The RIAA Armageddon has begun

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)

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

Economies collapse, icecaps melt, comets crash into the earth.

- If you lose your shit, the technogeeks will not help you. They will giggle at you and make fun of your not understanding the fundamental principles and engineering of client-server models. This is kind of like firemen sitting around giggling at you because you weren’t aware of the inherent lightning-strike danger of improperly bonded CSST.
- Since the dawn of time, companies have hired people whose entire job is to tell you everything is all right and you can completely trust them and the company is as stable as a rock, and to do so until they, themselves are fired because the company is out of business.
- You are going to have to sit down and ask yourself some very tough questions because the time where you could get away without asking very tough questions with regard to your online presence and data are gone.

u&k

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

when was the last time something just shut down and all the users got screwed over? (I really can't think of one outside of stuff like online poker. I'm not being rhetorical - I'm sure it's happened in some capacity)

as for the Facebook example - I don't know how, but my guess is that it's going to be very clear to the users when they should start moving their photos off

Jon's point above is a very good one and potentially a big issue in the future. BTW I'm not really talking about Spotify necessarily, but rather a cloud service where you upload your mp3s and can stream them from anywhere, so you are still responsible for your own data (in a good way)

geocities

Tabblo http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Tabblo

Magnolia http://www.technologyreview.com/view/412041/are-we-safeguarding-social-data/

I was in diasp0ra, and now its gone!

when was the last time something just shut down and all the users got screwed over? (I really can't think of one outside of stuff like online poker. I'm not being rhetorical - I'm sure it's happened in some capacity)

thread relevant example: megaupload

some people actually used it to store things besides pirated music

I mean if this isn't an object lesson in the joys of cloud computing, I don't know what

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/257376/if_megaupload_users_want_their_data_theyre_going_to_have_to_pay.html

Admittedly it's also a lesson in the joys of hard drives:

"Goodwin's hard drive crashed, and he lost access to the data he backed up on Megaupload when the site was shut down on Jan. 19 on criminal copyright infringement charges."

why do I need a hard drive? it's all in the cloud! fluffy fluffy cloud

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHixChYgGRI

Rickie Lee Dotcom

well considering that those big send file services are used mostly for illegal activity and routinely delete files after some period of time, I don't think that it's really a good example

Geocities I get, but I never had an account there so I don't know if it just vanished overnight or what.

both examples are a far way from what Amazon is trying to do

no one mentioned Amazon

or at least, I didn't. (I mentioned facebook)

the point is that there is an established pattern of tech firms failing and just going "oops sorry!" to users, and pretending that other firms are "too big" to act that way is myopic imho

booming thread

I'm not really sure if the possibility of Facebook vanishing really convinces me that a cloud can't be reliable, I mean MySpace has been dead for years and IIRC everyone's stuff is still up there. Obviously companies can fail but I still like to think that anyone paying attention will have ample warning before a giant like Facebook goes down. I don't know anything about Carbonite but don't they have a plan in place should things go south for the company?

Don't think that personal storage as a whole is going away for a very long time, but I would think most devices we use 5-10 years from now wouldn't have a need for much data to be stored, music included

frogbs remember wordperfect? lotus notes? 3.5 floppies?

web-based storage is like five years old. it's still being born. amazon isn't going to be the same company in ten years. i mean, if you wanna put your baby fotoes on s3 and treat it like it's magic, that isn't my problem.

the point is preserving things doesn't just happen, you have to make it happen, and you can only rely on companies so much since it's usually lower down on the list of stockholders' priorities than pr would have you believe.

also technology and software just change really fast. no one likes to migrate. a lot of stuff falls through the cracks.

no one likes to migrate.

quite honestly, this cannot be reiterated enough

granted, megaupload's services were used for illegal activity, but a lot of folks used them legally for their ostensibly designed purpose - to transfer large files. files weren't deleted if you were a paying customer, and folks used them as a convenient online storage locker. I can't imagine anyone who was a paying customer thought the system would disappear overnight, and that their perfectly legal files would be suddenly inaccessible.

though it sounds like your angle is, "it's never happened to me, so it's not a risk", ok cool

xps

should we have a separate thread about this?

i think we already have a few

WordPerfect is a word processor isn't it? Maybe I don't remember that one.

Again, I don't think personal storage is going away altogether, but in 5-10 years the mega-storage iPod will likely be replaced with something that just streams from either a server like Amazon or some home storage unit. In other words the idea that your data needs to be duplicated from your computer to your iPod or phone will likely be replaced with something that allows them all to use the same data.

The idea of the safe online storage locker is fairly new and I don't think the examples here really apply to what Amazon is trying to do since the whole point is just to protect your data in case of a crash. And the demand for that goes up every day. IMO it's a different issue from "will our devices have huge storage capacity", but maybe I'm lost in this argument

yeah, we do... and to bring this back to music this whole cloud file storage/transfer/backup/access web of problems is really immense, pretending that there's some easy cost-free way to just stream everybody's personal libraries of music everywhere forever for free is just... man, why not throw a unicorn into that deal too. it just speaks of massive ignorance about how tech companies function, make money, etc. it's hardly a "no brainer" type of model.

xp