This is the part of the entire streaming service payout values which artists appear to entirely ignore. Many of my singer/songwriter friends complain about the value of a stream relative to a permanent digital download or CD track cost (50:1 to 400:1 depending on the service and the analysis) as if a "listen" is someone enjoying the track as their primary activity. I suspect it often is neither.

When we talk about things being like 1984, we don't literally mean 1984.

"...could be engineered to show one number to the naked eye and another to an infared sensitive camera?"

Yeah, because intentionally falsifying your license information instead of just selectively obscuring it is so much less illegal.

Payments are paid to the rights holders. Artists get what is in their contract unless they own the rights.

It's one reason the artists are so up in arms - they're getting shit because they have shit contracts. Well, that and they're just the performer. They think they should get all the money. But that would be like paying an architect $1,000,000 for your house and paying the builder and subcontractors nothing. It doesn't work that way.

Look on the bright side. In 100 years, you'll be able to listen to Jumpin Jack Flash for free, assuming they don't extend copyrights again.

That's what the artists are not considering. In the best of cases, the entire production team: artists, writers, producers, promoters, will never average more than about $0.55-0.60 per track for a CD or permanent digital download. Pandora pays the cost of a permanent individual license, valuable for the life of the author plus 70 years by copyright law, after just 320 listens. Spotify in less than 90 listens. I'm finding it hard to see the economic case that an ephemeral transmission for 3 minutes is worth more than 1/90th-1/320th of the value of a permanent download good for 100 or more years with no limits on the number of times it can be played.

BUT radio plays that song to millions of devices simultaneously, whereas P & S play to a single device. If it's listens we're worried about (and that is what this is about), it would take Pandora 5.7 years for a million people to consecutively listen to that 3 minute Lady Gaga, but radio can distribute the same amount of listens in just 3 minutes.

Performers get zero payments for songs played on the radio (http://diymusician.cdbaby.com/2014/08/didnt-know-radio-royalties/). The authors of the songs (music and lyrics) do get paid. The payments to the rights holders (authors) of the music get paid from radio at a rate which is somewhere around $0.0003 per listener (give or take about 300% - source: http://davidtouve.com/2011/12/...).

In contrast, a permanent digital download and a CD (which can be played as many times as you like) have the same one time rate of $0.096 per track. This is set by law and is called a mechanical right.

So lets see what kind of relative value we have to a CD or PDD:

One radio listener, one listen = $0.0003, iow a permanent right "breaks even" at 320 listens

For Pandora and Spotify, they have to pay the entire chain - producers, artists, authors, promoters, etc.
If we scale the total fees using an album model, with a typical album costing $9.99 and having 12 tracks, of which 30% goes to the retailer, the value of a "track" is $0.583, or about 6x the amount paid for the author on that track. (you can argue the specifics, but if you're buying tens of millions of CDs worth of songs, you'd better get pricing that it *at least* this good)

So at that 58.3c/permanent track...
One pandora listener, one listen = $0.0014, break even is at 416 listens
One spotify listener, one listen = $0.007, break even us at 83 listens.
Radio has to play that track for 1920 listens to match the total compensation paid by the two streamers.

What does online streaming look like now? Pandora is slightly below Radio in their compensation per track to everyone they pay. You might contend that Pandora "finds" new artists better due to their model instead of radio playing whatever they're given to promote, and therefore provides slightly more value. Spotify, OTOH, lets you choose just what you want - you can play Brittney Spears all day, over and over - and therefore it's more like buying a track. And if you were to hit 83 plays on a track, you'd have been better off just buying the track. 83 plays seems like a lot, but that's over an entire lifetime - actually lifetime plus 70 years in copyright.

You mis-spelled Republicans.

This is good, or bad, depending on the tightness of your tin foil, but I think it reveals something far more important about encryption: we, the average users, are powerless to verify or truly trust any encryption solution offered. To realize that an audit of the code for a single-purpose program can only be done by a very small set of people shows that even with open source we're still just trusting others to safeguard our data. The need for encryption and the mathematical and coding complexity required to understand what we are using to safeguard our data is simply beyond our ability to check that it even makes sense at a basic level.

I'm not so sure I welcome our mathematical overloads.

Kanye would like to have a word with you...

Or maybe they're just patenting it so nobody can use the idea. That might actually be a worthwhile patent, in that case.

Except in specialized cases for manfacturing and mining, we have all the strength we need in buildings and bridges. What we really want is something with a higher stiffness.

Find me a material which costs the same as A992 steel and has a modulus of elasticity of 300x10^6 psi (10x that of steel) and I'll make you a millionaire. With very few exceptions, MOE scales linearly with mass, from Magnesium to Iridium. Beryllium-Aluminum is an exception, but is very brittle and hella expensive.

Yeah, get me 500ksi steel at $0.60/lb would be nice, but if it still has E=30E3ksi it won't save me much in a building. Give me 50ksi steel with E=300E3ksi and I'll save you at least 20% on the steel tonnage in a structure.

You're so cute!