How The Dark Net Is Making Drug Purchases Safer By Eliminating Associated Violence And Improving Quality

from the hidden-virtues dept

Despite a few daring experiments in the space, the dark net (or dark web, if you prefer) is generally seen as a dangerous, frightening place inhabited by terrorists, pornographers and general ne'er-do-wells. That makes a report in The Guardian about drug dealers moving online unusual, because it shows how the dark net can also be beneficial to society:

Research into internet drug markets by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) suggested the self-regulation of online markets such as Silk Road provide a safer environment for users and dealers of illicit substances.

Feedback mechanisms similar to eBay mean customers are able to hold dealers to account for the service they provide, the report said, while remote access to the market almost eliminates the risk of violence that has long been an integral part of the black economy.

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Filed Under: crime, dark markets, dark net, quality, safety, trust

No, The Internet Hasn't Destroyed Quality Music Either

from the panic-panic-everywhere dept

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy--I was a boy in this town--in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chords will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape. The vocal chords will go because no one will have a chance to sing, the phonograph supplying a mechanical imitation of the voice, accompaniment, and effort.

Yet all these years on we are still surrounded by music. It follows us throughout a day from our bedside to our commutes to our earphones at work to our drive home to settling into bed.

And an astonishing amount of it is new. A decade after the arrival of file sharing, US economist Joel Waldfogel charted what had happened in a paper called Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music since Napster.

There is no doubt that recording companies are making less money since file sharing, he says. But that doesn't necessarily mean they are making less music, or even less good music.

Assembling data on the quality of songs from the "all-time best" lists compiled each year by Rolling Stone and other magazines he finds that the albums regarded as good tend to be recent, and increasingly so as the internet age wears on.

The good new ones aren't even by old artists. He says around half of the good new albums are by artists who only started recording since file sharing. It has neither killed new music, nor frightened people away from beginning to make music.

Filed Under: business models, internet, music, predictions, quality, streaming

Hollywood Desperate To Blame Bad Opening Box Office Of Expendables 3 On Piracy Rather Than The Fact That It Sucked

from the might-be-another-factor... dept

Filed Under: box office, copyright, expendables 3, infringement, leaks, piracy, quality
Companies: lionsgate

Is There Any Merit To Neil Young's Plan To Improve The Quality Of Digital Music?

from the the-(record)-needle-and-the-damage-done dept

A press release issued last September by Penguin Group imprint Blue Rider Press, which is publishing Young's upcoming memoir, may have revealed the working title of Young's entire project. In addition to the memoir, says the release, "Young is also personally spearheading the development of Pono, a revolutionary new audio music system presenting the highest digital resolution possible, the studio quality sound that artists and producers heard when they created their original recordings. Young wants consumers to be able to take full advantage of Pono's cloud-based libraries of recordings by their favorite artists and, with Pono, enjoy a convenient music listening experience that is superior in sound quality to anything ever presented."

But does Young actually have a new idea? There are already lossless formats like FLAC that some audiophiles swear by, not to mention uncompressed formats like WAV and AIFF. But there is theoretically room for improvement: most uncompressed digital audio is sampled at a rate of 44,100 Hz, but some pro studio equipment can record at twice that, and technologies like DSD can go much, much further. Moreover most consumer audio consists of 16-bit samples, which could be bumped up to 24-bit. So on the technical side, there is the potential for new formats to popularize higher-quality digital audio. Who knows if that's what Young has in mind.

That, however, leads to the bigger question: is there really a market for such a format? The digital audio debate has been raging for years, and it has a lot of contours—not just the strengths and weaknesses of digital and analog formats, but also changing approaches to sound engineering and the debates over loudness, audio compression and overprocessing. While some audiophiles insist they can tell the difference, blind listening tests have proved they rarely can. For the average listener, convenience, selection and price surely trump such a negligible (and possibly undetectable) quality difference—and since it sounds like Young hopes to develop a proprietary, cloud-only format, I'm guessing those other factors aren't high priorities. Moreover, since most people are listening to their music on earbuds and other low-definition systems, the quality bottleneck exists much further down the line than the file format—and since an increasing amount of music is recorded with consumer tools like GarageBand that operate at the standard sampling rates for uncompressed AIFF/WAV files, there's another bottleneck above the file format too. Though, in theory, these factors are part of what Young wants to change with his push towards higher quality—and there may be some potential in that direction over time as bandwidth and storage space increases, and even some sort of immediate market among audiophiles. But it's hard to see what he could offer that existing formats don't already provide.

I know some people will insist that digital audio sucks, and that they can tell the difference—but frankly that's a meaningless assertion if they haven't done a controlled test. There are simply too many biases to account for. But even if it is a real problem for some people, it is likely to be a very small niche market, not a cultural sea-change like Young seems to envision. Some of his proclamations about the effect of music sound eerily close to Prince's insane ramblings about how audio interacts with the brain, which is hard to swallow. Music may create transcendent human experiences once it's inside your head, but your ears are still made of flesh and bone, not magic. And evidence suggests that most people's ears can't tell the difference.

Filed Under: digital music, flac, neil young, quality

Neil Young: Piracy Is The New Radio (But The Quality Sucks)

from the well,-there's-that... dept

It doesn't affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around. [...] That's the radio. If you really want to hear it, let's make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.

Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, his legacy was tremendous. [...] But when he went home, he listened to vinyl.

Filed Under: neil young, piracy, quality, radio

Even In The Age Of Abundance It's Quality, Not Quantity, That Counts

from the do-books-need-to-be-expensive-to-be-good? dept

Seth Godin is nothing if not prolific. As well as publishing a string of popular marketing books with catchy titles like "All marketers are liars", "The big moo" and "Small is the new big", he writes short but smart blog posts every day, some of which are rather obvious, but many of which contain real gems of insight.

This fluency with words means he is well placed to comment on the age of abundance we are entering thanks to the rise of digital technologies. One of his latest pieces is entitled "How the long tail cripples bonus content/multimedia", and appears as part of The Domino Project, "a new way to think about publishing. Founded by Seth Godin and powered by Amazon" -- a partnership that is itself symptomatic of the digital times.

The post is in response to a HuffPo interview with President and CEO of Ingram Content Group, David "Skip" Prichard. Prichard shows himself optimistic and surprisingly open to new ideas for someone leading a book distribution company -- not a sector known for its innovation.

But Godin concentrates on one particular aspect of Prichard's replies, which is typified by the following exchange:

Are there enhanced books available this holiday season that have already changed the definition of a book?

Yes, for example, a biography can to come to life in many ways. Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy has all of the interview audios, videos, photographs, text, and transcripts available. Even classics -- Penguin has updated Pride & Prejudice with clips from the movie and even instructions on dancing. For the 75th anniversary of The Hobbit, HarperCollins released an e-version with exclusives including J.R.R Tolkien's book illustrations and recently discovered Tolkien recordings. Publishers are still learning what added value readers will or won't pay for. I expect we'll continue to see lots of experimentation in this arena.

As Godin puts it:

it's not a few publishers putting out a few books for the masses. No, the market for the foreseeable future is a million publishers publishing to 100 million readers.

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Filed Under: abundance, business models, quality, quantity, seth godin

New Study: Piracy Increases The Quality Of Content

from the well-that's-not-going-to-play-well... dept

A case in point is the European unit of the cable TV channel HBO, which is fighting against unauthorized distribution of its content by illegal torrent websites by raising the quality of its offerings. The piracy rate faced by HBO is estimated to be between 30% to 50%. HBO has responded to this high piracy rate by churning out new high quality contents in different European languages (Briel 2010). New contents are available through both HBO’s cable TV channels as well as its new IPTV channels. HBO’s innovative offerings have reduced piracy and brought in new subscribers. Valve, a video game manufacturer, has also adopted a similar strategy. Since releasing its game Team Fortress 2 in 2007, it has made frequent quality enhancements, including addition of new weapons and avatars. This strategy has encouraged enthusiastic gamers, who have a strong preference for the latest version, to switch to legal downloads.

Filed Under: competition, content, copyright, infringement, piracy, policy, quality

Study Shows That Piracy Has Not Resulted In A Decrease Of Quality New Music

from the ain't-what-the-data-shows dept

The evidence thus far indicates no decline in the volume of new recorded music products forthcoming since Napster. It is possible, however, that the new music is coming from artists who were established prior to Napster. While products still come to market, it is possible that new artists are not establishing careers.

To explore this we examined the albums on three analogous best-of lists, for the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s, from Pitchfork Media. For each of the 300 albums, we determined the year the artist released his, her, or their first recording (whether an album, a single, or an "EP"). These data allow us to calculate the career age of an artist at the time he has an album on a best-of list. The question is whether artists have continued to establish careers since 1999. To explore this, we calculate the share of best albums since 1999 whose artists’ first recordings appeared after 1999. Since 1999, 49 percent of artists on the best of the 2000s list debuted following Napster. Figure 9 shows this year-by-year pattern: there is a systematic, although not a monotonic, rise from 10 percent of albums in 2000 to 100 percent at the end of the decade. On average, about half of the best-of albums since Napster are from artists whose recording debut occurred since Napster.

Although this is clearly a substantial share, determining whether the launching of new artists has changed requires a comparison with earlier periods. To this end, we calculate analogous annual shares for the two previous decades, the annual share of 1980s best-of albums from artists debuting after 1979, and the share of 1990s best-of albums from artists debuting after 1989. All three patterns are very similar, rising fairly steadily to 100 percent by the end of each decade. A regression of a dummy for whether an artist debuted since the decade of his appearance on dummies for years since the beginning of the decade and a dummy for the post- Napster decade confirms the lack a statistically meaningful difference in the tendency for new artists to appear on the list since Napster.

Filed Under: joel walfogelm, music, napster, new music, piracy, quality