On Tuesday 07 March 2006 22:09, Dana Olson wrote: No, its definitely NOT ok. I don't think its a bit unreasonable to want to recoup the sites costs, or to charge for the high bitrate version of the 11k/sec sampler. The bottom line is of course, and everyone with the its gotta be free attitude should understand that the site, however usefull it might be for those whose interests are in line with your's, will in fact go away if its not supported well enough for you to pay the bills. Thats simple economics 101 stuff & like the girl said, the hypocrasy runs rampant here. Leave me out. I'll be eternally gratefull if someone manages to come up with a pay as you go billing system where a good track could be sold for a buck, hopefully to 100k people, without the billing system eating 99k of the sales as overhead. Then I firmly believe we will have ushered in the marketing concept that will well and truely be the death knell of the creative accounting the RIAA, et all, get away with currently. -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.

Cesare Marilungo &lt;cesare(a)poeticstudios.com&gt; writes: It won't sound better, but there are other advantages to buying a real CD (even if it's a CDR that the band's produced themselves) -- having a nicely-printed case with liner notes, and having a physical artefact that represents the music you've paid for. The cost of producing and shipping a CD (even halfway around the world) is pretty trivial these days. I'm not at all comfortable paying money just to download files, but I'm quite happy to buy CDs from musicians who've made their music available online (and have done, many times -- it's something like a third of my CD collection now). Most musicians don't make FLAC files available; they just have lossy MP3. In that case, buying the CD is the only way of getting a decent-quality version to listen to once you've decided you like the music. I don't think it's a business model that's going to make anyone fantastically wealthy, but it does seem to work pretty well for lots of musicians at the moment... -- Adam Sampson &lt;ats(a)offog.org&gt; <http://offog.org/>

Hiho, Adam Sampson wrote: there is a difference between a CD-R and a CD... not directly the sound quality, but how long the data is preserved... CD-R's decay much faster than printed CD's, even faster when not stored right. Of course, this also depends on the brand of CD-R you get: some are better than others. So in the end, it may be cheaper to get the real CD instead of a burned copy of it... as you have to renew the second one from time to time. Of course, if you don't like the music anymore after a few years, then there's no problem... sincerely, Marije

On 3/8/06, Cesare Marilungo &lt;cesare(a)poeticstudios.com&gt; wrote: I actually pretty much don't buy cds. If i can get it on vinyl i'll buy it that way otherwise i'll live without or get it digitally. Got a few cd's from gigs were vinyl wasn't an option but usually it's not a big problem. Transport / storage does become an issue though. Small apartment, large record collection, arse when moving etc. 500-600 vinyl takes a lot of room! ;-) Loki

I was wondering about that... You see I had a look at your site a couple times, and really, your 'Still Trying To Grasp The Zen Mind' is absolutely breathtaking. I mean, I started listening, and it STARTED ME UP. I went nuts and was calm at the same time. It was similar to when I was playing with a couple of binaural recordings a while back, totally brought me into a different land... Perhaps even the Zen mind! I'm not sure anyone who's not a complete geek (like me) would click on the link though. I'm a total Uber-Geek, even though I have absolutely no idea if I'm even a good programmer (I think I take way too long), I'm totally completely in love with the geek philosophy especially as applies to Open Source. I read essays by Richard Stallman and my heart explodes with joy. I understand what 'simplicity' is and appreciate the beauty of the underlying HTML when I read a site that looks like yours. However, a non-tech-savvy person just sees a bunch of Times New Roman characters at best and is frightened he might be expected to know things he doesn't at worst. I think donation-based musicians sites should look more like CD covers. And actualy have that function. Liner notes, photographs, the musicians should be dressed like they would be in that musical wonderland people get into when they hear a record. I think 99% of the people would not hesitate to throw an Original Van Gogh straight into the trash bin if it wasn't framed and hung in Louvre. I know I would! I know nothing about art (you can't hear). I wouldn't recognize the subtle beauty of its painting... I wouldn't even know what to look for. So I have to rely on the fact that it is framed and hung in Louvre in order to recognize it as art. That's how 99% of the people who enjoy our art will perceive it. It is only proof that the record companies get away with throwing out the Shmock they do. People just don't get the depth of it, except the really rare ones who are soul-mate enough that we probably know them or even live with them. And maybe we are the only physical being in the world who 'get's' the art, and maybe not even we do. We can, however, put a nice frame around our art. If we are artists we will know if it hurts our art or not and we can easily find out which type of frame that will be perceived as 'honorable'. Personally, I find there is a great depth of that kind of art available in the commercial music field. They sure know how to frame things. I like prince :) So heck why don't I style up a little so people at least can appreciate my crazy personality as long as they won't be 'getting' my art anyway :) Point I'm making. Perhaps we need to explain to people what exactly to think as long as they're not going to take the trouble to find that out themselves. I owe you one for that one, Cesare. We need to TELL PEOPLE WHAT WE ARE AND WHAT WE WANT THEM TO DO RIGHT IN OUR MUSIC. That's how 'Die Fantastischen Vier' do it, a band I greatly respect because they are commercially successful (even with the record companies), they are pioneers, and I listen to their music and my heart goes 'WOW'. As far as I'm concerned these guys have it all. (Okay one of their clips is a bit tit-oriented, Troy, but I'm talking about their Live album especially) Anyway, these guys were introducing german hip hop back in the nineties. Back then, something like that was unheard-of. German hip hop would be just like Kraut & Sosse from Downtown Manhatten. So what these guys did, in their lyrics, they actually went out and explained to the people what they were all about. 'Hip Hop' is the music, and 'Rap' is the lyrics, and this guy has a sampler, and he's Rhyming, and this guy's name is Thomas D, blah blah blah... The first two CDs were like "Hi, I'm Carlo, what's your name?" Pure genius if you ask me. They went out and, as a CD, interacted with people who didn't know what they were all about. And rather than getting irritated about that they just went out and introduced themselves. I mean when you think about it it's kind of OBVIOUS, now isn't it! So what I think we gotta be doing is making SONGS saying 'This is the WE DONT NEED NO CDS NO MORE BLUEEEEEEEES!!!' Cuz ya see them people you by CDs from be kissin AAAAASSSSSS all day long n you wanna be listenin to FREEEEE MUSIC! N if ya wanna keep us from STARRRRVING ya betta give ya ten BUCKS AT THE WEBSITE DONATION BUTTON oh yah baby. And then when Richard Stallman's essays have been song over again, and our philosophy is clear to everyone, and we all have a full belly and a warm fire, then may we get back to getting REALLY crazy (like telling people THEY can actually make it as well. They'll try to shoot us. Good luck we don't care). Yes, we have a radically new philosophy and are probably thirty years advanced on the mainstream, and it is OUR JOB to educate people about this. The songs need to be viral, self-perpetuating. Now I know some people knock self promotion, but doesn't it just make sense? I mean better than self-destructive shit that's for sure! We've got to keep in mind that most people DON'T THINK. We tell them something and they take it at face value (we do to unless we do a lot of affirmations or something... Subconsious can be tricky to handle). So we've got to thell them that a) Our music is good b) CDs our out, direct downloads are IN c) They are good people d) waddle over to the button and DONATE already Yep! That's pretty much it! Just because we're not CHARGING doesn't mean we don't need to MARKET our music (MARKETING=Telling people what to think favourable to us). We also need to make it a social standard that musicians on the Internet are to be tipped, and everything else is simply a question of horrific manners. OK, that's pretty herculian... Enough so to be fun :) I think it's simply a matter of deciding what we want to be so... (Music off the Internet is superior to Music from the record so) and REPEATING IT UNTIL IT BECOMES THE TRUTH. Repetition. Repetion. Repetion. Over, and over again. We've got to hook these people. Why? Because other people have already hooked them. They want to be hooked. We're not going to milk them, we will treat them very well. But if we don't tell them what to think, somebody else will. And they can think whatever they want except for one thing: Internet musicians are to be TIPPED and their music is to be LISTENED TO. I mean it's not like I'm not guilty of this. Up until very recently I hardly even looked for music on the interent because I thought there needed to be a record executive saying it was good be fore it WAS good. Then I decided 'Screw That' and I've been finding some GREAT music on the web. INSANELY great music. (Yeah, Cesare, you're part of that one :) Boy this is sounding awfully devious... But Richard Stallman hooked ME on his philosophy, and it has caused me a whole lot of trouble at the University when everyone was using Microshit Word, but I would NEVER EVER EVER want to trade from having heard his words and getting hooked to where I was before. I mean I hated Windows all right but I didn't really know why. He explained it to me. I think we gotta do the same. We know things. These things are good and very wise. We need to explain them in a catchy way. Any ideas, gentlemen and -women? To sum up, mine are: * VERY spiffy web sites, like animated CD covers * Marketing tactic guerilla information ambush strategies (Like the 'Creative Commons' Button) * Song content that does not fight against anything, but simply IMPLIES that the truth is that downloadable music is superior. That nobody should even bother listening to anything else because it will be biased by corporatocracy anyway (I really BELIEVE this, personally) * People will disagree with us but start to agree with us after about the third time we repeat what we say as 'Truth' e.g. FALSE: "Why are these people so ignorant? You bastards!" CORRECT: "Internet music is a superior way to listen to music. Here is why. As an internet music listener, you are part of a powerful avantgarde... blah blah." We ASSUME people will listen. In fact, we should start today. Integrating these messages in our latest songs. Telling people. Writing web sites. Hehe :) I feel REALLY good. Carlo

Music in my ears bro, music in my ears :) Carlo PS: Always check for the VORBIS seal of quality.

Petter Sundlöf wrote: Artemiy is already a contributor to the Hydrogen project.

Petter Sundlöf wrote: Sorry, I thought that contributing to Hydrogen might be construed as reciprocating to the community in a libre way. My bad.

On Wed, 8 Mar 2006 10:12:14 -0800, Mark Knecht was like: I would be missing out on way too much info if I did that. <G> Ruben --------------------------- Debian DAW (2.6.15-1) Ardour 0.99-3+b1 AMD Athlon XP 2000 Delta 1010

My answer to that one: "Nope." Because: * This list is mainly populated by experts. * Advertising is only effective with non-experts * Advertising tends to disproportionately annoy experts -> Lose-Lose situation. Alternatives: Google SEO -> Own mailing list/fan club Carlo