HipHop: A "Popcorn Time" for music
gethiphop.net
gethiphop.net
I hate this entitlement. As if it was their decision. As if they were running a social movement.
I am all for open access to arts, but this is the artists decision and not some programmers, just because they can.
I took a short look into their source code and I discovered that they are using youtube (google video) for playback, the iTunes API to get the top list, LastFM to get the covers. One song is round about 20MB because they play the entire video. Nothing more then a youtube fronted stitched together from 3 API's and inspired by Popcorn Time. I think google will block it as soon as they can.
And after a short try I mentioned that some songs are only bad covers from private people. Well ... yeah
Not to mention the fact that the music industry has made music incredibly cheap and available over the last few years. $10 per month for access to most of the music ever recorded on all your devices is an incredible deal. And it's available to almost everyone in the world via streaming services like Deezer (which is available in over 180 countries).
None of that money goes to the artist... that goes to google... So you are okay with someone else making money of the free labour of artists, but not someone NOT making money of the free labour of artists. Interesting position.
> Nobody has the right to decide that something someone else has spent time and money creating should be available for free without the creators having a say.
The creator does have a say. They can not release the content, they can DMCA the youtube videos, etc etc.
Who decided that you should pay for culture? Who has the right to decide such thing? If society disagrees with that decision is that not another "piece of culture" ?
Youtube uses an ad-revenue sharing program. So video creators/uploaders do get a share of money from the ad, even if it is marginal.
So your real issue is with the YouTube API for not supplying ads with content?
That's an interesting position I've encountered the opposite before, but not this.
Does the rhetoric really matter?
Ask any politician, public speaker and successful fundraiser whether rhetoric matters.
Looks like this very app proves your assertion wrong: programmers -- by creating this app -- made it so listening to music is free.
I'm not commenting on the moral aspect of it, only the practical.
I would accept the practical part if they hadn't put out that statement.
I am commenting on the moral aspect of it, not on the practical.
If the statement were "we want to make access to freely available music easier" (and we cannot police how it got to our sources) - sure. Go with it!
I think you meant to say "it is the copyright holders decision and not some artists"
That aside, the app looks really polished and I'm glad it has Linux support backed in.
Yup I'm at the point again where maintaining my own library is more convinient again. It's exactly the DRM shit I won't put up with. Also spotify, rdio etc. Are exactly the same price with the same restrictions per plan (in .ch at least). Price cartel, oligopoly?
But that is not an excuse. The music industry in trying to provide alternative ways, and I extremely appreciate it and think that we need to be supportive. Only by supporting this changes we will ever see any improvements, we need to find a middleground that can satisfy both parties. Spotify offers a great service on a great platform. It can have his hippicus but that can happen with everything. What would happen if the player app you are using to play your offline library breaks and you have no data?
So no, I don't support them. I use Steam though, I think they got DRM right for the most part. I'd prefer no DRM, really. But with Steam I don't notice any DRM. That's good enough for me. I only use it in online mode though.
A traditional media player breaking almost never touches its "offline library".
WMP, Clementine, Foobar2000, Amarok, MPD, Audacious, so on and so forth. Hell you can use VLC as a music player if you wanted to. What happens to your songs if any of these crashes? What happens to the data if you delete the entire application from your computer? Nothing. The data is still there. The application is separate from the data it plays.
Now if the OS has issues, or the hard drive, or a few other things: Your data might be lost, but that is almost never the fault of the "player app".
While we'd all like a situation where those who've added most value get the lions share of the reward, this solution takes us from them getting a small percentage to them getting nothing. That seems to me to be worse rather than better.
I'd rather outright buy the songs somewhere else and have them backed up on another computer as well with btsync just in case these DRM apps try to pull some crap.
The above scenario worked perfectly for me. I could access all my music anytime and from any device but unfortunately looks it didn't work out for the vendors :)
I think saavn pro might be an option.
From a quick research it seemed that Amazon MP3 was DRM-free.. not that I trust them too much or would want to support Amazon, but it seemed the only option with a good catalogue.
I guess HipHop isn't.
However I'm certain my country of birth is still not covered by these services so in that case this is a good alternative.
False. Spotify is available in 45 countries. Deezer is available in over 180!
This duplicates PT's main selling point.
Sadly most of these are only available in the US – and there are ~500 million people in the EU without access to most of these services.
Luckily it gets better nowadays, Spotify exists in most countries here, iTunes in contrast to Google Play actually sells everywhere (GPlay only in some countries here) and with Netflix coming to Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France and some other countries from 2015 on movie piracy will also go down.
I've spent a lot of time studying/writing/playing music and through that have got to personally know many of the most talented and versatile musicians I've ever come across. These people are skilled like Douglas Crockford, John Resig, you name it. But they have to make the assumption that the music they want to do - their own music - will never make any money in a recorded format, forcing them to do wedding gigs during the day instead.
I'm interested to know what people think about this. Do people think that the end (taking power away from big music industry) justifies the loss for those small-time players, or is it something that simply hasn't been considered at all?
Do you have a justification for saying that all music should be free, or is it just that it would be nice if all music was free?
My opinion: The end justifies the loss.
Secure and private file sharing is going to be essential for ensuring liberty in the future. I am absolutely convinced about that. You can't have that and make piracy impossible at the same time. The people who make tools for circumventing digital restrictions today are doing the groundwork for essential technology of the future.
There are a number of drawbacks with enabling private digital communications: It makes the sharing of copyrighted works possible without the possibility for law enforcement to intervene, it enables the spread of child pornography or other criminal and morally unjustifiable information, etc.
The thing is, that is a price that is worth paying, because the alternative is a complete loss of liberty. If the government can prevent you from sharing music, it can prevent you from sharing anything. This may not be a problem for you personally right now, but it is a huge problem for people living in North Korea or Syria, for example.
Besides this, it is not at all clear that private sharing of digital information is automatically detrimental to musicians. While it is easier to share music for free, it is also easier for the musicians themselves to reach out directly to their fans. Whereas it used to be the case that you needed a record deal signed with a major label to have anyone even hear your music, these days you can become a major star, making a comfortable living off your music without ever signing a contract with a major label.
Seems like this would be pretty easy to work out. Look at the amount of money musicians made 30 years ago and compare it with today.
>> "Whereas it used to be the case that you needed a record deal signed with a major label to have anyone even hear your music, these days you can become a major star, making a comfortable living off your music without ever signing a contract with a major label."
This needs to be proven. Show me some of these big stars. If I look through the top 100 albums or singles I doubt I'll find 5 that have done it without the help of a label.
Making a comfortable living without a label contract is certainly possible. 2 seconds of googling found this person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordis_Unga
Thus, the only way piracy is ever going to be fought is through examples being made. A grandmother who inadvertently downloaded Madonnas latest album by mistake is sentenced to pay millions in damages. A teenager listening to her favorite band is sentenced to ten years in prison.
What is worse? Ruining someone's life because they listened to the music they like, or musicians /possibly/ not getting paid as much as they /possibly/ might have earned, were there no internet?
I know what I think is the right response to that. And I say that as a person who once thought he'd make a living making music. Of course, wanting to do that and actually being able to are completely separate things. Perhaps it's not the piracy which is holding the musician back. Perhaps they are just not good enough.
It used to be "do free shows to sell records". Now it's completely reversed to "do free records to sell shows".
My concern is for authors, game designers and others for whom there is no such substitution possible.
Actually, most are unsuccessful and make their entire income off of a second job, but most successful authors make their income from the above.
I know a friend who is a published, relatively successful author (makes a solid but not spectacular living from it) makes most of his money from the old fashioned business of selling actual books.
First of all lets acknowledge the fact that if these tracks are on Youtube, they are publicly available for free, and unless they are registering 100k+ views per song, these artists are not making any money off these tracks.
Second, musicians taking wedding gigs and whatnot to supplement their creative careers is not a result of piracy; musicians, filmmakers and photographers have been doing that since always and probably always will.
Third, if these musicians are resorting to private functions like weddings to finance their creative career, its likely that they don't have a wide enough fan base and revenue stream for a product like this to significantly affect them.
In my opinion.
Musicians (and other artists) can still make money from e.g. performing live - which I'm assuming was their dominant form of income before the 20th century.
I don't believe that a monetary incentive is necessary for good art. I understand that artists need to eat, but also that not everyone can eat from being an artist.
The internet is very important to me as an open and free resource. I can't see how information can be made non-private and scarce at the same time, so I can't see how we can pay for music and keep the internet as I want it.
In more seriousness, I'd guess that the traditional dominant sources of income for musicians were (a) patronage and (b) being independently wealthy; I doubt giving performances mattered all that much.
Instead of patronage / wealth, I suppose that a market mechanism could be used to support music creation in a wider section of society. However, I would actually argue for income redistribution to support that.
It's not necessary but it's important. I'll explain how:
1) If artists can not earn money from their art the need a full time job to support themselves, provide food and shelter and pay the bills.
2) They will also need some of this money to pay for equipment and in the case of musicians studio time, sound engineers, mastering engineers, designers (for album art) etc.
3) They will need to spend some of their free time (after work) online managing their social media, promoting their music etc.
4) With the very little time they have left they need to write songs, record demos, make time (somehow) for a few days in the studio and then distribute the music.
If things were like this in the 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's we would not have some of the great albums we have today. Art takes time. If the artist has to do all of the above it leaves very little time for the actual art and we get mediocre art. We might get some good art. It's unlikely we will get great art.
Or concerts/show. Is that such an alien concept? A musician performing their art live, in front of an audience?
Rapgenius may be branching out (and I have the same doubts in them keeping the rapgenius name), but at least they actually started with rap.
II. Prohibitions
Your API Client will not, and You will not encourage or create functionality for Your users or other third parties to:
8. separate, isolate, or modify the audio or video components of any YouTube audiovisual content made available through the YouTube API;
9. promote separately the audio or video components of any YouTube audiovisual content made available through the YouTube API;
So I can't imagine it lasting long.
EDIT: Looks like they already use a YouTube downloader, and not the API: https://github.com/hiphopapp/hiphop/blob/master/coffee/_play...
1) sudo apt-get install libudev1 2) ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1 ./libudev.so.0
--You could put this part in a batch file --- 3) LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(pwd):$LD_LIBRARY_PATH ./HipHop $
I think that approach is the best one to have. Pirate it try it out if you really love it please buy it.
You can find it here[2] i know it's a pain to find a link to the album on the main site I need to send them a message about it.
At some studios, their price includes an engineer, but often a good engineer charges extra. Once the song is recorded, a separate mixing engineer will take the raw tracks and make a finished mix. Then a mastering engineer will polish them further for different markets including radio or AAC. And if you need or want a producer, arranger, cowriter, or session player, you have to pay them for their time. All the while you need to eat and pay rent as an artist or band.
$10k is an average budget for a short album, and consider to break even an artist must sell 13,000 songs if independent through iTunes, more if they split revenue with a label. How many artists have less than 13,000 fans? This is why many record deals today include touring revenue as part of the contract, because they know they can't sell enough downloads to recoup the cost.
> many artists do not actually need professional mastering
Almost everything sold commercially has been mastered, the only stuff I have heard unmastered is on Soundcloud/Youtube for a reason. Having a skilled third party polish a track is essential.
> why not make your music free
Why is this acceptable for a musician but not for a film director, actor, programmer, or any other career professional? Should all films now be made DIY with volunteer actors and we'll just have hobbyist special effects and post added? What are these hobbyists supposed to do to pay rent and eat?
Music is an expensive business, and digital downloading hasn't changed that. That's why it's frustrating to hear people feel entitled to free music, even if there's not much we can do to change it.
First you need the audience. Without big marketing budgets free sharing of music is the best you have. Even if people were willing to pay for good music, many would prefer to just browse the free alternatives because there are tons of good musicians willing to race to the bottom.
It's not like you are alone. There are tons and tons of struggling musicians out there, but you compete aganist each other. Not only that, bur you also compete against other forms of entertainment too. How can I, as a consumer, get to listen to your music if not for free on YouTube?
I'm going to go with both. There has always been a host of undiscovered talent out there that never make it "big", ie: can sustain themselves and their families by doing music full time. (See Rodriguez and Searching for Sugar Man on how this goes), this goes back way before the Internet.
> Even if people were willing to pay for good music, many would prefer to just browse the free alternatives because there are tons of good musicians willing to race to the bottom.
This is exactly the problem. Were willing to pay for good music? This is the exact thing the parent is complaining about. Younger folk think it is for some reason not normal to pay someone else for their hard earned talent and work they put in to entertain you. There has always been a "race to the bottom". Some would say The Monkees were the poor man's Beatles, etc.
The parent is complaining that it is or should be somehow acceptable or normal that you get to listen to his product for free, even if it is against his wishes. Just because you can easily copy his entire music catalog in 3 minutes over the Internet doesn't change the fact that he should be able to charge you to listen to an album that took months to create.
> How can I, as a consumer, get to listen to your music if not for free on YouTube?
Contact the artist? Ask to buy their cd / 12" / mp3 / whatever from their online service?
If people download your album for free, and they listen to it and like it, they might want to buy concert tickets/merchandise/etc.. Isn't that a good thing, at least?
Also, why the opinion that listening to music should always be free? How is that a worthwhile cause? It's like saying driving cars should be free, but owning one should cost money.
edit: Just saw that it uses Youtube for the source files. Do the plays count against the Youtube video then? If so, great.
Why?
But, music is a solved problem for me, via Spotify, and I find then that my gut feeling on this is instead that it's parasitic.
Which means Amazon Instant Video is, if you want to watch videos multiple times, more expensive than buying the DVD or BluRay.
And anything it doesn't have, and I want (Beatles, previously Led Zep), I tend to have already bought, and have available via iTunes Match.
I understand this isn't an option for everyone but I think more people should consider it.
I searched for one of the artists (Talk Less Say More) from my label (Records On Ribs - http://recordsonribs.com) and it instantly played.
Have you tried performing an A/B test to see if you can tell the difference between lossless CD audio and 192 kbit AAC (the format used for 720p video on YouTube)?
Yet, I think you're looking at it from the wrong perspective, let me give you an argument.
Keeping the sound of good quality while lowering the bandwidth is an issue; the 192bit AAC is a great achievement in that regard.
Recording and reproducing music with highest quality is another; the CD itself is not entirely lossless in this context.
So I just think for a music streaming service it would be nice to not diminish the music quality at the source of reproducing chain.