[linux-audio-user] That whole mp3 vs. ogg vs. wma vs. yomamma thing

Aaron Trumm aaron at nquit.com
Fri Oct 10 13:45:01 EDT 2003


nobody taught ME all those big fancy words when *I* was an ado-adol-a -
teenager   ;) ;)

seriously though.  Thanks for this.  Word from the street.  I have a feeling
that this is some of the more valuable info we could get.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Houston Poetry Slam Team
www.houstonpoetryslam.com
NQuit Records
www.nquit.com
---------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Pete Bessman" <ninjadroid at ml1.net>
To: <linux-audio-user at music.columbia.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 10, 2003 12:10 PM
Subject: [linux-audio-user] That whole mp3 vs. ogg vs. wma vs. yomamma thing


> The biggest internet music demographic, be it legal or not, is adolescent
> kids in suburbia. As an adolescent kid in suburbia with 3 adolescent
> siblings, I can tell you with confidence from experience in my house and
> with friends that .mp3  is the king of internet music formats by at least
> an order of magnitude.
>
> People in my realm get internet music from three types of locations, in
> descending order of frequency:
>
> 1) P2P (mainly KaZaA)
> 2) mp3.com et al
> 3) Ripped CDs
>
> In all cases, mp3 is the lingua franca, the de facto standard. Formats
> such as wma and ra are considered laughable, they sound so much worse
> until the file size reaches gargantuan proportions. The only people using
> such formats are 'Tools of the Man', so to speak, and as you can see from
> the above list, none of the real music listeners give two craps about
> them.  Posting in ogg isn't that big a deal, winamp can play them and I'm
> pretty sure the internal player in KaZaA can also. These kids aren't as
> hesitant as most grownups either, if you tell them that "you need to
> download and run X to use superior format Y" they'll do it.
>
> The problem, as I see it, is distribution.  To take advantage of the big
> daddy, P2P, people gotta know who you are and want your stuff in advance.
> You can try using misleading filenames or info tags so that your stuff
> gets accidentaly downloaded, but I personally just delete stuff like
> that, so I wouldn't recommed it. You have a better chance of getting
> heard by option 2, the music websites, if someone is doing genre
> browsing, but then you're going to have to use mp3.  As for CD ripping...
> well, if that even becomes an option then we've already won IMHO.
>
> In my perfect world, everyone would use ogg or flac or some other equally
> libre format.  In order to help realize that goal, we need to gain
> musical clout so that the kids look up to us, and then choose to
> distribute solely in formats that we endorse.  We gotta have that clout
> first, however, and we aren't gonna get that without compromising.  A
> good solution, in my pea brain, is to setup an account with something
> like mp3.com and post a few _good_ songs (the songs have to be _good_ or
> else we're dead in the water).  If you get the kid's attention, they'll
> check out your personal artist page, from which you can link to your
> homepage where they can get "even more and newer" music in the "vastly
> superior and unrestrained" ogg format. The songwriting is going to be the
> biggest factor, IMHO.  Without kickin' tunes, nothing else matters.
> Period.  Get good songs, get them distributed, get popularity, get power,
> establish ogg as the new lingua franca for the hip and rebellious music
> community.
>
> Peace,
> =Pete
> --
> You can only run configure at the top level of the Ardour source tree.
> You don't want to know why this is true.  Don't try to work around it.




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