8 (disambiguation)

8 is the eighth year of the Common Era.

8, 8th, eight or eighth may also refer to: 8 (number), the natural number following 7 and preceding 9

Art

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Play Me

"Play Me" is a 1972 song by Neil Diamond from his album Moods. The song, the first single from Moods, was recorded in February 1972 in Los Angeles. It was released as a single in May 1972 and peaked at #11 in the United States in September of that year. It was listed by Billboard as #27 of his best 30 songs.

The "catchy pop-rock" song, a medium-tempo waltz, features broken chords played on the acoustic guitar, courtesy of Diamond's long-time collaborator Richard Bennett. Bennett had played on a few songs on Diamond's 1971 album Stones; Moods was his first full album with him, and he played on every Diamond album until 1987 and toured with him for 17 years.

Reception

Female praise

"Play Me" is an audience favorite, especially, it seems, among women, who carry signs that read "Neil, Play Me" to his performances and scream "me, me, me" when he plays the tune, described as "an entreaty to romance". Along with "Love on the Rocks" and "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", it is one of the "baritone ballads" that have "60-year-old women erupting in girlish screams"; it makes female audience members shriek and swoon. According to Melissa Ruggieri, writing for Media General about a 2008 concert, "Diamond [at age 67] also still possesses the ability to charm, even though he didn't need to do much except wiggle his prominent eyebrows at women in the crowd to elicit schoolgirl-like squeals—'Play Me,' in particular, had a bizarre aphrodisiac effect."

Free music

Free music or libre music is music that, like free software, can freely be copied, distributed and modified for any purpose. Thus free music is either in the public domain or licensed under a free license by the artist or copyright holder themselves, often as a method of promotion. It does not mean that there should be no fee involved. The word free refers to freedom (as in free software), not to price.

The Free Music Philosophy generally encourages creators to free music using whatever language or methods they wish. A Free Music Public License (FMPL) is available for those who prefer a formal approach. Some free music is licensed under licenses that are intended for software (like the GPL) or other writings (the GFDL). But there are also licenses especially for music and other works of art, such as EFF's Open Audio License, LinuxTag's Open Music License, the Free Art license and some of the Creative Commons Licences.

History

Before the advent of copyright law in the early 18th century and its subsequent application to music compositions first, all music was "free" according to the definitions used in free software or free music, since there were no copyright restrictions. In practice however, music reproduction was generally restricted to live performances and the legalities of playing other people's music was unclear in most jurisdictions. Copyright laws changed this gradually so much so that in the late 20th century, copying a few words of a musical composition or a few seconds of a sound recording, the two forms of music copyright, could be considered criminal infringement.

Royalty-free

Royalty-free, or RF, refers to the right to use copyrighted material or intellectual property without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use or per volume sold, or some time period of use or sales.

Computer standards

Many computer industry standards, especially those developed and submitted by industry consortium's or individual companies, involve royalties for the actual use of these standards. These royalties are typically charged on a "per port" basis, where the manufacturer of end-user devices has to pay a small fixed fee for each device sold, and also include a substantial annual fixed fee. With millions of devices sold each year, the royalties can amount to several millions of dollars, which is a significant burden for the manufacturer. Examples of such royalties-based standards include IEEE 1394, HDMI, and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.

Royalty-free standards do not include any "per-port" or "per-volume" charges or annual payments for the actual implementation of the standard, even though the text of the actual specification is typically protected by copyright and needs to be purchased from the standards body. Most open standards are royalty-free, and many proprietary standards are royalty-free as well. Examples of royalty-free standards include DisplayPort, VGA, VP8, and Matroska.