If you can't get the public to pay the costs, then there's no market for you, period. Just because you have something to sell doesn't mean there's people who'll buy it. What you're doing when you release it before having been paid in full is basically give the public a credit, which in itself is kosher, but you run the risk of them not paying back the credit, and you can't really complain when they don't.
And no, they're not making available any song at all... What they're making available is bandwidth to copy the songs from their servers, nothing more. You pay $.99, they let you copy the song from their server. They never sell you the song itself - they give it away with the bandwidth you buy.
No, I'm not being silly. I'm being logical. Back when the vinyl disc was born, the companies that were involved in the development of that cutting-edge technology suddenly had this ability to make discs of vinyl which could contain recordings of sound to be played back in a different location. They were not music factories, they were VINYL factories. And if they wanted to recoup their investment in the development and gain a profit, they needed a way to sell VINYL in massive quantities, ie. to consumers.
So what did they do? They contracted musicians, put them to play in front of a recording lathe, and then used the music as an excuse to sell the VINYL to the people. At some point they struck this deal that, instead of paying the musicians up front for the recording sessions, they would pay them a certain amount for every disc of vinyl sold, and it turns out that these discs of vinyl that just happened to contain recordings of music in them proved very popular with the public, so a whole industry formed around this. But what they were selling all along was VINYL, not songs, not music, vinyl.
Now, since the practical limitations of technology back then meant these vinyl manufacturing companies effectively had a monopoly on the transportation of recorded music to consumers, everyone in their head made a false correlation (false because it's not causation) that vinyl sold = music sold. However as the tape era came about, this correlation started to fade everywhere but in the people's heads...
...enter the third millenium. Now we have technology that allows us to copy information - not just music - from one place to another. This technology is called Internet. But there's a twist: This thing called Internet, unlike the vinyl, did not start as a medium for transportation of sound. Not because of any limitation on the Internet itself, but because the nodes (computers) connected to the Internet did not have the capacity to store, transmit or play back audio signals, but basically only text. Thus, the fist applications of the Internet involved only textual communications. This means that the companies that established themselves as the owners of the Internet did not have any interest whatsoever in using music as an excuse to sell the Internet to consumers. But computer tech evolved, and the situation changed... Fast forward 20 years, and now every node conneded to the Internet pertains to a consumer, and is fully capable of acquiring, transmitting, storing, copying, and playing back music. It's not that the transportation manufacturer disappeared... It's still there. It's called Internet Service Provider. They're the guys you pay a monthly bill to in exchange for using their bandwidth to transmit information. However, as mentioned above, the difference between the disappearing vinyl (read: prerecorded CD) manufacturers and the Internet manufacturers is that the ISP guys don't have any specific interest in hiring musicians to use as an excuse to sell Internet to the consumers - the Internet sells itself for many other reasons!
So now that there's no one around to pay the musicians their royalities, what the musicians are doing is, in an attempt to stick to the old ways of the vinyl industry, trying to pay themselves their royalities by reselling something they don't make (Internet bandwidth) at a few cents higher than you pay the guys who do make it (the ISPs) but with their music tacked on top of it - oblivious to the fact that once the music is out, it can be copied at the price of the cheaper bandwidth from the ISP, which is so cheap that in fact people is willing to just give it away (P2P nets) and cuts out their precious royalities. They effectively sold the song itself (which may have cost $60,000 to make) for the price of a nonexistent vinyl royality.
Can you see why this is never going to work now?... Either you find a way to make crowdfunding work, or say goodbye to the market. The only thing that'll save you apart from that is the people's good will, but building a business model around the people's good will comes with some caveats that you will have to accept. Accept them. Stop trying to legislate your way around them.
And by the way, there are crowdfunded music projects that have worked just fine.
(Excuse my English, I'm tired and it's not my native language.)
If people want to get paid for their creations, then why do they bloody insist on giving it away for free on a $10 CD or $2 of Internet bandwidth?
Musicians just don't seem to be able to understand that they're not CD manufacturers, and they're not Internet Service Providers, they can't charge for CDs, and they can't charge for Internet copying. What they can charge for is only their music... which they're stupidly giving away. People is already being generous when they buy plastic or bandwidth from them (being able to buy it from cheaper stores) just so they get their cut and try to recover their creation costs, but that's the wrong way to go about it.
Artist, does it cost you $60,000 to make your work (include your own salary)?... Pro-tip: Sell it for $60,000, not for $0.99. If your work is really worth that, people will pay the cost. Set up a kickstarter and watch it happen. If your work isn't worth what it costs, then there's no market for you. Tough. But please stop all this lunacy, we need it to stop freaking yesterday.
-Sincerely, an audio engineer who understands what is wrong with the businesss
The camera that films video for this display is a light-field camera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_camera
Surprisingly they're already being sold to mere mortals, but those are early models that are not mature enough to be used for video production (the Lytro is for consumers but can only take pictures, the Raytrix can take video but is for industrial applications).
In the meantime while these cameras mature, any way you can turn imagery into 3D models is fair game, maybe a wide-angle high resolution Kinect, or interpolation from two normal cameras (it's a bit more complex than interpolation but you get the idea), or mere image recognition a la gimmicky 2D-to-3D conversion, etc.
How long are we going to put up with his shit?
Forever. You kick out lamer smith, they kick in a replacement that shits just like him.
I didn't think anything of the time-varying, but maybe I'm just spoiled because in my field we convert from PCM to PDM and back, every day for breakfast, and once again for dinner, and the mindset of resolution--time equivalence sort of sticks with you.
But yes, your version is more accurate.
Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek
