Just Another Blurb About Sharing Weed

#5. BURNIN' WEED!

I subscribe to a lot of Yahoogroups newsletters for news to use in my own newsletter, and not too long ago this little marketing blurb hopped into my lap. It pissed me off when I read it and it still annoys me two weeks later, so in true UR fashion let's cut this pretentious little marketing scheme down. Yes, I'm ripping off the Metal Sludge model but if anything was going to replace the stupid Gonter Who article this e-mail is as good a candidate as any to do that. Cue the lights, please! 3...2...1...WE'VE GOT MARKETING SIGN! AAAAUGH!

[x], by the way, stands for weedshare.com. This is the only time I'll be referring to the company by that name, so keep that in mind.

Weed files are a brand new music file format that will soon revolutionize the music industry.

Wow, .wma files with a wrapper will REVOLUTIONISE the music industry. They have a funny name, too! Good gravy, SIGN ME UP FOR THAT!

Just download Weed file songs to your PC from [x]. Listen to each one three times for free on any software that can handle Windows Media Audio (Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, etc.)

Or you could download Real Alternative and IrfanView, eliminating to a point the need for excessive bloatware like RealOnePlayer or Windows Media Player. Don't play Weed files on anything but the two programs mentioned in the marketing blurb, though, since the other players don't have Windows Media Rights Manager V7 and thus can't identify the Weed license. Brilliant reasoning, guys. You're telling people to play Weed files on their favourite media player but your file format only works in RealOnePlayer and Windows Media Player. You've got my patronage, I can tell you that much.

If you think it sucks, delete it. If you want to listen again, just download the Weed Media Activator and pay for the song. Then play it forever on your computer, burn CDs for your stereo and download the tunes to your portable device.

How long is forever anyway? No one's been able to determine it because, oh I dunno, YOU CAN'T DETERMINE INFINITY YOU DUMB BASTARDS! Brilliant strategy there also, converting a wave file to Windows Media and then burning the file to CD (with lower sound quality, no less). You guys are going to win the war against music piracy yet, Weed-o-philes. Fight the power etc.

And for a limited time, when you sign up for a weed account you get $5 FREE to spend on your favorite songs.

Considering the average price of a Weed song is a dollar, that's five free songs. Hope you're not buying five songs from grindcore bands is all I have to say. (For those not up on the joke: some grindcore songs are sub-thirty-second ditties. That's, like, less than two and a half minutes of music. Thanks for asking, anyway.)

Sweet! But it gets sweeter.

I can tell these Weed marketers are cool. They're up on seven-year-old buzzwords like "sweet." That's mega-rad.

Take the song you just bought and create your own website, burn CD-ROMs, bust it out on a P2P

bust it out old-skool! Weedizzle is the shizzle, muddafizzle

or email it to your friends. Every time they buy a song you turned them on to, you get paid!

Pay attention to that last sentence. I'm going to quiz you on it later.

Listen closely...

I'm listening...

You get paid to listen to music and turn your friends on to hot new tunes by independent artists from around the world.

Oh. I get to listen to independent music. Like I couldn't do that at mp3.com or Soundclick or IUMA. Weed's "paying" me, though. I am full of joy hearing that.

What are you waiting for? The revolution has already begun at [x]....

Meh, I prefer Devolution. Different tastes I guess.

for the artists...

[x] is a new website that uses a revolutionary file format to completely change the model of digital music file sharing.

It's a .wma with a wrapper. HOW IN THE HELL IS THAT REVOLUTIONARY?

Weed files technology makes it easy and cost effective for independent artists to make money through digital distribution of their music.

I thought that was the point of digital distribution, to minimize costs inherent in the mass production of music. Again, what the hell do I know. I've only been knowledgeable about the music industry for, I dunno, eight or so years. I clearly know nothing about press releases or things of that nature. I must have been educarded retated or something.

Here's how it works...

We take the finest prairie-fed beef, slaughter it and process it into a fine paste...

First, a digital music file is converted into a Weed file. Music fans can download a Weed file from [x] and listen to it on their computer three times for free.

I see no flaws inherent in using a format so dependent on one codec since Microsoft is loved and respected on a par with Jesus. Yup, metadata. It's the wave of the future and crap.

The fourth time they try to play the song they are prompted to pay for it.

"ARE YOU GONNA BUY THIS SONG OR ARE YOU GOING TO BE A FUCKING LEECH? OH, YOU'RE GONNA FREELOAD? EAT MY VIRII, JERK"

If they choose not to pay for the song, that file is locked forever

at least until someone cracks the Weed code, thus making all security measures useless

and can never be played again on that computer unless they pay up.

Or get around security measures. Either or.

If the music fan buys the song they can listen to the music on that computer, burn audio CDs and transfer it to their portable devices.

Non-music fans, meanwhile, can rot in Hell. They're obviously heathens.

Then, if they choose, they can resell the file on their own website. If they sell that Weed file to another buyer, the first music fan gets a cut of the distribution. The seller also continues to get a cut for two more generations of sales. And the artists always gets 50% of each sale!

This is what bothers me about the Weed format: the pyramid scheme used to sell it. Essentially, fifty percent of the proceeds from each Weed sale goes to the artist. Twenty, ten and five percent of the proceeds go to three successive generations of Weed-o-philes. This sounds great aside from the fact that Weed gets fifteen percent of the cut for having its wrapper slapped onto an audio file. If a file gets traded around a million times and a million people pay for the song (assuming the person listening to the file wants to keep it in the first place) Weed gets $150,000 of that cut. The artist might get half the proceeds of their involvement of this business proposition but Weed is making the real money in the long run. Weed's share of the cut seems way too high in my opinion.

This seems like a terribly long way to go to say "partial refund."

Essentially, Weed files offer a multi-level marketing strategy on top of a secure digital file format.

Which can't be cracked, fact fans. Oh wait, it can. Encryption, gotta love it. Don't you also just love that phrase "multi-level marketing?" It's a word that has historically had as much cachet as "spamhaus," "paradigm" and "market demographic research." This is grass-roots stuff here. Get it? GRASS! HAHAHAHAHAAAA SMOKE IT

This completely changes the paradigm

AUUUUUUGH!

that the mainstream music business is trying to enforce by limiting the distribution of their files.

Huh. Here I am thinking that the limitation of MP3 distribution had to do with copyright issues and labels losing millions of dollars each year due to file-sharing (even though the music industry's losing that much money is in part due to the high overall price of CD's, but I digress.) It's always the mainstream music business, too, since we all know every independent label in existence cares about the signees to that label. I mean, Godflesh left Earache because the guys in Godflesh are bitter, money-hungry bastards...right? It had nothing to do with ownership issues, marketing etc. Way to prove your point, Weed-o-philes!

Instead of trying to stop users from sharing their music, [x] encourages users to further distribute their music.

Not until you configure Weed files to work in .mp3 format, it won't. Funny thing, there's a huge market in video and movie formats that is virtually untapped. MP3s are old-hat at this point from a marketing standpoint. Why is Weed focusing on Windows Media Audio files when the real money is in Windows Media Video files? It seems more people use WMV as a video format than use WMA as an audio format. Cripes, people still use FTP to share files so it's pretty damn obvious file-sharing is not going away. Video-on-demand is the real wave of the future, in my opinion. I'm honest about this.

And instead of punishing them for doing it, the system encourages fans and gives them legal financial incentive to continue to distribute the music.

Weed gives fans a partial discount on the music they buy. Nothing more, nothing less.

Effectively, this could turn millions of illegal file sharing teens into the biggest and most influential sales force in history.

Uh, it's not just teens that share files. Then again, you're actively trying to associate the company with something "cool" like marijuana usage. I'm not going to say anything else at this point except that I'm not surprised at least one stoner rock label has already hopped on the Weed bandwagon. From a stoner rock standpoint, that's the best damn marketing strategy there is.

So bust a move

and get your music weedified today:

No, I won't. Sorry, I've already signed up with Faircopy (as if anyone's going to buy the shitty noise music I make, but still.) With that model the author sets the discount for the sharer, there isn't as heinous a multi-level marketing scheme in place and Faircopy gets only a ten percent share of the kitty. Plus, it's 100% Digital Rights Management-free and crosses platforms. Faircopy's not a perfect system (being based in Europe and all - great if I was from Belgium, but I'm Canadian), but if Weed was good for one thing it's the fact the company led me to Faircopy.

To be honest, I'm posting this because I can't let something like this go. When I posted the marketing blurb to TheDDT.com's messageboard (the discussion can be found here, although if you have a more PC sense of humour you won't find it there)...well, read the damn thing. I can't respect a company that whores their product on everything it can. To be honest, it's hard to respect people who can't take negative criticism about the company they're affiliated with. I've installed Weed on my system, signed up for an account...but until the company improves, I'm not actively going to use the Weed format. It's one thing to market something, but you have to know how to market it and it's obvious the people involved in Weed don't know how to let go of the hard sell. Share Weed if you want, ingest it aurally - I prefer alcohol anyway.

CAMERON ARCHER
03.01.2004