Finally! Someone in the entertainment industry is starting to realize what the rest of us have known for years. I have never understood why record labels and movie studios haven’t gone the advertising route. As soon as they started losing to illegal downloaders, they should have accepted that they could no longer make money the conventional way, through record sales. While record companies haven’t jumped on board quite yet, at least movie studios are beginning to get the picture (pun intended). Why not offer free, high quality, ad-supported downloads? Its a win/win situation. I could honestly care less if the latest U2 single was brought to me by Coca-cola. Torrent sites are already covered in advertising, why not let some of that go to the artist (well, in this case the label). Stick a banner on their download page and a 10 second clip before or after each song. I’m sure advertisers would pay big money for that. I’ll be honest, I’ll probably strip it off as soon as I get it… but they’ve forced me to listen to it at least once. Sure you could go on about artist integrity and all that BS, but honestly at the end of the day an artist has to make a living and this way their music is freely available to anyone that wants it. I can’t see too many struggling artists arguing with that. In my humble opinion… free, ad-supported downloads are a no-brainer.
April 4, 2007
Bittorrent: Ad-Supported downloads
March 30, 2007
Music: Indie music web neutrality
CNN.com reported today that musicians are finally standing up together to voice their concerns with net discrimination. RocktheNet.com has brought together lesser known musicians and indie labels to support net neutrality.
What is Net Neutrality? I’m glad you asked. To give a rough example: Imagine you go to a free (legal) music download website. You punch in your favorite independent artist and wait as their page loads. Funny… their download page is taking a little longer than you would expect for it to load… but lucky you, while your waiting, a pop-up shows its bubbly face and offers you a direct link to the latest *insert major label act here* single for free. It gets better… this major label song will download at double the speed of your indie artist’s tune! Essentially whats going on is that artists with a bit of financial backing are able to buy the faster bandwidth, advertising, profile data and service providers, in turn pushing the independent artist further down the totem pole.
