Sir_NutS

Supporting the site that has fostered my favorite hobbie for years? sure.

I think responding to Brandon at this point is not productive. We're repeating the same things over and over, and he's unwilling to listen or thinks any explanation is not enough. Fails to provide a list of point by point questions and is just ego ranting and trying to leverage his status as a prolific remixer and album director to get his views on what's right to be implemented regardless of reason or logic. This: Is something that has been stated as the next steps to be taking going forward. As reiterated before, people who have a point of view in disagreement are welcomed to join the discussion and drop their two cents, as well as people providing ideas. I don't like to dismiss people but I think the discussion with Brandon is turning out to be exhausting and pointless for everyone.

I also wanted to make a point about something people don't seem to have a clear idea about: non-profit organizations and "profit". Non-profit organizations get money which is a surplus to their operational costs all the time, via donations, fundraising activities, merchandise selling, etc. They invest this money back into the organization (if they're not corrupt, that is) to have a broader reach to their mission, betterment of facilities, hiring more personnel, contracting work for the organization, etc. OCR as a non-profit, doesn't generate profit, however having a surplus is beneficial to its operations. Not only it provides a cushion for supporting its non-profits efforts (pursuing official non-profit status is a good example) but it helps making ocr better at its mission: the appreciation and promotion of video game music as an art form. Again, having a surplus is not only normal for non-profit organizations, it is something they're ALWAYS working on to have.

As has been established, website ads that are in individual mixes pages are fundamentally identical to YT ads. They aren't any less or more illegal or ethical. It would be ridiculous, to me, to expect to have someone get their song published, hosted and publicized, for free, but opt out of supporting the site back. Ultimately this is up to djp but I would be strongly against such practice.

There will be no licensing or payment of royalties to anyone.

Again, Youtube provides mechanisms to handle copyright strikes. It would be incredibly stupid for a copyright holder to go to court when they can just issue a takedown on the video, at which point they get all the revenue from the video. Again it's incredibly stupid to waste money on court when submitting a takedown will have the exact same result, taking the video down and giving the owner of the rights the money generated.

So let me get this straight, if I have a bunch of unlicensed music, put it in a page, which is by the way the only way to download the song, and fill the page with ads which surround the unlicensed music in question, I am not profiting off of the song and it's ethical. But if I remove the ads, and put the ad before people click play, even though people are STILL watching ads because of the song, now this is unethical? This is absurd.

tbh the intrusiveness argument is the only one with some ground. They're not as easy to ignore as website ads, that's objectively true. I for one dislike them very much specially the ones you can't skip.

You haven't been around for long, as this is quite tame and civil and hardly community breaking.

We are currently tempting it and the other new way of tempting it is virtually the same.

If youtube ads are illegal then our page ads on the mix pages are also illegal. They are virtually the same, companies know the same, yet ocr has been getting ad revenue directly from individual remixes pages for years and nobody complains. How is this playing with fire since this is virtually the same by fair use statures and just by common sense? The only difference is the intrusive nature of youtube ads. Nobody can download a mix without visiting the mix page(unless torrents, irrelevant), same as when nobody can listen to a remix without visiting the specific youtube video. There's no more "far" we can go when both are the same thing.

There's also a thing to be considered about "profit", whatever is made extra of just website sustaining, is put back on making ocr better. Do you want ocr to stay as is, and never expand or change, not promote vgm music more, that the staff keeps investing their time which most of them don't have, and money into promoting ocr everywhere they can? Improvements not only take time, which the staff provides for free and without asking anything in return, but it also requires money. Money for extra development, extra promotion, etc. Not only giving all this "profit" back to the artists generates more problems than it solves, it also stagnates OCR's mission.

Of course, I agree with all these points, but keep in mind that to be able to download a remix, people have to go to the mix page, which shows them ads, and makes ocr revenue off of specific, identifialble remixes. There's no button for "download all the mixes" or to download random remixes without visiting the specific remix page. That is, unless you torrent them, which of course has no relevance to ads. The "old way" is really no different.

I didn't direct those comments to you in particular, as you seem to have reasonable views, so apologies if it seemed that way. More specifically, you agree with the point I was trying to make in that sentence.

OCR has always been a gray area. The thing that keeps OCR from not getting into legal trouble, as does the unlimited amount of fanart found on sites such as deviantart, is not profiting off of it. Which nor the artist, nor staff does.

OCR was always making money off of remixes.

Well, my point is that Perception certainly isn't reality, hence the !=. Sorry, programmer's habit. As you've said, the appeal of the website are the remixes. But I'll go further and say that the whole point of OCR are the remixes. OCR is just a vehicle for distribution. The vehicle itself doesn't generate traffic and hence ad money, the product, aka remixes, are the traffic and money generators, excluding the ever-decreasing forum-visiting crowd. Remixes ARE the source of money for OCR. If the vehicle is changing over time it's ridiculous to imply that it shouldn't change because I perceive that remixes aren't the traffic generators when it's stupidly obvious that they are. Literally nothing in the revenue model will change but the place where the ad distribution will come from. Saying that oh, I don't agree with you making money of the mixes I willingly gave to the site and have been generating money since ocr implemented ads because I don't want my remixes generating money is just... incredibly silly. OCR was always making money off of remixes.

So you chose to ignore reality in favor of a feeling to make decisions, well, I certainly don't do that; you're entitled to do it on your own decisions. Anyone can feel that a decision is wrong even if it goes against reason, but that doesn't mean it's the reality of it. I for one do not care about decisions based on groundless or illogical arguments appealing to feelings as those are subjective and everyone has their own. The fair thing is to look at things objectively and see that Remixes have provided ocr with traffic during all its tenure and are the main source of income as very few people visit the site just for the forums and that number is decreasing as is also decreasing in most communities, vg related or otherwise.

This is the problem, which I mentioned before about Perception != Reality. Regardless of what you feel, which is subjective indeed, the reality is that your work, the remixes, are what generates ocr traffic and in turn money. Not the forums or the website itself, as those have diminished in use and relevance with the advent of social media. I don't have the figures of course, but given forum activity I would be VERY surprised if forum activity by itself, which can be considered not related to remixes, outweights social media/youtube/soundcloud views/plays. Whether you like it or not, or you feel like it's different or not, the reality is that what generates ocr money are the remixes, and always have. The website used to be a vehicle for that just as how youtube and social media are the vehicles now. Remixes were the main generators of ad money because that is the product that people visit the site for. Just as how Music for a radio station is the product and not the radio station itself. Your music was making money before. Ask for a check for the past years in ad revenue then.

Well, we're supposed to have a discussion, but since you don't care about people who disagree with you or their ideas, then I have no clue about what you're actually doing here. I could say what someone who only enters a conversation to spew their rhetoric and purposefully ignore other arguments actually is, but that'd be considered inflamatory in what has otherwise been a civil discussion on both parts. Good day, sir.

Fewer people come to OCR, which is not something unique to OCR but that is happening to pretty much every community out there as more people are less likely to keep up with an external website when they can just get all the information on all the comunities they belong to in their social media feed. This is interesting of you to point out since if that's the case, it makes more sense to move the ads to where the people would see them and where it would help OCR more. Facebook is monetizing people and their information. Facebook's product is people, information, not facebook itself. OCR product has always been Remixes, that's what draws people to the site and that is what we're monetizing with ads. If we remove the remixes from ocr people won't come, there would be nothing to monetize, same as if we remove people and their information from facebook. CNN's product isn't CNN, it's the news. That's what they monetize with ads. It's their product. Radio stations monetize the music they broadcast, not the station, etc. If people PERCEIVE that OCR is monetizing the remixes now and not before, they're just wrong and have no grounds on that argument, because that has always been OCR's product.

What are we monetizing with the website ads? People come to ocr because of... the forums? Our wonderful, 2005 web design? Perception != Reality.

I'm sorry but I fail to see any of these arguments holding ground, with the exception of intrusiveness in youtube ads vs website ads, which is a point in favor of having the website ads instead of youtube ads. Other than that, nothing has changed in where the money goes, which is, back to ocr, and what is actually being monetized, which are the remixes. I'm willing to bet money that less than 1% of the people who visit ocr do it for other reasons than to listen/download the remixes, thus ocr's product has always been the remixes and that's what we monetize.

This feels very barebones and incomplete. The instrumentation is very simple and plain, and some of the instruments felt very cheesy, and the lead at around 01:25 sits between a theremin and a very fake vocal sample. There wasn't much articulation applied to the performances other than this lead, and they seem to have the same velocity throughout. The arrangement gets repetitive. There's not much natural sounding interplay between the different parts, and although some of the percussion elements work, the bassdrum feels very out of place in an arrangement like this. NO

hmm interesting use of bitcrushing. I'm usually not a fan of what seems a blanket usage of the effect (on the intro) but It definitely adds character here. The bitcrushed triangle wave lead harmonics may be too much for some, I think they're cute. The guitar lead is surprisingly fitting though, and a highlight for me. The climax screams awesomeness and power. I think you did a great job with the arrangement here. Deftones is one of my favorite bands of all time (white pony is one of the best metal albums ever made, imo) and I loved the reference there. Overall amazing work putting this together, these different elements could end in disaster on less experienced hands but you managed to craft this with expertise. YES