i’ve been debating about posting this from John Perry Barlow, grateful dead lyricist and co-founder of the electronic frontier foundation. i made a pact that stipulated there was to be no posts regarding napster or copyrights for a >whole< week. but i can't help myself. the following prediction ruined my resolve:
“…many musicians have discovered, as the Grateful Dead did, that the best way to make money from music is to give it away. While scarcity may increase the value of physical goods, such as CD’s, the opposite applies to information. In a dematerialized information economy, there is an equally strong relationship between familiarity and value. If your work is good, allowing what you’ve done to self-replicate freely increases demand for what you haven’t done yet, whether by live performances or by charging online for the download of new work.
For these, and far more reasons than I can state here, I’m convinced that the traditional music business is finished. Napster and other environments like it will polish off the likes of BMG and Tower Records within five years.”
this is just so timely considering my rant just a few days ago:
“…the Volvo S40 ad campaign’s use of the Minutemen’s “Love Dance” seems designed to impress only those who already have the record. Unlike other Minutemen songs, “Love Dance” — an instrumental - is lovely enough to pass for a jingle. The shock comes exclusively from the seeing it embedded in such a strange context. Aggressively independent (they recorded exclusively for Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn’s SST label), and unapologetically leftist (bassist Mike Watt does a wicked Castro impersonation), the band’s oeuvre consists largely of pointed anti-capitalist anthems: “Let the products sell themselves/Fuck advertising and commercial psychology” they sing elsewhere on the record from which “Love Dance” was plucked.”
it’s not like this type of thing happened overnight and i don’t even really have a problem with it. supposed old ‘skool indy artists of a certain age have a right to make some cake just like everyone else.
i just find the whole thing so strange when i think back to how much things have changed.
“Imagine a network of a million hosts (a small subset of all webservers). Each of these is running a gnutella-based search-engine. On one of the servers is an interface to search the network for some information. The query is forwarded onto the overlay network, to say 10 nodes at each node, assuming some mechanism is in place to avoid loops. if the network is well interconnected, it will take about 5-6 hops to reach an edge of the cloud (probably a couple of times more to reach all the nodes). As
soon as the first nodes get the search-request, they send back results, say limited to the first 5-10 most significant hits. Each reply has a number of tuples consisting of (URLs, a description and an indication of how close the match is and a timestamp and probably some more), maybe 1-2 kB per reply. Say 10% of servers have a match, then 100000 hosts will at some point send back results.
I calculate, roughly a 100 MB of results will be arriving at the searching node within a few minutes, if it can process the dataflow.
This is only one search, both the searching nodes and the servers will have to deal with a lot of searches if you look at other search-engines as a comparison. ”
“…most importantly, it sucks bandwidth. I can easily see how network admins will want to outlaw this beast, if they can. For my evening of experimentation, I downloaded a total of 65 MBytes of files, while my total incoming consumed bandwidth was 365 MBytes, and my upstream bandwidth was 755 MBytes. Yes, really — all that, in a measly five hours.”
cnet has a brief piece on infrasearch which is a gnutella-based search engine, which is an interesting play for a ‘legitimate’ purpose for the file-swapping software. it didn’t provide very relevant results for me, so i don’t see myself switching from google anytime soon – but it is an interesting new chapter in the client as server story.
relatedly, jakob serves up a retrospective complete with an analysis of ‘victories’ and ‘defeats’ [ pssst – don’t forget to play the drinking game with friends [or alone if your into that sort of thing] while reading the retrospective]].