Motley Fool on RIAA: “Pull the plug, the old man’s finished.”

“We’re all thieves to the RIAA,” headlines Alyce Lomax at the Motley Fool.

via (also, funny)

Deutsche Grammophon sells DRM-free MP3’s online…

…at their new DG Webshop.  Including 600 out-of-print titles.

via

Linkfest re: the volume wars

Avant Music News has blogged a post from Bob Drake to a prog listserv with a bunch of links to articles and videos about the disappearance of dynamic range from commercial recordings. You can read that post, but my quote of his quote of Drake’s email has hyperlinks:

The Loudness War. Very good YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

IEEE article on the loudness war:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aug07/5429

Over The Limit: excellent, classic article about the volume war:
http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/files/8A133F52D0FD71AB86256C2E005DAF1C

Short Term Gain/Long Term Pain:
http://gboers.xs4all.nl/daisy/home/g3/139/loudnesswar.html

Death of Dynamic Range:
http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dynamics.htm

I Want to Break Free of the Volume War. Another good Youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkkqsN69Jac

Here is my own little example:
http://www.bdrak.com/other/mastering/examples.htm

Support Jammie Thomas’s appeal against the RIAA.

Jammie Thomas has been successfully sued by the RIAA for allegedly sharing two dozen songs online and ordered to pay 222k in damages. That’s over 9k per song. Fund her appeal. Here’s a news article and here’s an informative rant since I don’t have time to write one myself.

[edit 20071101- fixed link, spelled Jammie correctly]

I rant a little: mp3 blogs and the guerilla archiving of commercially challenged music.

Avant Music News blogs the demise of a couple of MP3 blogs (1, 2) that specialize in making available out of print music (I wish someone had blogged their existence).   I’m a little sad that these people are conflicted about what they were doing. The underlying principle for me is that it is never ethical to prevent music from being heard. I believe that the act of turning a music lover on to something that they need to know about improves the universe by a measurable degree. This act is sometimes complicated by ethical considerations involving monetary compensation, but even in these cases almost always registers in ethical black ink.

A couple of clarifying points: I do not believe that a rightsholder not getting money that they weren’t going to get anyway (which is what we’re talking about with these mp3 blogs) moves us closer to Stalinism. And I believe that in this day and age, scarcity is artificial at best and is usually more akin to market manipulation. The correct way for a capitalist to look at the collision between the internet and content is to recognize that there is no longer a market need for the manufacture and distribution of content. Consumers are happy to do it themselves. Anyone wishing to profit from the manufacture and distribution of content must either add value, or regulate our nuts off. Now who’s a Stalinist?

“Whimoweh my ass.”

Here’s a good Beware of the Blog post about random music industry perfidy.

(And here’s another one about Reagan wielding the axe in 1961 when he was still an actor.)

Marc Ribot explains why capitalism only works if you have no imagination…

…in this article at All About Jazz.

via

edit 20070614: Corrected spelling of Ribot’s given name in title.  Duh.

Music vs. evil.

A big pile of anti-RIAA ordinance (unwarranteed as I haven’t read them all yet, but the  Steve Albini one’s been around for a while and is great) at Rock Gems.
Via.

Credit where credit is due.

At Consumerist, the RIAA handily beats out Haliburton to win the title Worst Company in America 2007. Halliburton took out one heavyweight after another: NewsCorp, Clear Channel, WalMart. Although Haliburton may actually have had the edge on the RIAA lobby-wise, their puny engineer butts were flayed by sheer lawyerly force.