Prefuse's SWIFT KICK IN THE PANTZ to U downloadin' BITERS

that'll show me!

that post makes me want to steal his wallet.

Prefuse 73 told me I needed to "watch my back next time I rolled up in Williamsburg".

I think this guy has some issues. Also, I NEVER would have heard his music were it not for downloading.

Also, watch your back next time you're rolling up in Williamsburg.

ooh, such a rough neighborhood that is.

Aren't you the one who created the "new album leak alert" thread?

Not at all, because, unlike Mr. Prefuse, Sleater-Kinney are actually not being jerks at all, are being understanding of the download vs. supporting the band situation i.e. not being black & white about it, and actually show some pre-thought was put into their statement.

Like somebody else said, downloaders are usually their most hardcore fans to begin with. Without it countless artists would never get their music exposed to the general public in the first place.

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you and licking the boot that kicks you.

http://www.smithandplant.com

the donation thing would really work because owning CDs has become pretty undesirable to me (tho being able to buy a CD-R of the files was wavs might be nice!)

i'm definitely not going to go out of my way to make this one grow on me, because at this point i have no intention of purchasing it (or ever rolling up in teh Williamsburg, for that matter)

Fans that lack control to wait for album release time versus artists who lack the control to not lash out every time something pisses them off...

GUH WUH?!

and just found out Piano Overlord is a new pseudonym for Herren himself

http://www.hipinion.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=82810

On the other hand though, there are plenty i have bought that i wouldn't have even payed attention to were buying it first the only way to hear it completely.

Oh, yeah, he's a cock...

I'm wondering if some contracts would prevent it - probably if it was presented as not exactly money for music.

artists running telethons of self-interest much like the support drives that run on "ad-free" public television

http://images.prg.com/prg.com/projects/U2/bono.jpg
WE LOVE YOU FANS! IF YOU WANT CONTINUED HIGH-QUALITY U2 ALBUMZ CALL NOW WITH YOUR $100 DONATION AND GET A FREE REPLICA AMERICAN FLAG WITH AUTHENTIC BONO SWEAT ON IT!"

i write software for a living. what if my clients took the software when i was finished and then didn't pay me?

i know all the arguments trying to justify it and i'd love to believe them. there are some that are definitely true. but at the same time, i gotta side with jack on this.

until there is a formal mechanism for making sure artists get some kind of compensation, it's just kinda sketchy. we can get all love-in and happy over a virtual tip jar type economy (google for it, your paypal biz ain't new at all) where a moral sharing ethic is lauded and so on, but until someone proves that it's possible, it feels very iffy.

i can't possibly imagine waiting for a virtual tip jar to pay me for the time i spend writing software. in most cases, most people don't remotely understand how much time/money/effort it takes to produce all kinds of products, and generally will underpay if they're allowed to choose what to pay. people would pay me $200 for software that cost me $15,000 to make. if that.

i like free software... i support free and open software, and i even write it, but some stuff cannot be free. from that same perspective, i totally understand the thinking of an artist who decides they can't give away their product. scott may just be mad cause from what i understand about this record, there's a lot of collaborators and people who might expect to be paid a little something. suddenly his reputation with all of those people is at stake.
m.

Also, you may have read firstworldman's link and still disagree with him, but I think he raises some good points there.

But aside from that... why the hell did the Prefuse 73 album leak before street date? Did his label send out advance copies? Did he send out advance copies to friends of his?

Moreover, did he HAVE to send out advance copies at all? If he didn't send out any advance copies, none of this would have happened. And I don't think anyone would have been upset if all of Scott's fans waited until street date to hear his new album.

So, I'm not shedding any tears for Herren, sorry.. much less shouting "you COCK" at anyone that has shared his files.

no more advance copies = no more timely record reviews = broker rock crits 'cause they can't sell promos no more.

i just don't think that your analogy works...
when is the last time you programmed software live on stage before an audience of paying attendees? did they buy a tshirt? did you persuade them to buy a rare floppy disk with previously unreleased extensions on it?
see what i mean?

i know for a fact that prefuse charges a pretty hefty fee. and he deserves it, he puts on a pretty great show and he has to travel from spain to play here. but reacting in a knee-jerk fashion against inevitability is just useless. and he's still selling a lot of records... this record will be his biggest yet. hip hop heads will eat it up. indie people will cop it for the blonde redhead and books and broadcast, etc, etc, etc

Artists need to convert this into a marketing tool for themselves, possibly through leaking non-album tracks and single edits to help generate buzz. Also, it should be possible to encode ownership details into advance copies so that you can track down the source of unauthroized mp3 leaks and prosecute them.

What exactly does having your record reviewed before it's available in stores gain you, particularly in an era when people can download it off the internet before the (largely artificial) release date?

I'm pretty sure I watched him check his email for about 45 minutes one time!

..hoping everyone read that electronic music myths thread

Aaah. Still though, doesn't make the reuse any less childish.

no more advance copies = no more timely record reviews = broker rock crits 'cause they can't sell promos no more.

Huh? what do timely record reviews have to do with not being able to sell promos back? Also, aside from big name acts, why do timely record reviews matter at all?

artist's label sends out promos. rock crit writes review, sells promo.

no more advance copies (ie. promos), no more reviews, no more rock crits selling promos.

timely record reviews = the record buying public (all two of them left) knows what's fresh and available in the stores.

it's not fucking rocket science, people.

..removing the "advance" from advanced promos, and just sending promos instead, in other words.

m.

secondly, mike (xpost),
that's sad to hear, but in the 3 times i've seen him he's always used his mpc. and at coachella he had a full band.

It isn't "rocket science" but it also isn't the only way to promote your non-ephemeral product (a CD != a concert) and the current model leaves itself wide open for things like reviewers selling promos before the album hits the streets that fall into the hands of someone who then rips it and puts it on the Internet, leading to an artist's rant on a website.

Simpsons stealing cable TV episode to thread

-- Drew Daniel (mces...), February 17th, 2005.

it's somewhat funny to think at how much more the "thieves" are able to articulate their arguments... but then i guess i'm already convinced one way, so...

Because not every band gives a shit about or needs a Rolling Stone review?

I mean, I agree with that. I'm not disputing anything, just trying to explain why labels do promos. And it is not rocket science.

why are you doing this? being so contrary just for the sake of it? it's silly.

Look, I started a thread on this already under the "Rock Album Leaks: The Emperor Has No Firewall", but it's sitting there.. and there's a previous thread for that topic already as well.

are YOU willing to work for free? or how about at a significant pay cut?
m.

xpost - album leaks create even more buzz now donut! Look at this thread!

well, then you can obviously afford to do so. i can't. i do plenty of things for free as well, but 40-50 hours a week, i have to be paid for those.
m.

Still though, I'm sure the artists are hardly thrilled with this new "buzz" if they're having to make statements on their websites about fingerwagging fans into removing mp3s from their share folders.

Album leaks hurt "buzz", too. Daft Punk Human After All is a prime example.

I think it's more that we're going from the premise of the original rant and giving opinions/impressions.

What if promo CDs only had portions of the songs on them?

My name is Scott, and I'm a music stealer.

"The first minute of "Testicular Bravery," the Sage Francis tribute from up and coming MC BallZac, sounds okay enough..."

see also Wilco.

nobody FOR filetrading copyrighted music truly has a good argument why they should be allowed to have something for nothing. but if enough people would stand up and say, "PLEASE!" then the govt might actually do something in your favor and figure out a way for justice to be served and property rights respected.

http://eff.org/share/?f=compensation.html

m.

The difference is that the artist is not working under any sort of contract with the audience. Their work is purely speculative and they have to know they're taking a gamble. Someone could spend several years of his life working on an album only to see it flop and not make a penny. If a musician wants a more stable, clear-cut relationship between his work and the pay he receives then he's free to attempt a career in commercial music, soundtracks, etc. By releasing albums, a musician is attempting to be recognized as an artist and to enter some sort of worldwide cultural dialogue. He doesn't really have any choice but to accept the rules and whims of that cultural dynamic for better or worse.

F. Scott Fitzgerald used to write short stories for the Saturday Evening Post. In the early 20s these weekly mags were mass entertainment roughly comparable to television, and they paid their top writers $4,000 per story (about $35,000 now). But times changed and short stories became less valuable, to the point now where even high-profile writers sometimes place stories for less than $1,000. Isn't that what is happening to recorded music now? It's becoming less valuable.

but this is the nature of any bizness. my job has a performance and if that performance lags, then my business lags. if i work in software that no one wants, i get no business.

my point was: we all do some kind of work unless we're independently wealthy. when your job doesn't pay enough, you move on or you make that work a hobby for your free time.

and maybe that's that. perhaps it's an end of a really short era... popular music will live on like it did in the past centuries. just drastically different. or not. i just wish people were getting paid for their effort. (if they want payment.)
m.

m.

brrr. i remember how intense this argument got on "dissensus". but my thoughts on this whole debate are changing and evolving by the second. at base, my problem is still that for musicians this is their livelihood, and they deserve to earn money for it. however:

• although it's a truism, it really does seem that wider access to downloads = more music bought. my own experience backs this up, people here all seem to agree, and ... aren't UK album sales wildly up on what they were a couple of years back? (or am i getting confused?)

• exactly how much money does the average artist get per album sold anyway? i've always understood that the only way to make any real money through music is by licensing yr stuff for films/adverts/etc (aka "selling out") or by having a huge hit that then gets picked up and used all over the place, thus earning you big bucks (aka "selling out").

this is a huge, vast over-simplification, but it seems to me that the people stopping small-to-middling artists making big bucks aren't downloaders but the same people it's always been: their record companies. what we should be moving towards (utopian idealism/glib stereotyping warning) is some kind of web-based artist-centric system whereby musicians share their work with people who are willing to pay for it, and without huge amounts being creamed off to keep a bunch of corporate wankshafts in cocaine.

the problem, as i've said before, is that artists aren't really in a position to do this. the labels still write the cheques, therefore they hold the power. they need to be willing to dissolve themselves.

these are ill-formed thoughts, but ... well, what exactly is "the industry" doing here? absolutely fuck all that we can see. and until it gets its act together and gets out of the mid-20th century, people are going to download/share. end of story.

one last thing. i wonder if ILMers as a whole aren't slightly more likely to pay up/buy an album they've downloaded because they actually care about the music? what really worries me about sharing etc is that it'll breed a casually dismissive approach in the casual buyer, who'll happily nick the odd song/album and not even give the issue a second's thought. but that's kinda snobby.

Grimly, that's a highly unfair and inaccurate portrait of the labels, especially the indies who represent all those small-to-middling artists and tend to have very artist-friendly deals.

The most tiresome thing in all this is the whole self-righteousness of file-traders. Can't you just admit it's theft, and that you don't give a damn? Yeesh, every doofus with a sampler figured that one out years ago.

there are very few true indies now, though, aren't there? looking at the pile of 50 or so CDs next to me - none of which could be described as particularly "mainstream" - i can see an awful lot of corporate logos.

and the point remains the same: the music industry has to evolve, to deal with the all-too-real phenomenon of sharing/downloading, if artists are to continue to thrive. and it is the labels that have to find a way forward, not stay stuck in the past and hope it's all going to go away. the longer they refuse to engage with reality, the more potential revenue artists will lose as those P2P networks whirr away.

leaving aside any question about whether the prefuse guy is right or wrong or a cock or a martyr, it doesn't seem like whining about it makes good economic sense in any case, if that's what he's really worried about.

they have the most to lose. digital formats + p2p networks has rendered the distribution chain close to pointless. the cost is tiny now. of course, they can spin themselves as providing marketing, booking, commercial licensing, and recording services. maybe even branding services. i mean, in the indie realm, a label really means something. and it has in the past as well. labels like def jux, kill rock stars, warp, etc have a wide, yet narrow blanket of what kind artist fits in. it's a voucher. "this track is good cause snoop dog says so."

but yeah, p2p really kills elements of the industry more than the artist itself.

or maybe not. who knows? "wait and see."
m.

http://riffcentral.blogspot.com/

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It's kind of like seeing a movie in a theater v. watching it on TV. If I miss the theatrical run of a David Lynch film I'm mad at myself, b/c I know I missed the immersive "total experience," all the great sound design and so on, even though I can get the plot (or lack thereof) from renting the DVD.

Hmm. I wouldn't want to overstate the novelty of the situation (duplication is not new ie. people made tapes of records for friends, people taped off the radio, etc before the dl brouhaha), but all the same I do feel that in going from the idea of acquiring an art object (a record, a total experience) to downloading some files that you keep on your hard drive until they bore you and you throw em away (ie. consuming music becomes more like acquiring a popsicle that's melting and less like acquiring a bust of Caesar that is a part of your home), the diminished materiality of the art goes hand in hand with the rhetoric that it's less of a something worth paying for. The more people that feel that way, the more ghostly the end results of the makingmusic-consuming music chain are, the less likely people are to feel that there are any significant costs involved. So I see the philosophy of it underwriting the finances of it. Obviously I am familiar with the whole "I downloaded a song, liked it, so I bought the album" experience. That is real and it does happen; hopefully often and I know it's happened in my case. But increasingly over the last few years when we play shows we meet kids who say "I love your music" and we ask them what albums of ours they have and they get sheepish and embarassed and just tell us "Oh, um, I don't know, I just have a bunch of mp3s". It's awesome that they like our stuff, but when I think of how much thought goes into creating a conceptually coherent album (of particular songs in a particular order with particular art and particular information) on our end and how utterly irrelevant it is to the way people are experiencing the sound on their end, it's pretty depressing. Sorry, I seem to keep returning to this on an art level rather than on a financial level. I can only imagine that if enough people who love our music feel content with having files they got off soulseek because their formative becoming-a-music-geek years in college were spent ripping and burning mp3s with friends, that can't be unusual and it can't be unrelated to the marketplace. But there's no point in being "opposed" to it. It's how things are now. It's like being tied to the tracks and saying "I am opposed to the train that's going to run me over". The train really doesn't give a shit.

All very true!

and as gloriously immersive as cinema experience can be, it's never been a perfect picture.

To balance my rather melancholic pronouncements, let me also say that part of what is fun about releasing music into the world is exactly that sense that you have lost control over how it's going to get used, where it will be played, how it will be trampled on or played too loud or used as a drink coaster or slapped onto a student film or made out to or violently mocked at a party etc. There is an "ideal listening situation" in the minds of people who make the records, but it's pretty much a fantasy. Of course you can be moved and connect with art you're hearing on crappy speakers in mono with the "Loudness" button set too high etc. Yes the "golden age of the album" is a (rockist?) ideological construction. etc etc etc

that said . . . and on another point

Sometimes bad listening conditions are the best ever . . .
I had a great van drive listening to Van Halen where we could only hear the left channel- so there was no David Lee Roth and barely any Eddie! I'm sure it's not the experience that Van Halen intended for me to have- but it was really amazing and fun.

Hearing something on an mp3 is way better than never hearing it at all, and as a way to share an archive of odds and sods, it's a fantastic thing- sites like UBUWEB are pretty incredible, and yeah maybe if I was at the Dia center or the lIbrary of congress I could acquire some of those recordings, but now thanks to the web and mp3 sharing/playing/downloading, I can hear La Monte Young noise performances and radio interviews with Lacan etc etc. Ditto for the amazing "American Memory" website of folk recordings. So there are some big positives to the culture of downloading.

not at all: as a purchaser/downloader, it's fascinating to hear an artist's POV.

but i really want to know more about how it affects you financially. i understand you're not dependent solely on income from your music, but even so: artistic considerations aside, how do you feel about the fact a (growing) proportion of your fanbase isn't paying a penny to hear your music? put simply: what implications do you think this will have for your work in the future?

As mercenary and business-speak as this sounds, I think artists have to look at their recorded output as just a part of their overall project (if they're thinking of it in financial terms at all). I would say in this era, an "album" is a several headed beast - and as much a marketing tool as a primary revenue generator. Frankly, artists really have to think about customer acquisition, lifetime value, and various ways of monetizing their fanbase. I know all of this sounds evil and maybe it is, but in this discussion it's important.

Yeah on iTunes there seems to be some duration based cut-off point too- if a jazz track is 20 minutes long then you can't get it for a dollar, you have to spring for the album- I'm not sure what the duration is though as I did get some 9 minute epics for a buck.
"Faust Tapes" is a good example of something that is best approached as "all-or-nothing" if you're really going to "get" it, ie. you would have a very skewed picture of what that album was like if you just excerpted any one section from it- the composition *is* the total statement, I reckon. (Though the popsicle lover in me has favorite parts)

SCOTT HERREN: ..."

hahaha

Pitchfork: I've got a million questions for your million projects.

Scott Herren: Hang on. Simon, what am I allowed to talk about?

Simon [from Warp]: The Prefuse 73 album. And then the Books EP. What else did he want to know about?

Pitchfork: I want to ask about a collaboration I've heard you've done with Sa-Ra Creative Partners.

Herren: Okay, I can't talk about the Piano Overlord project. I'll just break down what it is in the context of Prefuse work.

...

ONLY DO WHAT SIMON SAYS!!

You know, I didn't actually HATE the guy per se but my god if he pats himself any harder on the back he'll wrench his arms out of his sockets.

I'm with Donut here.

REALLY FUCKIN' DEEP, DUDE.

Herren: True.

AUGH.

I always thought that was a joke referrence to Gil Scott-Heron. Is it?

yeah, we game emusic with this same situation... they don't have controls in their system yet to purchase a whole album. it's all X songs per $Y monthly fee. so your standard hardcore band cd with 25-40 songs at one to two minutes each is gonna cost you WAY more than some rad jazz record that's got 2 tracks at thirty minutes each. both the atavistic it's unheard music series labels are full of these... etc etc. it's cool, but uncool. i'd love a compromise on a case by case basis. buy the cool hardcore record for 10 or 15 instead of 40 and buy the jazz record for 10 or 15... just the same.

there are guys with huge lists of all the one track full length albums... evidentally there are quite a few. it's just such a hilarious reason to buy a record tho. it seems autistic or something. "i only buy cds with 5 tracks." in this case, the game is one.
m.