rip the ads out.
  • As long as they use the same ad in two or more songs, then it won't matter if they run the ads over the start of the songs. Subtraction with clean digital sources can be quite good.

  • One perspective (Score:5)

    by Chris Johnson ( 580 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @06:04PM (#941763) Homepage Journal
    *points to URL link* that is mp3 music. It is mine, copyright to me, and I get to do what I want with it. I choose to give it away because I see mp3 as one big radio- and in fact according to David Boies there's no such thing as an illegally copied mp3 so long as nobody's paying money for it.

    That said: I know who my competition is. It's the same major labels that have brainwashed generations into thinking that only majorlabel-signed acts are worth hearing, even though this is less and less plausible every year. As an indie musician (btw- buy one of my CDs for $5.99? Please? :) ), my mp3s compete against the 'unauthorised' mp3s of major label acts distributed through services like Napster.

    If the major labels want to make their products more unpleasant through building ads into the mp3s or other annoying practices, I say great, go right ahead and do it. If they can magically replace _all_ the existing majorlabel mp3s (hah!) with ad-laden ones, woohoo, go ahead and do it! I am delighted to observe any method by which the music biz can destroy itself through arrogance and greed. I would love to be known as 'one of those people who makes mp3s which DON'T have annoying ads on them'.

    Because here's the secret- the majors don't have a lock on worthwhile music. They don't even have a lock on well-produced, expensive sounding music- you just have to be enough of an audiophile geek to know how to make things sound right. I rejoice and dance about chortling smugly at every sign that the biz is going to leverage their supposed lock on all good music by building ads into the mp3s, or making their music SDMI-only, or making the CDs unrippable (and unreliable). They are only hamstringing themselves and doing great damage to the quality of their product, thinking that nobody can replace them. And today, you don't need to have the same kind of distribution networks to replace them... the rules have changed...

    (do please go listen to some tunes of mine at the URL given above- they're free and they're up there to be heard, and there will be more and more of them)

  • Re:Might not be easy to automate (Score:4)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @06:05PM (#941765)
    I doubt this would be possible unless the MP3 format were changed to allow for some kind of ad header to be applied to the front or back. If it's just some audio that they encode and stick on the back or front of the MP3, how are you going to know which frames contain the ad audio and which contain the audio you want to hear?

    Same way we do it with TV. Advertisements have a distinct signature audio-wise - the volume usually is higher than the TV programming. Simply normalize the output, and chop the high point. But that may only be effective for, say, classical music - Fear Factory might not have the same approach. Now most music has a prelude, a quiet opener, or atleast a distinct silence. You can't put that ad in the middle of the song or people will scream murder. So it has to be at the beginning or the end.

    There's also the encoding - they might mismatch the bitrates. They will almost definately use 1 encoder - and probably not the one the MP3 has. So you can just analyze the MP3 and determine when the encoder changes - non-trivial, but considering how much geeks detest forced-advertisement, I'm sure it's possible. It's a BIG itch to scratch.

    Another method I can think of is to simply visit the advertiser's site. Most of them are MORE than happy to provide ALL of their releases. A few waveforms and an FFT calculation later, and all your mp3's have had that signature removed.

    Given that the primary method of MP3 distribution is currently online, someone could simply md5 sum the "bad" mp3's, and blacklist them. The servers (or clients) could then automagically purge them from the network. THAT is a trivial programming exercise.

    Cheers,

  • kosher? (Score:3)

    by The_Messenger ( 110966 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @07:13PM (#941772) Homepage Journal
    I want a way to make MP3s kosher, but this ain't it.

    Yeah, keeping with that theme, cutting off the advertisement-end of every MP3 is akin to a bris.

    Btw, IANAR. (I am not a rabbi.)

    ---------///----------

  • You can play a partial MP3 right? You don't need the whole thing.. so stripping the ad would just be a case of cutting a bit off the front.

    Or am I wrong and you can play an incomplete MP3 as long as you've got the 'header'?

  • Talk about underestimating your audience.

    (This is not a bid for karma, just an observation.)

  • Am I the only one sick of all this buzz about mp3s? I like mp3s, it's good quality, but if slashdot is pro-mp3 (as it were) then why post all this stuff and get people so angry and hurt and upset and argumentative? That's why it's turned into a war -- people want to fight about it. If it is NOT a war, then what's all the fighting about?
    --
  • MP3s with ads--
    What an idea! (This haiku
    sponsored by Compaq)
  • Yes, the idea of a DJ adding the advertisment could create real crap, but there is a good thing which will come out of this: this gives the artists a chance to really take back the money making machine from the record industry. Plus, a small time artist who puts an ad. into his own song will do it taistfully while the DJ's who Metallica hires to put ads into their will talk for hours. Now, I do think advertising inside mp3s is the answer, but advertising inside the audio content will just piss people off. We need a way to attach a tar file contianing a web page top the end of the mp3 (and the mp3 players need to support launching a web browser to view the page). Yes, people could strip the content, but artist could just include useful information like song lyrics too. The ads would no lo0nger interfear with lissening to the music, so people would not want to strip them if they risked stripping cool stuff too.
  • Ladies and gentlemen, let's just face the facts. The cat's out of the bag and it sure as hell isn't going to go back in any time soon. Wether it's Napster or Gnutella or FTP, people are going to share mp3's. If napster wants to fuck around with licensing or commercials or whatever, someone will come out with something better and people will use it.

    I'm sorry, but i honestly see this as the great equalizer. Napster is the tip of the iceburg. Why? Because any regulation of mp3's is pretty damned unenforceable. Sure - put ad's on mp3s. Someone's going to use SoundForge or whatever and get rid of 'em - or make their own rips of tracks like people have already been doing. Sure - make mp3's illegal....then everyone will have to stop using them (just like people don't smoke pot, and minors don't drink? right?!?!) - Ladies and gentlemen: Welcome to the digital era!

    RIAA - it was fun while it lasted wasn't it ;-)


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • Plus, the independent artist who do place advertisment inside their songs will do it more taisfully then the big boys (who wil just have a dumb ass DJ talk to 5 min).

    Regardless, what we really need is for the mp3 players to support launching a web browser to view a URL or an attached web page. The attached web page could contain advertisments and links to buy CDs, but it would also contain things like song lyrics, art, URLs for more songs, etc (to keep people from stripping the attachments). This type of advertising might piss off the major labels (remember eople must actually go to some work and push a button to launch the advertisment), but independent artists would love it since it's a much more respectable way to add stuff, i.e. not talking in the song.
  • I wouldn't be surprised if that were true. I'm betting that Metallica is getting some kind of kickback from the RIAA in order to promote this anti-napster business. I'd really love to hear that come out in the news, that'd kill almost any artist-centric arguement that the RIAA might have.

  • Just got in the Kurzweil Micropiano! It is in a disassembled state all over my desk right now, and I am posting a Geek Report on what you'd find inside. Bear in mind that the huge expensive major label studios will have this sort of gear (a MicroPiano is considered a good piano module, sort of thing you'd have around dedicated to piano synthesis or if someone wants to use that particular unit)- but they won't have taken it apart.

    OK- first off, backtracking from the output jacks, you get the usual 'hiss must die, even theoretical hiss' little caps on the output. This is just a teeny cap to ground- may even be something fancy like a tantalum, or it may be just a cheap ceramic, hard to tell from looking. There are markings on them, which you don't always get on ceramic cheapies. This is going to mess with the impulse response going up into the supersonic- a cap configured that way rings very slightly. I'm lifting these with quite a bit of confidence that it will improve overall focus and tone color without significant hiss penalty- I call these 'anal hiss caps', and frequently remove them in mods.

    Moving on to the output coupling cap, I am shocked to discover a small cheap 2.2mf cap on each channel! The unit has surprisingly good bass, considering. These are being replaced by 50V 47mf caps- note however that the 2.2mf caps are also 50V. This is not because the circuit needs that voltage, but because pretty much all teeny electrolytics come in such voltages- apparently easier to make them that way. This could be an intentional decision on the part of Kurzweil because piano tones are well suited to choosing a more high-voltage cap even at the cost of bass extension- the piano does not have all that much very low bass, but it has a lot of low-mid kick that is enhanced by the heavier materials of a higher-voltage cap.

    Moving right along, the wires to the (analog) volume control don't look terribly special. They did have to be foil shielded, which just goes to show they were picking up digital noise (like the analog stages of a cheezy soundcard in a PC enclosure). Looks like a job for JumperMan! Bypass the control entirely. I'm not certain if the circuit requires the resistance to ground that the dualganged pot provides, but if so it's a simple jumper resistor, no fuss.

    Doing these mods (solder remove replace jumper) already delivers some very nice improvements. No jumper resistor was needed for the bypassed volume pot- 'Ballad Organ 1's low end took on a really lush quality- and the highs in general lost a faintly tinny quality that they'd had.

    It's Further Caplifting Time! Going in to see if there are other caps that are anal hiss caps (this becomes a one-part-at-a-time exercise because you rapidly start to discover parts that actually do something), C25 is discovered to be borderline- lifting it produces a nice hyper-focussed sound, but also causes the synth to emit a quiet little 'parrp' noise at one point, almost inaudibly- a sure sign that the circuit wants _something_ there. Out with the 1 pf caps- and replacing of C25 and C70 on the other side of the chip results in a very assertively extended treble- since it would be unuseful to take the highs any farther, time to look at some of the other electrolytics on the board. C35 and C36 look to be power supplies, and there's also C23, which matches the two output caps- replacing 'em with 100mf adds a fullness and solidity to things, especially the pianos- and raises the question, "were those 1pf caps enough?" since the highs are feeling kind of overenthusiastic. Ignoring that for a moment, C7 and C6 look enticing- they look a lot like coupling caps, lead to an IC in the output stages, and Kurzweil clearly wouldn't be using 22Mf caps unless they had to- two 10V 470mf caps are found and installed in their place. This might also balance the highs- and in fact it does, but it also raises a question- this is not a 'flash' unit, it's meant to be lush and full, would it be desirable to pull those highs back anyhow? A quick switch of the 1pf caps with 33pf caps and the answer is 'yup', the resulting fullness and solidity is very appealing- and that'll do for the modding- back on with the covers, and tadah :)

    Now moderate this down as offtopic, but it was nothing if not geeky. :) you try this with your own Kurzweil at your own risk- but the result _is_ bigger sound than the huge bloated gigabuck studios' Micropianos, you just have to be ready to hack :)

  • Most people can't manage to record a movie correctly from TV and eliminate comercials by stopping the recording. How can we expect a computer to be at least as smart? I can understand what you're saying about timing, but of course the ads can't be all the same length. And what about tracks which begin with dialog or tracks which are entirely dialog (comedy for instance)? Unless some sort of ad-library based scanner was to be implemented with constant web-updates to keep track of the newest ads, I can't imagine any scanner type solution to work more than half the time. Not so easy.
  • Given that you the average 128 Kbps stream .MP3 file is about a megabyte per minute of audio, adding any extra audio for an advertisement--even for 30 seconds--will increase the size of the file pretty quick. That's why I'm not too thrilled at the idea.
  • I think the solution to this is to have a rating system, along the lines of slashdot moderation. That way, people would be able to avoid ad-encrusted mp3, poor encodings, misnamed files, etc.

    It would also be a great way to find new music, based on the recommendation of the community. With a feature like this, Napster would be able to honestly claim they are promoting new music, not just providing a means of distributing copyrighted materials. It would also provide a raw, grassroots, rating system without manipulation by record companies or distributors.

  • Nielson Ratings and real time download logging (Score:4)

    by yuriwho ( 103805 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @08:45PM (#941814)
    Napster is a real problem for the record biz. It cost way too much to litigate all those little hosts of illegal music appearing and disapearing daily.

    If ISP's had an easy way to log the MB's of MP3's(or DVD's) downloaded by people and combine that with an analysis of the popular bands by download sampling (ala Nielson ratings from server logs at random), charge a premium for MP3/DVD downloads to the customer and the ISP's pay a "protection from procecution" fee to the MPAA et.al. that gets redistributed to the artists and I think we could have a system that allows artists to get revenue for their creations and let people pay as they play.

    I think it is likely that people would end up paying relatively little for their MP3's (~20cents a download) and ~$1DVD. People could even install programs that monitor downloads by content type and even whether the file was played >50% of content to allow people to settle disutes with their ISP.

    Of course this would stratify ISP's along the lines of MP3/DVD enabled/legal and those that can't afford to keep track of such data.

    So, a question to the network gurus out there....Is it possible to monitor net traffic of MP3's/DVD's in real time? Any other ideas for a fair system that allows certain data types to get charged a bandwidth fee?

    Cheers
  • The very thing online delivery advocates have been moronically advocating is that music will be LESS commercial while in reality it will be more. Much more. Lower margins means less risk, more conservatism, and less choice. Now we can buy music as a product - ok, that's inherently commercial, but once I buy it, it's mine and commercial-free. Now we are going to get commercials with our music, or should I say, music with our commercials. What'll you have with your cheez-whiz ads - Shostakovich or Sibelius? Hmm?

    What's next - corporate sponsorship? Since Metallica can't make money from records any more, the only way for them to survive is corporate sponsorship. They'll have to change their name to the Qualcomm Thrashers or some such (hey, it worked for sports stadiums!).

    Ok, that'd be bad, but let's look beyond that. Obviously corporate sponsorship also means controlling content. Music will just turn into jingles - the artists will sing about products and services. Look forward to a bunch of songs about fast food, long distance calling plans, and lower insurance rates, but precious little about broken hearts, angry protest, or innocent love.

    And, when you go downtown to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra -- oops, I meant CitiBanc Orchestra, Inc -- perform the AT&T theme song between the movements of Mahler's Fifth -- remember:

    YOU ALL ASKED FOR THIS. YOU ALL ARE THE ONES WHO THOUGHT MUSIC WOULD BE BETTER AFTER IT BECAME UNPRODUCTIZED.

    And, of course, a big, fat I TOLD YOU SO.

  • Requiring a plugin is no big deal as long as the effort to install a plugin is more effort than it is to reverse engineer it away.

    The problem I see here is that you are locked into someone else's software. The plugin is probably only going to be available for MS Windows. Maybe Mac. Linux (x86 only) is very iffy. The idea of it being available for other platforms is absurd.

    I would never be able to play it on my Amiga, or on a portable music player (e.g. a Rio-like thingie) or perform any other unanticipated use, unless I removed the plugin requirement. (By re-ripping the audio out, or cracking/REing it.)

    In order to be useful, it has to be open, and that pretty much flies in the face of the "The modified MP3 format would require the plugin to work" idea.

    IMHO, all attempts to restrict usage and playback will ultimately run into this problem. That's part of the problem with DVDs -- MPAA's attempts to force people to play them a certain way, are getting in the users' way and making it harder to enjoy the movies. Your MP3 idea has the same problem.

    Now, don't get me wrong: I think that have an extra chunk in audio formats telling people where to send the money is a fine idea -- you just can't do anything that would force players to pay attention to it. Throw out the "The modified MP3 format would require the plugin to work" part and it's a good idea.


    ---
  • I thought MP3s were already advertisements for the CDs and artists that they originated from. Sure, they're a replacement for some people.

    Still the idea of putting advertisements in advertisements has some sort of sick irony.
  • I will read for you the ad staring me in the face right now:

    "By now you've probably opened it already.
    The sound.
    The fizz.
    The taste.
    It's all there telling your senses to come alive and taste all that life has to offer.
    Coca-Cola enjoy."

    This is on a can of soda that I ALREADY FSCKING BOUGHT! Sorry. (turns ad to wall, though of course the 'coca cola enjoy' mangled-grammar slogan is written all around the top of the can and cannot be escaped) But it really, really bothers me. I have tended to stick to the same snackfoods and sodas, and this one attempt to further yell at me with mangled advertising even when I have already APPEASED the damned manufacturer by buying the damn product and should be left alone to drink it... it _never_ stops bothering me, all I can do is make fun of it.

    Well- not quite true. I used to drink only Coca-Cola for soda- and now I have taught myself to like Mountain Dew, as a DIRECT result of this ad campaign on the cans. I give Pepsi another year or so before they start doing the same thing. There's always tea- that I can drink out of a nice big mason jar that stands up to making hot tea well, and has no tea advertisements on it :)

  • Instead of automating the removal of advertising, just give users the option of clipping the first 30 seconds off of an mp3 file, or however long the ad is. That way, a user only has to be inconvenienced once and the file is good for further use.

    BTW, to hell with the RIAA. Those bloodsucking bastards can all lose their jobs as far as I'm concerned. Recording artists get such a small percentage of the proceeds of record sales that the whole argument of napster and gnutella taking money away from the artists is bullshit.

    I think the first thing that we do to make life better for recording artists is give artist 3 or 4 dollars an album sold, instead of 1 or half a dollar. Let the artists produce and sell their own material, either online, or through an online distributor. It's not like anyone needs anything other than a cd burner setup and printer for album covers and an ordertaking web site and UPS or Fedex to ship to record stores.

    Record companies can burn. Record execs should not be forcefeeding us what they want us to listen to. If something is good, than it will be rated well on sites like mp3.com and no other advertisement need be made.

  • In that case, first of all, they tread deeply into the realm of piracy where there aren't any questions about how legal such a practice is. Second, the band could very easily download a copy themselves and the back track the information to the person who hacked their MP3 and file a lawsuit and criminal charges.

    If money changes hands, then at somepoint that money has to get from the virtual to the physical and that point is very well tracked and logged. Being anonymous on the net is easy, being anonymous when you get your credit card bill or bank statement is not.

    ---

  • Good sentiment, bad idea (Score:3)

    by Raunchola ( 129755 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @06:16PM (#941830)
    "The question comes up how then can we legitamize mp3s and allow all this discussion to stop about illegal copying. It seems that either it will manifest itself in advertisements, much like some streaming radio and video providers are doing or else creating a highly encrypted limited use format of encoding."

    Time to respectfully disagree...

    For one, slapping ads on MP3s isn't going to work well. As somebody already mentioned in this forum, people have practically become desensitized to ads on the Internet, just look at the click-thru rates for banner ads. And when you throw that banner ad into a pop-up window, you've already given yourself the kiss of death. Besides, what is going to stop someone from finding ways to removing the ads from MP3s? There are already filters out there that remove the banner ads and pop-up windows from your browsing experience, a filter that removes ads from your listening experience may not be too far off.

    As for the encryption...you aren't new to Slashdot, are you? :) Remember when places like barnesandnoble.com were offering Stephen King's e-book for free on the day of its' release? People had already cracked the weak encryption on the e-books while they were still being offered for free. Unless you're talking about tossing something like 128-bit encryption on these files, forget about it. Where there's a will, there's a way, and I'll bet the farm that somebody will find a way.

    IMHO, there's really only one solution to this whole problem of MP3s: the artists, the industry, and the companies like Napster have to work together to find common ground, because there is money in MP3s. I believe that the musicians out there should be compensated for their hard work, but taking the "Shut down Napster" route that Metallica is on is just counter-productive and very stupid. Everybody knows that if Napster goes down, then programs like Gnutella and Freenet will just take it's place, and the "Sue 'em 'til they die" mentality of Metallica and the RIAA isn't going to work. The cat's out of the bag on MP3 trading, and unless everybody is willing to work together, find some common ground, and adapt to the changes, this problem will remain, no matter how many Lars Ulriches, Hilary Rosens, and Howard Kings there are out there.

    --
  • But how long would it be before anyone noticed the theft was going on? The bogus MP3 would not nessicarily totally supplant the real one, and the person getting the redirected money might even send one in four payments to the real band to try and mask the drop...

    Then, once they were found out, I do not think it impossible to obscure the trail to the real theives - what if the money went through PayPal into a swiss account? Organized crime seems to be able to launder money without trouble, it doesn't seem like this would be much different.

    Again, it just seems a lot more sure to have the payment originate from a server where you can be somewhat sure the right person is getting the money. I know if I had to rely on income from music that I'd prefer a server based payment mechanism.

  • Since we're basing the proposed system on trust and not enforcement of payment under threat of death (noble, and novel idea), there's another technique that could work even better.

    Rather than tweak the MP3 system, leave it the way it is. What you need is something like PayLars [paylars.com] that allows you to send a quarter or a buck or whatever to a band, DIRECTLY. This doesn't have to be tied to a song, music, whatever. Just set up a page (on mp3.com, but why bother with THAT even, any site will do, even the band's official page - a band is much like a business, right?!?!!) where people can buy music, or t-shirts, or whatever.

    You cut the evil record companies completely out of the loop, and you get your money. Some bands are already doing stuff like this, although, I'm not sure how much of the end profit they see. (See tbe Insane Clown Posse [insaneclownposse.com] web site.

    I would love to send some artists some money.. it might even be more than they get off the CD sale; Right now, I just make sure to go see bands I like in concert when they show up, because I know they get a good chunk of that money.

    The RIAA are money-grubbing sons of bitches. The MPAA are evil, but different, since it's the studios putting up the big money for the projects (and I've NEVER had a problem buying a movie for $30, and they have a good distribution system via theaters now. Their tacticts with DVD are dispicable, but, this is Corporate America).

  • The only problem I see is the potential to "hijack" the MP3 file, and release a version that sends money to someone else!

    I think the PayPal angle is a really good idea, I just think it probably has to be server based somehow...

    ---> Kendall

  • Advertising exists because many people are suggestable. I've taken hipnosis courses. I'm not all that good at it, but if you were sitting, just casually talking to me, I bet I could embed a few suggestions without you even knowing it. It's such a powerful tool.

    Some people are not as suggestable as others, but MOST people are. It doesn't have anything to do with how smart you are or how skeptical or cynical you are. If I just straight out told you "Buy Pepsi!" it wouldn't sink in. But after years and years of seeing Pepsi commercials, Pepsi signs, Pepsi shirts, Pepsi watches, Pepsi cans, and the Pepsi challenge, it does sink in, and the suggestion that Pepsi is what you want to drink becomes a part of people's lives. I bet you feel thirsty now :)

  • DMCA? (Score:2)

    by Masem ( 1171 )
    Ok, it's not encryption (mp3 is not encryption, just compression), but if you took the ad-fronted mp3 and stripped the ad, would you be in voilation of the DMCA, in the sense that you are changing a copyrighted work?

    Of course, as someone pointed out, it appears said ads would be on top of the 5 -10 sec intros most songs have nowadays, which makes stripping useless.

  • Noise Records [noiserecords.com] also has a bunch of MP3s from their bands on their web site, with a voice at the beginning explaining that it's a free MP3 from Noise Records.


    ---

  • As long as the intro is still actually part of the mix, it should be salvageable (if not at full quality). Subtract the ad content (as someone said in an earlier thread, the company will probably supply the ad on their site in hopes that someone will listen), then increase the volume of the intro to proportionally match the rest of the track.


    ---
    Zardoz has spoken!
  • Cheap Trick made Surrender '99 availiable online last year in MP3. The only catch? It came with a 10 second ad from the guys themselves saying "If you like this song, then go to cheaptrick.com and buy our new record." Rather nifty as far as promotion goes, I believe.
  • True, but what I predict will happen next is that people will start redistributing the "ad-free" versions.

    Brittany Spears - Music For Horny Old Men.mp3
    Brittany Spears - Music For Horny Old Men[nospam].mp3

    Even Joe Moron knows which one he should dub'l-clik on.

  • I recognize this. (Score:3)

    by Chops ( 168851 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @06:22PM (#941862)
    This must be from the Bad Internet Ideas secret laboratory. For those who don't know, BII is an organization in LA founded by a group of entrepreneurs who, after failing to find funding for cheap, effective security and privacy software for businesses and individuals, embarked on an experiment to determine what ideas VCs were most likely to fund. They came up with 160 wildly different ideas for making money off the net and proposed each of them to 10 separate VCs, noted the reactions (including the money they were offered, if any), and performed advanced statistical analysis to determine what types of ideas VCs were likely to cough up the big bucks for.

    The results shocked them. VCs go for bad ideas. Real-world feasibility, profit potential, and technological innovation all showed ironclad negative correlations with VC interest. Impossibility, incorrect assumptions, marginal gain, and large capital outlay all drew VC capital in droves. In retrospect, it was obvious -- good ideas haven't been tried before ("It looks pretty risky..."), require technical savvy ("Tell me again about the packets."), and are often cheap and easy to implement ("What do you mean server software is free?"). Bad ideas are simple, and run entirely on their own internal logic ("People don't mind commercials on TV."). They're easy to understand. VCs always want to invest in The Internet, but they startle and confuse easily. Bad ideas help keep them calm and make them feel technological: I GET it! Selling ads on MP3's! Why has no one thought of this before? Why were all those other guys babbling about pier-to-pier and data covens?

    With their newfound knowledge, these four geniuses used their remaining $2500 to start BII, which has been tirelessly working to plumb the depths of badness an internet idea can achieve. Although their standard fare is web-porno filters and pay-per-use software, they do come out with a real gem every now and then... I have to admit, this is one of the worst ideas I've ever seen. Rumor has it they're planning on starting a web site after they retire, showcasing for posterity their most stunningly awful ideas. I'm looking forward to it.

  • Gee, this looks remarkably similar to this piece [slashdot.org] I wrote. Now the trolls are plagarizing me too.
  • Thank you. I recently did some cover art for Phil Pritchett, a musician out of Austin, TX. (check my URL--hit the "Heritage Way" site. It's even Lynx friendly if I'm not mistaken and can code HTML 4.01 loose) The quality of the songwriting and playing speaks for itself, check the MP3s. But the recording, mastering and, not to be too self serving, the packaging is all equivalent too if not superior too a major label release.

    ----
  • The problem I see here is that you are locked into someone else's software. The plugin is probably only going to be available for MS Windows. Maybe Mac. Linux (x86 only) is very iffy. The idea of it being available for other platforms is absurd.

    It depends on who implements it. If a Linux geek does it, it'll be available for Linux. A Windows hacker, Windows. The best solution would probably be to make the modifications an open standard for anyone to implement. Maybe this could be an extention to OggVorbis?

    The main problem I see with this approach is, that even if you use digital signatures to verify that the recipient of the money is legit, it would be easy to hijack. First, get the raw music from the modified sound file--it's been said many times before, but no matter how good the encryption is, it will always be possible to get ahold of the enencrypted sound data (if only at the hardware level). Then, add your own recipient data and digital sig. Pretend that you were the artist who recorded it. Distribute, let money roll in, rinse, repeat. The digital sig will only verify that the person who added the payment info is the person who added the sig, not that they actually made the music.


    ---
    Zardoz has spoken!

  • Haven't you heard the hit song by LFO, "Summertime Girls"? (If you haven't, you are one lucky, lucky bastard) At one point they sing "I like the girls who wear Abercrombie & Fitch" If that isn't product placement, I don't know what is.

    Of course, nobody ever accused bubblegum pop boy bands of having scruples or artistic integrity...


    ---
    Zardoz has spoken!

  • Now most music has a prelude, a quiet opener,

    Ughh!!! Then they would probably keep talking during the opening parts of the song like bad radio DJs do.

  • here's what they need to do.

    Forget the ads.

    Develop their own napster-like system, which is 200X better than the current one:

    More reliable servers
    better search mechanism
    wider selection
    etc...

    Then advertise on the website and in the client software, as seen in Apple's Sherlock.

    Think of the targeted ads you could develop. "Do you like the Beatles track you just downloaded. Buy it now by clicking here!"

    The problem is they're too stuck in the old ways to consider this solution.

    tcd004

  • If it's just some audio that they encode and stick on the back or front of the MP3, how are you going to know which frames contain the ad audio and which contain the audio you want to hear?

    Who say's they have to stick it before or after the music? What if they stick it at the beginning or end of the music itself? DJs on the radio will generally talk over the first N seconds of a song until the vocals kick in (or the last N seconds after the vocals have ended), so what's to stop the ad from being played over top of the music in the same way? I must say, I think I would find this easier on the ears than listening to the ads first as I think I could tune out the ads in my head if there were background music to listen to. Nevertheless, I think I'll be sticking with MP3.com for the forseeable future as no audible ads are even better still.

  • Already been done (Score:3)

    by m3000 ( 46427 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @06:30PM (#941886)
    Go search on Napster for "Barenaked Ladies Pinch Me" and up will come a song by them that they've added ads for their new album in. I thought it was actually pretty cool that they'd decided to use Napster like they did.
  • you need a complete header =\ but you could say open file skip this many bytes... the header delete adspace make sure everything lines up right save file
    --
  • MP3s are already Kosher.

    When are people going to realize that MP3 is just an audio format. There is absoutly nothing wrong with generating an MP3 file or stream. What is under fire is the generating of Copyrighted Music and then distributing them.

    Guilt by association is wrong. Granted people here SHOULD know the difference between an audio format and an criminal act but the way 'the media' touts MP3 as an illegal format in itself sickens me.


    They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen

  • Might not be easy to automate (Score:4)

    by FattMattP ( 86246 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @05:47PM (#941895) Homepage
    but it would take about 1 hour before software existed to automatically strip it out: and open source gnapster clients would simply add a plugin interface to offer post download filtering before playing... which would strip the ads

    I doubt this would be possible unless the MP3 format were changed to allow for some kind of ad header to be applied to the front or back. If it's just some audio that they encode and stick on the back or front of the MP3, how are you going to know which frames contain the ad audio and which contain the audio you want to hear?

  • There is no way I would consider listening to this 'free' music. Hearing a jingle selling Tampax or Trojan condoms or Ex-Lax ever three or four minutes would just completely ruin the mood.

    Besides, why would someone listen to a free release with a commercial from a record company when they can just get MP3's from online or their friends? Duh!

    I wonder how artists will feel now. If I start hearing advertisements for Burger King before For Whom The Bell Tolls I will consider Lars and the gang to have officially and irreperably sold out. I mean, what self-respecting artist would want to participate in this scam?
    ---
    seumas.com

  • why is it always advertising *sigh* (Score:4)

    by SEAL ( 88488 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @05:51PM (#941904)
    I'm so sick of the advertising angle. Er maybe that's because I work late hours and arrive home to nothing but infomercials. Still...

    I realize people feel the need to make money but this isn't the way to go about it. I'm even more amazed that advertisers would go for such a scheme. Look at the low click through rates on web banners. People are almost desensitized to this continual bombardment.

    If the music industry (or small artists -- whoever) want to turn a buck off of downloadable music, I think selling individual songs is the better way to go about it. Charge more for the really popular tracks. But time and time again, people have shown that when you charge a fair price, many will cough up the $$ honestly. Many people dislike buying CDs because they get a song or two they like, and a bunch of filler crap.

    Advertising in songs would just piss people off more IMO. I'm certainly not going to put up with that if I'm shuffling a large number of songs randomly all evening, for example.

    Best regards,

    SEAL

  • Easy. (Score:2)

    by Seumas ( 6865 )
    Perhaps not automated, but it wouldn't take much trouble. Convert MP3 to WAV, re-encode to MP3 -- setting your encoder to wait XX seconds before recording (most encoders have such an option). Voila. Done.
    ---
    seumas.com
  • I will consider Lars and the gang to have officially and irreperably sold out.

    There are those who believe this has already happened...
  • The question comes up how then can we legitamize mp3s and allow all this discussion to stop about illegal copying. It seems that either it will manifest itself in advertisements, much like some streaming radio and video providers are doing or else creating a highly encrypted limited use format of encoding.

    Personally either format does not appeal to me, as I value the ability to have free control over a digital format of music while at the same time I want to listen to what I intend to listen to, not the advertisement which someone forces down my throat. The only other alternative that I see is for a change in the way people think of electronicaly distributed music, from the side of the artist and the "consumer". The consumer needs to realize that while the music industry sucks money away from the artist, the artist "stil" does make money and that revenue is the only way to produce more of the music which you apreciate. The artist needs to realize that there is a paradigm shift in how music and art is being distributed world-wide. No one wants to steal your creation, I haven't seen any reports of someone taking a Metallica song and trying to pretend it comes from the band Soil. If the artist can accept that we as consumers just wish to apreciate their creations, but are fed up with the high prices and difficulty in obtaining various formats then perhaps a happy medium can be obtained. I personally buy the CDs of artists which I feel are contributing to music as an artform and those who I enjoy listening to and I do think that this is the only way to legitamize MP3s.

    Let the artists know that music distribution needs to be changed, while at the same time we still wish to support in some fashion the creative juices of great musicians.
  • One reason MP3's are taking off like wildfire is that CD's are *so fucking expensive*. We're talking $17 for some CD I may have never heard, that may have 2 good songs on it, or may suck completely. I quit buying CD's like 7 years ago, and have listened to nothing but dj mixtapes, vinyl and MP3s ever since.

    Here's your business model: a subscription service offering unlimited access to over 1.9 million tracks for $5.95/mo. At a price point like that, it becomes much easier for me to pay the subscription fee than to track the damn things down and jam up my precious hard drive space with them.

    p.b., with no j :(
  • Let 'em try! I may not have the math background but I _do_ have the sound engineering background- I can tell you right now that in order to mess with mp3 ripping, the sound quality will be _screwed_ with. Bigtime. I daresay it's possible to make the files resistant to compression- but the resulting CDs will NOT sound good.

    Meanwhile, I just ordered for my studio a Lexicon reverb/multieffects- an upgrade of my Alesis drum module- and a Kurzweil Micropiano. I'm also plotting a revision of my UberMonitors while I'm at it. How did I get the money for this, selling CDs? No- I WORKED for it. (To be exact, I sold costume tails at a convention, believe it or not- see here [airwindows.com].)

    Let 'em keep coming up with new ways to make their $18 CDs sound worse in order to fight copying! I'll be coming up with ways to make my $5.99 CDs sound BETTER and encouraging copying- it's your right as a music owner to make dubs for noncommercial use, that's the law. The sooner I conclusively beat (oh all right, maim) the audio quality of the major labels, the happier I shall be, and getting them to butcher their tone in the name of copyprotection can only help. Bring on the mutated, deformed audio! *g*

  • An idea I had that might work better... (Score:5)

    by sterno ( 16320 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @06:57PM (#941921) Homepage
    Rather than having an ad recorded that people have to sit through, I had a thought that might work a whole lot better. Have a plug-in for WinAmp, XMMS, etc, that would integrate with a modified MP3 format. The modified MP3 format would require the plugin to work.

    Now, what the modification does is put a little "buy me" button on the player. When you are listening to a song, you are offered a chance to send a little money to the artist who made it. You don't HAVE to send the money, but basically you make it such a small amount that people won't mind sending it. Then you just have the system bill your credit card.

    I've noticed that PayPal allows increments as small as 1 cent to be charged, so I had the thought of using Paypal somehow as the charging system. Basically it would allow a small band to start distributing, getting some money back, and would require no significant infrastructure to process.

    If you wanted to take it a step further, you could provide a way for the people to buy a related CD, T-Shirt, etc. Or maybe have a contest where if you chipped in your money your name would be entered to win something cool. A personal performance of the band maybe, or autographed band items.

    The trick to all this is to insure that the system is neither intrusive nor restricting. Requiring a plugin is no big deal as long as the effort to install a plugin is more effort than it is to reverse engineer it away. Asking for payment, but not being intrusive about it, insures that nobody has an incentive to break your system.

    Sure, with such a system nobody is guaranteed to get a dime, but I think most people would honestly be happy to send 50 cents to an artist if they liked the song. If you get your music distributed broadly enough, the 50 cents can add up quickly.

    By the way, if you want to make such a system, go right ahead. My idea is now out there in the public pool of ideas for you to use as you see fit. In fact, I beg of you to make such a system because I think artists should get money, but I want it to be easy for them to get it direct from consumers without a bunch of money glutton corporations in the middle.

    ---

  • I would rather just fork over the $16 and buy the freaking thing.

    And, of course, that's probably what they're counting on.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • and call it advertising. At least you can't and still expect to be in business the next day. This just doesn't seem to make any sense anymore. It seems that more and more of the economy is being turned over to 'supported by advertising' revenue models. Eventually, somebody has to sell something sometime.

    I know, almost everything solid still requires an exchange of cash, but what percentage of the cyberworld will be turned over to advertising support before there is no more money flowing? Or will the Internet go the way of TV, where all the content was supported by advertisements (and sucked)?

  • At least when I listen to the radio I get ten, Ten, TEN songs in a ROW on NONSTOP-ROCK WSUX!!!.

    Now I'm supposed to hear an ad in between every song? Right, that's a good one.

    Yet another company trying to apply a 20th century revenue model to mp3 music distribution.

    Few artists are truly capitalizing on MP3, by using it to generate revenue through merchandise and concert tie-ins and building targeted consumer databases (you may hate the idea, but mp3 would be a great generator for this). Unfortunately, as many have said, these revenue models cut out the music label dinosaurs, so now we have this company trying to make money off of MP3 for RIAA. It makes as much sense as trying to sell software to generate revenue for oil companies.

  • Re:Only one? (Score:3)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @05:57PM (#941931)
    There were lots of other people who liked or didn't like things and put their support behind their cause. They didn't say "gee, this gets people riled up and arguementative, so I'm not going to talk about it anymore".

    I mean, Ghandi didn't say "screw peace -- it just upsets people".

    Jimmy Hoffa didn't say "Bullocks to the ruthless company-boars, but ya know -- fighting for unions just gets people all edgy and stuff".

    Martin Luther King never said "Damn. Maybe I shouldn't bring up racism anymore. It just makes people cranky".

    Rob Maldo never said "Bah. This Linux thing is starting to get old and boring. Let's talk about the Ron Popiel Juicer!"

    Not that MP3's rank anywhere near those issues, but they are at once controversial, interesting, popular and newsworthy. Thus, they are worth reporting.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • Let's make some money from MP3 (Score:3)

    by PhilWard ( 156499 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @12:40AM (#941932)
    MP3 is one of the best promotional tools a band could wish for. Here's a few ideas as to how to use it.

    Place all your songs on your own website for people to download for free.
    In the comment tags of each MP3 place your website address so that those who get it from other sources (eg napster etc) get the address.
    On the same website announce tour dates, ticket prices, and where to get tickets.
    Sell merchandise from the website.
    Sell CDs from the website (the quality is better than MP3 and if the price is right and ordering is easy then those of us stuck in 56kbps land will snatch them up). Without a blood sucking record company you'll find you can sell CDs really cheap, and yet make more money per copy than any of the well known artists.

    Other things you may like to try include:-
    bombarding local and national radio stations with demo tapes and include the website address with the tape
    including MP3s on your site that contain say 20 seconds of music from each track. That way we get a taster before either downloading the whole thing, or ordering the CD, or deciding that you're the greatest band ever and I'll be at that gig when you play near my town.

    I honestly think that we'll find that the new music business will contain many artists who make a good living, rather than the current few who make a fantastic living.

    Phil.

    It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock n roll! - Bonn Scott 1976
  • or why not have a url in one of the mp3 info fields. xmms would let you click an artist info button and fans could go to the artists web site and find out more about the person/people that made the music they like.

    one thing to find out? how to pay them...
  • Hehe, I can just picture it:

    The real Metallica has PayPal ID 3872. Anyone else is an impostor.
    --

  • If the music industry (or small artists -- whoever) want to turn a buck off of downloadable music, I think selling individual songs is the better way to go about it. Charge more for the really popular tracks. But time and time again, people have shown that when you charge a fair price, many will cough up the $$ honestly. Many people dislike buying CDs because they get a song or two they like, and a bunch of filler crap.


    Because by current thinking this method won't work. The huge claim is that Napster is used by people to sample music. then when they find something they like they go out and buy the CD. Now, if you download something of Napster you like, what are the chances you are going to go and pay $.25 to download the exact same thing from their web site? The people that sample music on Napster and then buy CDs (and I still don't think they are evn near a majority of users) do so because you get more than you had. You get a full CD, you get cover art and lyrics, you get a medium you can carry to work or put in your car, etc. If they don't get anything more than they already have for "sampling" purposes, they aren't going to go out and pay for it. Why should they, they already have it.

  • The problem with adding advertisements to .MP3 files is that they're going to dramatically increase the size of the .MP3 file anyways. That's something that is a big no-no even if you have a "fat pipe" broadband ADSL or cable modem connection.

  • Product placement (Score:4)

    by Michael Woodhams ( 112247 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @07:00PM (#941946) Journal
    "I want a way to make MP3s kosher, but this ain't it."

    I have a solution: product placement! E.g.

    Imagine there's no heaven
    It's easy if you try.
    Air-sole Nikes below us
    Above us only sky.
    Imagine all the people
    holidaying in LA.

    Woohooo
    You may think I'm a dreamer
    But I'm not the only one
    I hope one day you'll try out
    An Acme matress and have some fun.

  • I beleive the idea is to insert a short ad in the middle of the music...

    Oooooh, and she's buying a stairway to Pepsi...

    Or how about...

    Sweeeeeeet 10-10-321 (instead of 'Sweet Emotion')

    The possibilities go on and on...


    =================================
  • Um, there are actually a lot of utilities like that for the web.

    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
  • Is there anything out there the advertisers won't try to slap an annoying ad on?

    I think the past twenty years of North American culture should answer that question for you. Of course, just be glad that things haven't progressed as far as they have in David Foster Wallace's infinite jest , where the government sells the names of years, and the people have "the year of the depends adult undergarment"...

    yet

  • [ RANT MODE = ON ]

    E-Mail...the WWW...Usenet...software...and now MP3s??? Is there anything out there the advertisers won't try to slap an annoying ad on? Enough is enough already! I get bombarded with enough ads on the web as is, I don't need to have any more ads being forced my way!

    [ RANT MODE = OFF ]

    But keeping on the topic here, just throwing out the ad-infected MP3s on Napster and related services isn't going to help them spread. Once someone catches on that there's an ad in their MP3, *poof*, away it goes with one simple touch of the delete key. And if everyone deletes their ad-infected MP3s, then you've just lost the propagation (sp?) that is needed for a particular MP3 to spread around Napster.

    *sigh* Yet another stupid marketer...

    --

  • Acutally stripping software is out now (Score:3)

    by cdtoad ( 14065 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @06:00PM (#941964) Homepage
    Check Steinberg.com or any one of the Audio DSP places. They've got plugins for a variety of different recording progarm which strip out "noise"

    Personally I still think Corporate Rock Sucks (including SST)
  • There was a band devolved from Billy Idol's Gen-X called Sigue Sigue Sputnik [sputnikworld.com], had a few dance hit songs in about 1984.

    Their tapes and albums had short ~10 second advertising blurbs between each track. The only ones I remember was for l'Oreal hair treatment, and there was one about a mens magazine which was out of business after about issue 3. If you know the band, you'll understand why they have hair care ads :-)

    I've heard some other bands do this too, as a way to suck more money out of their short lived careers. Some of the european teen pop one hit wonder bands recently have product placement all through their music and cover artwork. But I don't buy those albums.

    the AC
  • Darn it, we almost got away with it until you had to tell them that it wouldn't work CmdrTaco. Come on man, who's side are you on?

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