A warning note

Nocturnity said:
Haha! Wish I had "standard" taste in music so I could buy cheap R100-R150 CDs locally! I have to import everything I listen to firstly because noone stocks anything locally and secondly because stores who import it for you charge R160 - R250 per disc...

As for movie piracy... It's actually quite a ridiculous idea in South Africa. Do a quick equation. What does it cost you to download a movie? Let's say a DivX is about 700MB. I'm on a 10GB SAIX account which I pay R349 for. R359 for my line and another 93 for the analogue line. Total: R801. That means R80.10 per GB. +- R65/R70 per movie. What happens when a movie's 2CDs like a lot of them are lately? Then you get the idiots who actually download DVDs! What the f*@#?! 4.3GB @ R80/GB? Sheesh...

Well, that's my 2c... Telkom helps fight piracy!

heh, nocturne you forget that .torrent will cost u at least 50% more :)
viva the spirit of sharing ;)
 
RichardP said:
Piracy in the 'old days' with casettes were not a problem as every copy got worse and worse and it eventually became so bad you could not listen to it. Besides, the music industry gets a "fee" for every blank casette sold.

The digital format is loss-less and you cant differentiate between the original or copy. The music companies also get paid for every effing blank CD sold too... (they tried to levy a fee on MP3/USB memory sticks in Canada, but the government soon stopped this practice)

very interesting rich, a few more points to keep under my tin beanie - :)
thanku
 
heres the example:
the closure of Napster by the so called "authourities" probably did more to promote p2p than anything else.
so now we have a plethora of proggies

winmx
morpheus
bearshare
limewire
ares
emule
edonky
grokster
shareza
--------
some bases on nodes, gnuttela,


-------
oh then the torrent based
bitlord
bitcomet
azureus
bittorrent
bitswarm

its like saying, the bank is closed but the following area are open
the door
the window
the roof
underground tunnel
no locks
safe open for business :)

well i'll be damned, ...
 
RichardP said:
Piracy in the 'old days' with casettes were not a problem as every copy got worse and worse and it eventually became so bad you could not listen to it.

At my old firm we formed a club that bought 10 albums per month. This doesn't sound too bad until you realise that each album bought, was copied 19 times from the original, so the loss was minimal.

Piracy in one form or another has always been there and I've always wondered how many other "clubs" were out there.
 
join the club
i download lotsa mp3zzz, this gives u a better picture of the release.
Like every1 said, 1 / 2 tracks on a retail cd are good these days!
except for some compilation cd's!
 
RichardP said:
The digital format is loss-less

Incorrect, Mp3/Wma/Aac/Mpc/Atrac/Ogg are all lossy formats(very lossy). Obviously there are lossless formats (Like wave,flac, ect) but they are rarely used. I think what you mean to say is the transferring of bits is lossless so even thought the copy is lossy but still sounds good, it will always sound as good as the first time no matter how many times it is transferred.

RichardP said:
Besides, the music industry gets a "fee" for every blank casette sold

In the "old" days I believe a fee was not yet levied by the music industry (unless they sold the blanks themselves?), and it is a recent development to sell blank cd's or tapes with these "copyright fee's".

RichardP said:
(they tried to levy a fee on MP3/USB memory sticks in Canada, but the government soon stopped this practice)

Fact is the music industry is trying to run the new p2p piracy story to get as much money as possible by charging for every single thing they can, and I am sure that even if p2p is completely abolished(yeah right!) they would keep levying those fee's.
 
If the record companies would wake up to the fact that media is now being obtained in other manners than purchasing CD's, and actually embraces the downloading of music as beneficial to all parties, piracy would decrease immediately.

Maybe they should specify the following:
a) royalties paid to the artist
b)manufacturing costs
c)investment in new artist by themselves
d)marketing and promotion

and then calculate a fair price for a song bought over the internet. Judging by what Allofmp3.com is doing legally, I would be very surprised if the artists royalties exceeds 10 cents per song, and lets judge the record companies investment at 20 cents a song. We add a profit margin of 30 cents and we come up with a fair price of under R1-00. This model can also now include computer infrastructure in that price.

I do not beleve that anybody in their right mind would pirate music for that price as itunes for example proves with a vastly more expensive cost. The benefit of downloading music from a reputable source far outweighs saving R1-00 on a song. I also believe that inherently nobody likes to steal music from the artist and would gladly pay R1-00 if the song was good. Also by marketing like this, there is one central point to introduce new acts, albums etc. I believe that the winamp videos and yahoo proves invaluable as a marketing tool these days. I would also without doubt say that anybody owning a mp3 player, 10 to one has a connection to the internet

Thbe people talking about piracy are the same excutives trhat had to be taken to court by the actors when Video was first released and I believe that the same happened with DVD. The company bosses refused to pay artist royalties because their contracts did not specify video as a medium. So much for honesty!

And seriously how many times must one pay royalties for the same product. In fact if they were honest, I could have upgraded my record or tape collection to cd for a fraction of the cost. The same applies now to the model they have for DVD's and UMD movie and video- if you buy both you would still pay intellectual property on all of them. They also prevent you from making backup copies of discs, so when they get damaged they expect you to pay the intellectual property again? I believe that my so-called piracy is far less than the acts of theft that the record and movie companies have effected on me. In fact when I buy again, I should only pay the manufacturing costs.

This does not even cover the zoning of media(to protect monopolistic ccompanies in certain regions) or the inavailabilty of media(such as itunes being American) or the three tier martketing process-movie, rental and then only direct sale, all geared to get more and more money out of the same product.
 
funny how this forum insisits on transparency, a very good post ernstn
i mean i do believe in transparancy, as much as helkom requires it of telkom
 
BruceS said:
Snopes lists this one as undetermined, who knows...
http://www.snopes.com/music/media/cdlength.htm

very interesting, but wasnt the industry following a norm which they were comfortable with?
ie: Vinyl ?
vinyl was what 5-6 tracks per LP side? average ?
so all they did was keep the format ie: wav and start using cd media.
Snopes i think the beethoven 9th theory is a bit far out, but maybe i should remove my beanie :P
 
Um.

How much play time did these 2 artists [Arno Carstens, "Mandoza"] get on 5FM/Highveld/Other Local Station ?

Who "buys" their airtime ?
Who is being outbid by international companies for the airtime ?

What - the record company ?
Seriaaaaas ?
So - what the heck does piracy have to do with the record company's inability to market thier offerings properly ?

Such B.S. - If I actually did get hold of a pirated copy, then it'd be the first time that i've heard one of their offerings. Somebody is riding the piracy bandwagon all the way to the blame something else bank.
 
sounds like the "apartheid" myth that lingers............................and lingers and lingers...............
 
Car Music

In a noisy car mp3 quality is more than enough.
Im waiting for a front loader in my dashboard with a data dvd compliant player,The important think to allow me to burn my legaly purchased music onto a 9 gb dvd rewritable. At 4 mb per track id have a selection of about 2,300 tracks instead of loading 6 cd's into a shuttle for about 100 wav tracks max.
Overkill would be a 6 shuttle data dvd player giving 50 gb capacity, about 800 hours music, but then again i'll wait for blu ray!
How the boss at Sony sleeps at night knowing that so much music can be written to such a cheap piece of plastic, even now a dual layer data dvd holds over 150 cd's in mp3 format?
 
Counterfeiting mostly deprives executives of big salaries. All major labels go to a lot of trouble to make sure the musicians and song writers get as little as possible.

Are local labels associating with criminals like Sony-BMG and EMI? Then they should be boycotted. We should all be making an effort to stay away from products associated with the major music labels.

Do the CDs of musicians like Arno Carstens contain attempts at copy protection? Then don't buy them.

R9.90 for a single song? Are they out of their mind? It probably stinks of DRM too.

I buy music, if it is on an independent label I know treats its musicians well, and I can be certain that no money falls into the hands of the music mafia. For lossy-compressed downloaded music I expect to pay a lot less than I'm prepared to pay for a CD - latest CDs should be no more than R60, older stuff R40, and things I have to download (lower quality, my bandwidth) R20.
 
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