I found this thread via Google and have read all the posts with rapt interest. I’ve never before been exposed to a community of opinion that is so opposed to file sharing. It’s been an eye-opener.

The main argument I’m seeing here, is the theory that music costs money to make, and those involved in the production need to be compensated for their work. A secondary argument is that file sharing, by it’s nature, prevents compensation and is thereby stealing. A third suggestion I’ve seen is that artists will not make work if they are not receiving adequate compensation to dedicate the time needed to make great art. (An argument, I believe, that ironically propelled the creation of much copyright law that exists today. I say ironically because so little copyright law, in practice, actually monetarily protects the person who made the art.)

I disagree with almost everything in the above paragraph. But it’s going to take me a while to deconstruct it.

The first misconception is that the artist, if not compensated will no longer create. Any artist of a decent caliber creates their great works because they have to create, not because they want a big fancy house (not that anyone’s turning down big fancy houses if offered.) If you took all the money from artists away, you’d still have writers, painters, musicians, and actors all still struggling to create, and their work would still be appreciated by their fans. And, it would still be great.

And that’s the core relationship. The one between the artist, and the fan (or listener, or appreciator, or reader, or viewer, or whatever word applies to the art). That relationship has always existed throughout history, and nothing that has or is happening in this technological revolution is going to change that.

However, there is another piece to this relationship. A big piece. That is the people that come in between and facilitate the relationship. This piece has also always existed. A writer needs a publisher, a painter needs a gallery, a playwright needs a theater, etc. It’s also in this part of the process where money so often is exchanged. The theater owner charges tickets for his theater, the audience happily pays, the playwright gets a cut.

How much the artist gets versus how much the middle men get, and how much the audience has to pay is always in flux.

Also, when an art is popular enough, completely useless middle men get created due to the sheer profit, volume and popularity of the art being created (think record label executives, entertainment lawyers, and the entire concept of Ticketmaster.)

Right now, the relationship between artist and fan is better then it’s ever been. The artist is now in much better control of his/her message thanks to the internet and has a much more direct line of communication with the fans. What’s in incredible flux, however, is the middle men. They, by this technological revolution, are getting completely knocked around.

What I’m seeing on this forum is a bunch of middle men, who are about to be replaced, standing around and screaming “THIEF!” instead of trying to jump in to the revolution. Which is a shame, because how this shakes down in the coming years is going to mean a lot of money to the right people in the right places, and it just involves repositioning yourself.

I’m going to give you some free advice, as I’m a nice hippie anarchist :

1) Now that we’ve established that artists are always going to create and audiences will always want to pay (yes, they will always want to pay in one way or another), think to yourself, “how can I reposition myself back in the middle of this stream/relationship?” With this question in mind, think about the old way that the art was being delivered, and now look at the new way. What was you old job? Is it going to be needed if the new way is the only way? (Assume the new way will be the only way within 10 years). If not, how can what you are doing translate into the new way of doing things?

2) If you are becoming dispirited by these simple realities, remind yourself that someone is going to make an awful lot of money off the new way of doing things. Right now 3 of those someone’s are Broadband ISP providers, MySpace and Apple, as examples. But those are hardly the only 3 and the power will shift and turn as new ways of transmitting art evolve. Think about all that money! You greedy middlemen bastards! Maybe thinking about it long enough will inspire you to finally get creative and think of a way to jump in on this!

3) Try not to get too caught up in wishing laws were implemented or fighting a fight against a revolution that’s going to happen anyway. Even if you sued the shit out of every little kid you could find, and successfully stopped every ardent fan from redistributing their favorite band to their friends, this revolution would still happen a few years later and you’d again find yourself making less money and now staring down the barrel of a technology behemoth like Google. If you just stay stuck in cement yelling thief you’re going to watch as all of your relevance fades away as you get older and older. At that point, why not retire? It’s a young man’s game, after all.

I know I sound harsh and condescending, but none of you have been particularly nice in reacting to the rather rational kid in this thread who is merely trying to, like me, get you to think a lot differently then you are now. You already lost the old business model, it’s just taking a while to completely die. But this is most certainly an opportunity disguised as a crises, and people will come out on top and the same amount of money is going to be spent by consumers on entertainment, it’s just a question of how and where they spend it, and where you sit in that relationship to make money.

Finally, research your competition. Go hang out in p2p communities. Try the clients and software. Check out the torrent sites. While doing it, ask yourself, what are they doing right but, more importantly, what do they suck at? People will always choose the easiest path to their favorite artists. The iTunes music store isn’t succeeding because people are “moral” or “immoral”, it’s succeeding because it’s incredibly easy to get the song, have it labeled perfectly with album art, and have it placed on their ipod. But I think there are other ways the store isn’t there yet, and there are still a lot of functions the p2p scene lacks as the main distributor of music to the next generation. A TON of features, in fact. You very much can compete with, and beat, free.

“Understand the risks. See the benefits.”

I was browsing the latest in piracy news (yargh! I’m a pirate!) when I came along this blog post, an alleged interview with aXXo, a person that is assumed to be a teenager whose repackaged dvd rip torrents have become so popular they have become a search term in itself. Don’t bother reading the interview, it doesn’t appear to be him/her and is boring regardless. It was the comments after that interested me.

It seems, a lot of people hate this character for, and I’m not kidding, releasing well packaged, decent quality, small sized encodes of releases by other groups and then making them available on public torrent trackers.

Well, why the fuck would anyone have a problem with that? Well, the problem appears to be, for these assholes, that he makes the films too easy to get for the average user, and that he’s taking credit.

Reason one blows my mind away, so I’ll start with the foggier point. While it’s true that a lot of people don’t realize that aXXo is generally not ripping the movies or acquiring the rips himself, merely repackaging, compressing and redistributing the work of other groups, it’s also true that he’s created something new that has meaning. By being selective, choosing only good quality rips and then encoding them at a decent rate, he’s essentially created a brand.

If it has aXXo on it and a lot of seeders, basically you know it’s not going to be a cam, the audio synch is not going to go out, and you’re not going to be asked to visit 25 pr0n sites to get the password for the rar file. Should he give credit to the original group in the .nfo file? Maybe. But they would probably get pissed at that as well.

This reminds me a lot of the old days when we would trade mp3s, via IRC, and then later Napster. There was a lot of resistance to making this cool little toy public. And after mp3s got widespread, suddenly we had ratio ftps. The “l33ts” (i.e: 13 year old boys) would have us believe that the only way we could get good music would be to sign up with their bullshit servers, and really, their music taste was always suspect at best. Napster, of course, didn’t end. Networks like Audiogalaxy, WinMX and the shockingly powerful Gnutella would come to allow us “masses” to make good on the promise of free music. And we gave back with our shares. We fought the private ftp servers (whether you knew it or not) by simply sharing, downloading and spreading your music as far as the fucking internet could see.

But now we seem on a breaking point, where public sharing is considered to be uncool. The way to be “in” is to be part of private bittorrent trackers for either music or film. This isn’t so different from the ratio ftps from days ago.

Here’s how this works: the general public is not your enemy. In fact, they are the ones that are going to find and encode that kickass 1967 movie that you don’t know about but is really fucking good. Just like Napster, they are the ones that are going to kick this thing into the fucking future. Just because you get a DVD a few months before release, you don’t get to control this. It’s a revolution.

Those who pursue private trackers fall into 2 categories: elitists and pussies. I assume there is a combination of both in the motivations of the casual user. “If I’m on a private tracker I won’t get sued.” “If I’m on a private tracker I’m better then the rest.”

Let go of those 2 really shitty attitudes. It’s a fucking one in a million chance of getting sued. Join the rest of us sharing music in a community. And don’t be such an elitist pussy.

Dir: Todd Phillips
Written by: John Hamburg
Starring: Ben Stiller & Jaenene Garofolo

From the people that brought you “Road Trip” (T. Phillips) plus “Along Came Polly” & “Meet the Parents” (J. Hamburg) comes “The Gentrifiers,” a 2006 comedy that had an all-too-brief theatrical release, however now available on DVD. Part gross-out comedy, part social commentary, and all-hilarious, “The Gentrifiers” never quite handles a consistent tone, which is perhaps why it did so poorly in theaters. Which is a shame, as there are both comedic and dramatic gems here that make “The Gentrifiers” easily worth a rental.

Stiller & Garofolo play Stan & Laura, a couple happily married until they decide to leave their rental apartment in the village to buy a brownstone in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. And when these two uptight yuppies are forced to encounter the inner city realities of Bed-Stuy, hilarity ensues.

From moving day, when their truck is surrounded & looted by the neighbors, to the hysterical neighborhood dance, when Stiller tries to dance “ghetto” to fit in, the zany culture clash jokes never stop.

Side characters are introduced via “The Diamond in the Rough,” the local coffee shop where other “colonizers” (as they dryly call themselves) meet, hang out, drink coffee and listen to comedically bad poetry. Gross-out comedy abounds, some hysterical, some not so much. Funny side characters include John Turtorro as a greedy, land-owning Hasidic Jew and Chris Tucker as the local “Gangsta” drug dealer with a very embarrassing secret!

If you want to see if Stan & Laura’s relationship survives, or even if they physically survive this CRAZY neighborhood, rent “The Gentrifiers” today!

Criticism

There are those who have made accusations that “The Gentrifiers” is racist, insuler, and geared toward the white middle/upper class in a way that is stunningly shallow and lacking in any sense of conscience or self-awareness. But if that were true, couldn’t the same be said of every movie directed by Todd Phillips, or every movie written by John Hamburg, or even nearly every movie Ben Stiller has ever starred in??!!! Just remember kids, 5 million Ben Stiller fans can’t be wrong!

People who feel this way need to take a chill pill and stop hating! “The Gentrifiers” is a laugh out loud comedy all upper class white people can relate to, no matter what race or class they belong.

DVD Extras - Featurette - “Hearts of Darkness - Shooting ‘The Gentrifiers’ on location”, Commentary by Stiller and Todd Phillips, Deleted Scenes.

UPDATE - 4/19/07 - The below method just doesn’t work for me. I blogged (i.e: farted) this out in a bit of excitement thinking I had found the solution to this problem. Only problem is, it’s been over a week of me playing occasionally trying to make this work for me and it won’t. However, I’ve seen a number of people on the intraweb writing in comments that it HAS worked for them, so I’ll keep it here for you lucky bastards that it works for.

This is an old complaint, but I had to read some infuriating posts on a macintosh forum and then scroll to the bottom of comments of a better informed community somewhere else and scroll to the very bottom of the comments in order to find this fix. With this in mind, here’s a post for the intraweb gods on how to disable gapless playback in itunes.

Despite what a ton of apple fans with their heads up their ass think, gapless playback, and it’s automatic implementation, is a huge pain in the ass for power mp3 collectors like myself. Combined with the awful library update features of Itunes and you have features that make this program nearly unusable.

Ok, here’s the workaround.

* When Itunes starts and loads up your library for the first time (if you are reloading it like me), click the X for both Determining Album Art AND Determining Gapless playback. (Album art is a whole other headache in iTunes I’m not even touching here)

* Now select all your tracks (Ctrl+A)

* Right click for “Get Info” and CHECK the box for “Gapless Album” and make sure “NO” is selected.

* Click Apply.

That’s it, no more horrid gapless playback checking when you run Itunes.

In theory, but it’s never FUCKING WORKED FOR ME. iTunes keeps coming up trying to determine gapless playback for my gazillion songs. And every time I need to reload my library, it begins. Again. My love/hate relationship with iTunes continues.

While we’re at it, here’s 2 essential iTunes mods:

Multi-Plugin - The biggest treat of Multi-Plugin is the ability to add custom skins to iTunes to get rid of it’s rather boring look. However, the features don’t end there; once Multi-Plugin is installed you will see a tab called “Multi-Plugin” within preferences, which adds a lot of custom options you will wonder why Apple never included in iTunes in the first place.

iTunes Library Updater - Anyone with a large and growing mp3 collection has banged their head up against the wall with how the iTunes music library behaves. This small and incredibly helpful program will allow you to easily and quickly update your iTunes library when it changes.

The whole fact I had to struggle with this crap today has reminded me that I have to bend over backwards to get a software music player working the way I like it to. Here’s the 3 I’m using right now and why, though I’m always on the lookout for good alternative suggestions, as I’m not quite happy with any of them.

#1 - iTunes. Why? The interface. There’s something really clean and easy about the iTunes interface that has kept me hooked despite all it’s problems. There’s no question, iTunes is designed, like AOL, to trap you in their universe, only buying tunes from their music store, only ripping through their interface, and never being able to smoothly switch players. The way they limit features and function to accomplish this borders on an evil comparable only to Microsoft. But damn! I like that interface!

#2 - 1by1. 1by1 is the literal opposite of iTunes. It’s unpopular, small, very easy on your computer resources, ridiculously fast, and just as ridiculously ugly. If you, like me, already have all your music saved in a folder format of artist–>album, this player rawks as a way to quickly and easily play your favorite albums. In fact, this small little proggie would take over iTunes as my favorite if not for the fact that it doesn’t play mpeg 4 (that’s those m4a music files all your friends with iTunes have forced on you).

#3 - Winamp. I still have winamp out of nostalgia, but it’s attempts to compete with iTunes as a media library solution have pretty much failed for me. The interface is awful. Just awful, for me it’s unusable. However, I still occasionally use Winamp the way I have since they started: I open up the playlist window, toss in a bunch of folders based on my mood, shuffle, and save the playlist to open another day. Thanks to this, I still haven’t removed from my computer.

I’ve been growing sadder and sadder with NYC for years now. How nice of LCD Soundsystem, with the new album Sound of Silver, to give voice to my feelings.

The latest shitty miscarriage of culture in NYC, the end of Coney Island, which had it’s last opening day yesterday. Fuck!

The new LCD Soundsystem album is pretty good, btw. Def. worth a download or purchase, depending on your ethical sensibilities. The track that I’m loving, “New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down,” is below: