security
If I start to make an own website with the (allmost all rock) music I made, are there risks people “steel” the music? Of course, I know everything is possible but what are your experiences in these kind of cases?
And is it possible to make it able for everyone to listen but that nobody’s able to download it?
Something else: what’s a very good soundcard (i’ve VIA AC’97 audio??)…?..
Thanks Maria! 
It’s like a radio…If someone can “hear” music on a website, they can steal it (by recording it), there’s no getting around this.
There are ways to make it harder. One possibility is to encode all the music as Flash movies. Not everyone knows how to turn a Flash swf file back into a MP3 file.
You can also reduce the benefit of stealing the music by encoding at a lower quality, and only encoding 30 or 60 sec of the song. Few people would want to steal that. Doing this also makes the music files alot smaller, which saves bandwidth.
I mean with stealing: makin’a hit with somebody elses music after a few changes. In Holland it’s called “plagiaat”… Does these kind off things ever happen?
Sure. Plagiarism in English. That’s what copyrights are for. Don’t post any originals of yours that aren’t copyrighted properly by sending in the correct forms and whatever else is required. When you hear you song on the radio you call a lawyer and make waves. If your song wasn’t copyrighted properly then it’s your words against theirs and if they sent in the forms and you didn’t then there’s not much you can do.
Right. To be safest, first take care of the minor legal issues. Copyrights are very easy to get – Anyone can get a certificate from the US gov’t for US$30, good in most civilized countries (not that the US is terribly civilized. 
) For more info on copyrights for folks like us, see THIS.
After that, sure, you can protect your songs from being copied by posting incomplete or low-fi versions. However, I think that the thing an aspiring artist needs most is exposure, and it’s better to give away free music than make sure everyone pays for it. That’s just my hunch, though.
PS: There are ways to distribute music that make it a lot harder to copy – you have to be quite a bit more of a nerd (i.e., you have to do more than “right click / save as”). This involves using a java or active-X player or something like that, and is advanced web wizardry. It would be nice to know if there’s a cheap or freebie way to do this.
"Something else: what’s a very good soundcard (i’ve VIA AC’97 audio??)…?"
This part of your question was sort of missed. Maybe you should start a new thread. We have lots of opinions on this subject and just not enough people to listen to them.
| Quote (learjeff @ Dec. 12 2004,19:33) |
| However, I think that the thing an aspiring artist needs most is exposure, and it's better to give away free music than make sure everyone pays for it. |
That's not my issue. I don't care about that, I don't have to be payed! I have a job, music is just for fun. The issue is that the results of the music I made, are better than I expected. Before put it on a website I wanted to know the experiences of other people. I'm a little bit afraid that another musician or band hears the music, "covers" it en after that saying it's their own song. My english is not that good I hope you understand what I mean.
For all: thanks for the advises!!!
I would, of course, always say register your copyright. I don’t know how it is in your country, but in the US, if your creation is in a tangable form (CD, etc.), then you own the copyright. The registration is simply a way of ensuring proof of ownership. I know some people here in the US do this by simply sending a copy of it to themselves registered mail. It’s not nearly as solid as registering. Also, I will say that, in my experience, that people are less likely to steal from an active artist. However, in my area at least, once a band breaks up, people start stealing their riffs like scavengers over a corpse.
fish
check out voxengo’s new freeware, here it is:
Aleksey has made a free one for us all, now thats pretty cool!
He says:
"Beeper is an auxiliary plug-in which you can use to insert short beeps to the program material. This may help you to protect your work from stealing. It is safe to apply this plug-in to any mission-critical material because plug-in does not perform any processing on the audio between beeps."
Here is a direct download.
Beeps in songs
make sure your site can handle the bandwidth, I just found out I might get slapped with a $215 bill after letting my music be downloadable from my webpage. you can always use a site like mp3.com to store your music and just link from your site.
Hmm… I just wacked a website up at my AC space, and got my domain pointed at it…
I already had registered a few weeks ago. But still thanks for all advises!!! maria