Quote:
Originally posted by HarmlessRabbit
What I hope is that the copyright law becomes so annoying that people actually start making their own music again, in small groups. We are such a consumer culture. We don't dare sing, dance, or make art ourselves, that's for the artist! Personally, I would love to go to a bar and stand around a piano singing drinking songs, but I don't know anywhere around here that would let me. 
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In a sense what you're advocating here is the same idea of a community approach that people have been suggesting as a possible application of peer to peer, websites and streaming radio/video. The question is whether you try to build the community around the technology or use the technology to enhance the community.
The difficulty I've always acknowledged with something like mp3.com is there is no consistent model for mass promotion of good artists as familiar to us as the corporate mass advertising model. True, mp3.com "insiders" might know whose judgement to trust, but an outsider has no good way of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Imagine if the TFP created a digital community based model of musical collaboration - Tilted Musicians; in which ideas were exchaged and final tracks were eventually released to the rest of the forum. To protect the sites bandwidth though, users would quickly have to resort to peer to peer much as
www.redvsblue.com uses Bittorrent to protect its bandwidth from
www.fark.com.
Imagine that bar where people stand around the piano drinking and singing songs because of those annoying copyright laws.
Now imagine two bars, one in the southern US and the other in Ireland. The bars ship exotics to each other like kegs of Guinness and cases of fine Bourbon respectively. Then they set up a two way streaming video webcast. The cooks use this to teach each other how to make each other's traditional dishes in the afternoon. That evening, the musicians use the connection for a virtual jam session, perhaps pitting the Irish fiddle against the banjo in a furious contest.
These things would enrich both digital and real life communities. Why not use the internet to exchange musical ideas or enhance that community pub singalong? - Because a company zealously protecting its copyright has crushed the technologies that would allow you to do so. Screw that.
Sorry for drifting away from the topic a bit, but I want to think about HOW people listen to their music.