Music Industry Tells Advertisers to Boycott "Pirate" Baidu 206
An anonymous reader points to a story at PC Authority, which begins: "Music industry representatives have warned advertisers to stop supporting Baidu, China's largest search engine, because they believe it is encouraging music piracy. Baidu is the largest source of pirated music in China, according to the representatives, who describe the company as 'incorrigible.' The Chinese firm's music search engine is accessed through what is described as a prominent link on the company's home page."
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they should have sent Baidu a DMCA notice instead. </sarcasm>
How Do I Submit My Tracks? (Score:5, Insightful)
I searched for my own music [geometricvisions.com] on Baidu, and it didn't find it. How can I submit it?
I clicked all the links on the homepage, and hovered my mouse over all the links on the result page, and couldn't find anything that looked like a submission form.
I'd love it if everyone in China were to download my compositions - they are all Creative Commons-licensed.
Money by advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that simple (Score:5, Insightful)
For a start, advertising doesn't really pay big bucks any more. We've had companies flop during the peak of advertising money in the dot-con years with that model, what makes you think it's more viable now?
A quick search says that the Cost Per Click (i.e., what the advertising companies pay) can be as low as 1 cent per click. After the ad provider takes their share, it's even less money for the site carrying the ads. And that's per _click_. So if every single person downloading your music were to actually click a banner per song downloaded (fat chance) and the ad provider gave you the full cent (fat chance), you'd need to sell some thousands of songs per month just to pay for your hosting costs. Probably more, since you use bandwidth too.
Pay per view, even less. If you go really per view, expect it to be small fractions of a cent.
Remember, you're not Penny Arcade or PvP Online as a musician. You're not going to make a new song per day, and serve an ad or two with each one.
The RIAA members also provide one valuable service: they create a scarcity via marketing. There are hundreds of thousands of girls who can sing just as well as Britney Spears, and don't look much worse. But there's only one Britney Spears. And boy band members are even more dime a dozen, and chosen mostly on how well they look (i.e. how wet would they get a 16 year old girl seeing them on stage.) Not on any skills in composing that music or expressing anything profound. There are a few tens of million of young guys who'd be not much worse than, say, Backstreet Boys, and some would probably be only better.
So while it's easy to say "OMG, musician X is only getting a pittance out of the CD sales, and gets all the money out of concerts anyway," the more cruel reality is that musician X would be yet another _nobody_ without the publisher. Maybe a thousand people would know about his music, and maybe a dozen of them could be arsed to show up at a concert.
To put it otherwise, it's an economy of massive overproduction. If left to the free market, you'd be about as able to make a money out of music as you'd make money out of your farm in 1929. When there's 10 times more produced than anyone needs, and the products are perfectly interchangeable, the price doesn't just go 10 times lower. It spirals down to the point where nobody can make a living out of it.
Now I'm not saying it's necessarily the best model for society, but that's how it works.
And the moral of the story is: well, maybe a better model can be found, but it will have to be a better one than, basically, "but I want them to work for me for a tenth of a cent in ads."
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the search engine relevant for my business or not? Does it bring me customers or not? First of all, does it have users or not? That's what counts.
Whether that search engine is a haven for copyright infringement, questionable porn or DIY bomb making, do I care? If that's what brings them users and me visitors (and customers), more power to them.
Hmm? Moral? Hey, I'm pretending here to be a corporation out to make a profit, stop pestering me with things that ain't in my dictionary!
Re:Why didn't the FTC convict Sony? (Score:3, Insightful)
The amount for loss of earnings? Ask the RIAA where they pull their numbers out from, I'd reach for the same place.
But I wouldn't use a lot of lube...
Re:Music is already free. (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you have a faint idea how much good music costs you for a movie? Now imagine the studios finding out that they could easily save a lot of money by just including the name of the artist in the credits (i.e. what they do anyway)...
Re:Don't all search engines do this? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why i want my adverts displayed on Baidu's top 500 tracks page.
That's What Google Hack is For (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't all search engines do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Counterfeits and piracy are a cultural norm in most Asian countries.
Over there, the CD is an advertisement for the tour.
AFAIK, nobody actually expects to make money from CD sales in Asia.
So what if the search engine has a MP3 search page?
Like the counterfeit goods, the MP3s are still there, even if nobody is pointing you directly to them.
Re:It's not that simple (Score:4, Insightful)
> It spirals down to the point where nobody can make a living out of it.
And that, is called a commodity [wikipedia.org]. Your view assumes that people should be able to make a living out of something beyond its real economic value. What does this add of value for society or for any of the individual parties? Nothing.
What you fail to mention is that it's more than just "marketing". The music business needs to do more than promote the acts it wants to push, it needs to actively sabotage and destroy the competition.
It is like the inflation added to diamonds by De Beers "marketing" (destruction of low value diamonds). All you are doing is pumping the price of an artificially rarified stock by destroying the surplus (eg crop burning, diamond warehousing, attacking the free market in music). To me that goes against the grain of free market principles.
Why is this bad? (Score:2, Insightful)
By linking it to Baidu, now they can advertise their music to a larger audience. I don't see why any sane musician would be against this.
Why would we want to pay for low quality records? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not that nobody is willing to pay for recorded music, it's that the product that American record companies tend to offer is crap. 5 minute tracks, usually they aren't all that good, I'll be glad when the current music industry falls so we can focus on the art again.
Music is not a product, it's art. A true masterpiece is priceless and will be paid for. An artist should get paid when CDs are being sold, however when music is shared thats advertising.
People aren't going to buy your albums or go to your concerts if they don't know who you are!
Re:How Do I Submit My Tracks? (Score:3, Insightful)
Humiliated? I doubt it. Insulted, most certainly. The US Supreme Court has already decided that the linking was legal in the US. IPR laws, my ass. You can frame this anyway you want. Whether it's on one large web site, or on many little web sites, the linking is legal in the US either way. It's the hosting and the sharing that are not.
As to getting blocked, we're the ones getting blocked right now, we're the ones who should be embarrassed. Our copyright zealots are getting out of control. They're attacking foreign servers. They're attacking legal US content owners even some within the US. Denial of service attacks are not fun. They're destructive. They tie up a lot of infrastructure. Except for a commercial web site, who wouldn't want to block the US? After all, I know of many non-commercial US sites that block all the IPs coming from Ukraine or Ethiopia simply because they don't want to deal with all the crap that's coming from over there (and by that, I mean no disrespect to any Ukrainian or Ethiopian here). I realize it's only a tiny-tiny percentage that spoils it for the rest of the country, but ultimately if there is a destructive rogue group of vigilantes within your country, you damn better do something about them -- otherwise you may find yourself completely cut off and isolated from the rest of the World.
Re:Why didn't the FTC convict Sony? (Score:2, Insightful)
Hypocrisy is not illegal. "Illegal activities"? Let's see:
Well, that's simply a lie. Sony BMG had plenty of legal troubles [wikipedia.org] over it, with various suits getting settled or still on-going. I now ask you to present a single case of hacker going to jail for 40 years for anything — not just installing a trojan, which has not, actually done anything wrong to the user itself (only exposed them to other harm).
Why should they be arrested? They did pay, what they were ordered to pay...
MediaSentry and other RIAA hackers have done no harm. Using their results against thieves (I'm glad, we agree on the term here) is certainly good. And before you get too outrage, let me remind you of a case, when a thief sued a house-owner for damages after breaking a leg on a poorly-maintained staircase, which the thief had to used to escape capture... It happens — thief is prison for robbery, but the house-owner's insurance had to pay him for "pain and suffering"... There are also numerous cases of robbers suing their victims over being shot [yahoo.com].
So, you want the FTC (the Executive) to prosecute this thought-crime ?
As long as the following conditions are true:
- Nobody forces music buyers to buy it from RIAA.
- Nobody forces musicians to sell it to RIAA
they can sell it for $2900, for all I care.The Baidu search engine should die a thousand deaths by choking on its own bile. They are propped up by China's (routinely evil) government, they are complicit in the government's censorship — and benefit from it [techcrunch.com]. They are winning in mainland China over Google, not because of being better, but because they facilitate copyright infringement [techcrunch.com] — and nobody over there cares, because the losers are usually not Chinese.
It's really not that simple (Score:4, Insightful)
I decided to make an attempt at making some money, and hopefully some day making a living (pipe dream), off of all the music that I write. I, like many, figured the old way of doing things was dead, the net is the future, and what works for others should work for me. I decided to apply the webcomic business model to music. I write a song every month, post it for free, and you can, if you are so inclined, buy some merchandise to support my efforts. The back catalog is all available to anyone, and I make a couple other inconsequential updates between songs to keep the site alive and active more than once every thirty days.
So, a couple years back, I setup my website [scienceofshape.com] (shameless self promotion), and I started rolling with the project. What's working in my favor:
* I've got a MySpace page, complete with all the similar musical artists friended.
* I took out some advertising on what I figured would be the most relevant (affordable) website, Questionable Content.
* I do plenty of forum posting (read: free advertising), and had a few friends and some interest in my music before the site was launched due to that.
A couple caveats, to be honest and fair about this:
* I honestly do not write even remotely commercial music; it's instrumental, and it's somewhat experimental. It's not mainstream.
* My T-shirt and web design may or may not be the best; those are not my strengths.
* I don't update absolutely every month. Right now it's working out to about two on, one off, but I've had some longer on streaks.
* I could play the MySpace / LastFM angle harder than I do, I suppose.
* I don't play live. Probably the single biggest dent in this whole thing, and likely by a good margin.
So, no, I'm not poised to take over the internet and become the next Arctic Monkeys, and while I certainly daydreamed about such things, I was mainly hoping to cover costs, and maybe even make enough to purchase another effects pedal or even a new instrument. My total haul from not quite two years of all of this? Not enough to cover the domain name for a single year. Hell, even if the merchandise was completely cost-less to produce and I made 100% profit on it (Cafepress certainly takes plenty), I would still be in the red. Take out items bought by my friends and that would be even more true.
Honestly, a record contract is looking better and better the more I try to go it alone (this isn't my only musical project ever, either).
I'm not saying that because it doesn't work for me, it won't work for anyone, but it's not as simple or as easy as one might think. The net isn't the answer to everything, and the old guard isn't completely irrelevant or without its advantages. Going with a new, cutting edge model of distribution does not equal success, nor does it equal easy or guaranteed money. It doesn't necessarily even equal any money.
Re:Why is this bad? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it isn't the musicians making the complaint. It is the copyright holder which is something entirely different. This is RIAA members (read DISTRIBUTORS) that hold the copyrights.