New York Times Misses Pay2Pay Point By A Mile

[JackSpratts]

By NEIL STRAUSS, NYT

Recently, more than a few music fans who were diehard advocates of swapping songs illegally through Napster and its clones have found themselves doing something they never would have predicted: subscribing to Internet services that abide by copyright laws and paying for the music they download.

These fans once scoffed at the attempts by the record industry and others to create such subscription services, in which users pay monthly fees for access to large online music libraries. Now they are joining them.

"I've been walking around for a month at least saying that I'm impressed by Rhapsody," said Ian Rogers, referring to a subscription service for which he pays $9.95 a month. Last year Mr. Rogers, an Internet and music consultant who has worked on both sides of the business (for the technology company Nullsoft and for the Beastie Boys), distributed on the Internet a scathing condemnation of the industry's subscription services.

But recently he said: "The selection has finally reached a threshold I'm happy with, and the interface is good now. With other services before, there was a bad selection of songs, they were of bad quality, and they were hard to get to."

Just six months ago, this sort of talk would have been unthinkable, downright apostasy, among those who consider the giant recording conglomerates the bane of free-wheeling musical access and innovation. Even those who have been won over are usually still skeptical of the power of the big corporations. And there are still plenty of fans who think the subscription sites are inferior, doomed to fail and maybe even intended to do so by their corporate sponsors.

But now, largely because of tough actions by the record companies to combat free music sites through the courts, legislation and even through techno-guerrilla tactics, there is a noticeable change of sentiment in a small segment of the downloading cognoscenti. Though their numbers are low, many are the early adapters who spot a trend first. "File sharing has become such a dreadful experience," said Brad Hill, who writes books and articles about digital music, referring to the illicit music-swapping sites. ~

anyway, this and more corporate media wishfull thinking can be found in the following full article.

"File sharing has become such a dreadful experience".

oh yeah?

- js.

[pod]

Haha, that's a funny article. But perhaps the pay services will free up bandwidth and upload slots from those Britney/Nsync downloading freeloaders. There are some major issues with the pay services:

1. monthly fees. yay... yet another monthly bill to pay.
2. restricted access. you still can't download as much as you want, for the most part.
3. restricted usage. forget about burning for a second, what about just playing? will it work in winamp? will it work with ices/icecast on my private streaming server? will my dvd player play cdrs?
4. selection, while growing, is still tiny compared to what's available even on the puniest of p2p networks, and some stuff just never gets released on cd, or by the big 5 labels.

Ultimately I still buy way more than I download. What I do download I either cannot buy ANYWHERE (remixes, live dj sets), or can't buy from the major labels. P2P will never die, just because there ARE legitimate uses for it.

[Eagle]

"the downloading cognoscenti"

lmao.

what next? the file-sharing glitterati?

[spstn]

That's what happens when a specific subject matter is covered by one of the "illeteratti", purporting to belong to the "conoscitori" league, but in fact with just a mile wide and one inch thick "conoscenza".

CONOSCENZA ???... Mamma mia...!