Big Music vs Digital Audio
p2pnet.net News:- “Technologies that let people record satellite and Internet radio broadcasts digitally are opening a new front in the recording industry’s war on music piracy,” the Associated Press says here, .
In fact the front, such as it is, has been open for quite a while.
J.D. Lasica wrote back in May, “The Recording Industry Association of America has discovered that digital radio broadcasts can be copied and redistributed over the Internet.
“The horror.”
Yep. And the MPAA’s Jack Valenti or RIAA’s Mitch Bainwol, and others of their ilk, would be the ones expressing it – the horror, that is.
The AP story was sparked by Scott MacLean, a Canadian who developed TimeTrax so he could record straight to his PC in WAV or mp3 format from his XM Satellite Radio’s PCR receiver which, he points out on his site, is, “available for under $50, plugs into a USB port on your PC and lets you tune into over 120 digital audio satellite channels, featuring music, talk, comedy and news”.
Digital radio means pure digital sound without the kind of interference you can get on ‘normal’ radio, together with text information, such as data on who and what you’re listening to, playing back as it happens on a tiny screen.
With digital radio, you can also pause, rewind and record live radio music programs and later convert the songs to mp3s for playback.
To beleaguered Big Music, therefore, it’s an absolute horror-show – yet another example of 21st century technology that doesn’t fit into 1970s business models and so must be stomped. Really hard.
TimeTrax is, then, evil and wicked. It records individual – individual, mind you – mp3s, each tagged with the artist and song name and with the ID3 written with the same information and, “Leave TimeTrax recording overnight, and in the morning you will end up with a directory full of several hundred mp3 files, each perfectly cut and edited.”
The horror.
“Since the TimeTrax program debuted on the Internet earlier this month, XM retailers like St. Louis’ XMFan.com saw a crush of demand for the PCR units, which first hit the market about a year ago for under $50,” says AP, also stating:
“PCR receivers were selling for upwards of $300 on eBay on Tuesday, and the founder of the company that distributes TimeTrax said XM’s lawyers had written him asking that he stop selling the program.”
StationRipper
But that’s not all the long-suffering multi-billion-dollar music bizniz has to contend with.
There’s also Greg Ratajik’s StationRipper.
When we wrote about it in April, StationRipper was available from Ratajik’s site. But these days, as a mark of its popularity, it’s on Download.com as v 1.10.
“Record internet radio stations as an MP3 file with this capture utility,” says Download. StationRipper is going like the clappers with a popularity rating of 97%.
The horror.
The Big Four record label cartel hates digital radio and all that stuff that goes with it.
Music fans could “cherry-pick” songs off the air and redistribute them over the Internet, the labels anguish through their RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America),”.
So they sicced their RIAA onto the FCC (Federal Communications Commission ) in an attempt to browbeat the latter into protecting Big Music’s perceived copyright interests.
“The widespread unauthorized copying of music facilitated by DAB [digital radio] will also threaten the newly developing legitimate music distribution industries, such as iTunes, and will reduce the diversity of music available for broadcasting as the record companies have fewer resources to devote to new talent,” says the RIAA.
It’s difficult to see how cookie-cutter ‘product’ from the Big Four record label cartel could be less diverse than it is, but anyway, “In time” digital audio “may also jeopardize the radio broadcast industry as consumers use the recording capability to cut out commercials.”
Oh NO! Cut out commercials?
The horror.
September 1st, 2004 at 6:53 pm
I must confess that I have been a music fan-er- “thief” since MY DAD bought me my first Wards Airline reel-to-reel recorder and I used it to copy tunes off of KFQD-AM in Anchorage, Alaska. Later, when album oriented FM became popular, I graduated to stereo reel and compact cassette thievery–often abetted by the DJ’s themselves who would announce “Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon starts in two seconds.” <just enough warning to release that pause button>
Today I own 1150 vinyl LP’s and 895 legally purchased CD’s. The only difference I see in today’s climate is the ease of performing this kind of sampling. (Heck, my old tapes sound better than a lot of squishy mp3’s I have heard) Meanwhile, the record industry has yet to come up with any definitive, truthful data indicating that this kind of activity has actually affected their bottom line.
Please don’t post my IP or email address as I don’t want my 84 year old father incarcerated for inducing me to commit piracy!
September 1st, 2004 at 7:05 pm
“and will reduce the diversity of music available for broadcasting as the record companies have fewer resources to devote to new talent,”"
Diversity? People, myself included, just aren’t as aware of the indie scene as others would hope. But obviously, you don’t need to be on a label to produce something diverse.
Available for broadcasting? RIAA has just admitted to the companies using some form of radio-air-play scheme, most notably payola. They think only their material is useful for broadcasting, eh? Try letting the very many independent musicians have a shot at radio play. After that, some of these independent musicians may themselves be offered a contract from a label due to ‘discovery’. Not that I would know, but to many people, it seems like it.
September 1st, 2004 at 7:48 pm
I like your last two lines very funny!!!!!! Let ’s hope it stay’s a joke !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
September 2nd, 2004 at 9:14 pm
This is kind of a toss-up for me. I’m not really sure if the investment would be worth the end result. If I were to propperly set a system up to rip the music I’d need to drop $50 on the XM PCR, $10 a month for the music and like $100 for a mondo HD to store them all. I suppose that in the course of a month I could accumulate several gigs of music.
To be honest, I might have to get it simply because the Big Four wants it shut down and is afraid of it…
April 20th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
If you do give timetrax your money and you ask for a refund, good luck getting it back. They took back the hardware that I bought and was *told* that I’d recieve a refund, but that was a month ago. I’ve sent emails every day to timetrax support and thier corp email asking about the open ticket. No response. Nothing, nada.
THANKS A LOT SCOTT!!!! HOPE YOUR ENJOYING MY MONEY!!