From owner-freebsd-chat Thu May 16 9:26: 5 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mired.org (dsl-64-192-6-133.telocity.com [64.192.6.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 7493937B40B for ; Thu, 16 May 2002 09:25:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 14597 invoked by uid 100); 16 May 2002 16:25:01 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15587.56669.382241.766052@guru.mired.org> Date: Thu, 16 May 2002 11:25:01 -0500 To: Nils Holland Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The road ahead? In-Reply-To: <20020516091031.A2259@daemon.tisys.org> References: <20020516004909.A9808@daemon.tisys.org> <15586.61471.456290.764885@guru.mired.org> <20020515211922.J1282@darkstar.gte.net> <3CE34A8B.7D999E2C@mindspring.com> <20020516091031.A2259@daemon.tisys.org> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ From: Mike Meyer X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/0.55 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org In <20020516091031.A2259@daemon.tisys.org>, Nils Holland typed: > Another thing I'd like to mention is that I guess the Internet is > successful because it's free. As such, I remember that a while ago all the > world seemed to swap music via Napster. Then Napster was closed down, and > started to come back, using the Internet to seel online music for money. I > find this idea a little strange, as I don't think Napster was successfull > because it made music available via the Internet, but because this music > was *free*. On the other hand, if people now had to pay in order to > download music from the 'Net, they might as well buy the CD. I disagree, because I think people are fundamentally honest enough to buy it if they don't think they're being ripped off. I don't know of anyone selling music that way. The music industry has the right kind of price point, selling you things for pennies per song. However, the product they offer isn't reasonable, as you can't use your favorite player, you can't copy it to an mp3 player, and it eventuall expires. The last time I looked royalties for music was typically pennies per album - and I'd love current information. Give somebody a small markup - or even a large one per song - over that, and I think people would buy it. The problem is that that the big publishing companies and the RIAA currently take a slice of the profits, and they obviously aren't willing to endorse any mechanism that leaves them out of the cash flow. So much so that they're trying to force every computer buyer to pay more for their computer just so they can enforce the model they want. http://www.mired.org/consulting.html Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message