12 Dec
2007
12 Dec
'07
4:46 p.m.
On Wednesday 12 December 2007 10:13:16 plutek-infinity wrote:
Perhaps a little, but certainly not for most and I agree. However, Free Music
made with Free Software might be a bit more interesting.
Good music at a good price that also fits in the above mold might be even more
interesting.
So, assuming we have the music already (haha - I am in serious danger now...)
what are some good ways to "sell" it?
I was looking at CD Baby, yesterday. Somewhat interesting, but they want
physical CDs.
Anyone know how to get music into the itunes store?
Other possibilities:
lulu.com
cafepress.com - seem to sell CDs but I see no way to make one in my account.
Would magnatune be willing to handle music with Free licenses? (Do they
already? - I can't tell now, something is busted with search on their site at
the moment.)
opsound.org - may work. They want CC BY-SA music.
Would Fading Ways be willing to handle Free licenses? (Do they already?)
Other ideas?
From: drew
Roberts <zotz(a)100jamz.com>
Payment In Kind Experiment or Funding Musical Free Software Development
Was: Re: [LAU] A year of Linux Audio revisited - would like to know your
oppinion
New ideas at the bottom, quote for context.
On Wednesday 12 December 2007 06:49:08 Pieter Palmers wrote:
a very interesting idea, drew. indeed, it is probably necessary to leverage
resources outside of the software users, since our user base is so small. a
key question, to my mind, is how to make something like this look desirable
for folks at large -- the simple fact that it has been made using free
software doesn't in any way make it music that anyone might be interested
in purchasing. Chris Cannam wrote:
Nice write up.
I have had this or a very similar thought recently in another context. So
here is my first attempt to develop it some for this context.
We have people writing music making software and people using the same
software to make music.
So. What can we do?
1. Every software project that wants to could offer a version for sale
that is basically identical to the one available gratis. Hey, perhaps
with an autographed manual or a certificate of support to hang on the
wall, or perhaps to get your name in a "funders" list in the code.
2. Request for coding help.
3. Request for support in the form of Free Music.
3.a. Please send us music using a Free License that you made using our
stuff. If you don't have any originals of your own, here is where you can
find some to do your own take of and send in. We can include this as a
showcase of our stuff.
3.b. Help us put together a CD of such Free Music that we can sell and let
the proceeds support the project. ***
*** This may just be the key idea. Now we get funding not just from the
limited number of people who use Free Software to make music, but from the
much wider number of people who are willing to buy music.
If anyone wants to discuss these possibilities further, I would be most
happy to do so. A brainstorm in making 3.b. effective would be welcome. On Wednesday 12 December 2007 05:50, Robert
Persson wrote:
> Here is a good explanation of how groove quantise works in protools:
> http://www.audiomidi.com/classroom/protools_corner/ptcorner_63.cfm
>
> For some really fancy midi stuff going way further than groove
> quantise, you could take a look at some of Ntonyx's products, such as
> StyleEnhancer and StyleMorpher. If Rosegarden could implement some of
> those features that would be very useful for composers.
Groove quantization is one of the oldest outstanding feature requests
in the Rosegarden tracker, submitted by me in 2002:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=633259&gro…
id= 4932&atid=354932
Unfortunately, as for so many features, this has simply never
percolated to the top of my priority queue, or stack, or whatever my
brain uses, and nobody else has ever shown much interest in coding it.
And sadly I only have eight hands and three heads and there are only
132 hours in the day.
IMHO this remark gets to the heart of the problem. As a human being we
have limited resources. I personally have to settle with one head, 2
fingers and 24hrs in a day. The fact that humans also have to eat, and
that food is seldom available 'for free' makes that some part of our
resources are allocated to surviving. Oh, and having 'a life' also
consumes an astonishing amount of these resources.
There is no way around the fact that one has to eat, and that that
doesn't go well with writing free software in the 'free beer'
interpretation. Which seems to be the main reason why people turn to
Linux. I've done a quick check on the cheapest offer from Cakewalk
(Project 5) that might have all functionality that came up in this
thread, and it is 100euro here. If all Rosegarden users were to pay
Chris 100euro, I think Rosegarden would have more features than 'Project
5', or maybe even Sonar.
The catch 22 seems to be that we currently attract a lot of 'free beer'
attention. But in order to get really professional software, you need
time, and time = money. So in order for the programs to become more
professional, we need people that are willing to pay for them. Which we
don't seem to have.
You could think of it this way: suppose you have a Linux tool that has
20% of the functionality of an the equivalent Win/Mac tool, you could
argue that it's worth 20% of the money. Now add all tools you use on
Linux and try to estimate this '20%' value of your software collection.
IMHO that's what you would have to be prepared to pay. Of course I know
that this is a rude extrapolation, and that 20% of the functionality
usually doesn't get you anywhere. But to be honest, I think most of the
tools are more near 80% of the 'competing software's functionality.
To give you another idea, from my personal pet project (FFADO):
we are registered on the ohloh site
(http://www.ohloh.net/projects/8040?p=FFADO), and one of the things they
do is scan your code repository and use some industry standard way of
value-ing the code (COCOMO). In the FFADO case they end up with a value
$1.000.000. In other words, if you were to have a
commercial company
develop the code, it would cost you 1M$. But hey, pick me, I'll do it
'for free'... Rosegarden is also present on ohloh, and is valued more
than $2M.
I admit that these numbers are large extrapolations and have limited
applicability, but they do provide some reference.
The only project that seems to be able to break this circle is Ardour.
I'd say that that is due to the fact that Paul didn't have to worry
about his survival for the time it took to bring Ardour to a critical
level. I.e. a level that was high enough for people to start paying for
Ardour as soon as Paul's self-funding approached it's limits.
For myself I can say that I'm spending an incredible amount of time and
energy into coding open source, and that there is not that much in
return. Well, there is the respect from fellow coders, gratitude from
users, even free hardware (lucky me). But that doesn't pay the bills. So
I have to go out and spend time at 'something that someone actually pays
for'. And hence it takes 3 years to reach the functionality that comes
'out of the box' on another OS. If I would be sure I can earn a decent
living with writing 'free' software, I would seriously consider it. But
alas...
Note that this is not really a reaction to the original blog giving an
overview of the current Linux audio status, but more an attempt at
expressing my view on why this is as it is, and why it's IMHO not very
likely to change soon. It's like the Ableton guy said at LAC07: "I'm
pretty happy with the we-sell-shrinkwrapped-boxed-software model, and I
don't see a reason to change that.". Read: "why would we give it away if
people seem to be willing to pay for it?".
2 cents for discussion,
Pieter Palmers
another thought which i've been entertaining is to direct a certain
percentage of any personal profits made using free software back to the
software authours. it seems to me only reasonable that, if i am making
money with these tools, some of that money is a result of the work of the
respective coders. it's difficult to come up with any sort of rigourous
algorithm to assess how much each application contributed to the final
profits, but i think it's time (for me, personally) to implement some fuzzy
instance of that principle, anyway. unfortunately, as alluded to above,
even if we ALL did that, the user base is probably not large enough to
fully support the coders.
best.
all the best,
drew