I'm interested and puzzled... there seem to be two ways of "downloading" or am I showing my age and lack of understanding?

One way, very useful to me and utilsed by us on this very board (check my Plead Guilty track on the Frontpage) and by Myspace and others is...
you click and hear a track WITHOUT downloading it (i.e. you can hear it then and there but not copy or repeat it, except by clicking again).

The OTHER way is buying (or stealing) downloads so they remain on your hard drive (or in my case in my iTunes file).

I am a huge fan of both (apart from the stealing bit).

Can someone explain what the major difference is - apart from the obvious?

Surely Martin you also approve of both and it's the stealing/illegal part you object to?

All the stuff on our website is available in streaming only format, i.e, there is no right click option, so that you cannot save the MP3 to your computer. The only way to illegally download, in this format, is to have a recorder seperate from the computer to gain the sound to another device. Many sites I have visited have not used this option, which is why , I believe we are watching so many industry heads roll at the moment. None of the majors were ready for the speed that downloading came in at. Nizlopi`s sales at xmas , would have been far higher had the song and video not been available on broadband for so long.
I really dont know what the way forward is at the moment, I like the "Plead Guilty" song for example, but I only have to log on to play it.
Therefore, the answer has to be, pay to play streaming songs as well, as in a jukebox.
We all love to be heard, but we all need food on the table.

And a slightly longer reply is that even when you "stream" music from a website, it is temporarily stored on your computer in a temp file. This is why there was some debate about streaming music leading to mechanical rights. Technically, yes, a copy is made albeit temporarily.

The geeks can always recover a stream from their computer if they are desperate enough. In most cases, of course, it's not worth the bother. Particularly as music is so cheap and easy to buy as a download.

How about:

Creators: "Commercial" music, I.e. Registered with a royalty collection agencies is streamed or downloaded at a cost.

Listeners: If they want to stream or download music which is "commercial" they must pay, either singularly or subscription.

Therefore, music being "tried out" will be free. If the demand is there it becomes payable. I would imagine all majors music would start out as payable.

Illegal sharing: I think the only way to solve this is make the authors of the sharing software responsible for the content being shared. If the software will allow pirating then it shouldn't be released or the authors will be fined and/or shut-down.

Martin K wrote:
Nizlopi`s sales at xmas , would have been far higher had the song and video not been available on broadband for so long.

Is this right?

Maybe its the other way round: Without the free pr from the web Nizlopi wouldn't have sold so many records.


About myspace.com:
If copyrighted songs are streamed from myspace.com someone has to pay the royalites. Who pays? Murdoch?

Good point Kev, but that doesnt solve the problem of remixes, and decent cover versions of top songs, as clearance would need to be obtained before a website(or a My-space tune etc) is even put up.
Lets face it, the internet just was not ready when it was issued, the loopholes had not not been looked at, or even thought about plugging up.
And....you cannot de-invent something, so a solution will have to be found..
I certainly would hate to be the government minister to sort it out. I have no idea as to how it will happen.

If copyrighted songs are streamed from myspace.com someone has to pay the royalites.

Er, do they? I know it's pedantic, but did you mean that?

If you stream something to/through a computer, it's almost always going to be possible to copy it somehow. People bang on about technological means to prevent it, but at the end of the day, if I strap a 96kHz 24bit sampler (over-the-top example, admittedly) across the outputs of my PC, I can copy something and make a fair quality MP3 of it. I think the world is some way off accepting encrypted links all the way from a PC to the amp/speakers as most of the world isn't going to want to chuck away their existing equipment. So: stream at lower quality, in mono, make it a "radio edit" with something nice missing that's on the real thing, etc. But accept that if you stream, it'll get copied.

As for making software authors accountable for the uses to which their software is put - no, no and thrice no. That is an incredibly dangerous precedent to set in law, especially when such software can be, and is, used for legal purposes as well (such as distributed distribution of large chunks of free software, for example).

--Chris
(inevitably, www.myspace.com/stryngs )

JK2006 wrote:

Can someone explain what the major difference is - apart from the obvious?


It is the HTML used to create the link.

HTML being the script (or code) you don't see that tells your browser what to show.

Actually, a friend has just proudly e-mailed to proudly say he has succesfully downloaded a streaming piece from my site, so I am completely stumped now!

Martin, if it's being streamed using the conventional "link" files (I.e. .M3U or .WMX) then the address for the media is contained in the file (it's just a text file too, even if the extension is odd). Therefore you just need to save that and you can get the media.

The way ROTD does it looks pretty good to me using Flash, I don't know a way of saving that.

Yes it was in M3U Kev. All is not lost though, as the guy who has taken the track is doing another re-mix, which is cool.

Hey mr JK, here is a quick breakdown for you from someone who has done a bit of research on this and also having worked in IT since 1997 im familiar with all the current formats online now.

Lets start with Myspace. It appears that myspace is using a web streaming server to serve all the streams from their website. This saves a copy in the internet explorer cache folder and is very easy to retrieve the mp3 file. Just go into tools > internet options > settings > view files and you can find the mp3 file.

A 'proper' streaming server does not actually save a temporary file onto the computer it serves the music directly and you will not find a copy on the hard drive or in internet explorer cache folder. But it costs extra dosh to set this up.

If you cant afford to set up a 'proper' streaming server then you can set up your own streaming server using www.peercast.org which is a free server which runs a bit like p2p radio. You can also set up on www.mercora.com which will replace myspace as the place to discover and listen to music online as it is a bona fide internet radio station that pays royalties if you are registered with Ascap/bmi/prs.

If this is too much of a hassle JK and you want to allow people to stream your music without actually being able to save it (unless they record using their soundcard, then i would suggest you encode the music in flash as a soundtrack and save it in flash format (swf). That way no one can use it outside of their web browser.

KZ, you can record Flash audio, can't save it but you can record it. There's software around which will allow anything being played through the soundcard to also be spooled to an output file.

Nothing is safe!

Kev.
www.soundsunique.co.uk