Whoops, by "they" I mean the record companies.

That part is standard practice, and I doubt they're worried about the artists finding out since they're the ones who draw up the contracts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

In her defense, she appears that way in her movie and TV work as well.

* if they're not getting some of the door money

oy vey

Sorry, I meant that if a band does their own songs and they're getting some of the door money then they need better songs :)

The ASCAP/BMI system works fine when the performance rights org actually notices that your song was played, takes note of it, and sends you your cut. Unfortunately the artist still has to do their own accounting since everyone else benefits if they fail to notice your song was played. We already have automated systems, for instance, radio stations keep track of what they play. You'd think it'd be a simple matter for, say, BMI to just call up the station and verify if one of their member artists claims that a song they wrote is in rotation. A friend of mine, after years with BMI, is moving to ASCAP and has to decide whether to take BMI to court over all of the money they've shafted him.

Accuracy benefits the artist but not the accountants.

Right, but we're talking about streaming. I'll take lower quality over not having the song stutter.

The trolling is spot on...what worries me are the positive mods.

Any app with GUI has a good reason to be multi-threaded...we don't expect a button to stay down if it triggers, say, network activity, we expect it to come back up immediately regardless of how long the activity takes.

And anyway this isn't about multi-threading at all. So what's with the mods? I think someone smelled some (misguided) cynicism on the post and said, "yeah, now there's a sentiment I can get behind!"

Stop being so damn reasonable. It's Slashdot. Pick a side and childishly refuse to acknowledge the other or GTFO.

Jesus, I don't know what you people are doing that your browser crashes every day. For me it's maybe 3 times a year, if that.

It'd be one thing if FF (or Flash) crashed all the time, and then yes you could paint the FF team as ignoring a fundamental flaw. But that's not the case, and you know it. I'm glad they spend the time on the new location bar and the new bookmark system. I actually use those.

I'd say it's bad for traditional broadcasting as well as the traditional ASCAP/BMI arrangements. I have high hope for things like Songbird...I bet if you get enough music blogs who primarily feature the music of artists who stream or host it themselves, and some feeds to aggregate those blogs, you could end up with something Pandora-ish that sidesteps all of the old guard licenses and restrictions.

A band could license one or two tracks from an album under something like CC attribution.

It's working to some extent for Revision 3 and internet TV. Of course, it's normal for a TV show to have ads, it's not normal for a song to have ads. And most of the CC licenses rule out being able to track and collect royalties on someone else's performance of your song, which is how a lot of songrwiters and musicians end up supporting themselves.

So who knows. Could just be a pipe dream. But in general what I'm saying is, if we switch from a broadcasting model to one where people discover music through social tools & feeds, and the artist takes care of their own licensing issues...

Or is that Last.FM?

And when I say traditional I pretty much mean "listener supported."

I should add there's really nothing better for me than the traditional radio format...DJ gets full reign, no algorithms and no forced playlists. Just someone who's got an hour block or so to show you what music they like and why.

I personally think the Music Genome Project is awesome. The thing I like about Pandora is that it does an amazing job of introducing me to music based on how the music sounds rather than by "people who listen to this generally also listen to this" (which, granted, is not a bad way of doing it either). But the more the merrier. I listen to shoutcast stations and web streams of FM stations more than Pandora anyway.

It's just semantics. Obviously for a *live* performance the act is going to get paid a lot more than just a fraction of a cent.

You may be right, but I don't think we can determine that just from the 40 hour cutoff. It just makes sense to charge your heaviest users before your lighter users. Right now they are not at the point where they have to charge everybody and they're probably glad for that. It also means they don't have to work as hard to get people interested in the service.