On 25/01/2011 07:52 AM, scott wrote:
>>> The radio station pays a fee every time they play a song.
>>
>> And that fee is identical regardless of whether they have two thousand
>> listeners or zero listeners.
>
> Are you sure that is correct? It seems very odd that the song owners
> wouldn't charge more for stations that have higher audience figures. It
> would mean they'd have to charge an totally insignificant amount to the
> big stations in order for small ones to be financially possible.

Well, since it's impossible to know how many people are listening at any 
given instant in time, the price cannot possibly be determined by the 
number of listeners. Oh, they probably have some vague statistics to 
suggest approximately how many people listen on average to a given 
station. But you cannot know the true numbers at any specific moment. 
If, by some fluke, you had zero listeners for a few minutes, the fees 
wouldn't change. If, by some freak of nature, millions of people 
suddenly tuned into an unpopular station, their fees wouldn't change.

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>> Drifting somewhat off topic here, but today you can buy software and
>> hardware that lets you use a home PC to do almost everything that would
>> be possible in a recording studio. (About the only bit you *can't*
>> easily do is really high quality recording of acoustic signals. But if
>> you're making synthesizer music like me, that's irrelevant.)
>
> Well, you can do it, but the capture equipment can get fairly pricey
> (good mics aren't cheap).

The one thing a recording studio does better than a bedroom is... well, 
recording.

Good microphones aren't cheap. Nor are soundproofed rooms with flat 
acoustics. And rooms big enough to fit musical instruments in? Well...

However, as I said above, if all your sound sources are electronic in 
the first place, these points are moot. In theory, it should be possible 
to produce million-selling dance records using nothing more than a 
laptop and a bunch of software.

The reality is that mix engineering is *hard*. Oh, sure, getting 
something that sounds OK isn't too tricky. Getting something that sounds 
commercial-grade is another matter.

Still, I guess it didn't stop Stavely Makepeace...

> Not quite the same as music production, sure.  But we do have one guy in
> the group who used to do broadcast-quality radio recordings (so he's
> taught us a few tricks of the trade) and I have a little background in
> sound systems myself.

I'm sure most of it is fairly easy if you actually know what to look for.

>> The difference, of course, is that me twiddling with the equaliser knob
>> is no match for a professional mix engineer who knows WTF he's doing.
>> And if you listen to the music I've made, you can tell it doesn't sound
>> very good.
>
> Well, I've listened to it, and I thought it did sound good.

Good, yes. Fantastic? No.

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Le 25/01/2011 10:23, Invisible a écrit :
> On 25/01/2011 07:52 AM, scott wrote:
>>>> The radio station pays a fee every time they play a song.
>>>
>>> And that fee is identical regardless of whether they have two thousand
>>> listeners or zero listeners.
>>
>> Are you sure that is correct? It seems very odd that the song owners
>> wouldn't charge more for stations that have higher audience figures. It
>> would mean they'd have to charge an totally insignificant amount to the
>> big stations in order for small ones to be financially possible.
> 
> Well, since it's impossible to know how many people are listening at any
> given instant in time, the price cannot possibly be determined by the
> number of listeners. Oh, they probably have some vague statistics to
> suggest approximately how many people listen on average to a given
> station. But you cannot know the true numbers at any specific moment.
> If, by some fluke, you had zero listeners for a few minutes, the fees
> wouldn't change. If, by some freak of nature, millions of people
> suddenly tuned into an unpopular station, their fees wouldn't change.
> 
And yet, the same stations are able to adjust the price of the
advertisements according to the hour of the day.

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On 24/01/2011 10:09 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:

> And so it is that I spend about $130/month on a basic digital cable
> package and end up skipping through commercials.

Hey, don't worry. When I eventually get somewhere of my own to live, I 
will have to pay money to fund the BBC, even though I don't watch TV or 
listen to the radio. The fact that the building doesn't contain a TV 
apparently is no excuse.

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>> Well, since it's impossible to know how many people are listening at any
>> given instant in time, the price cannot possibly be determined by the
>> number of listeners. Oh, they probably have some vague statistics to
>> suggest approximately how many people listen on average to a given
>> station. But you cannot know the true numbers at any specific moment.
>> If, by some fluke, you had zero listeners for a few minutes, the fees
>> wouldn't change. If, by some freak of nature, millions of people
>> suddenly tuned into an unpopular station, their fees wouldn't change.
>>
> And yet, the same stations are able to adjust the price of the
> advertisements according to the hour of the day.

Oh, sure. I imagine they have estimates of when they think the most 
people are listening. There's no proof that they're right though.

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On 25/01/2011 04:12 AM, Darren New wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> I love the way that Steam won't let you log in twice, so you can
>> install the same game on two PCs, but you can only play it on one at
>> once...
>>
>> ...unless you put Steam into offline mode. *facepalm*
>
> Sure. Steam keeps the honest people honest. It's sufficiently easy to
> bypass that nobody really feels the need to *crack* it. But it's hard
> enough to bypass (in that you actually need the steam account that
> bought the game to play it) that it keeps them earning money.

More to the point, Steam does genuinely *useful* stuff. If you could 
remove it, you probably wouldn't want to. It doesn't stop you copying 
stuff (actually, it *assists* you in copying stuff). It just stops you 
(or rather, everybody you gave the copies to) from using more than one 
copy at once. And since all your online activity is linked to your user 
account anyway, you probably wouldn't *want* to let other people use 
your account anyway.

In all, it works rather nicely.

>>>> (This of course leads directly to high quality content no longer being
>>>> made, which would be very sad.)
>>>
>>> But that's my point. High quality content used to be made before it was
>>> easy to make copies at all.
>>
>> Given that copying becoming easy is the problem... what's your point
>> here?
>
> That presenting things only in forms that are impossible to copy does
> not spell the end of high quality content.

The problem isn't that companies are making stuff impossible to copy. 
The problem is that companies *cannot* make stuff impossible to copy.

>> Yeah, pretty much. I gather zero-day cracks are a relished challenge
>> for some people. (Then again, most of the DRM I've seen surely can't
>> be *that* hard to crack in the first place...)
>
> You would be surprised. Almost every crack of modern DRM requires
> someone to void their warranty.

Heh, like a cracker is going to give a damn about a warranty.

Seriously though. Assassin's Creed II requires an Internet connection or 
it won't play. Somebody runs it in a VM and pokes the page tables a bit, 
and figures out how to get it to run. Where have they voided a warranty? 
(Other than expecting to get any product support out of Ubisoft...)

>> So the encrypted link from the graphics
>> card to the monitor is a completely seperate cryptosystem from the
>> encryption on the disk (or whatever).
>
> Yes? And your point is?

Your monitor doesn't decrypt the disk. Your PC does.

>> Ultimately, what it all boils down to is that the piece of electronics
>> in front of you knows how to decrypt the video data. Which means that,
>> in theory, you can do this too. The keys must be stored somewhere.
>
> Sure. If they're stored in the silicon, that's not going to be easy to
> get out.

Not easy, for sure. But still possible, in essence.

>> People paying money for computer systems that purposely prevent them
>> doing stuff? Not gonna be popular. :-P
>
> Game consoles? Blu-ray players? DVD players? No, none of those are
> popular at all.

Last time I checked, a DVD player isn't a "computer system".

Oh, you and I know there's a computer in there. But to most people, it's 
just a player, like a cassette machine is just a player.

(FWIW, *my* cassette machine actually has a computer in it. Not joking.)

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>> Yeah, there is the argument that by "illegally" showing people music or
>> whatever that they didn't pay for, they might well go out and buy a copy
>> themselves.
>
> That is not what I meant.

Fair enough. But I think since the earliest days of performance, people 
have found out about stuff through word of mouth as well as actual 
advertisements.

> I meant DJ's and record shop owners.

One nice thing about smaller shops is that the people running them 
*have* to be good at what they do, or they wouldn't still be in 
business. If I go to my local car spares shop, the owner *knows*, off 
the top of his head, the exact type of headlight bulb my car needs, just 
from the make, model and year of the car. Doesn't even need to look it 
up. Knows the price off the top of his head too.

I imagine there must be music shops like that. I haven't found any 
though. Just the usual big chains staffed by poor broke students. If you 
want to know what's hot in the latest street metal pop grunge, they 
probably know everything there is to know. If you ask about Bach, they 
look at you as if you're slightly strange. (Hey dude, this is a MUSIC 
SHOP, right? You sell all kinds of music, not just grunge.)

Similarly, most DJs seem to simply play what they're paid to play. And 
they think everything they play is absolutely awesome, which seems 
highly implausible given what they play.

Not to take away from your point, though. A good DJ is supposed to be a 
music expert. They're meant to know their stuff. And I've been to 
parties and gatherings where they pay a DJ to play the music that people 
actually want to hear, rather than what the record companies pay them to 
play...

> That is a model that should also work on the internet (and not only for
> records but also for books and fashion), yet I have the feeling that it
> won't.

I have a feeling you're right about that.

> One difference is that on the radio you hear it once with some talking
> over in general, whereas from your friend you get the entire thing to keep.

I've heard plenty of radio stations that seem to play endless music with 
only a very occasional interjection of a human voice.

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>> Are you sure that is correct? It seems very odd that the song owners
>> wouldn't charge more for stations that have higher audience figures. It
>> would mean they'd have to charge an totally insignificant amount to the
>> big stations in order for small ones to be financially possible.
>
> Well, since it's impossible to know how many people are listening at any
> given instant in time, the price cannot possibly be determined by the
> number of listeners.

So you're not sure then :-)

You can be sure how many people are listening at any given instant in 
time to within some confidence/accuracy levels.  There are plenty of 
companies that deal with collecting such data (eg barb.co.uk does it for 
TV, I'm sure there are similar for radio).  Why wouldn't the song owners 
use such figures for setting the prices?

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> The problem I have always had with that "harm", though, is the assumption
> that those who illegally copy would have paid for the product if they had
> no other choice.

Yep, the problem is they assume every single illegally downloaded file 
would have been bought otherwise.  Sure if piracy was impossible they 
might sell a few more copies, but certainly not the same number that 
were illegally downloaded.

> Software piracy is like that, though:  Most of the offenders in computer
> games are kids who can't afford the steep prices of many of the
> products.

Or even adults who don't want to spend $750 to have a go at 10 games. 
If piracy was impossible then maybe that adult would buy 1 or 2 games, 
but to say the industry has lost $750 because he downloaded 10 games is 
ridiculous.

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On 25/01/2011 10:17 AM, scott wrote:
>>> Are you sure that is correct? It seems very odd that the song owners
>>> wouldn't charge more for stations that have higher audience figures. It
>>> would mean they'd have to charge an totally insignificant amount to the
>>> big stations in order for small ones to be financially possible.
>>
>> Well, since it's impossible to know how many people are listening at any
>> given instant in time, the price cannot possibly be determined by the
>> number of listeners.
>
> So you're not sure then :-)
>
> You can be sure how many people are listening at any given instant in
> time to within some confidence/accuracy levels. There are plenty of
> companies that deal with collecting such data (eg barb.co.uk does it for
> TV, I'm sure there are similar for radio). Why wouldn't the song owners
> use such figures for setting the prices?

I'm not saying they don't. I'm saying that the price is set by the 
*predicted* number of listeners, not the *actual* number, which could be 
arbitrarily different.

Still, I suppose there's nothing particularly unusual about that. My car 
insurance price is set by the *predicted* probability of me getting a 
cheaper quote from somebody else, not the *actual* probability of this.

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