Prince and Village People dive into Pirate Bay

"dive into"

i get it.

lol.

"go for a dip in"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/17/the-pirate-bay-trial-guilty-verdict

they finally got got. dumb.

Since Pirate Bay doesn't host anything, does this verdict mean that 90 percent of the Internet is now illegal in Sweden?

Did he really say "Really, it's a bit LOL"?

As long as he pronounced it "loll" and not "Ell-Oh-Ell" I'm cool.

i think he twittered it

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Will they be going after Google eventually? Now that Googling "[artist name] rapidshare/mediafire/whatever" is one of the easiest ways to find illegal downloads?

most critics argue that Google should be sued next, for linking to copyright material. they really should win the appeal but will take years.

maybe piratebay dudes could've done more to divert people to other sites. if it's possible to have 10-20 portals all equally well known and used it would be harder to single one out the way they have been.

haven't used them for anything for a few years anyway.

I don't torrent nowadays cos my ISP is a twunt.

If people really gave a shit what happened in Sweden we'd have a decent public service infrastructure by now.

But re: blueski's thing about diverting people, I suspect that Piratebay's, um, confrontational attitude hasn't helped them in this case so far.

swedish prison is probably awesome anyway

It's full of beautiful ladies but the football and food are shite.

If the food's that shite how do you explain the shape of Tomas Brolin?

dudes swedish food is not shite

even tho they have a chocolate bar called PLOPP

Those Ikea meatballs are nasty tho.

Read a bit of slashdot's comments, of which there are already a thousand. The argument that people are stealing from artists is really solid as a myth. If the RIAA has dropped the ball on everything leading the industry into the 21st century, they've been overwhelmingly successful in perpetrating this myth.

As a longstanding independent performing & recording musician I have lots of experience with recording music and not getting any money from it. The fantasy of the rock star earning tons of money from records (hell any money at all, they get cheated by the Man just as much) is as big a fantasy of any kid growing up to be Michael Jordon or Barry Bonds. We're talking fractions of fractions of a percent of people.

Anyone here a musician that makes money from their recordings? Want to share some experiences?

Only money I ever made from music (aside from selling maybe a total of 200 or so CDs personally at shows) was royalties from Momus for the Super Madrigal Bros. album, which came to about a month's rent over 4 years. Some of my friends have been on national TV and their labels barely give them that much.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/music/newsid_8007000/8007950.stm

Paul McCartney has labelled last week's Pirate Bay verdict as "fair".

Four men were found guilty by a Swedish court of breaking copyright rules and ordered to repay damages to entertainment companies on 17 April.

The file-sharing website made millions of music and film files available to users for free.

Speaking to Newsbeat McCartney said: "If you get on a bus you've got to pay. And I think it's fair, you should pay your ticket."

Artistic reward

Sir Paul McCartney, speaking before headlining US festival Coachella, said: "Anyone who does something good, particularly if you get really lucky and do a great artistic thing and have a mega hit, I think you should get rewarded for that.

"I'm in favour of that sort of thing."

He added: "The problem is you get a lot of young bands coming up and some of them aren't going to last forever so if they have a massive hit that's going to pay their mortgage forever.

"They're going to feed the children on that and if they don't get that money, if they don't see that money, I think it's a bit of a pity.

"I've been very lucky because my main era with the Beatles was at a time when everyone did get paid.

"Particularly for young bands and they've got a young family, I don't want to see them destitute after a couple of years when they were mega. So I think it's fair."

Jules De Martino from The Ting Tings - also playing the American festival - agreed that new bands are the bracket most affected by illegal file sharing.

He said, "When you're a new band it really sucks, it is really hard.

"You should value art, even if it's a penny. Art has to have a bit of value, whatever that cost is."

The Tings Tings' lead-singer Katie White also commented: "I think there should be a five play rule or something. If you play a record more than five times you should buy it because you're getting pleasure from it."

However, some bands are more sympathetic towards internet users sharing files free of charge.

White Lies' lead singer Harry McVeigh said: "The band still makes money and they can still carry on making music so its not actually the worst thing in the world."

Following last week's trial site founders Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were all sentenced to 12 months in jail for breaching copyright and order to pay £3 million in damages.

Speaking after the verdict about the compensation, one of the men, Peter Sunde said, "We can't pay and we wouldn't pay."

The Pirate Bay website currently continues to operate.

Entertainment companies argued that the guilty verdict sent out a warning message to other file sharing websites.

The four Pirate Bay founders have already said they will appeal against their sentences.

"I think there should be a five play rule or something. If you play a record more than five times you should buy it because you're getting pleasure from it."

...and slowly the punchline gallops toward the camera...

Skimming that piece, I misread this:

He said, "When you're a new band it really sucks, it is really hard.

"You should value art, even if it's a penny. Art has to have a bit of value, whatever that cost is."

As:

"You should value a new band, even if it sucks."

I figured, yeah, it makes sense that the Ting Tings guy should say that.

who is your ISP, noodle?

http://www.karoo.co.uk/

Prince and Village People dive into pirate bay almost sounds like a plausible headline from the early 80s.

Once again Paul McCartney opens his mouth and turns into a prick.

Let's say all this piracy kills the music industry, leaving only musicians that don't care about making money-those unfortunate ones who would be/are doing it anyways-and ask yourself would this really be something detrimental to the art form.

I say the art form would progress more in a year than it has in the last 50.

Or... only self-indulgent rich people would be able to make music.

another paris hilton album :D

srsly though, why is it that no one expects painters to paint for free or writers to write for free, but everyone wants musicians to make music for free

I mean, is self-delusional rationalization for stealing other people's work really THAT powerful

no one paints for free?

please reread what I wrote

man i've not made money on any of the bands i've been in but -- while i def download to a degree -- the thing is that it hurts even bands that do it on a small local level.

like basically put it this way, it's always going to cost money to record -- even home recording costs money for good mic pres, good mics, and stuff if you're actually going to have it not sound like shit -- mastering costs money, practice space rent costs money, etc etc

frankly itunes checks don't amount to shit, it's even worse than conventional CD sales, since apple takes a cut before your label/distributor....so that's like "hey kids enjoy your $4.56 check every six months"...

but at base level now it's so fucking hard to even sell CDs at show...we've seriously had kids kinda front on us and act like we were being dicks when we wanted $10 for a goddamn CD and they said they "loved our band"....Basically, this last CD release show I did, we had TONS of local radio play, article in the City Pages, hype etc etc...we pretty much had the club packed, and did 44 CDs...which is actually great by today's standards...

back in 99 my old band didn't get shit for press, basically ran under the radar of radio totally, were in no way as well covered and had a smaller crowd...I remember we sold like 70 that night...that's how much it's gone down..

i mean i'm not saying i ever wanted to make money but even just breaking remotely even seems so damn hard now it's like now that the last band is done even starting a band seems sort of overwhelming and maybe not worth it anymore....

"srsly though, why is it that no one expects painters to paint for free or writers to write for free, but everyone wants musicians to make music for free"

Because most of us listen to music for free all the time (via radio or on TV or streaming on the web or whatever) and have been since as long as we've been alive?

it's just like that fucking kid i know goddamn well whose parents is putting him through the university standing there acting like he expected our disc to be free at the show was just like fuck u.

I always try to buy product at shows whenever people bother to sell stuff anymore.

Because most of us listen to music for free all the time (via radio or on TV or streaming on the web or whatever) and have been since as long as we've been alive?

You paid for your radio. You paid for your TV. You paid for your computer. A lot of money gets shelled out for this "free music" and none of it goes to the people who are actually making the music. Does that really seem right?

(rhetorical argument, not accusatory, btw)

I paid for my computer and my iPod too though.

Technically when you buy CDs or mp3s most of that money doesn't go to the people making music either. Which is one of the reasons I like buying stuff at shows actually.

b/c who wants to deal with a physical cd, right?

try offering a link-to-download to sent to their email address that night for, I dunno, 5 bucks. seems worth a try...

hich is one of the reasons I like buying stuff at shows actually.

― Alex in SF, Monday, April 20, 2009 4:35 PM

This. I definitely try to buy from the band first, then the label, then Amoeba.

um, royalties? you may be listening to the radio "for free" but your money still indirectly goes to the composer eventually...

There's a huge wilful denial by people who steal music that brings out all kinds of bullshit justification, but there's also a real denial by concerned parties within the industry that new technologies have altered the value of their product. I doubt that the free-for-all is stoppable. I don't know if that will be good or bad for the quality of new music, but everybody involved is going to have to come to terms with major change. The music industry wouldn't be the first big industry in the world to be transformed by technology and every time this has happened in other industries there've probably been more losers than winners, short term.

"um, royalties? you may be listening to the radio "for free" but your money still indirectly goes to the composer eventually..."

I don't think people think of themselves as paying for music when they turn on the radio. I certainly don't.

That's because people don't have to think about it that way. The radio pays for it with commercials, listeners can listen for free, bands get paid.

I'm aware of that. I'm just making the point that it's easy to imagine music as being free cuz a lot of music is available to listen to for free.

i.e. the listener only has to pay by switching to another station when an annoying commercial comes on.

I understand.

I still think this issue is way too complex to simply turn it into a stealing/non-stealing issue. All the metaphores in the world - does a painter paint for free, stealing a bread would also get you in jail so why not this etc. - won't relate to this issue, because it's another thing all together. It feels like, on a time line, we're only in the first mile of a marathon. 'Illegaly' (is it? we don't even know? judges don't seem to know. what's illegal anyway?) downloading music redefines 'stealing' entirely, since people don't have to go to a record store anymore to put cd's or even vinyl in their shorts anymore to get their music 'for free'. The lure of a tune that nestled in your head in a club or on the radio can be satisfied so easily nowadays, it kind of degrades the concept of 'stealing'. And by that I'm not saying it's not stealing. Just that it's a fairly new cultural phenomenom all layers of society have trouble dealing with.

It's stealing that's become hugely socially acceptable, which is maybe what makes it an interesting phenomenon. That's only a problem if you like to think of yourself as somebody who would never steal or you think you're being stolen from.

Painters for example have a degree of defence against theft because the painting itself has a value that usually far outweighs any reproduction of it. What's messing up music as a commodity is ease of reproduction with no appreciable loss of use-value in the reproduction. The value of books - books of information or knowledge or ideas, at least - has declined similarly, but more slowly and over a longer period of time.

nvOTM the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction etc

That is what makes it interesting, yes. But don't throw it in my face now (if you directed that at me personally). It would be nice to discuss this without one's integrity being at stake. It's what all these discussions eventually end up to be, it seems, the 'but you're stealing', 'no I'm not!' thing. Hell yes I download in a way as what's being referrred to as 'illegal' (I can't think of anyone on this board not doing that), but it would be nice to leave the pointing fingers out of this. Stealing has become more acceptable, yes. But music also seems in transition - probably because of p2p, but I don't know if the cause is really that important - from a musicians point of view, from making money off records to making money off concerts and merch. Which, to me, seems to go hand in hand with the decaying record sales (if that's really a decay at all).

xxpost, NV very otm about digital reproduction.

I'm not personally having a go, sorry if it came across like that. I steal music and other stuff all the time. But it is pretty clearly some kind of theft and I'm kind of amused and fascinated at the way that lots and lots and lots of us will squirm and circumlocute to avoid seeing ourselves as digital looters.

yes I think most people would agree it is clearly theft in some way, yet not exactly the same as stealing an egg or a car, which is often argued by those harmed by piracy

Spotify in all its staggering legit glory has actually killed the urge to steal...and better still, it may ENCOURAGE listeners to go out and actually buy the slightly more obscure stuff it doesn't harbour, or stuff they want physical copies of. Seeing as Spotify will be everyone's stock music-browsing library within about 3 months, I think there's something to be said for a slight renaissance in the value of the purchased copy.

^^^is this a decent argument?

Well of course what goes on a lot of these sites can be called stealing but, as others have mentioned, the logic and rhetoric is all very slippery.

Is downloading some obscure album from the 1980s that you wanted to hear and then sticking it in an external hard drive or on some place on your computer where you'll never hear it again really stealing in practical terms? As some have said, that sort of behavior might more accurately be called sampling a product. You heard it, didn't like it and now it's gone forever. The problem comes from the fact that, should the consumer like it and want to hear more of it, is he really going to delete what he already has for free and look elsewhere online or in stores (lol) so he can purchase it legally? Why buy the cow...

And how do pirates differ in category? There's the type of person that will steal music they would have, in a more technologically primitive era, purchased legally, but because they can get it for free and pay no consequences they will DL it off of Limewire or something. This might describe the more casual music fan who wants Coldplay's newest hit but just doesn't want to pay for it.

But what of the person who has gorged on music/movies that, if it weren't for P2P, he would have never have heard about - never mind have consumed? He's technically committed more crime in the eyes of the law but he wouldn't have taken any interest if it weren't for free in the first place. He's more like someone who who watches obscure foreign movies at the library as a teen simply because he was bored and he wasn't going to pay for, or be interested in, what Blockbuster was offering. Take away the library and he'll just play outside more, he won't necessarily start going to Borders as a substitue. So who of the two downloaders is worse, really?

First off its not stealing it's copying. And it's imperfect cos CDs/vinyls have higher bitrate than MP3s and nobody pirates the artwork.

Secondly, as a lifelong musician, I think all of this "What you want musicians to work for free?" is bullshit posturing because first of all people have been stealing from musicians forever (crooked club owners, crooked managers, record contract, record companies underreporting printed albums, etc. etc.).

Third, the big outcry right now against pirated music is not coming from the musicians but from these 'entertainment companies' who say they represent not just their musicians but 'all recording artists'. The truth of the matter is they see that their status as the middle-man in all manners of modern music (recording - get Garageband, tour booking - set it up on myspace, getting music to your fans - post an mp3, etc. etc.) is vanishing before their eyes. Musicians are gaining full control of their shit and this is not good for the middle man.

Lastly, there are a lot of people out there that would play music for free, and would even suffer in order to play music.

First off its not stealing it's copying.

Horseshit. It's stealing.

Secondly, as a lifelong musician, I think all of this "What you want musicians to work for free?" is bullshit posturing because first of all people have been stealing from musicians forever (crooked club owners, crooked managers, record contract, record companies underreporting printed albums, etc. etc.).

I don't think the "everyone else jumped off the bridge" argument is helping you here.

Third, the big outcry right now against pirated music is not coming from the musicians but from these 'entertainment companies' who say they represent not just their musicians but 'all recording artists'.

haha did you miss the cavalcade of A-list stars complaining about illegal downloading over the past 10 years (Paul McCartney, Missy Elliott, Prince and Metallica off the top of my head)?

Lastly, there are a lot of people out there that would play music for free, and would even suffer in order to play music.

So this means that the people trying to make a living at it should not be able to?

haha did you miss the cavalcade of A-list stars complaining about illegal downloading over the past 10 years (Paul McCartney, Missy Elliott, Prince and Metallica off the top of my head)?

Those people represent musicians as much as the Henry Paulson represent taxpaying Americans.

HI DERE are you a musician?

I am and I would love to make money off music for a living please tell me your secret.

I don't make a living at it. I know a gigantic number of people who are trying to in the classical world and the ones who are succeeding are the people with major symphony jobs; everyone with a minor symphony job or who primarily performs via contract work has another job, ranging from running their own non-profits to tech jobs to working at universities (one dude is actually a tenure-track philosophy professor).

Interestingly, the best way people I know have made a reasonable amount of money off their music is by direct online sales. Wether a download for $2, or selling a limited run of hand-designed CDs/CDRs for $5. You cant make a living off it probably but Adam is OTM with "Those people represent musicians as much as the Henry Paulson represent taxpaying Americans." when talking about McCartney, Metallica and co.

Shitfuck, even Trent Reznor says the old model is a joke and always was. He says itunes is not the way to make any money. And he points out that the online only album he did for Saul Williams made more money for Saul in his hand, than would have been the case thru a label.

I cant help thinking *some* people think "it is the labels I want to hurt by downloading this, not the artist - they arent makin shit anyway".

Unfortunately a lot of ppl dont think that way, but its too late now. Horse, bolted.

xp Wasn't that true before the advent of Napster, et all, though?

Please keep in mind that I am not saying the old model should be preserved.

xp Matt: That's the experience of a lot of folks I know. The serious dive CD sales have taken are making touring less financially feasible for folks as well.

Third, the big outcry right now against pirated music is not coming from the musicians but from these 'entertainment companies'

that's because as a musician if you say anything other than "rah rah filesharing!" you'll get a shitload of bad internet press - believe me, even the dumbest musicians know to keep their mouths shut if they have anything negative to say about how hard it's become to get people to pay for music. great big honkin' artists who're already super-wealthy can say what they like, everybody else knows that the customer is always right, even when he's gettin a li'l five-finger discount now and then

I realise yr playing devil's advocate to a degree Dan. And I agree with your points too. I'd like to see a direct-to-artist model that rewards them rightfully and kills off the middle man. But that's a pipe dream, especially as the internet came up in such a way that at least certain of its population honestly does regard everything as rightfully theirs for nothing, which annoys me not just re music but software too, as many friends of mine make a living off either of those things!

xpost none of which matters, if you're smart you see what your audience wants and figure out a way to give it to them & make them happy enough about the whole matter to somehow float a coupla bucks your way - the age of stealing's-cool has forced musicians to think of their work as work, not some magical "...and then we'll have a lot of money" wonderland, and moreover to make artists think hard about their relationship with their audience, all of which is a 100% positive development

I suppose it matters nowt but I dont download anything from torrents. I have an emusic account and I pay for my lastfm account, and I still sometimes buy CDs too.

I admit I do make copies of friends CDs - but hell, I did that in the tape days! Fuck I BUY more music now than I ever did pre-mp3 times.

Wasn't that true before the advent of Napster, et all, though?

Oh yeah, absolutely; in fact, the genre most of the professional musicians I know are in is hit far less by downloading than rock/pop/r&b/what have you. This doesn't really change the fact that the downloading being discussed here (not the Radiohead model, not the NIN model, but people hitting slsk to grab CD-quality rips off of other people, etc) is stealing.

xp: oh don't get me started on software pirating, I'll be even more tedious

the age of stealing's-cool has forced musicians to think of their work as work, not some magical "...and then we'll have a lot of money" wonderland, and moreover to make artists think hard about their relationship with their audience, all of which is a 100% positive development

i guess this is true, but i'm actually rather wary that the artists who benefit and thrive will be whoever comes up with a creative, innovative business plan out of this situation. i don't trust any of my favourite artists, still less their management, to emerge particularly well.

no, that's true - things must & will change, are changing, and the nature of the trade will change in the process. but: what is "well"? there is no reason for anybody to stop doing good work.

i dont see how this is a '100%' positive development. its a mixed bag

the age of stealing's-cool has forced musicians to think of their work as work, not some magical "...and then we'll have a lot of money" wonderland, and moreover to make artists think hard about their relationship with their audience, all of which is a 100% positive development

i guess this is true, but i'm actually rather wary that the artists who benefit and thrive will be whoever comes up with a creative, innovative business plan out of this situation.

yeah this is something that bothers me too - for every case of a guy like lil wayne who played the new model brilliantly in a way that was equally fruitful for him and his fans there's a million guys like charles hamilton who get tons of press based on internet gamesmanship alone. and i guess this is more of blaming the music press but these "stories" are seemingly overtaking quality of music in terms of importance, but i'm sure that's the priority of the labels too.

altho it's funny that two of the biggest pop stars atm - taylor swift and lady gaga - came up in 100% old model fashion

there is no reason for anybody to stop doing good work.

nah, but some types of artist are more reliant on/beholden to existing industry structures than others - this obv benefits people at either end of the spectrum, the DIY musicians used to doing everything themselves and the megasuperstars who can do whatever they want, but not necessarily those in the middle...

i dont see how this is a '100%' positive development. its a mixed bag

didn't think I was unclear, but: what is 100% positive is that working musicians are now in a position where they're forced to cast aside some pretty infantile notions of what it means to be an artist & to embrace what are imo better, healthier, more productive, more positive ideas about art-as-work

not "the whole deal" - just that part

and yeah there's jordan's more negative slant on it, that artists who make bad music will be the ones who take advantage of the need for a new business model!

don't get me wrong though I'm always gonna be a little pissed that I didn't get to really bro down with the "money, it flows through a magic pipeline into my wallet & I hardly have to do shit" era

altho it's funny that two of the biggest pop stars atm - taylor swift and lady gaga - came up in 100% old model fashion

tbh i haven't seen anyone coming up to anywhere near the (mainstream) top in anything other than an old school fashion. every breakthrough act since lily allen has been trailed with a "myspace slant" to their early promo but they've all had a good, solid industry structure behind them too.

I'm still trying to work out what my patterns of honest CD/mp3-buying (now sparse) and online thievery (now very sparse) would be were it not for Spotify. When I actually have any money I'm sure I'll resume building my CD library in earnest, but there's a lot I currently have easy access to which I probably won't get around to purchasing. It's the slightly-younger generation who never really had to buy music at all which I worry for.

On the plus side, and I say this as someone who's wading into the choppy waters of band membership, easy access to studio recordings will possibly provoke artists into a) placing more of a premium on their live shows, and b) exercising better quality control in the studio, releasing only when they have the material to do so. J0hn kinda makes the same point I think.

i think the basic problem is still a disconnect in the marketplace. the product has been devalued by ease of replication and distribution. i work in newspapers, which have undergone something similar (music isn't the only thing people want for free these days), so i understand how hard this is to adjust to. and i understand the tendency to try to find ways to thwart the technology or blame the consumers rather than try to acclimate to the new, uncomfortable reality that what you do isn't worth as much as it used to be. but that's still the reality. i pay for my emusic subscription, because to me they've hit on a reasonable price point while offering lots of stuff i'm interested in. their rates are way too low for most major labels, and i totally understand that artists are not getting the same reward from a portion of 25 cents that they get from a portion of a dollar or whatever. but that's because a song -- any song -- is actually worth less to the consumer now than it was 10 years ago. and all the efforts to artificially inflate that value and cling to economic models based on it are just ultimately doomed.

that doesn't mean everybody has to work for free. but it probably means fewer people being able to retire off that one big hit, like mccartney talks about up there -- but that's only ever been a tiny number of people anyway. and it obviously means there need to be other models. (like, do ISPs pay any ascap fees or anything like that? probably they should.)

all of which is to say that i think the arguments about stealing-vs.-not-stealing are mostly angels-on-pinheads stuff. the old ethics were dictated and enforced by the limitations of old technology. with old technology superseded, you can't seriously expect the old ethics to remain in place.

Pirate Bay Admins Shot By Navy Seals

i totally understand that artists are not getting the same reward from a portion of 25 cents that they get from a portion of a dollar or whatever. but that's because a song -- any song -- is actually worth less to the consumer now than it was 10 years ago.

this. and part of what that means is that people who like music have more and easier access to more music than ever before. not less.

like, do ISPs pay any ascap fees or anything like that? probably they should.

No they shouldnt, because an ISP is not a radio station in this analogy, really. They're not the ones "broadcasting" the music; its the websites et al doing that. Online radio should be paying the fees, and I seem to recall there was a massive stink about that a couple of years back.

Making the ISPs pay the fees is like, um.. making the antenna or the radio pay the fees. Sort of.

Well, let's assume that the trend is towards people expecting music to be available at the click of a mouse. Let's assume it is. Let's assume everything finds its way onto Spotify or equivalent. And let's assume that you can upload these tracks to your iPod/whatever.

What this will do is prevent a band from earning much money while it is not publicly functional. People will buy the product, there will be demand for the luxury of a concrete purchase. But once a band is gone, it will not earn much from retrospective sales. Its earnings will come from its existence, its physical manifestations in the live setting, or perhaps its innovations of product (so much more can be done with band merchandise, for instance). Bands will have to cultivate genuine, interactive followings to survive. Almost cults! But nice ones.

A flipside of technological advances is that recording this studio output will become much cheaper, and that band members themselves will become production experts.

xpost

but "online radio" is the least of it, and until recently has generally been saddled with the most restrictions and the highest overhead. that's what allowed services like audioscrobble/last.fm and pandora to catch up in the first place.

in practice the ISPs probably should pay ascap fees, though as bandwidth increases the traffic devoted to music is going to become a drop in the bucket compared to the traffic in video.

yeah, i think basically all royalty- and rights-holders are going to have to negotiate some small standard usage fees from ISPs (or whatever the next-generation version of ISPs is). it's true that not everyone who uses the internet uses it to access movies, but not everyone who walks into a bar sticks around to see the band. doesn't matter, the bar still has to pay the set fee.

i don't know that that's the ultimate solution, but i think it's one way the existing model is going to have to change. you have to get concessions where the distribution is actually happening.

Wont happen. Asking the ISP to pay the fees is like asking the electricity company to do so for TV shows. The ISP is too neutral, they just pass you data through the pipes.

More to the point, asking that this happens opens a can of worms whereby EVERYONE - newspapers, online stores, advertising, music, movies, tv shows, online games etc etc - pass their fees to ISPS.

Then, regardless of what the end user actually WANTS from their internet, the ISp has to charge them $400 a month to recoup their costs.

How about ... no.

i don't know if it'll happen or not, but the ISPs are more than neutral pass-through agents. they profit directly from all the content that their users have access to. they have a vested interest in that content being accessible, and they offer services like broadband explicitly designed to access it. and it's a much more direct place to go than to try to track down every peer-to-peer or torrent or rapidshare user.

and you wouldn't have to ding them too much. with hundreds of millions of people online, 50 cents a month each or something would generate a lot of cash.

(the ISPs aren't really like a phone company, an electric company, a broadcast network, a cable company, or any of those -- they don't really have a direct analogy. that's part of the problem with the response to this issue so far is everybody from the RIAA on up -- and down -- has been trying to build responses on existing models. but the existing models just don't fit the situation.)

Hmm I dunno if I agree, I *do* think theyre akin to a telco in analogy.

But then again, it is a little grey of an area.

The other problem with going down these paths, is it also opens up the ISPs to the responsibility to be sued by the RIAA et al when the end users pirate things.

An Aus ISP (iinet) is being basically made a test case scapegoat on this issue at the moment. The film/TV companies argument is the ISP knew they had torrenters doing illegal things on their systems and did nothing to stop it.

THe ISPs argument - which I agree with - is that they will happily stop it - IF THE POLICE ASK THEM TO. They dont want RIAA/record companies applying the law as they see fit, and thats a very very good thing to stand against.

Er, perhaps a slight straying of topic, though.

Oh sorry one last point:

i don't know if it'll happen or not, but the ISPs are more than neutral pass-through agents. they profit directly from all the content that their users have access to.

Yer big guns aside (Telstra/BT/verizon) the majority of ISPs do not make much of a profit at all. Running an ISP is a fucking cutthroat business, with the constant catch-up to be played over tech changes, maintenance, the balance of ROI and so on. Again, the ISPs are not supplying the CONTENT. They are merely facilitating access to that content.

Should a business who use their connection for nothing but email and EFTPOS transfers have to pay a "radio tax"? Should a granny who only ever looks up bus timetables and emails her grandkids? We already pay way more than we should for data (in Aus and the UK anyway) - this issue is very much not a part of that.

Seems like under the old models the IPSs should get a cut just like the manufacturer, warehouse manager, and the truck driver who conveniently 'loses' a couple hundred boxes of CDs.

Tispy OTM about old ethics/new ethics

the age of stealing's-cool has forced musicians to think of their work as work, not some magical "...and then we'll have a lot of money" wonderland, and moreover to make artists think hard about their relationship with their audience, all of which is a 100% positive development

The biggest impact on my music the MP3 has had is now whenever I record something that I'm really proud of I can post it and suddenly all of my friends (plus people around the world who I've never met) can have it almost instantly. No need to buy blank CDrs, spend time burning each one, wasting gas money to drive around, etc.

Very intersting thread.

Economic considerations aside, what personally bugs more is how downloading is changing the way most people listen to music. Or don't listen, to be more precise.

And I know I sound a little pathetic.

As long as it doesn't prevent you from listening to music the way you want to, I really don't see why you should give a shit.

Mmmh, maybe because its the world I'm living in?

Mmmh maybe you've got too much time on your hands if you are worried about how other people are consuming music?

Things were definitely better when people sat down, fired up a bowl maybe, and listened to a whole wax cylinder. Warmer and punchier too.

Alex in SF OTM. It bugs me when people spend more time worrying about how other people listen to music than they do listening to music themselves! I know a guy who, nearly every single time I run into him, steers the conversation into a rant about how he hates that "kids" download hundreds of gigabytes of music they never listen to. Uh yeah, and people download hundreds of movies they never watch too, shit happens.

"consuming"

kinda makes Marco's point I think

xpost No, unfortunately.
But yes, the fact is exactly that people are (ahem) consuming music.
Not really my problem, of course, but maybe something to think about?

(not really, but it's not such an empty point either - when the nature of reception changes, it also changes the nature of the craft, and that's worth chewing over some)

Thanks John.
It is more or less my point.

And craft is one of the keywords here.

Aside from the issue of an artist getting paid, meaning strictly from the consumer end of things, how is it different from someone buying 30 albums in one massive spree and leaving 28 of them sitting unheard in a pile in the basement? Does that someone diminish your listening experience Marco?

"somehow"

Musical bulimia is never healthy.
Still there's a little difference.

btw i wasn't really complaining about declining CD sales in the sense of "oh wow now i can't make fabulous amounts of money" is more a matter of "damn it used to be easier to make gas money from milkwaukee to minneapolis and still have money left over for wendys. or it used to be easier to at least break even on the $1200 for pressing. just like basic survival level stuff that sort of more and more makes people want to say fuck it.

I'm not disagreeing with that Marco, but as long as you aren't the bulimic one why is it worth letting that particular bee in your bonnet?

Anyway, running this thread way off topic. I'd prefer to let the actual ILM musicians chew on this.

"kinda makes Marco's point I think"

Yeah unlike back in the day when music wasn't about consumption which was uh before any of us was even born.

I can't believe the Earl of Douchenstein hoards all those orchestras in his East wing.

pretty sure that outside of the accounting dept you wouldn't have heard anybody describing listening as "consuming" before the digital era

Oh so our pre-digital delusions are what matter most. It was still consumption, J0hn.

in the 19th century i hear people died of consumption.

listening is a form of consumption

something to consider, maybe: has devaluing the album shifted many bands' focus to actually PLAYING OUT? packing a venue will always be more profitable than selling records (for a band, not a label), and live music is, for me, a billion times better than records pretty much any day of the week

Oh so our pre-digital delusions are what matter most. It was still consumption, J0hn.

that's certainly one way of describing it - if you imagine that because it's the current paradigm, it must necessarily be the true one, then there's another delusion to be dispelled

re: M@tt's point, i've never been in a band that's actually sold merch at shows, but it is always amazing to me to watch people at clubs shell out $6 for a beer while the band's merch table has their CD on sale for $4. i mean, i'm guilty of it too -- i don't buy CDs from every local band I go see -- but there is certainly a de-valuing of music at work here.

pretty sure that outside of the accounting dept you wouldn't have heard anybody describing listening as "consuming" before the digital era

I agree but want to say this is quite ironic when you consider that MP3s are ephemeral patterns and pre-digital music was tangible and store-bought. It's like the labels are completely the opposite of what is actually happening.

listening is a form of consumption

― lex pretend, Tuesday, April 21, 2009 4:56 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

^^ this.

...which I think is actually the point (and why "worrying about other people's listening habits" is actually a potentially productive and certainly enjoyable subject for conversation): how people describe/think of their listening habits tends to infect/inform the way that those habits are generally thought of, which in turn informs the music being made, since the general discourse (naturally) extends to the people making music

How about "Yay! With mp3s I dont have to spend $1200 and months and months pressing CDs that I'm going to have to bend over backwards to sell."? Your fans can have your music instantly and without hassle on either side. Leaves lot more time for developing 'the craft' instead of 'the product'.

^^^^^ this. it sort of raises the bar for who should and should not bother go to the trouble of actually producing hard copies

something to consider, maybe: has devaluing the album shifted many bands' focus to actually PLAYING OUT? packing a venue will always be more profitable than selling records (for a band, not a label), and live music is, for me, a billion times better than records pretty much any day of the week

― i like to fart and i am crazy (gbx), Tuesday, April 21, 2009 4:58 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

honestly this doesn't really make much sense to me. if you're starting out, playing live is more what it's about than recording, you pretty much have to play out if you're going to do anything or get noticed....for me, it's pretty much you almost have to do a couple shows a month and that hasn't changed much internet or no.

maybe it's different for larger artists that can pick and choose what they do, maybe they will tour more, but they get guarantees etc.

on the average though, i'd say getting $100-150 per band on a four band bill is about the norm for a decently attended show. so, you know, there's that...$25 a pop per member

How about "Yay! With mp3s I dont have to spend $1200 and months and months pressing CDs that I'm going to have to bend over backwards to sell."? Your fans can have your music instantly and without hassle on either side. Leaves lot more time for developing 'the craft' instead of 'the product'.

― Adam Bruneau, Tuesday, April 21, 2009 5:04 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^^^ this. it sort of raises the bar for who should and should not bother go to the trouble of actually producing hard copies

― i like to fart and i am crazy (gbx), Tuesday, April 21, 2009 5:05 PM (49 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i guess you can forgo the pressing, but there are still recording and mastering costs -- if you actually care about the "craft" in terms of how it sounds you need to spend money there...

also, frankly, we may have moved to a "post CD" era in terms of usage, but certainly NOT in terms of getting press...getting reviews, write-ups, etc is pretty predicated on releasing CDs, and though i know friends that have just put up stuff for download it pretty much seems to get ignored...the mentality still exists that albums are the mark of a band, and I think this exists very strongly still within the press and even newer outlets like blogs.

m@tt otm, I don't know many critics who actually click on the "listen to our new tracks at our myspace" link

Well the industry owns the same companies that control all the mainstream outlets of press so until they either go digital or go bankrupt it's just going to be that way.

don't know why you need 1500 run in order to send A CD to a critic

(not really yr point, but still---there are ways around the problem)

yeah, unless you're a fairly established band (local or national) you're not going to get press coverage because you have mp3s on your myspace. media outlets like having release dates, etc. And in my experience, $100-150 per band on a four band bill is an excellent night out, relatively speaking. Last show my band played was a packed 3-band bill and we took away $75. Other acts were national touring people, but still ...

I've been playing music for 10 years now and that's a really really good night to me. Then again over time I've become increasingly skeptical of the clubs ripping bands off.

adam you seem to be on some ENJOY THE SAMEOCRACY SHEEPLE type shit, but i'm not even talking about "mainstream" outlets owned by big companies, i mean like actual blogs and pitchfork and college newspapers and pretty much everything has that mentality

don't know why you need 1500 run in order to send A CD to a critic

(not really yr point, but still---there are ways around the problem)

― i like to fart and i am crazy (gbx), Tuesday, April 21, 2009 5:14 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

basically most ppl do 1000 runs, because the pressing plants discourage any runs smaller than that...you COULD do 500 (doubt you could do less) but it's like basically like hardly a price break at all for getting HALF the CDs...they basically don't want to bother setting up the machines to do less than 1000....

you COULD send a CD-R or something to a critic...haha good luck with that, you and every crappy suburban nickleback sounding band....

you could send a CD-R in an elaborate hand-made package or whatever. i mean, saying the demands of the media/critical establishment justify the continued production of small-run albums by young bands is sorta weaksauce, imo. there are plenty of decent arguments, and i'm not sure that's one of the one, is all

(and, full-disclosure, i was in a band that put out a small run album that i'm very proud of, and that didn't sell basically at all)

actually, here in Denver we've had an OK response from the local critics with just mp3s and no physical product. But that's mainly because the local alt-weekly guy is a serious cheerleader for the scene here -- he really puts a lot of effort into knowing the local bands. Might not be the same everywhere. But that said, we're not going to get a lot of meaningful press without actually releasing a physical, non-CDR product. I think it's a fact.

saying the demands of the media/critical establishment justify the continued production of small-run albums by young bands is sorta weaksauce, imo.

the idea being to get people to go to your shows, this is still done primarily through the media be it new or old. people aren't just going to magickally flock to your band, lots of times they need to be told that it's something cool.....

Yes I agree I am on the SAMEOCRACY SHEEPLE shit. Pitchfork is on CNN for christsake, and bloggers that want to attract readers are going to write about the same bands big companies do. Pretty much everything has that mentality because that's the way it's been for 50+ years! It's the reason why people go to see a band to hear the songs they already know.

I think it's just as valid as an opinion as anything else on the site.

some other questions:

when ppl talk about the costs of even making music, what do they even mean? studio time? rehearsal time? sitting-in-a-room-thinkin-baout-lyrics time? time on the road? gas money? patch cords? guitar strings?

"you COULD send a CD-R or something to a critic...haha good luck with that, you and every crappy suburban nickleback sounding band...."

Yeah totally killed those Jewelled Antler Collective dudes.

"when ppl talk about the costs of even making music, what do they even mean? studio time? rehearsal time? sitting-in-a-room-thinkin-baout-lyrics time? time on the road? gas money? patch cords? guitar strings?"

sorry to restate something I posted three years ago at dreary length: It costs money to make records. This is true because it costs money to survive. Somebody has to pay for the food and the rent, and somebody has to pay for the transportation and healthcare (if you are getting fancy). Furthermore, when your tweeters are blown or your hard drive bites the dust or the neck of your bass cracks etc. that stuff has to get replaced. If, to save money, you record at home, whatever system you record consists of computers and components that cost money. The mastering of your finished product costs money. The tools of the trade cost money. Furthermore, the time that you spend working carefully day after day on your art is time you are not spending generating an income at some other career- the time comes from somewhere, and time you give to your art is time you stole from whatever it is you do to make the money to give you the free time to make the art in the first place. (Unless you are lucky enough to have the perilous opportunity to try to make a living making your art.) It is more expensive to make some kinds of records than it is to make others. No sooner need this be mentioned then inevitably people point towards the innovative, wonderful records that have been made with limited gear or at almost no expense in almost every genre (and here's where people bring up Springsteen's "Nebraska" being a 4 track record or the Germs "Forming" 7" or the straight-to-walkman recording of Throbbing Gristle's first album or most punk and hardcore or lots of early rap not to mention the entirety of the home taper noise scene and the lo fi indie pop scene). That said, if you don't want to make a lo-fi DIY made at home on the cheap record, if for some insane reason, you want strings on your record, and you have asked someone who lives in one city to play on one thing but they play an incredibly quiet/delicate acoustic instrument (harp, clavichord) that needs to be professionally recorded if it's going to work and so on and so on etc. suddenly the expenses add up. The rationale of "well you *can* make a record cheaply" does not fit every person's aesthetic. Frankly I'm glad that those records I've already listed sound the way they do- but you couldn't make Van Dyke Parks "Song Cycle" on a 4 track and you couldn't make Billie Holiday's "Lady In Satin" on a 4 track and you couldn't make David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars" in Garageband on your laptop etc. Now as long as you are a touring musician and you don't completely suck and you're really really really lucky, you will be able to make some money touring and selling merch etc. But that leaves out a lot of people who we only know about because some brave fool at a record company decided to throw some money at them to make a record. Maybe they wanted a big hit because they were evil sharks, maybe they wanted a big hit because they wanted lots of people to like the same artist they liked. For whatever reason, the record wasn't a big hit, the artist sank like a stone, and then years later people are ranting and raving about a Linda Perhacs or a Vashti Bunyan or a Karen Dalton etc. etc. (i.e. people who are incredibly unique talented artists but who were not well oiled touring machines and primo business people). Without someone funding the recording (and that someone tends to be the supervillain record label) the recorded evidence of their work wouldn't exist.
My points are few and hopefully uncontroversial:
1) not every record company is motivated by "evil"
2) it costs money to make records
3) artists have to live somehow, and if they can't make a living making their art that is going to affect the kind of art they make, and often it's going to impact the scale of the canvas on which they work- if everyone is a hobbyist with a day job, that's going to allow some awesome work to still get made, but certain kinds of statements are going to be far less likely. Nick Drake could easily have made "Pink Moon" at home; it's doubtful that he could have made "Bryter Layter" at home. Personally, I'm glad that a label existed and threw enough money around to keep Joe Boyd going as an engineer.
Obviously to download music is to express curiosity and interest in someone's art- that's a totally positive thing, and often it's the first step towards finding out more about an artist, or going to see them live if they tour. Downloading is inevitable given the nature of current technology so the only thing to do is to try to adjust to it. But the fantasy scenario that exactly the same range and diversity of great art is just going to keep springing forth fully formed from a musician's head straight to your hard drive once the last A+R dude is strung up by the guts of the last record company robber baron with no money changing hands between said musician and the real world in which that musican has to eat and make rent is really corny. Sure some record companies are run by creeps who hate art and are just sleazy and evil. But most people I know that run their own label and go without so they can put out somebody else's record and give up rooms of their houses to be occupied by cardboard boxes filled with somebody else's artwork- they are not evil people, sorry. They're people who are so insanely supportive of music that they spend their life trying to evangelize on its behalf. Usually they go away with little enough to show for it- but to compare them to slave owners is out of line.

not saying it can't happen, but that's the exception to the rule IMO

costs of being in a band:

practice space rent
strings/cords/various
amps/instruments
repairs (love u tube amps but gah)
if you tour: van/gas/insurance/food/shelter if you can't find a place to crash
recording costs
mastering costs
pressing costs (if applicable)

Yeah totally killed those Jewelled Antler Collective dudes.

when I stopped by their mansion I asked them whether the 15 years they'd been making handmade shit was worth it but they were too busy stoking the money fires to answer me

"...which I think is actually the point (and why "worrying about other people's listening habits" is actually a potentially productive and certainly enjoyable subject for conversation): how people describe/think of their listening habits tends to infect/inform the way that those habits are generally thought of, which in turn informs the music being made, since the general discourse (naturally) extends to the people making music"

Thanks again, John: this (and this: "that's certainly one way of describing it - if you imagine that because it's the current paradigm, it must necessarily be the true one, then there's another delusion to be dispelled") being what I was trying to say in my rather convoluted English.

"when I stopped by their mansion I asked them whether the 15 years they'd been making handmade shit was worth it but they were too busy stoking the money fires to answer me"

Oh I get it. In J0hn world success = I can buy anything I want ever! Modest goals are for the birds.

But most people I know that run their own label and go without so they can put out somebody else's record and give up rooms of their houses to be occupied by cardboard boxes filled with somebody else's artwork- they are not evil people, sorry. They're people who are so insanely supportive of music that they spend their life trying to evangelize on its behalf. Usually they go away with little enough to show for it- but to compare them to slave owners is out of line.

^^cosign this x10000000...dude that put out our records was a great guy, super straight up and if any thing our band should be ashamed of not doing better by him, not the other way around

thanks drew, that's actually the sort of answer i was looking for!

(also doing handmade artwork is going work way better for bands in certain genres than other -- like crystal antlers -- noise, psych, avant garde, etc is way more open to that...if you're doing a more normal rock thing don't expect the same obsessive collector's market audience)

Oh I get it. In J0hn world success = I can buy anything I want ever! Modest goals are for the birds.

― Alex in SF, Tuesday, April 21, 2009 12:31 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

^^^misunderstanding on purpose

What is absurd is that anyone expects to make a living off of their art. Seriously, grow the fuck up-- independent writers and visual artists haven't expected to make a living from what they're doing for a while. What makes musicians so special?

drew's post was brilliant

Cos the RIAA speaks for all musicians in the world and have determined if you wrote a one-hit wonder in 1981 you should never have to work again.

"^^^misunderstanding on purpose"

All I'm saying is that there are many paths to "success" (as long as you aren't defining success as being bigger than the Rolling Stones) and not all of them have to involve professionally mastered CDs in pressings of a thousand.

over time I have become to think what a strange anamoly it is that musicians expect to make money selling recorded music. There was a very brief period in the mid-20th century when America was flush with cash and had a burgeoning middle class that essentially wildly overvalued music production for several decades (ie, post-war through the early 90s) But this was never going to be sustainable, and millionaire rock stars will, I think, in the future be seen as a bizarre abberation. If you survey the global history of music, it becomes readily apparent that musicians are, more often than not, always at the BOTTOM of the economic ladder, with well-paid elites developing only as appendages of wealthy patrons. Otherwise, more often than not musicians have been itinerant members of the lower classes, their "art" not very well-respected and certainly not well-compensated. We are returning to this state now - music is going to be seen as something a lot of people just *do*, and music (of widely varying quality) is going to be readily available for next to nothing. The bloated infrastructure of the recording industry is going to continue to collapse and will eventually vanish. Is this a bad thing...? I dunno. For those of us who missed out on the golden era of million-selling tours and massive record deals and mountains of cocaine/groupies/whatever it's hard not to feel kind of ripped off, denied a world of comfort and godlike status... but at the same time that pipe dream was fucked up to begin with (remember punk's Situationist mission to destroy "elitist" rock star machinations? well, technology did it better than punk ever could have) and I can't really say that, y'know for example, Michael Jackson's ridiculous wealth is at all justifiable (is Thriller *really* worth that much? Come on now). And prior to the recording industry, did music suck? Did it suck to be a musician? Was it so bad that people had local folk music traditions and that average people provided their own entertainment to their communities? Was it an awful thing that music was not so much a commodity as much as it was something that was just AROUND when people needed/wanted it?

many x-posts1

how does one propose we 'solve' the issue of stuff like file-sharing and whatever? legislating seems unwieldy, and wishing it away/getting angry that ppl are 'stealing' is unproductive. how does a person finance something like bryter layter nowadays? are there institutions in place like those in the visual art world? that is, should musicians think less about albums and more about, say, grants?

What makes musicians so special?

their tremendous personal charm

tables: i'm sort of with you, but there's a world of difference in cost between writing and recorded music! like what about film??? making even an inexpensive (hell, dirt cheap) film costs thousands of dollars!

you couldn't make Billie Holiday's "Lady In Satin" on a 4 track

must...resist...pedantry

how does a person finance something like bryter layter nowadays? are there institutions in place like those in the visual art world?
i know that canada has various grants in place for musicians/bands, which seems to work out well. For the bands at least.

Van Dyke Parks, meet Olivia Tremor Control.

shit was shocking as fuck back then OTMFM!!!

I think folk music and musical development was on some kind of cool natural progression that was totally derailed with the invention of the Music Industry and that is why now there is so much musical inbreeding.

i think independent writers and visual artists should be able to make a living from their art, totally. and it's sad that they can't expect this.

well yeah you could make Lady In Satin on 4 tracks (or 2 tracks as the case probably was), but you couldn't do it in your basement on your 4-track. You need awesome mics, a great room, expert engineers, pro musicians, etc. I assume that's what he meant.

also, the ability to distribute music to a mass audience via 78rpm gramophone disc had the effect of shifting a lot of composition talent toward 2-minute recordings in vulgar styles (ragtime, bitches!), and heralded the slow decline of symphonic orchestral composition

i made a documentary with a budget (we estimate) of about....$10k? that's the cost of the camera, plane/train tickets, and my friend's laptop (which he bought with his own money cuz he needed one)

not included:
- cost of our time
- food/rent (we were fortunate enough to live w/my pal's (wealthy) parents while we edited)
- final cut pro (pirated lol)
- etc

had we not had a grant/savings/someone's wealthy parents, the ~actual~ cost of our amateurish little (32min) film would have been several times what it was.

Wow, the scorn for musicians from people who I'm sure would swear up and down that they *love* music is really startling here. Why should the economic disenfranchisement of poets in the United States in this century be some kind of 'purity' to which Musicians are now expected to aspire? That's not being historical, that being *presentist* in a deeply under-theorized manner. Table, the idea that musicians *ought* to only be hobbyists with dayjobs would strike most Europeans as bizarre. Surely you don't think that a classical orchestra full of hobbyists will be *just as good* as people who have dedicated their lives to their art?

Getting back to the label topic . . . I just kind of can't deal with the switcheroo whereby all "labels" AS labels are treated as equal. The difference between a passion-driven bedroom operation and a real deal corporation is huge, and the slump in sales that downloading has produced across the board (and hell yes it has hurt very small and underground labels who put out weird shit- mp3 blogs will put up their stuff just as quickly as a major label release) has meant that a lot of the weirder smaller operations aren't willing/able to take the risk of spending the money to actually manufacture a material release anymore. More sadly still, the culture of convenience in which kids grow up has led them to regard listening on laptop speakers to mp3s as somehow "more or less" just as good as vinyl on a real stereo through real speakers. Daphne Carr's presentation at the EMP POP Conference pointed out that out of 65 people she talked to, only three had a stereo, and something like 59 of these people listened exclusively to music through their laptop speakers. It's depressing. We don't watch feature length films on You-Tube for a reason, but people seem happy to tolerate a more or less equivalent formal/sonic/formatting degradation in the signal when it comes to music. It seems to validate the notion that music is becoming "mood perfume" rather than a fundemental / immersive experience. Materiality meant waste and ecologically bad pileups of garbage- but it also functioned as an index of community to commitment to an artwork. I'm not going to stumble onto somebody's old files in the cut-out bin of a thrift store; when your P2P pals have a bad sector on their drive they're just throwing it in the garbage and downloading something new. There is no participation in the historical solidarity that material archives permit between one generation and the next. Bah, I'm off to play shuffleboard at the old folks home.

And prior to the recording industry, did music suck? Did it suck to be a musician? Was it so bad that people had local folk music traditions and that average people provided their own entertainment to their communities? Was it an awful thing that music was not so much a commodity as much as it was something that was just AROUND when people needed/wanted it?

In some ways, this comes back to what I've been saying for the past couple of years-- if you're a musician nowadays, whether you be a band or a DJ or whatever, you should expect people to pay you to have the pleasure of seeing you perform in a given circumstance. And YES, you should be able to make an okay amount of money doing so. But since there's so much out there demanding peoples' attention, and so much shit amongst it, it seems absurd to demand money ($10 an album or so) for lo-quality mp3 packages or whatever.

well yeah you could make Lady In Satin on 4 tracks (or 2 tracks as the case probably was), but you couldn't do it in your basement on your 4-track. You need awesome mics, a great room, expert engineers, pro musicians, etc. I assume that's what he meant.

― tylerw, Tuesday, April 21, 2009 1:49 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yes, exactly. George Martin's small number of tracks at Abbey Road are not the same as some Pork Queen 4 track lofi Tascam whatnot. OBVIOUSLY.

i think independent writers and visual artists should be able to make a living from their art, totally. and it's sad that they can't expect this.

frankly I can think of a lot of things in the world that are way sadder.

(I am a musician with a dayjob btw)

"Surely you don't think that a classical orchestra full of hobbyists will be *just as good* as people who have dedicated their lives to their art?"

When mp3s replace orchestras, I will agree that this has all gone too far.

you're all old

there I said it

In terms of independent artists and writers, people seem to forget that most of the writers and artists from previous times slaved in penury for their work, had someone footing the bill for them, or were teaching. Nowadays, teaching is the best gig many can hope for, and that's all right in my mind. It's just that no one wants the fucking Ting Tings teaching music comp classes at Evergreen or whatever...

mercifully it is not a sadness competition (xposts)

if i had the millis i would def sponsor other artists as well as fund my own (inevitably flawed partly due to lack of 'hunger') arts

i honestly wouldn't be surprised if music started shifting towards visual arts style patronage, on a larger scale. arts patronage in general seems to defy the whole notion of a rational economic actor in the first place (cf 'pay what you want' album download schemes and paying a relatively arbitrary price for a painting you like...not totally equivalent, but still), and shifting the focus from a commercial 'moving units' mentality and towards music as either art or folkway might be beneficial?? or is that horrible

xposts

Wow, the scorn for musicians from people who I'm sure would swear up and down that they *love* music is really startling here. Why should the economic disenfranchisement of poets in the United States in this century be some kind of 'purity' to which Musicians are now expected to aspire? That's not being historical, that being *presentist* in a deeply under-theorized manner. Table, the idea that musicians *ought* to only be hobbyists with dayjobs would strike most Europeans as bizarre. Surely you don't think that a classical orchestra full of hobbyists will be *just as good* as people who have dedicated their lives to their art?

whoah slow your role there cowboy... classical orchestras are one of those "elite appendages of wealthy patrons" that I referred to, and the *quality* of the craft is always proportional to the time spent honing that craft so duh of course people that are paid well and given time to practice will be able to execute with skill works of greater complexity than, say, your field hand with his beatup banjo. However, priveleging one of these as "better" than the other raises a whole host of unpleasant implications... and I'm not saying the economic disenfranchisement of musicians is an objectively GOOD thing, just that it is not surprising. Its the brutal realities of the market. The market is oversaturated with free product - that will drive down the value of the product, and there's no way of artificially re-inflating it or restoring it to previous levels. I am not saying what musicians OUGHT to be one way or the other, just that this is the pattern that seems to be clearly developing and that having some kind of ethical hissy fit over that development is largely a pointless excercise.

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table on the same page as me, I think...

point of clarification, since we're talking at cross-purposes: would you all agree that not ~everyone~ deserves the right to make a living from their music? that is, that some people make shitty music and really ought to keep their dayjob? how then, do you propose that society allows the good musicians to make money and the bad ones to keep working at starbucks? i know this is like lol capitalism can of worms here, but isn't it relevant? what rationale should we use to determine whether or not j0hn or drew or fucking nickelback or whoever ought to make the jump from bedroom hobbyist to working musician?

Uh quality?

what rationale should we use to determine whether or not j0hn or drew or fucking nickelback or whoever ought to make the jump from bedroom hobbyist to working musician?

ILM polls

Myspace hits?

seriously yr question is a joke right? there is no way to arbitrate quality, and if you think the market does so on its own you are sadly mistaken.

how then, do you propose that society allows the good musicians to make money and the bad ones to keep working at starbucks? i

seriously when has society ever done this. Mozart buried in an unmarked grave, etc.

Just think of what Mozart could have done with fruity loops.

arbitrate quality via pirate bay torrents

Wow, the scorn for musicians from people who I'm sure would swear up and down that they *love* music is really startling here.

I am a musician (and my father and my brothers and most of my friends) and I haven't taken any offense to anything written here. Are you a musician?

Why should the economic disenfranchisement of poets in the United States in this century be some kind of 'purity' to which Musicians are now expected to aspire?

This is not a new thing.

Surely you don't think that a classical orchestra full of hobbyists will be *just as good* as people who have dedicated their lives to their art?

These people are professional musicians that get paid loads of money to perform in front of people. Or tell me what is the royalty for performance on a classical CD?

a lot of the weirder smaller operations aren't willing/able to take the risk of spending the money to actually manufacture a material release anymore.

My friend runs a noise label called Sound From the Pocket and he still puts out cassettes, CDrs, noise comps, etc. constantly. All my friends who make weird music put out CDrs and vinyl themselves.

More sadly still, the culture of convenience in which kids grow up has led them to regard listening on laptop speakers to mp3s as somehow "more or less" just as good as vinyl on a real stereo through real speakers. Daphne Carr's presentation at the EMP POP Conference pointed out that out of 65 people she talked to, only three had a stereo, and something like 59 of these people listened exclusively to music through their laptop speakers. It's depressing. We don't watch feature length films on You-Tube for a reason, but people seem happy to tolerate a more or less equivalent formal/sonic/formatting degradation in the signal when it comes to music. It seems to validate the notion that music is becoming "mood perfume" rather than a fundemental / immersive experience.

This is putting fidelity on a pedestal and one of the oldest RIAA tricks in the book. Using this argument you could say they should have never made CDs cos records are more 'pure'. Something recorded on a boombox is no less valuable musically than something recorded by U2's engineer. It provides no less emotional resonance and if the quality of the wave is different, well then it's just adding a whole other shade to the presentation. Besides in 5 years I bet the sound quality of streaming audio/video will surpass CDs and DVDs.

Materiality meant waste and ecologically bad pileups of garbage- but it also functioned as an index of community to commitment to an artwork. I'm not going to stumble onto somebody's old files in the cut-out bin of a thrift store;

This I agree with, and it's kind of sad. Maybe in the future there will be internet thrift stores, places with old servers that Google has thrown out in favor of the new ones. Places with ancient 192kbps MP3s.

i think you guys are misunderstanding my question on purpose for lazy zings: i'm ~not~ saying the market does so on its own, as a casual listen to the radio will prove. i'm genuinely asking: if musicians can't expect to make money by selling records, say, then how does a musician be a full-time musician, as drew and europe believe he or she ought to be?

when do you get to call yourself a musician?

Uh does Europe really believe that?

from drew's post: "Table, the idea that musicians *ought* to only be hobbyists with dayjobs would strike most Europeans as bizarre"

if musicians can't expect to make money by selling records

Musicians have very rarely made money by selling records.

We don't watch feature length films on You-Tube for a reason, but people seem happy to tolerate a more or less equivalent formal/sonic/formatting degradation in the signal when it comes to music.

I wish people wouldn't act like audio was really on a par with audiovisual when it comes to these matters. Beethoven said he'd rather be deaf than blind etc.

basically: since the market has, as shakey said, utterly devalued music-as-product, then what means are available for yr aspiring full-time musician to make money? cuz i agree: "having some kind of ethical hissy fit over that development is largely a pointless excercise," and i'm genuinely wondering what other avenues there are for an artist to make challenging, necessarily-expensive albums

"then how does a musician be a full-time musician"

Live tours. Collectible items. Lots of cheap mixtapes. Government grants. Film score work. The possibilities are fucking endless.

What is absurd is that anyone expects to make a living off of their art. Seriously, grow the fuck up-- independent writers and visual artists haven't expected to make a living from what they're doing for a while. What makes musicians so special?

― the table is the table, Tuesday, April 21, 2009 5:37 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

WHO THE FUCK IS SAYING THEY ARE EXPECTING TO "MAKE A LIVING" OFF OF THEIR MUSIC??

i've in fact gone to great lengths to stress that i never would even dream of that.

all i was trying to illustrate is that it's harder now. it used to be easier to at least break even on a modest scale. that's all.

plus the good guys won okay, it's not like downloading is going away, you will all be able to download anything for free FOREVER, no one is taking your ball away.....it's just a fact, like the weather.

however, that doesn't seem to be enough, it's like people need all the free shit they want plus they want artists to understand that yeah this is SO MUCH better for you and really recorded music is just a historical anomoly don't u see?....it's like fine whatever i will still subject the world to whatever shitty music i want to, just don't tell me things have gotten easier when it's not true.

I mean all that assumes someone wants to buy your crap/support your craft. If they don't, well hey the market at work! Woo hoo!

yeah but it's like selling milk when someone can download milk for free. i think that would affect dairy farmers.

(also, as an aside: most ppl are much more tolerant of poor video than they are poor audio, when the two are together. something shot with a shitty handheld but properly mic'd is waaaaaaaaay more watchable than something shot on film but with like a tinny laptop mic)

i'm genuinely wondering what other avenues there are for an artist to make challenging, necessarily-expensive albums

there are none. the days of challenging, necessarily-expensive ALBUMS is over

^that's maybe the only real loss

i don't even know if i really believe most people do want music they LOVE (as opposed to just wanting to hear a few times in order to determine whether or not they love it) to be for free. that would of course be v disturbing. i remain optimistic that once people find a system they're satisfied with most of them would be willing to pay (the issue of what is the right price for art you love is separate thing and yeah it's shame recorded digital music isn't likely to do well on this front).

BPI missed a trick many years ago not pushing for a 'music player licence' lol

Ugh. What is it about music+business or music+dowloading that brings out the stupid? Copyright infringement isn't stealing. It's closer to trespass, in that it's someone infringing on your exclusive rights. A fair amount of technical trespass isn't a big deal, but that doesn't mean you want some asshole sleeping on your lawn.

There are a huge number of technological changes that have happened since mp3s and Napster exploded. Some of them are good—there's a lot of music that has no commercial release that I can now hear because it's not tied to a physical object. For folks who are into obscure, weird or non-commercial music, that's a godsend. On the other hand, there's the fact that a lot of music I like takes a lot of craft to produce. Craft takes investment, and investment requires returns to be viable.

Basically, what's happening is that supply is wildly outstripping demand, even as demand grows. Supply of music is functionally infinite—there's no way to listen to all the music that's been released on a major label in one year (assuming that you're not blaring 17,000 turntables at once). Combine that with all the indie music and all the music that has been released in the past, and there's no way to take in everything you're interested in unless you're not actually interested in that much music. Combine that with a very real drop in infrastructure costs—after you sell your first mp3, it takes negligible investment to sell a second—and you have a recipe for what could be thought of as conceptual price dumping. To compete, you have to cut prices, which makes it harder to make more music, and the cycle includes amplifying feedback, so it gets harder and harder to sustain a career as a musician (or attendant industry).

I don't know if there's a market solution. At least, not one that serves those folks whose work I tend to be most interested in: lower mid-level independent artists. In the long term, they might be best helped by adopting a system similar to, say, Denmark's, where bands are subsidized because there's a recognized cultural value that the markets are bad at supporting. This brings its own risks, obviously, regarding state interference in arts production, but I don't see another way out given that folks aren't going to stop downloading, artists need some sort of cash to live on, and the infrastructure of the music industry doesn't seem sustainable.

what means are available for yr aspiring full-time musician to make money?

Alex is kinda glib but he is mostly right... if you want to make a living as a full-time musician, you will do ANYTHING involving playing music. Rolling back a few decades this meant you would play live, all the time, every night if possible (and you still probably wouldn't make jackshit). In today's climate it means you will play live all the time, license your shit to advertising/TV/music as much as possible, play weddings/corporate events/private parties - essentially you will throw any aesthetic rules/standards out the window in order to economically survive and you STILL won't be making much more than poverty-level wages. That's the way it is. The market briefly valued music. Now it does not.

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Live tours. Collectible items. Lots of cheap mixtapes. Government grants. Film score work. The possibilities are fucking endless.

― Alex in SF, Tuesday, April 21, 2009 1:12 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

I mean, I guess I knew this. i'm thinking more w/r/t ALBUMS, not just 'being a fulltime musician'.

xp yeah maybe shakey's right

Ugh. What is it about music+business or music+dowloading that brings out the stupid? Copyright infringement isn't stealing.

if by "copyright infringment" you mean "downloading an album you haven't paid for," you're wrong, it is stealing

(I'm all for gov't grants for music btw - inevitably this will run into problems of censorship, which is the unfortunate trade-off)

Can't agree with stevem's optimism. I'm pretty sure the majority, or significantly huge minority at best, of people will continue to favour the taking stuff for free option unless it becomes way more difficult than it is now.

frankly, and this is totally divorced from me as someone who plays music on a small level...

but i for one think the fact that you CAN'T get rich playing music, or at least that it's a lot harder to get rich will mean a lot of people that would make great music won't....like i dunno do you think jeezy would go through what shakey is talking about? or a young guns n roses? or sinatra?

i feel like this should go without saying at this point, but c'mon Que, listening to something you haven't paid for and like taking someone's television is some false equivalence

"but i for one think the fact that you CAN'T get rich playing music, or at least that it's a lot harder to get rich will mean a lot of people that would make great music won't....like i dunno do you think jeezy would go through what shakey is talking about? or a young guns n roses? or sinatra?"

Great! Maybe they'll go into investment banking!

duff does write financial columns for playboy now

repeating myself from up above, but i really wish people could get past the "is it stealing" argument. that's just semantics for its own sake, and is largely irrelevant. if it's a crime that can't be prosecuted on a level that would actually provide deterrence -- and i think that has at this point been demonstrated -- then it's not worth arguing about whether it's a crime at all, except to try to make people feel bad. (and if prosecution doesn't work, i don't think shaming is going to either.) the question isn't, "how do we turn this set of circumstances back into something like the old set of circumstances." it's, "how can we adjust our ideas about art and value and royalties and all of these things so that our current set of circumstances doesn't completely kill off something we care about?"

tipsy otm

guess i should qualify--if you download something and listen to it for years and years than yeah that's wrong. downloading something and listening to it a few times and then buying is ok

not that bands ever make music off records anyway--but that's not the point

.like i dunno do you think jeezy would go through what shakey is talking about? or a young guns n roses? or sinatra?

you know what fuck all these people and that mentality

"This is putting fidelity on a pedestal and one of the oldest RIAA tricks in the book. Using this argument you could say they should have never made CDs cos records are more 'pure'. Something recorded on a boombox is no less valuable musically than something recorded by U2's engineer. It provides no less emotional resonance and if the quality of the wave is different, well then it's just adding a whole other shade to the presentation. Besides in 5 years I bet the sound quality of streaming audio/video will surpass CDs and DVDs."

Dude, that you can't make an argument that one way is universally better than another doesn't mean that they're the same thing. Psychedelic Horseshit isn't going for the same aesthetic as Brian Wilson, but that doesn't mean that they could do what Brian Wilson does. Arguing that there's a difference in fidelity and mixing and mastering, and that those things are worth paying for, is the same as arguing that there's a difference between someone who has just picked up a guitar that instant and someone who's spent years practicing. You can't say whether their art will be of higher quality, but you can sure as hell say that they'll make different sounds. Respecting the low also means respecting the high.

It's funny, I (we) have been thinking about this forthcoming "death of the music industry" for, what, a decade now (since the Napster heyday)? I mean, that was going to kill the physical product and end the album forever, but here it is 2009 and I'm gonna run out at lunch to pick up the new Depeche Mode album physically. All this doom and gloom is warranted, but I think its happening at a much, much slower pace than we originally expected.

(pretty off topic, but something thats been floating in the back of my mind all day)

yeah but we'd miss out on "welcome to the jungle" or "send in the clowns" or "go getta".....assuming that people with the best motivations are necessarily going to make the best music seems false to me...otherwise my band would make albums better than appetite for destruction

if you agree that downloading and stuff is all economics and how markets work, then don't you have to agree that "falling wages" is going to result in music not attracting the best talent?

(xpost to shakey)

i've bought more music (on physical formats) in the last few years than I ever have. for what that's worth.

if you agree that downloading and stuff is all economics and how markets work, then don't you have to agree that "falling wages" is going to result in music not attracting the best talent?

nah because there's never been a correlation between the best talent and the best-compensated talent. art is funny like that. (not saying i expect musicians or anyone to be willing to starve for their art, just that it's hard to make an economic-incentive argument about what produces the "best" art.)

Same here. In fact, I rarely download anymore. In fact, outside of downloading promos from labels, I have downloaded less than 5 albums in 2009 so far (3 of which were paid for via iTunes).

(xpost)

In fact In fact. Jeez, you get my point.

"how can we adjust our ideas about art and value and royalties and all of these things so that our current set of circumstances doesn't completely kill off something we care about?""

OTM. I just get a bug up my ass every time a retard tries to get all legal beagle on the stealing tip.

we've already got a system in the UK where the most successful artists now tend to come out of either the 'Brits school' or democratised TV shows. it's become harder for trad rock bands to compete with that (let alone anyone outside that) and i dunno how much money Arctic Monkeys have actually made up to this point (altho they probably have a fanbase more willing to pay for their work for various reasons).

if you agree that downloading and stuff is all economics and how markets work, then don't you have to agree that "falling wages" is going to result in music not attracting the best talent?

I think you could also argue the inverse - that the only people left making music will be those who really care about it and are willing to do it without compensation... in reality there's probably some combination of the two dynamics in effect. (I do think its important to note that Jeezy - who I don't even like - or Sinatra or GnR or whoever is also the EXCEPTION to the rule. The vast majority of people who are/were in the music biz just to make money produce godawful crap.)

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I'd respectfully suggest that the personal experiences of people on ILM - because of the board it is - tell us nothing about the habits of the broad spectrum of music buyers.

"yeah but we'd miss out on "welcome to the jungle" or "send in the clowns" or "go getta""

And maybe we'll get something a lot better now! The future is hard to predict like that.

that the only people left making music will be those who really care about it and are willing to do it without compensation.

should rephrase this - the only people left will be those who really care about it and are willing to do it in spite of not being compensated for it, and their commitment to their craft will develop in a more natural, unfettered environment that is immune to market pressures.

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And maybe we'll get something a lot better now! The future is hard to predict like that.

theoretically I agree with you - always optimistic - but I'm hard pressed to name things that've emerged under the new & developing model that support the idea, you know?

"how can we adjust our ideas about art and value and royalties and all of these things so that our current set of circumstances doesn't completely kill off something we care about?""

Uh music isn't going anywhere guys. And if you really care about something, you are creating a market for it. Someone, somehow, will fill that need.

What is absurd is that anyone expects to make a living off of their art. Seriously, grow the fuck up-- independent writers and visual artists haven't expected to make a living from what they're doing for a while. What makes musicians so special?

What makes musicians, writers, and artists so special that they shouldn't get paid for what they do, as opposed to accountants, doctors, and postal workers? Speaking theoretically. Unless you're some sort of hardcore utilitarian or agrarian nostalgist, why should creative work be uncompensated? And I don't know if you're aware, but the visual art market was pretty "hot" for a while, but suffered a hit with the banking/economic crisis. More visual artists have been expecting to make a living from what they do in recent years. Every month or so I see some new visual art magazine, while music publications disappear. Writers are in a similar boat as musicians, in that the internet is depressing the monetary value of what they do.

The problem is that supply and demand are not in the artist's/musician's/writer's favor -- free downloads, last.fm, pandora, et al. cutting into merchandise sales are only one part of it. The other part of the problem is competition. There are more musicians than there are venues to pay them to perform, publications to review their records, etc. Not all of them are going to even recoup their costs, let alone make any kind of living. Technology has made it even easier to be a musician, and thus has increased competition. The professional/amateur divide is pretty much what's fallen by the wayside, or, from another perspective, is being set considerably higher, as fewer musicians are financial able to devote as much time to music because they can't afford to.

xpost

yeah but the people that were doing it for the love of it were always doing it for the love of it....so then you're basically just cutting off the possible awesome music created by people that wanted to escape and get rich.....

"theoretically I agree with you - always optimistic - but I'm hard pressed to name things that've emerged under the new & developing model that support the idea, you know?"

There is definitely no digital age Frank Sinatra yet.

I think, too, what makes these discussions get so weird is often on one side there seems to be a real animus toward artists thinking of their work as something for which they ought to be compensated - a real "hey, fuck artists & their sense of entitlement, there're always gonna be artists & they're going to create anyway" which any artist is going to hear and think "yeah, you're probably right, but fuck you if you don't think I ought to be compensated for the sweat of my toil"

take me, for example, posting on ILX - I'm still waiting for that first check and I'm starting to get impatient

There is definitely no digital age Frank Sinatra yet.

― Alex in SF, Tuesday, April 21, 2009 6:41 PM (43 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^hasn't heard the siren song of michael buble

Re: Downloading

Spotify has taken a huge chunk out of my album downloading, because now I can pretty easily hear whether I want to buy an album without dealing with the bullshit of slsk or torrents or rapidshare. What's become more valuable to me is my time.

And I like rewarding bands for good music, so it makes it easier for me to do that. I realize it's kinda a fucked-up tip cup relationship, but absent anyone making me pay for music I still find that I want to pay for music because I want bands I like to keep making music. (On the other hand, I don't like the trying to buy shares in upcoming albums sort of thing, because quality of music is really unpredictable—even established artists routinely bum bullshit out. It's like batting averages, where a career with three great albums out of ten is still a pretty decent career.)

It will be awesome/hilarious if in 50/60 years time there are rock bands whose existence depends on the kind of state subsidies afforded to orchestral music in most countries now.

uh i'm sure we'll continue to have superstar musicians raking in megabucks. maybe less of 'em but that'll just sharpen the ambition of people like jeezy trying to make it there.

theoretically I agree with you - always optimistic - but I'm hard pressed to name things that've emerged under the new & developing model that support the idea, you know?

lolz yeah J0hn why hasn't this emerging new market of the last 10 years produced any towering works of genius yet?! Sgt. Pepper's wasn't recorded in 1909 ya know.

lolz lex

xp Alex: And if you really care about something, you are creating a market for it. Someone, somehow, will fill that need.

What if that someone is dead? That's another part of the mp3 blog, torrent, internet thing. I can spend all day downloading and listening to recordings of awesome music from the past. Theoretically someone's need for music can be thoroughly filled by old music made by dead people or at least defunct bands. There is so much out there, that one can always find something that is new to them, that they can be easily distracted from listening to or caring about any new music.

"yeah, you're probably right, but fuck you if you don't think I ought to be compensated for the sweat of my toil"

key problem may be that most people think your job is actually, y'know, fun. and most people don't get paid to have fun. (not saying that being a musician isn't being hard work - it IS - but there are people willing to do it for free, which is not the case with, y'know, janitors or stockbrokers or cab drivers or whoever. Other people who might do their jobs for free - like teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc. - often do so because they believe the value of their work is independent of the market, that it is intrinsically a good thing for them to do.)

"What if that someone is dead?"

Uh bad luck for them, I guess?

xp Shakey: The only teachers, doctors, or lawyers I know of that work entirely for free are retired and doing volunteer work to get out of the house and fend off Alzheimer's.

note I didn't say entirely

I was just listing examples of professions that often include a fair amount of pro bono/volunteer work, professions that aren't "fun" but that people still do. Certainly, as a child of teachers, I am well aware of how hard teachers work while getting paid next to nothing.

xp Shakey: my Dad is a public school teacher, and made enough to be able to afford to buy a house, go on vacation, save for retirement ... more than most musicians make. Granted he makes less than my uncle, the doctor and my other uncle, the lawyer, but your average teacher makes a lot more than your average musician.

don't get me wrong, I feel I am about to say some overly harsh things, but its hard not to detect a sense of entitlement in the arguments that J0hn and Drew put forth - that even though their jobs consist of what most people would consider "fun", even though the market has consistently and persistently devaluing their labor, even though their work does not have the obvious utilitarian/easily identifiable benefits of most other labor (ditch-digging, farming, medical aid, development and maintenance of infrastructure, etc.), even though their are hordes of people who want to do what they do and eagerly participate in ensuring that supply of their services outstrips demand, even though there is no real historical precedent for a society maintaining a similar professional class of musician - even with all that, they still deserve a middle-class income.

You can see how that position might chafe a little, or seem unrealistic, considering that the vast majority of people have to work really shitty jobs that they have no real interest in for decades and still barely manage to maintain the standard of living of their parents.

devaluing
devalued

Spotify has taken a huge chunk out of my album downloading, because now I can pretty easily hear whether I want to buy an album without dealing with the bullshit of slsk or torrents or rapidshare. What's become more valuable to me is my time.

This is OTM and I have no idea why labels and musicians have been so slow to wake up to this. iTunes, for example, is successful because people will pay to get music quickly, at their convenience, and without any bullshit involved (e.g. searching something on slsk, sifting through a huge list of poor quality/incomplete files to find the few that were ripped properly, wait in long download queues to get the album).

In ten years we'll probably be listening to most of our music via paid subscriptions to gigantic music banks like last.fm or Spotify, where a monthly/yearly membership lets you listen to music on demand, and won't be downloading much at all. We are basically already doing this with youtube when it comes to watching videos (except not paying for it).

even though there is no real historical precedent for a society maintaining a similar professional class of musician

Can someone actually back this up or dispute this with actual facts, as opposed to assertions? Because my instinct is that this isn't true -- that historically there has been a professional class of musicians that were working class or lower middle class (of course, historically, these people were able to afford to buy houses).

xp Noodle: I think state subsidies for rock bands are actually in effect in countries that are not America or the UK - as a form of preserving their national culture from the entertainment megacorporations.

john and drew are interesting examples for me, because thinking about their music that i own in one form or another, there's:

-- one mountain goats album i bought, full price, at a real record store;
-- one matmos album i bought, used, at a real record store;
-- several albums by each that i have bought at emusic rates through emusic;
-- a few mountain goats songs downloaded off slsk.

so out of those examples, obviously the one that produced the most artist revenue was the full-price purchase at the record store, but right after that come the emusic downloads -- which still produced more money for drew than that used matmos album i bought. not saying any of that proves anything in particular, but we've getting music in different ways for a long time. at least half the albums i bought when i was a kid buying vinyl were used, because that's what i could afford.

(oh, and also one mountain goats album that i got a promo of and wrote a review of. and a matmos song from the big ears mix that an ilxor put together and offered for download.)

xp tipsy: A number of musicians I know will buy their own records used at stores, so that other people won't.

Can someone actually back this up or dispute this with actual facts, as opposed to assertions? Because my instinct is that this isn't true -- that historically there has been a professional class of musicians that were working class or lower middle class (of course, historically, these people were able to afford to buy houses).

one example off the top of my head - in Rome, musicians (and actors) were on the bottom of the social totem poll. They were often retained by rich families (or owned as slaves) but their art was largely regarded as degenerate and was an activity unworthy of any respectable citizen.

xp Shakey: Ancient Rome is not the most relevant example - a better case would be made by citing history post-Industrial Revolution.

that historically there has been a professional class of musicians that were working class or lower middle class (of course, historically, these people were able to afford to buy houses).

although now that I re-read this post I'm sorta uh flabbergasted that anyone would make this claim (there was no such thing as a "middle class" for most of history, and in feudal societies the working class didn't own jackshit, much less "buy houses"...? I'm not even gonna bother getting into how tribal societies...) I don't even know where to begin with this question.

haha x-post

a better case would be made by citing history post-Industrial Revolution

so tens of thousands of years of history are not relevant, just 1830s to 1900 or so? uh waht?

this all gets back to my point about well-paid musicians being a historical anamoly enabled by the unprecedented wealth and leisure time (achieved via slavery and colonialism, incidentally) of the Western middle class.

shakey already hinted at this but what's interesting to me about art as a vocation is that some people make art as a hobby, while other people make art as a job. i'd like to discuss the implications of this outside of the context(s) of file-sharing and compensation. maybe i should start a separate thread

The question is whether there is historical precedent for a professional class of musicians that are not "stars" or in the employ of rich patrons. You said there was no historical precendent. I said, I think that might be false. Citing an example from a time period considerably distant in the past prior to the existence of a middle class and the leisure time brought by the Industrial Revolution isn't proving your point.

In ten years we'll probably be listening to most of our music via paid subscriptions to gigantic music banks like last.fm or Spotify all have musician slaves who will perform for us at our bidding

this is a sidepoint, but also sometimes i think artists are more interesting because they are super wealthy egomaniacs...like jeezy couldn't even MAKE the some "my president is black" if he didn't have a blue lambo...or like Queen is just wonderful but what is great about Queen doesn't even seem possible if they were just you know stringing along self released CD-Rs with handmade art and club tours....they seemed to NEED the stage of Wembley for what they were trying to do.

I guess I'm saying in certain senses the wealth provides the context for the art, and I'm not sure the art works the same way in a more modest context.

this all gets back to my point about well-paid musicians being a historical anamoly enabled by the unprecedented wealth and leisure time (achieved via slavery and colonialism, incidentally) of the Western middle class.

If the point you're making is that musicians weren't well-paid through most of human history, then that is obviously true. But there are plenty of things that would be "historical anomalies" in that sense that are not changing because of the internet.

xpost

not that it's all that crucial to point out, but i do have a fulltime job and make music in my sparetime. I have been lucky enough to live off of music for some time now, but for the last two years I've been an academic. I don't think people are entitled to do live off of music in some abstract "the universe OWES me this" way, I just don't think the desire to make a decent living off of music is somehow offensive. Inevitably it intersects with public taste, but I've known people who make a living off of hellish noise and I've known people who made their living off of pop music that millions of people like. Neither sorts of people were being arrogant, just persistent, hardworking, and lucky.

extrapolating from now to "then" in order to make claims about what is "to be expected"/"what is fair" with references to the number of musicians a society can support seems logically bogus to me. How could you compare the London of today to the London of 1660 with 375,000 people and argue that *either* ratio of "musicians" to 'ordinary citizens' (a demographic fantasy if ever there was one) was the correct one, or the anomalous one? The discussion is plagued by trying to turn and "is" into an "ought".

xp tipsy: A number of musicians I know will buy their own records used at stores, so that other people won't.

they do realize how insane this is though, right? like, they do this but with a "ha ha i know this is crazy" kind of chuckle.

like, if I buy 10 of my own CD @ $8 per, that's $80... Assuming my royalty per new CD nets out at, like, $0.80 after payouts for producer's fees, packaging, etc etc and (here comes the biggie, and this one is manifestly false) assuming a 1:1 correspondence between used CDs I take out of circulation and new CD sales, I lose $7.20 for every used CD I buy.

What's the upside?

an "is" into an "ought". sorry.

xp Drew: I think this discussion is plagued by the fact that what "is" has changed fairly recently, and people are trying to draw historical parallels that are lacking to various degrees - whether in terms of precedent for the musician's role in society to how to compensate musicians for internet downloads.

xp rogermexico: these are people that sell a lot of their own recordings. So it's less about royalties, and more about selling it at shows or through their websites where they get the full amount.

So they are reselling the used CDs?

That's the weirdest fucking thing I've ever heard.

I've posted this on another thread but it's appropriate to this one now:

http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/images/adaccess/R/R02/R0206/R0206-lrg.jpeg

I think in the end, it's basically going to come down to how the corporate lobbyists divvy up the internet and how much control they give people.

i wish they'd get on with it then. stuff like this is getting pretty silly:

I think in the end, it's basically going to come down to how the corporate lobbyists divvy up the internet and how much control they give people.

Yeah man, the corporations are just keeping us all down man. If it wasn't for them music would be great for us all man.

Glad you agree.

I do agree with you, to some extent. But I think its overly simplistic and willfully wrongheaded to place the blame squarely on these unseen "corporate masters".

stuff like this is getting pretty silly

seriously.

but whoever holds the copyright on the shuffle should sue the fuck out of those guys.

YOUR LIFE FADES FASTER
OBEY YOUR MASTER

xp tipsy: A number of musicians I know will buy their own records used at stores, so that other people won't.

― photoshop your disgusting ass partner into passive-aggressive notes (sarahel), Tuesday, April 21, 2009 3:14 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

reminds me of people who buy 100 lottery tickets thinking it substantially increases their chances of winning

dude you have a 100 times better chance of winning!

You can't win if you don't play.

But I think its overly simplistic and willfully wrongheaded to place the blame squarely on these unseen "corporate masters".

They are becoming less unseen every day (via Obama Taps 5th RIAA Lawyer to Justice Dept.):
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/obama-taps-fift.html

Regardless of if TPB wins their appeal their opponents are encouraging the image of the internet as a place where illegal and bad things happen that should be regulated. Sweeping internet-changing legislation in the name of anti-terror/torrents/p0rn/etc. could fix things for good.

Adam, have you ever considered what the corporate music biz might have given you that is valuable and that you won't have if/when it is gone? Home-recording is cool, but I want the choice of hearing home-recordings AND hearing insanely slick and overproduced stuff that can only be made in the kind of high-end studios that a major deep pockets label can support. Having been to Olympic Studios in London where Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy" was mixed and watched Spike Stent mix a contemporary pop record, I can tell you that those studios can create signal chains and processing environments that indie bros and noise bros who read Tape OP and do it in a DIY style (such as myself) will NEVER be able to fake or approximate. One is not "better" than the other- they are different, and serve different aesthetic goals and hit different pleasure centers. But the notion that somehow the world of music will be "Better" when it has been purged of big business and it is only a million little home project studios of people recording themselves (not saying that that's your point- just saying it comes up a lot on this topic) is just false, and I get kind of sick of the pious way that people who record themselves at home implicitly pat themselves on the back for the sheer fact of home-recording. And I say that as someone who has made, er, upwards of nine albums that have been entirely home-recorded. It's cool and fun to do and a good way to work, but the notion that all music *ought* to be made this way and that music that is recorded only "for the love of music" is ethically *better* than the music made by someone who wanted to have a hit song on the radio- sheesh, that seems implausible, and, given its reliance on the intentional fallacy, doomed to unverifiability anyway. It would sound like a strawman that nobody believed in were it not for the way it flickers in the background in discussions of this topic. Ask yourself, would the world of film be *better* if people only used handheld Super8 and there was never a Golden Age of Hollywood complete with studios and a star system? Scale affects content. You don't get the "same" musical range of options if you take away the big label/big studio nexus, because lavish overproduction that gives you a Fleetwood Mac album or a Queen record or an ELO album like "Discovery" comes with a big price tag for some bad reasons (plenty of coke) and some good reasons (serious amounts of gear/processing/boards/tubes/room/support).

Neotropical pygmy squirrel totally OTM.

as far as rumors goes, it's possible the coke should be included on the gear/processing side of the ledger.

I don't think things would be 'better' but they would certainly be more democratic and less pandering to mass tastes. Certainly more experimental as well. Perhaps without the idea that 'some day we'll make it and be able to afford good recording equipment' the more ambitious bands developed their own recording equipment that surpassed even what we use today. That goes for music and video. But of course we are talking parallel dimensions.

I blogged about this alternate universe once:
http://rabbitscgi.blogspot.com/2009/03/destroy-canned-music.html

You don't get the "same" musical range of options if you take away the big label/big studio nexus

good post - all true. but the big label/big studio nexus is a losing investment now, financially it can't be supported by the market. which means either the public sector steps in (seems unlikely, esp. in America) or it dies. the whole system was funded with massive amounts of disposable income, and the economy can't/won't sustain that anymore. musically we're becoming one of those cultures that has its most orgiastic expenditures of combined wealth and artistry behind it - like Greece or Egypt ("man I wish we could still build pyramids..." "not enough slaves, ennit?")

we're becoming one of those cultures that has its most orgiastic expenditures of combined wealth and artistry behind it - like Greece or Egypt ("man I wish we could still build pyramids..." "not enough slaves, ennit?")

hahahaha come on now

It also seems like you are operating on the "mass tates" = bad music fallacy, which is of course v v ridiculous. Plenty of people find value and good things about Beyonce and Kanye and Jeezy. You come across as, quite frankly, an obscurist and elitist that thinks his opinions are valid above all others because you don't suffer the taint of "mass tastes". If that's why I seem to be jumping all over you on this thread, this is why.

xp tipsy: A number of musicians I know will buy their own records used at stores, so that other people won't.

they do realize how insane this is though, right?

pro tip: the way to play this is to buy your own record used, and then turn around and sell it for full-price your show that night!

(my band did this in chicago and it was awesome)

^^respect the grind! : )

totally makes sense on that basis

"Buy for a dollar, sell for two - it need not be more than that" - Prop Joe

# classic or dud, yo? people who watch the wire and then start speaking like the characters from it [Started by Buck Naked in April 2009, last updated 5 minutes ago by I'm the head soul brother in the US. Where to now? (bernard snowy)] 23 new answers

sheeeeeeeit

ayo

Game's the same, just got more fierce.

http://www.journerdism.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/broken-record.jpg

You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/middleman/images/thumb/8/86/Getting_to_know_about_the_Truth_Bomb.JPG/180px-Getting_to_know_about_the_Truth_Bomb.JPG

I don't think things would be 'better' but they would certainly be more democratic and less pandering to mass tastes.

you're contradicting yourself here so badly it'll take a magnet to extricate you from it.

you're giving a shit when it's not your turn to give a shit.

my bad

it's all in the game.

I don't think things would be 'better' but they would certainly be more democratic and less pandering to mass tastes.

you're contradicting yourself here so badly it'll take a magnet to extricate you from it.

― Just one thing I was thinking about as I was getting on the copter (J0hn D.), Tuesday, April 21, 2009 7:02 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

I don't see how this is contradicting. Corporate music biz dying would leave a void that would be filled by non-corporate musical entities. These entities would not have to worry about being dropped from their label or even sued (see John Fogerty, Neil Young) for not sticking with a familiar sound. Perhaps this will mean heaven for the musician but hell for the listener, who grew up in a society of musical hierarchy. It could be better or worse depending on what you expect from music.

lol u r so dum

Brian Wilson never had to give up on Smile the album because he simply got a musical copyist to write out a score for 50 musicians and invent the Smile Caravan that went all around the world for 5 years.

really makes you think

XD

"Buy for a dollar, sell for two - it need not be more than that" - Prop Joe

― 4,000 hoes in blackburn, lancashire (M@tt He1ges0n), Tuesday, April 21, 2009 6:22 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

The way Joe says that always reminds me of "I'll gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today"

Apologists for file sharing love to talk about "democracy" and "the music industry changing for the better". In fact, it's the majors who will survive. It is the musicians and labels who put the bottom line first who will be the ones making albums and putting them on your faces.

I think it's funny that some of the people complaining about musician sense of entitlement on this thread have no qualms about their own sense of entitlement to free music.

A lot of what I want to say I have either said before or has been said upthread, and a lot of it is moot anyway because the market will do as it does.

But I do want to emphasize that not only does making music cost money (as made clear above), but getting the music to an AUDIENCE costs money and requires a lot of time (which in turn requires at least some level of financial/career sacrifice). The internet as some kind of equalizing merit machine is a myth. Bands very rarely just put up an mp3 and have it spread like wildfire. The bands that you wind up hearing about, even the most DIY-seeming of them, often have some kind of professionals backing them -- label (even if indie), management, publicist, or whatever. Even without that (if you want to talk truly DIY), in fact even MORESO without that, getting music on the radar at all requires a lot of time and effort. How many people are lucky enough to have jobs that let them take off more than 2 weeks to tour? You can maybe work temp jobs, and live with your parents or in a grungy communal situation in a cheap city, or maybe you're a lucky one with crazy freelanceable computer programming skills or a trust fund from mom and dad.

Adam, it's fine that gas money for you is a good night, but frankly your music probably isn't amazing. Because it doesn't sound like you aspire to much.

Again, the CD thing is a moot point. But I can't help but be disappointed at how easily most people have abandoned the idea that it might be worth paying a little for music you acknowledge is of value to you.

My band was able to sell enough CDs to pay all our recording costs and have some money for short tours and occasional equipment needs. We still all had day jobs, but selling CDs made it much more manageable for us. It contributed to us being able to make a better quality recording than we would have otherwise. It allowed us to improve our sound with better equipment. And it enabled us to get our music to more people.

I think there's a long way between wanting a mansion and being content with a pure "for my friends" type band.

but frankly your music probably isn't amazing.

i've never heard it so i wouldn't know, but fuck me this seemed completely unnecessary

eh, maybe it was overboard. I just can't take the self-righteous and disingenuous "I'm content to make music for 20 of my friends so why isn't everyone else?" attitude.

the argument shouldnt really focus on the pay rate of the average musician, rather there should be less average musicians

i think where the idea of "entitlement" comes into it is in the way royalties work -- the idea that somebody keeps getting paid over and over forever for work that was done once. i know that in practice, this does not lead to very many people making very much money. but it's the place where creative work diverges most strongly from all other kinds of work. as somebody who gets a (very, very small) royalty check every year for something i did 10 years ago, i know that that money just feels like free cash to me. the work was done so long ago, and was not in any way harder work than lots of other work i've done under salary with no expectation of ongoing reward. if the checks were bigger, it would still feel like free money, just more of it.

i'm not saying we should scrap royalties, just saying that's the place where there's the biggest disconnect with the average person's experience of work and reward, which is generally that you get paid today for work you do today. if you want to get paid again tomorrow, you have to do more work.

I think we've pretty much established that Adam is batshit in his expectations of the "industry", so its probably safe to ignore him and move on.

But I can't help but be disappointed at how easily most people have abandoned the idea that it might be worth paying a little for music you acknowledge is of value to you.

This is really, really OTMFM for me. I went through a phase about 7 or 8 years ago when I was relatively broke and downloaded a shit ton of music. Most of which I never listened to. It came to the point where I just felt overwhelmed by it and deleted every single MB of it, and retreated to my physical collection. Since then, I very rarely download anything. I'm old fashioned, I love the anxiousness of waiting for release day. What I do download is usually stuff that I just can't get any other way. Anyway, it does pain me to hear my brother and his friends (all 18-19) talk about how they feel they shouldn't ever have to pay for music when so much of it is for free. The sense of entitlement really bugs me.

But I do want to emphasize that not only does making music cost money (as made clear above), but getting the music to an AUDIENCE costs money and requires a lot of time (which in turn requires at least some level of financial/career sacrifice).

again, this ties in with the music as a job vs. music as a hobby split. lots of people spend money and time on their hobbies, and don't expect to make this money back. i'm not saying it's wrong to want to make your money back and cut your losses. but the idea that a band deserves to make back the money it invests is based on the perception of the band as a business. again, no value judgments here, just think it's interesting how these perceptions affect expectations

I think what's sad, and I say this as an avid downloader (legal/illegal), is that the money the artists aren't getting is just going to go back into the capitalist system somewhere else, either to facilitators like ISPs, computer companies, Apple, Spotify perhaps or future similar programmes, etc etc.

That said I just don't think you can stop progress, people have a strong feeling that music should not be a product, people can't go back to thinking of it that way, probably because that was so unnatural in the first place.

Not really judging either, I fully agree with the points about big labels allowing kinds of music impossible to the home recordist and the relentlessly twisty entitled justification of file-copying...but...it's sad when industries get fucked over by the vagaries of the market. I was sad when the UK's manufacturing base got decimated in the 80s and threw half the people I knew onto the dole. Bewailing does nothing to stop it. When you make your living thru the workings of market forces, as we nearly all do, directly or indirectly, you have to know that one day that wave might well crash and leave you beached. If I'm sad to see the old music industry mutate or die, I'm not any sadder than all the other industries, useful or useless, that went before it.

but the idea that a band deserves to make back the money it invests is based on the perception of the band as a business. again, no value judgments here, just think it's interesting how these perceptions affect expectations

― congratulations (n/a), Wednesday, 22 April 2009 13:19 (40 minutes ago) Permalink

But I don't mean only to talk about the expectations of the band, but the expectations of audience as well. I don't think bands "deserve" to make back the money they invest, but I'd like to think the fact that we were able to is some reflection of the fact that people enjoyed our music and got something out of it and weren't just supporting our hobby. We never forced anyone to buy our CDs, but there's a difference between a situation where people choose to buy only what they like and one where people get everything they like for free.

The thing is if we want bands to be able to make the jump from hobbyist-quality to a higher level there needs to be some kind of support for them to develop in this way, and the same goes for giving higher quality bands the ability to get heard by more people. You would just never hear of most of the music you like in the first place if there wasn't some system of financial support behind those bands (whether it be label advances, flexible day jobs or trust funds). I'm not saying bands should be "entitled" to this, I'm just saying there has to be a way for bands to have a fair shot at it.

The thing is if we want bands to be able to make the jump from hobbyist-quality to a higher level there needs to be some kind of support for them to develop in this way, and the same goes for giving higher quality bands the ability to get heard by more people. You would just never hear of most of the music you like in the first place if there wasn't some system of financial support behind those bands (whether it be label advances, flexible day jobs or trust funds). I'm not saying bands should be "entitled" to this, I'm just saying there has to be a way for bands to have a fair shot at it.

I always thought the way to do this was to tour your ass off

This thread reads like souk-bargaining.

Bands very rarely just put up an mp3 and have it spread like wildfire

This happens with CDs?

Adam, it's fine that gas money for you is a good night, but frankly your music probably isn't amazing. Because it doesn't sound like you aspire to much.

I'll file that with 'elitist', 'batshit', and 'disregarding of others opinions'. Am I personally attacking you guys on this thread? Why do I deserve this?

I think there's a long way between wanting a mansion and being content with a pure "for my friends" type band.

― excuse me, brutality here? (Hurting 2), Wednesday, April 22, 2009 2:16 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hey musician dudes, here is a related thread: why do you make music?

In fairness, Adam, most people's music isn't amazing. I know the rock stuff I did wasn't amazing; I'm not fooling myself on that front. Conversely, some (not all) of the choral stuff I've done has legitimately been amazing, but surprise surprise I didn't write that stuff. (Personal choral highlights: singing "The Creation" with the BSO; singing "Mahagonny" with Opera Boston; singing in Japan with the Harvard Glee Club)

That said, that was kind of a blunt and shitty way of putting that, to the point where I'm surprised it didn't come from me!

Am I personally attacking you guys on this thread? Why do I deserve this?

you're not personally attacking anybody (though I do make my living as an artist, and have to tour more than I like to; I know people think tour's just fun city all day, but it's actually a lot of work; it'd be nice if selling a thousand records were still as easy as it was in the mid-nineties, when, I can attest, it was a piece of cake to sell a thousand seven-inches in a couple of weeks) but you do have the sort of tell-people-their-work-is-worthless/tell-them-how-best-to-regard-their-own-labor stance that a lot of digital age cheerleaders have; for example, you say

Let's say all this piracy kills the music industry, leaving only musicians that don't care about making money-those unfortunate ones who would be/are doing it anyways-and ask yourself would this really be something detrimental to the art form.

I say the art form would progress more in a year than it has in the last 50.

if you believe that Sergeant Pepper (for example) or Aja (for another) or Loveless (for a third) or Nevermind (for another) would have been made by people just doing it for the thrill of being told "I like your work," well - I think you're wrong, and I don't think you can really offer anything other than "it would, because I imagine it would" to defend this idea that once money's out of the equation music will somehow magically progress. I don't think there's anything wrong at all with artists - musicians; film-makers; actors - believing that they deserve to be paid for their work, and for thinking of their work as work. The burden of proof is sort of on you here. Of your favorite albums, how many of them do you really think would have been made in the first place if everybody knew up front there would never be any money for anyone in the process? Is there one of which you can say "this was done by people who knew there was no money in it for them ever, and it's one of the best albums ever made"? Mozart wrote for money; so did Beethoven. Classical music has not "progressed" as the money's drained out of it, in my opinion; do you disagree?

you think fuckin lemmy would make music for free

ask him about the alternate universe

if i was a poptimist i'd be really bummed out.

cuz realistically there will always be nowheresville rackety midwest post punk bands for me to dig on, but man if i were lex or something damn the future would look bleak.

just thinking of that butch vig video that was posted recently where he talks about having to cajole and trick kurt into doing multiple takes & overdubs, which obv. wouldn't have happened if he wasn't being paid a shitload of money to get the record made.

cuz realistically there will always be nowheresville rackety midwest post punk bands for me to dig on

this cracked me up

Good glossy sounding pop records can be produced on the cheap, but more importantly I'd guess the popularity of going out to clubs and dancing will continue to drive a market.

xpost

haha

new tornavalanche EP - "get rich or cry tryin'" drops next month limited ed of 300 vinyl, handscreenprinted covers booya! :P

I just can't see a collapse of the recording industry coming. It'd be interesting to know how the majors' bottom line is holding out given the fact that music has lost market share to e.g. video games and DVDs/videos over the last 20 years. I'm pretty sure it's still a lucrative business. As was said upthread it's really the people at the margins who are gonna suffer first and hardest.

Good glossy sounding pop records can be produced on the cheap, but more importantly I'd guess the popularity of going out to clubs and dancing will continue to drive a market.

― Ronmael de Canarias (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, April 22, 2009 4:10 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

really doe? cuz i dunno when i hear some shit like when that chick from The Hills tries to do a pop record it sounds like some douche fucking around with a laptop protools set up, say compared to some real high budget shit like timbaland or dj kahlid or something

the thing that it's neither the black and white universe of "money ruins music" (it doesn't) nor the (wholly imaginary, nobody actually thinks this but the strawman gets raised all the time) universe where The Man is people who don't care about music at all pumping oodles of money into music that sells millions (to: actual millions of people, who enjoy it) but which somehow is also said to be of no value. as the music industry has collapsed, so many people who cared a great deal about music & musicians & the culture of getting music out & keeping the whole arc of musical progress going have found themselves out of work; these were not & are not The Bad Guys Ruining Music With Money. They are and were passionate lovers of music in the industry. Is there a lot lame about the industry? Of course; nobody says otherwise; the Industry Stooge is a strawman. But the function of the industry - funding and supporting artists - is & was worth preserving.

I also, to be clear, believe that everything will come out in the wash, and that artists who love their work and love the people who listen to it will continue to do good work. It's just harder for them to do. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But the rhetoric of The Evil Music Business vs. The Artist Who Only Cares About His Work And Would Never Dream of Assigning Value To It, that's fairy tale garbage that should be countered every time it comes up.

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd120/hipsterrunoff/screen-capture-5-3.png

I've been wondering how long it could be before a major label collapses. Surely they can't all go on forever in this economic climate? One of them must be in trouble?

well, they don't really collapse, they get bought by one of the other major labels. used to be the big six and now it's the big four, right?

I feel like there are just enough Taylor Swifts and High School Musical soundtracks and NOW 352s out there to keep them from being in that dire of shape right now.

I think a key point that hasn't been discussed is that while the 'value', in financial terms, of a track has definitely been reduced, the value of music in terms of trends/coolness/fashion/brands/memes is still as strong as ever. So if you're not selling any records but you've got a zillion myspace hits, someone may be willing to give you loads of cash to make that expensive studio album with yr orchestra if you just wear our logo/drink our beverage whatever. This probably only works for bloghouse mind.

Ugh that would be even worse than the complete collapse of the music industry. Bands all stickered up like fucking NASCAR.

Ugh that would be even worse than the complete collapse of the music industry. Bands all stickered up like fucking NASCAR.

Asian pop has been like this since the late nineties as least - when I'd buy Thai pop CDs they would have ads for yogurt drinks and stuff. Co-branding was the Asian pop industry's first thought for monetizing bands, and I remember when this whole discussion was new there being lots of "put ads on your website" talk about how bands would make money

http://www.zhaocd.com/lib_b/200701301229post-77037-1126339300.jpg

Obvs I was half-joking there, but I guess it would come down to how tastefully this sort of arrangement would be.

Was thinking more of Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

Cobblers to tasteful, I wd pay proper money for a Radiohead album with 12 songs about how great Burger King is.

The Arcade Fire Presents An Evening with the New Ford Focus

lol

It's not just theory either: friends who work in the music industry have told me the idea of bands being signed to 'brands' rather that record labels is being considered.

Everyone agrees that the current model is now inadequate but what sets music apart from other artforms in my mind is the overwhelming manner in which people, especially kids, align themselves to certain kinds of music to define their 'personal brand' (to paraphrase Carles). While this is still the case there will still be a shitload of money to be made in music - what would be nice is if during this industry reshuffle we can end up with a model where the artists get what they deserve. I think we all agree on this and the argument that artists deserve no financial compensation for their work is completely o_0 to me

didn't groove armada sign to bacardi?

Yeah there are some specific examples of this but I can't recall. Obviously Red Stripe/Red Bull already invest heavily in this kind of thing.

Its a very interesting idea, but man I'd hate to have to give up on my favorite band because they signed to Wal-Mart or something.

I don't think there's anything wrong at all with artists - musicians; film-makers; actors - believing that they deserve to be paid for their work, and for thinking of their work as work. The burden of proof is sort of on you here.

I agree w/a lot of what J0hn says except this part - the burden of proof isn't on Adam, the burden of proof is on the market. The market determines whether or not people are willing to pay for a product. In many ways, people are no longer willing to pay for the products made by musicians. So whether or not musicians "believe" they should be paid is really immaterial. The fact is they will NOT be paid - at least, not until they have a product people are willing to pay for.

Red Bull sends flimsily-clad reps into dressing rooms to encourage bands to drink up plenty of free Red Bull, hey Red Bull! you guys want some Red Bull? We're here from Red Bull!

it is weird when that happens and everybody looks around uncomfortably.

(Shakey the burden of proof I'm referring to there is for the claim that money doesn't have anything to do with the making of great albums)

Just thought we should hear from Kenny Dixon Jr., as a brief intermission:

"All money ain't good money. I'm a nigga from the D, let me tell you, I can think of a million ways to get paid in this motherfucker. Unfortunately, music is not a way for me to get paid, it's just something I do, you know. I do it. I did it long after I seen my first dollar, and I'll do it long after I sold my last. You got lot of motherfuckers out here just doing shit for, you know, the bill, the dollar bill...this and that, and then they getting mad 'cuz they ain't getting paid, they didn't get paid last time, and telling you they ain't gonna make no music 'til they get paid. It becomes complicated, you know, but as far as I'm concerned, if this shit becomes a job for me, I'm doing it for the wrong reasons. You got all these motherfuckers trippin' over this dollar bill, they tripping over that motherfucker. I'm just now getting beans with my rice...I see that dollar bill in the street like a real bitch, make that bitch work, that bitch gonna be payin' my rent, that bitch gonna' be putting food on the table, I'm gonna be stuffin' that bitch in my pocket, be handin' that bitch to somebody else, but whatever goes on that bitch gonna be doing whatever the hell I want it to do. But one thing a nigga ain't gonna do, is a nigga ain't gonna be chasin' that bitch."

ah. silly me

x-posts

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8012160.stm

Global music sales fell by more than 8% to $18.42bn (£12.67bn) in 2008, according to the body that represents the record industry worldwide.

Physical formats like CDs and vinyl performed particularly badly - dropping by 15% globally and 31% in the US.

Sales of digital formats like MP3s and ringtones grew by 24% worldwide but failed to make up the shortfall.

This is partly due to the lower price of downloads, but also because people tend not to buy entire albums online.

According to figures released by the Official Charts Company earlier this year, Only 10.3m albums were downloaded in the UK last year, compared to 110.3m singles, or individual tracks.

The prevalence of pirated music on the internet also plays a key role in the decline in music sales overall.

Best-selling album

As well as physical and digital sales, the IFPI's figures cover performance rights money.

There was a global rise of 16.3% to $802m (£548m) in money received by record companies for music being used on radio and TV and being played in public.

Europe accounted for most of that money, with a total of $576m (£394m) collected by bodies like PRS for Music.

Separate IFPI figures released earlier this year showed that Coldplay's Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends was the best-selling album of 2008 worldwide, selling 6.8 million copies.

It was followed by Black Ice, by veteran rockers AC/DC, and the soundtrack to Mamma Mia! The Movie.

(i don't necessarily agree totally, duh, but find it a somewhat intersting quote)

also this on RA today...http://www.residentadvisor.net/news.aspx?id=10481

Physical formats like CDs and vinyl performed particularly badly - dropping by 15% globally and 31% in the US.

huh this directly contradicts what other industry people have told me about vinyl's market performance in the last year.

that can't be right, quite honestly-- vinyl sales worldwide might have declined (due to the somewhat recent emergence of new technologies in some countries) but in Western capitalist states, sales surely rose....

well that figure is cds and vinyl combined, as i read it

"physical formats"

pretty pissed off I didn't think of that RipBlock idea first - genius!

maybe they're lumping all physical formats together for those numbers?

xp

ugh as a dude who watches musicians (hobbyists and otherwise) desperately trying to get together money to buy a new cable or some strings or (god forbid) repair their guitar so they can continue playing, the attitude of a bunch of people on this thread is kind of fucking infuriating.

"If their music didn't suck, the magical music fairies would buy them new strings."

as a dude who watches musicians (hobbyists and otherwise) people desperately trying to get together money to buy a new cable or some strings or (god forbid) repair their guitar food and space to sleep so they can continue playing living, the attitude of a bunch of people on this thread is kind of fucking infuriating.

seriously.

(btw jj- still trying to scrounge to get my cab re-coned, will hopefully be able to call you in a couple weeks, shit is blooooown.)

(also need my bass neck is fucked and my strap peg popped out and fell under the stage so i have it duct taped right now, need that fixed)

might want to throw some hitler in there too for good measure xpost to table

xpost

so basically unless you are actually homeless stfu about everything?

i know a lot of professional musicians and not one of them live entirely on money from touring & record sales in the traditional sense. pretty much all of the ones with decent livings have cobbled them together from different areas in addition to those: licensing their music for commercial use, recording music specifically for commercial use, teaching, etc. this seems to be a much more realistic way forward than making living solely off making the creative music you want to make/being in a band.

I'm gonna go steal some food from the grocery store for lunch, I mean, shit, why pay for what grows out of the ground anyway?

ugh as a dude who watches musicians (hobbyists and otherwise) desperately trying to get together money to buy a new cable or some strings or (god forbid) repair their guitar so they can continue playing, the attitude of a bunch of people on this thread is kind of fucking infuriating.

― no. (jjjusten), Wednesday, April 22, 2009 11:55 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

do these people not have other jobs? if not, maybe they should. that's kind of what makes something a hobby, and not a career

well yeah they have other jobs but they are often the sorts of jobs that dudes who try to tour get - which is to say shitty jobs that pay poorly but have "flexible hours". also doesn't change the fact that it isnt like these dudes are trying to be all musicmaker rich, they just wouldn't mind making back some of the money it costs to play.

but from what i get from some dudes on this thread, that expectation makes them assholes.

looking forward to people decrying RipBlock as "evil"

(although: it is "stupid")

i feel like i'm being a dick here but then maybe these people shouldn't be touring, as it doesn't seem like it's fiscally viable for them?

I think this discussion can be pushed beyond music too though, I was just reading an article in The Advocate this weekend about how porn, one of the few industries that has traditionally been recession-proof, is suffering big time right now because, basically, people don't think they should pay for what is all over the internet for free. And, I think, if the Kindle and e-books really do ever take off, booksellers and authors are going to be arguing these very same ideas.

and is it really the fault of downloading that these dudes can't afford strings?

no, but the attitude that musicians expecting the potential of any income is alternately elitist or idiotic grates on me when i talk to these sad little dudes on a daily basis.

And, I think, if the Kindle and e-books really do ever take off, booksellers and authors are going to be arguing these very same ideas.

i've been thinking a lot about this lately, too, and it's sort of off topic, but i think if the Kindle was *really* going to take off, it would have already. that's not to say there won't be something that may kill off the book someday, but i think books will be around for a long time.

I can totally see what you are getting at jjjusten and it sucks, but its not like I could just quit my job today, write a bunch of tunes tomorrow and expect to be paying my mortgage as usual in three months, you know? That would be ridiculous for me to expect that.

(xxpost)

Mr. Que, totally with you on both counts. But I have seen more Kindles on public transport and in coffee shops in the last two months than I ever have before, so maybe something is finally happening.

and the really sad thing is that as a guy who is in the music business end of selling gear, these guys aren't really where we make our money anymore - its mostly doctor and lawyer hobbyists and whatever, so most music stores wont really give them the time of day or any consideration. ten years ago most of our business came from people that were actually out playing/touring/whatever - and not to make a value judgement out of who should be the focus of the musical instrument industry, but it is oddly indicative that the general watchword in a music store now is to beeline for the guy in the suit and ignore the rocker dude.

xpostsssss

some of my best friends are sad little rocker dudes

sitting alone at night in an unlit room full of tiny bobbing bobbleheads

oh and also part of the problem is that people are conflating "making truckloads", "making a sustainable income", "making enough to barely scrape by without savings or healthcare" (which is the most common and also o_O one unfortunately), and "making back a small percentage of what you need to spend/have already spent to make music" - which are basically all totally different expectations, and cant be lumped in together without the argument getting all sloppy.

honestly this whole thread is pretty sloppy and all over the place

talking about like 50 incredibly complicated subjects in one thread

yeah i will stop the kindle talk

Should've been a poll amirite?

"should have been a poll" is the new "Killing Joke are a goth band"

Is there a kindle thread btw cos I don't think those things are ever gonna be more than a tiny minority pursuit?

Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

I'm just saying, as with most creative ventures (and many straightforward business ventures tbh), the expectation of immediately making any significant amount of bankable income is kinda ridiculous. I mean, the guy down the road that opens his own copy shop can't plan on giving himself a $60k salary right out of the box, can he? He needs to work hard, pay for his overhead and then pray he makes enough to live on after all of that. Its kinda the same way for musicians. Hell, small businesses fail all the fucking time even when their owners know their shit and really bust ass. And thats sad, but we don't waste time screaming about the injustice of that do we?

And wasn't the old model that bands hoped and prayed they'd be picked up by a label who wd 99 times out of 100 do nothing but saddle them with a big debt and dump them 18 months down the line anyway?

Yeah, people should be able to make some money for playing gigs and touring and whatnot, if only so they can keep the equipment/etc. in good shape.

What I object to is that underground music-makers, hobbyists or not, are buying into this very mainstream idea of the marketplace as it has existed in the past. McCartney got paid$$$ for his recordings (and continues to get paid shit for nothing good, apparently), so that means that my touring musician friends (some of whom are on legit labels) should also get paid$$$ for their recordings, even tho their music has been disseminated in formats in a culture that has completely and irrevocably changed the way people listen to music?

Yeah, I want my friends (and others like them) to have enough money to get to the next stop on tour and to eat and to repair and keep investing in the tools of their trade, but to expect this money to come only from recordings is absurd, at this point. There are many other ways to use your craft's skills and make money while still doing what you want to do, and they have been discussed endlessly above.

In terms of my 'fixing' of that statement, I was being inflammatory-- this is a serious issue, I agree, but I also think that some perspective on the entitlement inherent in the original statement is needed. I wasn't trying to be Eichmann or something.

Again, yes, what I said above completely ignores the individual expectations of "significant income", but I think the point is valid. Why don't we feel the same great sense of injustice in the world when another restaurant goes out of business?

NOODLE OTM

there are a lot of technically-otm posts in here that completely miss the point anyway

Talking to myself here now, but oh well. I mean, from the restaurant owner's positing, doesn't he deserve to make an income for providing people with good food?

i don't think anyone is disagreeing that music-as-business-venture is a risky proposition, but the point is that musicians are currently getting the deck stacked against them in a way that simply didn't happen 10 years ago

"position"

I'll stop now. Just lots of good discussion on this thread to keep up with.

i mean copy shop/restaurant/whatever isn't really comparable guys

Not 100%, no, but I think there are some valid arguments about how they could be similar in terms of expectations.

well, i dunno, i'm bummed when a good restaurant in my town goes under. who wouldn't be?

And wasn't the old model that bands hoped and prayed they'd be picked up by a label who wd 99 times out of 100 do nothing but saddle them with a big debt and dump them 18 months down the line anyway?

― Ronmael de Canarias (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, April 22, 2009 5:28 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah but this is affecting smaller indie like for example touch & go who you pretty much can't find an artist who's worked with rusk who would criticize their practices

But they're also stacking their own decks against the powers that be-- for example, it ain't like Dan Deacon is making shit-tons of money, but he is making money AND existing in both above/underground scenes, as well as creating spaces and scenes for other bands. a friend's group has one record out, another coming soon, and most of this is because of 1) blogs, 2) myspace, and 3) shit like whartscape. yeah, they're not raking in the dough, but they get paid some monies at their gigs now.

Of course, but people don't feel that its some huge injustice that it didn't do as well as Corporate Chain X down the road. It's just business.

(xpost)

xxpost

Yeah I wasn't on a "Oh those evil labels" tip I guess I was saying that it's always been an unremunerative business at the underwater part of the iceberg.

is dan deacon an exception or something to what tons of musicians would like to be doing? do you know that he is uniquely successful in some way?

Anyway, I'm totally conflating the ideas of "business" and "art" which is a very dangerous and probably wrong road to travel down.

"Art" was invented as a way of getting paid when rich patrons stopped being so patronising.

so basically the future is less steely dans, more dan deacons. sweet.

One thing that has happened recently in the book-selling business, if people care to have that analog explicated, is that independent book-sellers and independent have seen approximately a 20% rise in sales (and thus rises in profits) compared to 4-5 years ago. Corporate publishers and chain bookstores? The figures are insane-- something like 47%-60% drops in sales, and thus total basementing of profits.

The problem is that musical 'objects' are not as valued in today's internet culture as much as book 'objects.' I don't know how to resolve this issue, but there has to be some way to take a cue/lesson from independent book-sellers and book-publishers.

There isn't, not when people are satisfied with an electronic version of the music but unsatisfied with an electronic version of the book.

I'm just saying that Dan Deacon is one example of an independent musician who exists outside of corporate RIAA music structures and who has had some success. Just an example guys, jeez.

One thing that has happened recently in the book-selling business, if people care to have that analog explicated, is that independent book-sellers and independent have seen approximately a 20% rise in sales (and thus rises in profits) compared to 4-5 years ago.

Really? Where did you read this? I'd be interested to hear more about it.

so basically the future is less steely dans, more dan deacons. sweet.
ouch

also Dan OTM on electronic books

i was just making a joke guys jeez ; )

Besides being really hard working - in terms of networking/scene building and a heavy tour schedule, Dan Deacon got lucky.

xp Que: That is interesting, as in our area a lot of independent bookstores are closing.

its "fewer" steely dans

i think everything should be free, always, and no one should have to work, ever

your mom is free

There isn't, not when people are satisfied with an electronic version of the music but unsatisfied with an electronic version of the book.

As much as it pains me, I don't think thats always going to be the case when it comes to books. Fuck a Kindle, aren't there apps on the iPhone for reading books now? I could see that catching on more than an awkward brick.

I reckon most book purchasers are too attached to the book as object for iPhone apps to ever really dent sales.

i just don't understand why dan deacon is a great example when this thread is about how 10 years ago there were probably a lot more ppl as successful as him, or more successful, or slightly-less-successful-but-could-still-pay-for-gas, etc.

Not to continue this derailment, but I'm sure there were a lot of record store owners saying the exact same thing about 9 or 10 years ago.

(xpost)

self-xp i mean i suppose he is a good example of the tour your ass off model altho that's a whole lot easier when you are one guy not a band

Mr. Que, the figures come from a study/survey that I read about in a Small Press Distribution catalog in the fall-- the figures astounded me so much that they're burned in my mind. Couldn't find the article on their site, but they're the biggest independent distributor of small & independent presses in the US, if not the world.

As much as it pains me, I don't think thats always going to be the case when it comes to books. Fuck a Kindle, aren't there apps on the iPhone for reading books now? I could see that catching on more than an awkward brick.

I do think it will change in the future; my point is that it hasn't changed yet, so the markets aren't in the same place. If anything, I think the book industry needs to be looking at what's happening in the music industry and shitting its pants.

until they come up with a reading experience on a computer screen that duplicates the experience of reading a book, i think iphone apps and kindles, while growing in use, are going to be nowhere near as popular as an ipod

Oh, exactly, thats what I was getting at with my earlier post about books and porn in relation to our discussion.

i just don't understand why dan deacon is a great example when this thread is about how 10 years ago there were probably a lot more ppl as successful as him, or more successful, or slightly-less-successful-but-could-still-pay-for-gas, etc.

HELLO THE INTERNET HAPPENED.

The book industry is already shitting its pants cuz the Harry Potter series is over.

i've read similar stuff about bookstores. small bookstores in urban/collegiate areas seem like they've got a reasonably bright next 5-10 years at least

i'm in the harvard coop like every weekend; place is always nuts

HELLO JK ROWLING HAPPENED

Fuck the book industry. For real.

table we might just be saying the same thing at this point? i haven't even been on this thread long and i'm already confused

the book industry is in a different kind of danger than the music industry anyway; the threat isnt coming from consumers wondering why they should pay for something they can get for free online--its coming from a public that reads fewer books than it did 30 yrs ago

corporate RIAA music structures

still a strawman btw & Deacon does business more or less the same way as everybody else (play locally til someone notices, record some stuff, hire press, tour a lot, make an album, hire press, tour a lot)

Yeah, but I don't think everyone shares in the same idea of what "the experience of reading a book" means.

(xxpost)

i've read similar stuff about bookstores. small bookstores in urban/collegiate areas seem like they've got a reasonably bright next 5-10 years at least

in the small midwestern town i went to school in over 10 years ago, there is only one (indie) bookstore downtown, and that one just opened a few months ago. for at least a year there was no bookstore downtown.

i live in DC and the major indie bookstore, olsson's, closed last fall. there's a huge borders downtown on l street--i went there the other night and in the fiction section there was TONS of empty space, so much so that if you'd told me the store was closing i wouldn't be surprised.

Er, from what I've heard Border's as a chain is pretty fucking close to closing down.

Table: I think you're conflating "music industry" with "big corporate swindling industry that fucks over the artists." The two are not the same, and decent small and medium-sized labels who treat their artists great are impacted by downloading too (and in my experience most people who grab free music do not discriminate between indie/major)

Dan Deacon is still on a real record label with a 20+ artist roster. I'm sure he gets advances and whatnot. He probably has some kind of management and/or publicity and/or booking team. You don't strike gold by just spamming blogs, no matter who you are.

yeah, maybe.

i also admit that i don't really know anything about current music that isn't made by DJs, except some stuff about the psych/noise scene. and since those are two areas that have some amount of 'difference' in the way the music is bought, sold and valued, i plead ignorance.

Er, from what I've heard Border's as a chain the retail industry is pretty fucking close to closing down.

― homage is parody gone sour (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Wednesday, April 22, 2009 1:57 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

xp Hurting 2: Dan Deacon does have a PR and booking agent.

the one bright spot in consumer spending is supposed to be electronics and the US can't even support 2 national electronics retailers?

http://www.chinakontor.de/chinamap2.jpg

xp Edward: the US is supporting quite a few electronics retailers - they sell things over the internet. I'm guessing UPS and Fed Ex are doing pretty well by them.

I meant B&M retail

BM retail? gross

"Is anyone else BMing like a rockstar?"

The H&M store is doing pretty well.

there has to be some way to take a cue/lesson from independent book-sellers and book-publishers.

― the table is the table, Wednesday, April 22, 2009 10:43

yes. if only we could figure out a way to get people to pay lots of money for theoretically limited-edition (i.e. decommoditized) "objets de musique"... perhaps manufactured from rare materials...

http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2005/12/09/iconbg_vinyl2_dec10,0.jpg

is self-delusional rationalization for stealing other people's work really THAT powerful

OTM. I'm so sick of the sophistry of the music-should-be-free crowd. The "lolz, it's not like I stole a television" argument falls at the first hurdle, because the material that you've acquired a free copy of is not actually intangible, and does have a definable monetary value. Go and have a look at the racks in your local record store if you don't believe me.
What it comes down to is this: unless musicians expressly waive the copyright to their recordings, you simply do not have the legal or moral right to make their art freely available on peer-to-peer sharing networks. It's not your choice to make. And if they made those recordings in the expectation of financial remuneration, it's not good enough to declare, as you download the album, that you don't approve of the record industry's business model. If you genuinely don't like how the artist gets paid, you should express your disapprobation by boycotting their product. Downloading the album from Soulseek and telling yourself that you're sticking it to The Man is just pathetic.
When I was growing up, my friends and I were perfectly happy to put our cash down for records. It was a simple and eminently fair quid pro quo. The anecdote above, about the rich kids who won't pay ten dollars for a CD by a band whose music they already know they enjoy, perfectly illustrates where the downloading culture has brought us to.
I'm amazed by the presumption of those who declare that musicians are just going to have to forget about record sales and find other ways to earn a living through their art, e.g. live performance and merchandising. Who put you in charge? Musicians shouldn't be forced to spend their lives on tour, and neither should they have to flog teeshirts or diet soda to pay the rent.
All that said, I don't deny that the big record labels are run by shit-for-brains fatcats. I remember that during Napster's heyday, the most common justification one heard for music sharing was that "CDs are poor value for money". Not once did I hear an industry spokesperson point out that in fact, a CD - which, even at full price, costs less than a round of drinks - can be one of the best investments you can ever make. I bought my first CD twenty years ago. I still have that album and I still enjoy listening to it. And I'm really glad that the band that recorded it got some money from me for it.

I'm amazed by the presumption of those who declare that musicians are just going to have to forget about record sales and find other ways to earn a living through their art, e.g. live performance and merchandising. Who put you in charge?

the market. you can complain night and day about how things aren't "right" but its really entirely inconsequential. people don't want to pay for music anymore. you can whine about it, but that won't make them pay for it.

as far as CDs go, the record industry completely screwed themselves when they decided to make music available as ones and zeros instead of as an analog artifact. I have no pity for them.

the invisible hand of the market gives music the finger

Shakey's kind of OTM here, I think.

haha, as if they could have made the choice never to do that?!

xp

i mean, it was an inevitability as soon as the technology became available.

you can whine about it, but that won't make them pay for it.

And that won't ever be right, no matter how much you may enjoy seeing musicians getting fucked over.

s far as CDs go, the record industry completely screwed themselves when they decided to make music available as ones and zeros instead of as an analog artifact. I have no pity for them.

― shit was shocking as fuck back then (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, April 22, 2009 2:52 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

tbh this doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me

Shakey's kind of OTM here, I think.

Et tu, Randy?

haha, i don't think shakey * enjoys * seeing musicians get fucked over! he's just stating the economic facts as he sees them
xpost

i mean just because i acknowledge that life = totally unfair doesn't mean I enjoy that!

xp: Jordan OTM The music industry could have done it, or Microsoft could have done it for them.

I remember when CDs came out. It was a complete scam on the part of the record companies to make money off of their existing catalogs via a new, wildly overpriced (and imho largely inferior) format. And instead of looking down the road and considering the ramifications of setting as the industry standard a musical format that could be distributed independently of the physical artifact, they cashed in for the biggest short-term gains they could get. Now they are fucked. Oh the irony.

what is better music or economics

And that won't ever be right, no matter how much you may enjoy seeing musicians getting fucked over.

you're funny. I'm a musician btw. enjoy your righteous indignation.

tylerw OTM: It still sucks but that doesn't make it any less true, and if you want to change it, you have to take the current situation into account.

i just bought a CD on my lunch break, everyone! :D

i got that special thrill i always get when i buy a CD.

I bought a CD yesterday!

that's the cling wrap xp

i don't think the average consumer gave a fuck that lps were "analog artifacts" and cds were "a bunch of ones and zeros"

you're acting like they could have done something about this. i'm pretty sure most people viewed cds as the superior format, whether or not any of us agree/disagree with that.

When I was growing up, my friends and I were perfectly happy to put our cash down for records.

And you never, ever made a mix tape? Like, to introduce your friends to some awesome stuff?

Lets add vinyl vs. cd arguments to make this an even bigger clusterfuck thread!

it is interesting -- would things be radically different if something along the lines of iTunes debuted pre-Napster, say in 1995 or something? was there something like that? I actually don't remember.

HOME TAPING IS KILLING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

Is it okay to play vinyl while masturbating with a racist bottle opener in front of a baby? How much should you tip afterward?

15%

did you buy the bottle opener online or B&M

did you come on the baby?

TOO FAR

i'm sorry

no you are not

go back to teh kindle thread you perverted undersea librarian

xp tyler: I don't think so. In 1995, hardly anyone had broadband, and not as many people had computers, even college students.

masturbating on baby's BM? Ewwww!

instead of looking down the road and considering the ramifications of setting as the industry standard a musical format that could be distributed independently of the physical artifact, they cashed in

Yes, and if the White Star Line had had any sense, they wouldn't have bothered building the Titanic. I mean, how could you not see that iceberg coming?
In 1984, not even the guys who invented the Internet could have foreseen Napster.

god i wish i could find that super soaker/baloo gif :(

xp Vast Halo: Seriously, how could the people who invented the airplane not know that people would use them to fly into buildings and kill people?

Jordan OTM The music industry could have done it, or Microsoft could have done it for them.

yeah this is true - the music industry could have, y'know, possibly excercised a little foresight and innovation and worked out the ramifications of the CD format with the emerging technology and tech firms but instead they just stuck their heads in the sand and tried to treat CDs as records.

argh so many x-posts

Is it okay to play vinyl while masturbating with a racist bottle opener in front of a baby? How much should you tip afterward?

^^^best thread ever

In 1984, not even the guys who invented the Internet could have foreseen Napster.

um, the guys who invented the Internet were all swanning around on USENET groups where large binaries were being UUEncoded, split up, and passed around (the format was invented in the 70s as an email security protocol)

Is it okay to play vinyl download MP3s while masturbating with a racist bottle opener in front of a baby? How much should you tip afterward?

xp Hi Dere: Who is getting the tip? The musician whose record you're masturbating to? The baby?

im going to write an alternate history novel where we all obsessively download and exchange MIDI files

Is it okay to play vinyl download MP3s while masturbating with a racist bottle opener in front of a baby? How much should you tip afterward?

― i like to fart and i am crazy (gbx), Wednesday, April 22, 2009 2:15 PM (6 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you don't have to tip if you just torrent that shit

the bottle opener

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/f/7/0/f70c6573a80bf2f019456b1feb1da6db.gif

guys lets stop pretending that the music industry was blindsided by downloading - people warned them of this shit as soon as it developed (if not even earlier, I'd have to check my back issues of WIRED lolz) and the music industry's response was one of active denial, combative legal maneuvering, and completely inept development of potential market alternatives.

x-post

you tip the baby obviously--gotta pay for that poor thing's years of therapy somehow

you don't have to tip if you just torrent that shit

― congratulations (n/a), Wednesday, April 22, 2009 2:17 PM (0 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is also the chorus of my new hip hop song btw

You're tipping the guy who just brought you the pig-knuckle and falafel pizza.

feat. asher roth

xp Hi Dere: Is the pizza New York style?

btw i don't mean to keep ragging on adam bruneau, but that alternative history is some serious dork lols, all music nerd wondering what would have happened if germany had won or whatever

xp thank you chocolatepiekid

guys lets stop pretending that the music industry was blindsided by downloading - people warned them of this shit as soon as it developed (if not even earlier, I'd have to check my back issues of WIRED lolz) and the music industry's response was one of active denial, combative legal maneuvering, and completely inept development of potential market alternatives.

x-post

― shit was shocking as fuck back then (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, April 22, 2009 2:17 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is otm, tho i'm not sure what could have been done differently.

^^^this

And you never, ever made a mix tape? Like, to introduce your friends to some awesome stuff?

Sure I did. But I don't see any real equivalency. I wasn't making my entire collection available for copying by anyone in the world. And more importantly, receiving a mixtape didn't give my friends the notion that they'd never have to pay for music again.

if only someone could.....imagine a world. a different world

http://crazyabouttv.com/Images/differentworld.jpg

I mean, anyone with access to a university network that was plugged into Usenet KNEW that CDs were going to make stealing music that much easier! It was already happening with sound files converted from analog; making everything digital just removed a barrier of entry and made it possible for everyone to do it.

more ambitious bands developed their own recording equipment that surpassed even what we use today.

wow, i missed this. that is just a hell of a thing to say.

WTF people, CD's weren't about the industry generously providing consumers with a superior product, it was about making people buy their own music collections all over again. The industry fed off this bubble of inflated sales for 15 years, and when it was over, they blamed downloaders/aliens/whoever they could find instead of, you know, long-term investment in newer artists. Shakey is OTM here.

um, *making* long-term investments ...

yeah, Shakey OTM. i kept trying to say the same thing, but not as eloquently, obviously.

it was about making people buy their own music collections all over again.

yo how did the music industry "make" people do this exactly?

they slowly stopped producing vinyl, duh.

^^^

i mean i know we are all posting on I Love Music but are we forgetting that the CD's ridiculous (at the time) portability, convenience, and ease of storage were actually selling points for people?

they told me they'd kill my dog if i didn't buy CDs

Vast Halo, I'm not suggesting these things are identical. Only that the sky has always been falling and things have always been changing. cf. my post upthread about classical, Adam's post about theater musicians, J0hn's post on classical, etc etc.

I agree that a lot is lost when the curatorial aspect goes away, but, y'know, such is life. What's given your friends the notion that they'll never have to pay for music again is the simple observation that they'll never have to pay for music again, though they may choose to in specific instances for any number of reasons. Genie/bottle, horse/barn.

people warned them of this shit as soon as it developed (if not even earlier, I'd have to check my back issues of WIRED lolz) and the music industry's response was one of active denial, combative legal maneuvering, and completely inept development of potential market alternatives.

― shit was shocking as fuck back then (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The industry's success in effectively killing DAT probably provided some false confidence.

this whole idea that CDs were some kind of nefarious plot is just retarded. technology folks made a new format, that -- while i do love vinyl -- seemed at the time to be more durable, more convenient (no fliping sides, instant track access, being able to program a running order), and not prone to skipping. the music industry naturally assumed that this format would be something people wanted -- which they did, for a while.

but this whole fairytale thing where it was some kind of murder pact against vinyl and now the chickens of this plot have come home to roost is just like a fantasy land thing. at the time there seemed to be a lot of advantages to CDs, esp when the audio industry was telling everyone the sound was scientifically "better" etc, so it made sense for the music industry to do it....and the fact that zillions of CDs sold seemed to suggest that it was something that was in demand....the idea that they should have foreseen the Internet filesharing thing seems like Monday Morning Quarterbacking to an extreme degree.

yo how did the music industry "make" people do this exactly?

I have had it up to here waiting for the Beatles catalogue to be remastered

maybe i'm ignorant of the history but if people actually preferred lps to cds wouldn't the market have borne that out and lps would have continued to be produced?

Until CDs, I bought most stuff on cassette, for the reasons call all destroyer cites above - portability, convenience, and ease of storage. Also, Columbia Tape Club.

they slowly stopped producing vinyl, duh.

― the table is the table, Wednesday, April 22, 2009 7:28 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^

― I can sit in my car all day, and that doesn't make me a car. (HI DERE), Wednesday, April 22, 2009 7:28 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah but wasn't this more a fact of the audience turning away from vinyl? i.e. the same "market forces" that everyone talks about every other post in this thread?

What's given your friends the notion that they'll never have to pay for music again is the simple observation that they'll never have to pay for music again, though they may choose to in specific instances for any number of reasons.
What's given your friends the notion that they'll never have to pay for music again is the simple observation that they'll never have to pay for music again, though they may choose to in specific instances for any number of reasons.
What's given your friends the notion that they'll never have to pay for music again is the simple observation that they'll never have to pay for music again, though they may choose to in specific instances for any number of reasons.
What's given your friends the notion that they'll never have to pay for music again is the simple observation that they'll never have to pay for music again, though they may choose to in specific instances for any number of reasons.

the guys who invented the Internet were all swanning around on USENET groups where large binaries were being UUEncoded, split up, and passed around

Vint Cerf in original gangsta shockah! Seriously, do you think what you're describing constituted the writing on the wall?
Anyway, what made the mass piracy of music practicable was not the invention and popularisation of the CD. It was the invention and popularisation of the MP3 file format, and the widespread availability of PCs that were powerful enough to decode MP3s in real time.

CAD, yeah, they were selling points, especially at the beginning, when only nouveau riche, the already-rich, and insane music heads like us bought CDs or CD players.

I purchased DARK SIDE OF THE MOON on vinyl, cassette, CD, Gold CD, and probably some other bullshit format I can't even remember. Like, MiniDisc or something. Industry owes my ass some free downloads.

i'm not reading a 100s of posts thread abt the beatles--what does it explain w/r/t my question?

sarahel otm--the cd actually killed the cassette, guys

yeah but wasn't this more a fact of the audience turning away from vinyl? i.e. the same "market forces" that everyone talks about every other post in this thread?

I don't think so - pretty sure there was an active "we're pushing a new format" culture in the biz. It took a long time for CDs to take off, and the vinyl sections of the stores shrunk while they were still viable - not a "conspiracy" but I think a choice by labels to transition to CD once they were assured that the customers would accept the new format

I purchased DARK SIDE OF THE MOON on vinyl, cassette, CD, Gold CD, and probably some other bullshit format I can't even remember. Like, MiniDisc or something. Industry owes my ass some free downloads.

― butt-rock miyagi (rogermexico.), Wednesday, April 22, 2009 3:34 PM (14 seconds ago) Bookmark

why didn't you just listen to your lp? why did you re-buy it all those times?

as in CDs ad CD players were aspirational at first, making them a status symbol, much like the original iPod back in the day.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/cb/Sonyd50.JPG/728px-Sonyd50.JPG

because he was hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

i mean i know we are all posting on I Love Music but are we forgetting that the CD's ridiculous (at the time) portability, convenience, and ease of storage were actually selling points for people?

One of the major selling points was that "cd's would last a lifetime" and "couldn't be damaged"

which is so lol rong that it hurts me a bit.

i mean sure any new technology is aspirational/statusy at first. but there are tons and tons of failed media formats--ultimately the cd did something right or it would have been there along with them.

everyone thought cds were pretty fucking rad

i still like em fwiw

rip minidiscs

i like them but mostly because i love Yasunao Tone.

http://www.amazon.com/Solo-For-Wounded-Cd/dp/B0010WO0TY/ref=mb_oe_o

CDs sure as hell were shiny. i remember my older brother getting his first CD for christmas and we loved looking at our own reflection in it. this might mean something. i don't know what.

I didn't like CDs and didn't buy a CD player until 1995

I have no idea what this has to do with the village people and pirate bay

why didn't you just listen to your lp? why did you re-buy it all those times?

― call all destroyer, Wednesday, April 22, 2009 12:36 PM

LP: because there was nothing else

cassette: for teh car

CD: because it sounded better, plus ability to skip "money" by remote controlz0r

Gold CD: because it sounded even better in some way my dog could surely hear, plus, dude, seriously gold cd, right?

Other bullshit format I can't even remember, like MiniDisc or something: i dunno, i made this up. i actually made up the rest, too. i've actually never owned DSoTM ;_;

i'm converting all my CDs into clocks

hey guys remember cassettes?

i miss cassettes

i have a large box of cassettes in my car, and i love them.

cassettes in the car are possibly one of the greatest things ever

some things sounded great on cassettes and I can't listen to 'em on CD anymore, lots of hip hop

must be that bass compression

lots of xposts

Many good comments here, but my main point was that the music industry should have recognized that the huge sales increases of the 90's were a bubble, and that the money would dry up once everybody a) replaced their turntables and cassette decks with new CD players, b) bought their music collections all over again, c) bought the boxsets, d) bought the remasters, and so on. They could have done a better job of planning ahead with new market strategies, or *some* kind of next step once this bubble burst, but they didn't.

I thought CDs were rad when I finally got a CD player ... no more fast-forwarding to disrupt the soundtrack to my highschool angst!

i still buy vinyl and cassettes and some cds if its cheap/cant get vinyl

the thing i hate buying for more than a few quid are cd's. I refuse to buy £7.99+ cdrs from Volcanic Tongue.

the thing i hate buying for more than a few quid are cdr's i mean

Many good comments here, but my main point was that the music industry should have recognized that the huge sales increases of the 90's were a bubble

ok this is getting on to some basic human nature ish but successful people, especially a large group of them, generally are not going to recognize this, as intelligent as it would have been to do so.

i buy blank cassettes to record on via 8-track. they still sell them at cvs

I only buy vinyl if I can't get something on CD.

btw, I was and am all for CD. took up a shit-ton less space than vinyl, infinitely more portable, damage-resistant, plus track-skipping/programming was like a prayer heard and answered.

of course my greatest format-related desire, so precious i didn't even dare to speak it (because, y'know, crazy!) was "if only i could have all of my music with me all the time.

I lost track of this thread too long ago to catch up, so apologies if these challenging examples have been brought up already:

1) If I bought and own the complete works of Led Zeppelin, and then, for convenience, also download a copy of the complete works of Led Zeppelin for my iPod, is that stealing?

2) Say I bought and own the complete works of Led Zeppelin, copy the tracks for my iPod, then give the boxed set to a friend. My hardrive crashes, I lose everything, so download another copy of the complete works of Led Zeppelin. Is this stealing?

I bring these examples up not just from personal experience, but to I think underscore the changing, tricky nature of the medium. Is an MP3 an object? Does one "own" an MP3? Does an MP3 have any intrinsic value? There's a host of confusing rhetorical conflicts at work here that don't necessarily jibe with the law as written, especially when we talk about theft and stealing.

i mean sure any new technology is aspirational/statusy at first. but there are tons and tons of failed media formats--ultimately the cd did something right or it would have been there along with them.

This is wrong -- unlike many other industries, the free market doesn't determine who has the best product (i.e. format). If stereo manufacturers, record companies, distributors, and retailer all decide that they're going with a certain format, and will be phasing out other formats to make room for it, then that's the new industry standard and you're buying that format because there's nothing else to buy. It's not as if you can realistically compete by, say, forming a startup company and trying to market a competing format.

1. yes. gotta rip 'em.
2. definitely
3. it doesn't matter

doh xpost @josh in chicago

I personally never saw CD vs vinyl as an either/or thing, where one format must die so that the other can live. They each have their advantages and disadvantages. It's more like conventional ovens vs microwave ovens -- they're each good for certain cooking tasks, and you aren't forced to make do with just one of them!

NTBT, i think we're both essentially speculating, but if consumers really do not like a format, don't you think they have the ability to kill it by not buying it?

pretty sure there was an active "we're pushing a new format" culture in the biz.

absolutely, for the very simple reason that they could charge SO MUCH MONEY for the new format. even though once they made the intitial infrastructure investment their costs of production weren't really any higher. profit margins on cds vs. profit margins on vinyl were huge. (and they were already pretty good on vinyl.)

1) If I bought and own the complete works of Led Zeppelin, and then, for convenience, also download a copy of the complete works of Led Zeppelin for my iPod, is that stealing?

If you bought and own the complete works of William Shakespeare and then, for convenience, also photocopy someone else's complete works of William Shakespeare from the library for your office, is that stealing? Maybe; there's some gray area there in that you already own it that would be less gray if you photocopied your own copy.

2) Say I bought and own the complete works of Led Zeppelin, copy the tracks for my iPod, then give the boxed set to a friend. My hardrive crashes, I lose everything, so download another copy of the complete works of Led Zeppelin. Is this stealing?

Say you bought and own the complete works of William Shakespeare, photocopy the tracks for library, then give the boxed set to a friend. Your library burns, I lose everything, so photocopy another copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Is this stealing? Most people would say yes, even though it's understandable. Also, most people would be able to reclaim the copy they owned via insurance; I don't know if that applies to digital media yet. (I know I recouped a ton of CDs and tapes that were stolen from my parents' house right before I went to college thanks to an obsessive list I made as I accumulated them; if that were to happen to me again, I'd be fucked.)

Can we stop with the idea that the existing canon is all people keep re-buying? CD sales didn't decline because everyone already bought all the Beatles and Zeppelin catalog over again.

It does kind of amuse me how a lot of people still think that everything in electronic format is magic, intangible fairy dust that operates in a different world from the one we live in.

They want it to be one way ... but it's the other way.

NTBT, i think we're both essentially speculating, but if consumers really do not like a format, don't you think they have the ability to kill it by not buying it?

I think it happens like this: the industry tries out two or three new formats, and consumers "decide" which one they prefer. However, sticking with the old formats never seems to be an option (at least from the industry side of things) -- in the end, *some* new format will win out, and you have to spend more cash to keep up.

"However, sticking with the old formats never seems to be an option (at least from the industry side of things) -- in the end, *some* new format will win out, and you have to spend more cash to keep up."

Consumers can delay it for a while though, thus music DVDs and Super Audio CDs never caught on.

ha i just ordered a SACD of an eric dolphy record cuz my new CD player uses them, curious as to how it will sound

"independent writers and visual artists haven't expected to make a living from what they're doing for a while"

I know this is from long ago (in this-thread time), but where on earth do people get this crap? I know plenty of people who make a living writing and making art. I can only imagine that in this context "independent" means "hobbyist," making the statement a tautology. And btw I am a writer who does not currently make enough of a living at it to want to quit my day job and I have the utmost respect for people who sacrifice their comfort so they can devote themselves to their work full time.

But I'm baffled by people who claim that whatever current market forces dictate is automatically what ought to be and doubly so when they posture as if that were some kind of rebellion, when of course it exactly is the system. (Lacan to thread.)

xp Zoilus: Lacan or Adorno?

people who claim that whatever current market forces dictate is automatically what ought to be

Haven't seen any of those posts. Have seen people saying it's misguided to expect one niche of the market to have different rules to the rest of it.

They want it to be one way ... but it's the other way.

― photoshop your disgusting ass partner into passive-aggressive notes (sarahel), Wednesday, April 22, 2009 1:08 PM

it's like you've been taking notes on this criminal fuckin' conspiracy

Random sample example: "maybe these people shouldn't be touring, as it doesn't seem like it's fiscally viable for them."

hahaha waht