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"And so Audiogalaxy dies, praise to the record exec"

Let us praise the record executive, who, in his infinite wisdom, has stumbled upon THE ANSWER. Yes, that all-encompassing 100% to blame, root-of-the whole problem answer, which, when eliminated, will provide a panacea for each and every one of the music industry's woes. Yes my friends, the MP3.

Three letters that epitomise every single reason that singles sales are down, album sales are down and the industry is going into recession. MP3. Know your enemy. We are talking about a computer geek fad that went mainstream, that we didn't control and that resulted in, horror of devalued dollar horrors, a free lunch. Yes, you got it amigos, a bona fide 100% gratis, no questions asked gift horse.

Poor misguided consumer, you thought that we would let you enjoy this meal on us, you thought that you could boot up the old PC and steal our property, cowering behind your monitors like the worthless wretches you are. But no longer for we have triumphed. Now you will see row upon row of X. Because X doesn't just mark the spot, it marks the end of the road for your dirty, conniving thefts.

Praise be to the record executive for he hath truly found a solution in this time of woes, a beacon of light in the darkness, using his army of lawyers and muchos dollares he hath toppled that Sodom of sharing, Audiogalaxy. Let us leave its festering corpse of X's so all can tremble before the power of the dollar.


The Voice of Reason:
Surely you are but looking for an excuse, a simple reason on which to blame your poor performance. You look beyond the wanton excess of $30 million record contracts, and multi-million dollar videos, and talentless "artistes" who squander their fortunes and churn out albums of filler material that consumers rightly shun. You ignored the outrageous prices you persist in charging for singles and albums. You look beyond all this to the MP3. The tool that put information into the consumer's hands. For the first time they refused to pay £3.99 for a single they didn't like; they refused to pay £14.99 for an album with only 2 good songs, both a-listed and number ones.

Poor short-sighted record exec, you will drink champagne long into the night toasting the death of audiogalaxy. You will travel home in your company car and you will deposit your nice fat bonus at the end of the month. And then wait for the plaudits to come in, when the turn-around begins and the consumers flock back to the record stores crying out for the latest media-tart songstress or washed-up pop sensation.

But they won't. For the MP3 did not hurt the music industry. The MP3 led to people expanding their musical horizons. They still bought CD's, but only by bands who produced good albums. They even spread their wings a little and dabbled in CD's they would never have even dreamed of buying before MP3 gave them the chance of a musical epiphany. They only stopped buying the albums of the artists you should have turfed out long ago.

So enjoy your bonus while you can, record exec, because you haven't won anything. You are a luddite who is scared of change, you smash the new infrastructure that will help your industry and sit in your throne commanding the tide to go back out. Yet you have no divine right, nothing, that guarantees easy money.

Your final satori will come. Too late alas.
So smile in your empty victory because everyone knows it but you.

i would learn how to make one, but i would probably get caught up in all the legal mess. and thats just to much for a kid, so i'll stick to good old winmx. although if i have to i will make a sharing prgram and hide my identity so noone can ever get rid of it

mwahahahahahahaha

Mr. Happy wrote:
For the MP3 did not hurt the music industry. The MP3
> led to people expanding their musical horizons. They still bought
> CD's, but only by bands who produced good albums. They even spread
> their wings a little and dabbled in CD's they would never have even
> dreamed of buying before MP3 gave them the chance of a musical
> epiphany. They only stopped buying the albums of the artists you
> should have turfed out long ago.

Well said Happy. How are we supposed to know which albums to buy when they are killing off our source to it. Most people download a couple of songs from the album to know what its like, and then buy it, so that they have the CD design, booklet, cover etc. MP3 has helped music vastly, whatever the statistics say. MP3s will never die, that, I am sure of. There will always be some brainchild, sitting away at his computer, developing the next MP3-sharing client. There's a Shawn Fanning in all of us, you know...

Bloody bureaucracy, no good...

Those execs should enjoy the light while they can, because it will come back to bite them in the ace, it always does...

Mr.Snuggly wrote:
Am I a mug?

-----

Yes, sorry.

*****

Anyways, whats all this talk about Audiogalaxy, ive never heard of it before....

Meh!

I swear, I must be the only person who buys CDs any more. Am I a mug?

oh big whoop audiogalaxy has gone.

i didnt use it anyway. there are still many great mp3 sharing programs such as kazaa, winmx, morpheus and many more that use gnutella

also with the others i listed u dont just stop at mp3s you can download movies not even in the cinema yet. yes these are the great programs. so go to download.com and get on of them, you'll never regret it (unless you get arrested, but has very slim chance) so go there now and download

The really worrying thing about the music industry is the way that the companies are trying to control the information you and I receive about bands. Take winamp.com, it's owned by nullsoft who were taken over by AOL. That's right, AOL Time Warner, who control a great deal of the bands you listen to. All the mp3's and skins that get promoted by Winamp are on the Time Warner label. But they don't tell you that.

Also AOL Time Warner own NME and other music mags. Now if that isn't a conflict of interests I don't know what is. And as independant as NME may claim to be, I'd see little use for AOL owning it unless they wanted to either push albums by their bands on to the review pages or pressurise for good reviews. What all of this represents is a systematic effort to control the information that consumers receive and base their decisions on. This is another reason why audiogalaxy has gone, behind all the bluster about MP3 destroying sales, there's also the dislike of anything that allows the consumer free will. What better position to be in than when you can tell people that your bands are good, without them knowing that you are telling them?

As Goebbels said the best type of propaganda never makes itself known.

POP for LF

I understood some of that. That's worrying.

KaZaa is a FastTrack client, like Morpheus used to be Gaz, and it will probably never be shut down as it's a true Peer2Peer network.

OpenFT is the best Peer2Peer client. It's run by opensource programmers and features a node based system where there is never one true server - you couldn't shut it down if you tried.

However, it's still 0.1 software, and there's no Windows clients or even daemons available outside of cygwin compatability layers.

I think the answer is to opensource the Audiogalaxy software and website and move it to a client based system with a decentralised server. But that's not going to happen.

WinMX. I love it, just like Morpheus used to be.

It'll be shut down soon, probably. Damn.