No, fuck that! I only watched a few episodes. I like Keven Spacey and I actually did enjoy the episodes that I watched, but it just didn't hook me into wanting to watch more. Perhaps I'm just not that into politics? Anyway, if season2 really is better..., Maybe I'll continue on later when I have more time.Originally Posted by Rare White Ape
In 1998, I thought things were going to evolve much, much more quickly. I expected artists would shed themselves of the middle men and focus on giving away content in exchange for attendances at live performances, and I thought the middle men were going to shrivel up and die. I really underestimated how entrenched the studios and labels were and overestimated how income-driven the artists were. Sure, some artists have found success independently, but the middle men haven't really lost any ground and consumers haven't gained any leverage. In a sick sort of way, the digital media wants to be free revolution hasn't done much more than further fragment the market and not only make things more difficult for consumers, but also set the stage for things to become even more difficult.
15 years ago I bought a CD changer that could play MP3s off burned CDs and proclaimed I had seen the future. These days, people can't get their new phone to talk to their old car radio and their ISP charges them extra to watch movies from Netflix because Netflix doesn't pay it's fair share of the ISP's bandwidth. I don't ever remember AT&T keeping me out of Hollywood Video, and I recall my tape worked in everyone's deck and copying it was a matter of pushing three buttons. Pre-"rampant piracy" things might have been a bit easier for consumers. Crazy.
Odd, I don't have that impression at all.
Right now if I like a song, I can buy it immediately off of an online store (that quite often has high percentage sales, including the last time I went to buy an album, so I ended up buying two). I can play that music on several different internet connected devices, and download it to multiple of them. If I download it to my computer, I can copy it to a USB stick or CD-R and then play it in almost any car from the last decade and a half (guesstimate).
Plus there are the all-you-can eat services like Spotify and Rdio. I think music is doing a great job.
I think one of the biggest reasons that the studios and labels are still involved, though, is marketing. It's all fine and dandy to make an album at home by yourself with Garage Band or whatever else, and then you can post it on your own website or even self-publish onto a major online store.
But then how will people find out about you? Who is going to tell the mass market that your album came out? Who's going to get the word of mouth started?
As you said, musicians still want to make money and still want to be heard, and they want to do it on a large scale, so a big company willing to throw millions at a marketing campaign and funding a concert tour is going to come in to the picture. But you don't HAVE to work with them, it's just a matter of bands choosing to.
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Video content is not to the DRM free download point yet, but comedy specials are already starting to do similar (being sold DRM-free directly from the comedian's site, or from Comedy Central's site), and RedBox is there to give you the Hollywood Video treatment. I think we're much better off than we were, but we're not where we could be. Just like the music industry, though, I think it will slowly figure itself out.
Get that weak shit off my track
All of that is definitely true, but don't overlook all the closed ecosystems that still exist. One of the biggest is iTunes, which for being DRM-free is still all wrapped up in pseudo-proprietary hardware and software. We've got the likes of Amazon and Napster (ironically) selling wide-open MP3 tracks, but many of them impose stupid, artificial restrictions that make no sense... eg, with Napster, if you buy a track once you download it that's it, that's your only copy. If you lose that file, you have to buy it again. It's like the twisted opposite of DRM. You also have limited services selling anything but '90s-grade bitrates. There are just so many gotchas to be mindful of when navigating the commercial music scene it's tough, as a consumer, to fully grasp what it is you're doing at any given moment. With a tape or CD from Tower Records, you knew what you had. With digital track from somestore.com, it's not so clear. Because we have lax rules at the office for personal use of company resources, I deal with this a lot - it's rare a week goes by I don't get a question like "How come this track won't play here," "Why does this sound terrible," or "How come my music is spread out between three devices? Can't I merge them all together?" It's tough... and annoying. We should be doing better than this.
Video is set to get even worse, for reasons mentioned in this thread. Having to maintain relationships with each studio to get all movies? To pay special transport fees to your ISP to get HD movies? It's ridiculous.
Don't get me wrong - it's not all bad. But, it's bad for many people, and far worse than I expected it to be this far down the road.
I can understand your reasoning, but if simplicity is what a consumer wants, they can still just go out and buy a CD, like they always have. Having that, plus multiple other options, some of which have little to no restrictions, I would say we're definitely in a better place. Consumers can get in over their heads, but there's always a physical media safety blanket waiting for them if they do.
Get that weak shit off my track
Sure, sure. I'm just frustrated/blown away that in the 15 years since this stuff has been happening this hasn't been sorted. It should have been sorted. We've cured diseases, impossible math problems, space flight, and a bazillion other far more complex things than this in less time. It is very upsetting to me that all this time later we are still wondering how we get the media we want, where we want it, for a price we're willing to pay. It's nuts.
I would argue that it *is* sorted, but there's still inferior competition out there that people use because they don't know any better.
I personally don't see any flaws with Google Play's implementation. I'm sure there are some fringe ones (you can only have 10 devices on your account, you can't upload more than 20,000 songs from your own collection, there isn't a native app for Windows Phone so you have to transfer downloaded music over manually), but for the average user it's nearly perfect. The problem is that on iOS you have to use the website to buy music, not the app, because of the 30% cut Apple demands for all in-app purchases. Therefore iTunes is more immediately convenient for huge swaths of people on iOS devices.
Get that weak shit off my track
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