>>Basically it's all going to hell. ;) I'm betting it'll be somewhere between Bladerunner and Mad Max
(but Mel will be shouting more anti semetic phrases)<<
much as I enjoyed the sci-fi elements of BR, I feel that ridley scott (a fellow teessider) underplayed the essential moral dilemma of the original tale, & the movie became instead a nicely-lit allegory for ethnic cleansing. mad max, on the other hand, was just hurt & angry.
I'd hate to have to choose one over the other.
as for free downloads- quite a few of us on the fence are sort-of-ok-with-it so long as there's this feeling that mp3 "isn't as good" as having a cd. which, when you think about it, is absolute nonsense. head-in-the-sand of the first order.
(fwiw, both of them will suck, but they're what we've got, so we live with it. I can't persuade everyone to buy their own open-reel deck & have all our albums distributed on ampex 456 at 7-1/2 ips, now, can I? even 180gm vinyl is out of the question at our level.)
with modern download speeds, one can deliver an entire album as a high bitrate mp3, indistinguishable from the cd.
downloads are no longer the equivalent of "taping it off the radio" & then buying the record properly later on. downloads are it, the whole thing, for many consumers now.
& digital rights management is dead-in-the-water; the second something enters the analogue domain, which it must in order to be consumed, it can be re-encoded. & that's where the DRM falls off. doesn't matter if it's an anti-copy code on a cd or in an mpeg file, or macrovision, or whatever. all of these things can & will be defeated by people who think that "art" should be free to consumers.
well, I'm an artist. sometimes. I can't afford to do it full-time, because- shame on me- I need to eat occasionally.
someone out there [points in the direction of moscow] is SELLING downloads of my band's albums. this is even worse than giving them away.
I'm not going to do the free downloads thing until my local supermarket starts giving me free food.
whatever you're good at, whether it's fixing walls, growing wheat or playing the guitar, you've a right to some appreciation of it from those who enjoy your work.
(so you caught me in a ranty mood... sorry)
d.