The RIAA Armageddon has begun

(which I did; in fact I made a C90 that was nothing but "Curiosity")

Records are fun!

I can think of few worse things than playing "Make It Real" on repeat

7": "Love Will Keep Us Together", "Black Superman", and "Rhinestone Cowboy" all at once
LP: Songs In The Key of Life
Cassette: 9 from Columbia House (Police, Def Leppard, Big Country, others)
CD Album: Alice Cooper, Pretties For You

xp: dude I never got the second Jets album for a reason

I could hear the "Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers" theme song for hours though.

I am quite certain that the vast majority of people procuring illegal copies of albums are not doing so because of bogarting publicists, so I'm really not sure what the point of the anecdote is beyond presenting a more defensible "well it's okay for ME to do it" argument

There was no point. Just a story.

However, here is an illegal downloading story with a point. I buy a CD. I pay full price. Years later, I rip it to my computer, then sell the CD/give it to a friend/throw it away/use it as a coaster. I then transfer the MP3 files to my iPod. Do I own those MP3s? I think I do. Let's assume I do. My computer harddrive crashes, and now the only copy of the music, which I paid for, is on my iPod. So far so good? I get a new harddrive/fix my computer and want my MP3s back on it. But the iPod makes this very difficult, and not possible at all without limitation-circumventing third party technology. So I illegally download a copy of a CD I had already paid for to get a copy of music I already own, just to put in a different place.

How many laws/user agreements have I broken? Probably a lot. How deep an ethical infraction is it? I don't know.

scott, i'm going to buy some ray lamontagne vinyl and send it to you.

if you were running Windows it actually should have been super easy to pull music off of it since the OS looks at it like a USB hard drive that you can navigate to and copy files off of

I get a new harddrive/fix my computer and want my MP3s back on it.

You can get around this by a) saving the CD b) making a back up copy of the Mp3 files.

"I haven't tried it for many years but when you go on a pirate website, you choose what you like; it downloads to the device of your choice and it will just work – and then when you have to jump through all these hoops [to buy legitimate content], the walls created are disincentives for people to buy," he said.

What's this pirate site that downloads straight to your record player?

also lol @ u for never backing up

I realize this is not what you're looking for Josh but there are many programs that can rip straight from an iPod.

If you buy a disc and sell it, I dunno how "ethical" it is to then d/l the disc. It feels like a loophole and again the artist is getting screwed since used discs are bad for sales. But how is it different from accidentally breaking the disc? I dunno. My Dad was always pissed that he had to buy four copies of "Brain Salad Surgery" in his life. I sympathize with that. Just another example of how the economics of intellectual property is just one big grey area.

I think that getting rid of physical media *in general* helps solve a lot of this - pay a fee for some MP3s/Flacs that you can do whatever you want with, you can re-download anytime, and for which you can get remastered/bonus tracked versions cheaper

Non-"Mr. Puppy's Sing-A-Long Jamboree!" firsts:

7" - Amii Stewart - "Knock On Wood"/"When You Are Beautiful"
10" - Luscious Jackson - "Here"
LP - Beach Boys - Love You
Cassette - Cats Original Broadway Cast Recording
Cassingle - Wilson Phillips - "Impulsive"
CD - Massive Attack - Protection
CD single - Ani DiFranco - "Joyful Girl"
MP3 - Tyrannosaurus Rex - "Lofty Skies"

xpost There are lots of could-have-dones, but for lots of reasons I didn't. I could have saved the CD, but the point of making a copy is that I shouldn't have to. Which boils down to the backup quagmire: how many backups? How many backups of backups? Regardless, the point stands: my iPod (or Apple) made it difficult for me to listen to music I purchased where I wanted to listen to it. This is no longer a problem, since they've more recently made streaming from various locations very easy, but a few years ago it was a problem for me. It is an example of how the "convenience" of illegal downloading can be defended, at least in this instance.

And honestly, I've had plenty of backups, and backups of backups, all go bad on me, for reasons beyond my control. I have a lot of (legally paid for) music that lives on one old 160GB iPod.

Used CDs, I can always defend selling. Everyone benefits. The record industry and artist got its sale, which is all it can expect from a single CD. I get money to spend on more music. The store gets total profit over selling my used CD, which it can then use to bolster inventory of new stuff. And some buyer gets a deal on music he or she might have otherwise never bought.

Right, but as far as the artist is concerned, two people bought the CD but he only got paid for one. Hence why I thought the RIAA should be all over downloading.

As far as the backups go - that's why I love having the 160 GB iPod, when you do get a crash it's easy to just restore from there

what you're talking about is really an insurance question/issue

basically, should your digital assets be placed under the same type of protection as your physical assets?

if you had an LP or CD that you copied onto cassette or CD-R for your car stereo and your house burned down, destroying the LP/CD, your home owner's insurance would allow you to replace the original album; none of that is currently there with digital-only music, including stuff that you've bought in digital form, and is the #1 reason why I still purchase CDs whenever possible

Yeah Josh's question is a good one - the number of albums I've downloaded for free is dwarfed by the number I've bought on CD and ripped, then sold or given away six years later but kept on iTunes (or partially kept i.e. the three or four tracks I still liked, or kept for another three years and never listened to again then deleted out of annoyance after scrolling past the cover for the one-hundred-and-umpteenth time).

I would think that in the future the "cloud" idea of personal storage would spread everywhere and you wouldn't have to worry

as someone who works in an industry that espouses cloud storage philosophy... I recommend worrying for the next 30 years

^^^

well I don't think that personal storage is going anywhere soon but we're already in a world where people use phones/tablets with like 5% the storage of a typical HD and everything works out okay since there's a ton of streaming services and a lot of cheap and effective ways to back up data without having to actually own a physical anything

yeah you'd think that but it's not really true so

digital objects are at-risk after like a year. five years = transfer them now. 10-15 years = uh-oh.

yeah digital archiving is a non-trivial task.

cloud storage? i mean idk but the tech industry goes through huge change so often i... don't really trust amazon to house my personal archive. the company could be gone in ten years. or it could be a datamining powerhouse that updates my junk mail profile every time i sync or whatever. either way...

I will say this: Apple's drive (so to speak) toward non-expandable drives, on their listening devices as well as their laptops, has discouraged me from downloading, legally and illegally, as much as I used to. I've had such terrible luck with external drives that I consider everything on them not just expendable but ultimately doomed.

All hard drives are doomed; if you want to believe you won't lose a file, you need a local copy and two external backups, one of them off-site and rotated regularly.

(N.B. I don't do this (yet))

silby OTM

I'm pretty sure the RIAA would like each individual MP3 to be its own entity, like how each tape or CD is an individual unit. Making backups may be legal if you own the original, but yeah the 100% ethical way to do that if you lose the hard copy is just buy another hard copy or pay for a new mp3. After all, they didn't give out free CDs to anyone who bought the same album on vinyl.

Cue Men in Black "I'll have to buy the White Album again" joke.

yeah you'd think that but it's not really true so

how do you mean? it's one thing if you don't trust Amazon but somehow I don't think they're going to suddenly go out of business and delete everything without giving people a chance to move their files out.

when was the last time anyone actually bought a dismemberment plan or cracker cd in a store? 2001?

Dismemberment Plan was one of those "heard of, never heard" bands that I downloaded a bunch of songs by on Napster circa 2001. I bought a couple of the actual CDs over the next couple years, and burned copies of the others from the college radio station.

I think the first tape I ever bought was License to Ill when I was in 7th grade.
First CD was Physical Graffiti in 1990, from a friend who accidentally ended up with two copies from BMG. I didn't even have a CD player yet but was going to buy one in a couple of weeks.

I sold all my cassettes to a used record store in Madison, WI sometime in 91 or 92, as I hated them and had replaced everything with CDs by then.

I've also recently started buying CDs again, but only because Amazon often has downloads of old albums that have sold millions of copies already for $10, but sells the same CD from some online flea market for $0.01 with $2.98 shipping, meaning I have to wait a week but somehow this seems both more legit and worse for everyone at the same time.

how do you mean? it's one thing if you don't trust Amazon but somehow I don't think they're going to suddenly go out of business and delete everything without giving people a chance to move their files out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/amazon-pulls-thousands-of-e-books-in-dispute/

regardless of who you trust or how much your hard drives fail (and I think everyone here has gotten screwed by an untimely HD crash at some point), I don't think you can deny this is where things are heading

peoples' faith in tech companies is baffling

no one said "things aren't going there"; I see multiple people saying "things aren't there yet so behaving as if they are is foolish at best"

also I don't think Amazon's going to be pulling content that was already purchased from ppl's devices anymore, they pubically admitted that was a mistake. Apple's policy w/r/t iTunes "purchased" songs is loosening over time, I don't think we're headed in the direction of more restrictions in general but obviously I could be wrong

also I'm aware we aren't quite there yet but the idea of a $600 tablet with only 16 GB of storage would have been insane in 2005

this all sounds very complicated. i will pray for you all. good luck and godspeed.

I mean it's all about tradeoffs, you know? I have no space to have records or even CDs of all the music I have digital files of (and it's not very much compared to probably everyone else on ILX).

In exchange I have to worry about failing hard drives.

I don't think the pulling content thing is as much of an issue as the inability to guarantee access to data over the long term

xp

companies fail, stuff gets lost, streaming services /= ownership etc

but i thought this bright blue screen was magic

well "stuff getting lost" shouldn't be a big issue, I'd think all these companies use RAID and multiple backups of everything b/c them losing anything would result in a lot of very negative publicity

"companies fail", yes but the risk of you putting everything on Amazon and having them go away overnight is basically 0%. you'd probably just have to move it to a different service.

Here's the thing that really bothers me about 'one big library in the cloud that everyone streams from for a reasonable fee'. Record labels in the last few years have shown themselves unable to really at all QC the shit-tons of content they are digitizing for itunes, emusic, amazon, spotify etc. Some of them are using shitty codecs or shitty hurry-it-up encoding settings. Some of them are uploading files with horrible clicks and clacks and cutoff beginnings or ends. Say we're in the future and and I, jon, want to listen to [insert 1960s classical recording now owned by UMG]. A track has a hideous artefact during a crucial moment of the music. It's not like my copy of [piece] is defective. The ONLY COPY AVAILABLE TO ANYONE ANYWHERE is defective. I submit a complaint form to UMG, who are responsible for trillions of tracks and whose digital QC department has been directed to prioritize classical content 99th out of 100 genres and whose complaint queue is several hundred thousand incidents long.

Or EMI has four different remasterings of recording X in its portfolio. They naturally choose the most recent one for the cloud. Unfortunately that's the remastering that they brickwalled for the kidz. Or the one where they removed too much hiss from the beautiful stereo masters resulting in a pathetic lack of high end. Etc.

trying to think of any precedent for moving this kind of data between services and can't think of one

xp

this is the seminal angry rant on this topic:

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717

like when Facebook finally dies do you think all the users will be provided with a seamless transition for uploading all their photos to some other site, I sort of doubt it

(the cloud topic, not anything related to music collecting specifically selfxp)