Meet the new boss, David Lowery tackles the internet and the past while Ted Lucas gets past around

http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/meet-the-new-boss-worse-than-the-old-boss-full-post/
Can we talk about this? I know there are lots of threads on file sharing and the state of the music today, but I feel this needs more thought. There seems to be such a wide gap between fans of music or bloggers, artist themselves, and everyone in between. Not that this is news, but I like David Lowery's perspective on this. Are his facts solid?
Also Yoga records has been getting a lot of trashing about for asking to remove his reissue of the Ted Lucas record, which indirectly led to mediafire removing all of this blog'ss links.
http://calmintrees.blogspot.com/2012/05/money-records.html

Musicians are constantly derided by the Digerati. It’s usually after someone like myself suggest that if other people are profiting from distributing an artist’s work (Kim Dotcom, Mediafire, Megavideo, Mp3tunes,) they should share some of their proceeds with the artists. At this point the Digerati then proceed to call us “dinosaurs”, “know nothings” or worse. Suddenly your Facebook page is filled with angry comments from their followers that seem to all be unsuccessful Canadian hip hop artists who proclaim:

“We are gonna turn you into Lars Ulrich and bitch your band sucks anyway”.

David Lowery otm

when was Lowery a quant?

Lots of strawman arguments, yay! (Which isn't to say i don't agree with him, but the tone, and some of the actual arguments are a little rough...I mean, how much time does he need to spend giving his 'nerd cred' and disparaging the 'freehadists' and 'canadian rappers')

strawman? dude trots out a lot of data imho

Not enough time spent disparaging Canadian rappers imho.

he's got a chip on his shoulder but i mean judging from his songwriting that's just his personality, the actual content is a pretty worthwhile read

What's the future of the music industry?

Earlier discussion of earlier expressed Lowery views here

It's interesting to read the comments on the micro in the trees blog artist/blogger/labels alongside David Lowery's article. Also Neil Young's recent coming out in favor seems to have given fuel to the "music should be free camp". I dunno.

lol Neil Young won't give away shit

his records cost like $50 and he aggressively goes after copyright violators etc

So you might have seen this:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2012/06/16/154863819/i-never-owned-any-music-to-begin-with?sc=fb&cc=fmp

Mr. Lowery has a response:

http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

Take the interns bowling!

"All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?"

Dear Emily, We will see what we can do. Hang in there and keep on trying! Remember, everyone is a winner. All the best, Scott

P.S. I was gonna tell you to go fuck yourself, but that would have been rude and I know how sensitive young people are these days.

that was super awesome

pretty well-reasoned argument.

aside from bootleggy/live stuff (which i assume lowery is a-OK with: http://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3ACracker), things like mog and spotify have brought my downloading pretty much to an end. there really isn't a good excuse for it.

that was super awesome

― Victory Chainsaw! (DJP), Monday, June 18, 2012 12:44 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this

spotify stinks, because their business model is to interjects ads into the listening experience. i can't imagine david byrne wanted that there should be a guy selling me vodka between every third song on "fear of music." i'll just buy the fucking album.

that should be a general response to folks like the NPR intern lowery is responding to. JBTFA.

are there still ads if you have a subscription? i subscribe to mog and it's ad free. and cheap!

i wasn't even aware you could buy a subscription. what is mog?

ha, i'm obviously not very up on the details of this new business model. i just buy a lot of LPs. and download old jonathan richman concerts on torrent sites.

It's interesting to read the comments on the micro in the trees blog artist/blogger/labels alongside David Lowery's article. Also Neil Young's recent coming out in favor seems to have given fuel to the "music should be free camp". I dunno.

― JacobSanders, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 5:00 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not only is NY a hypocrite (see above) but lowery deals with precisely this phenomenon in his articles. those least negatively impacted by filesharing and the iTunes regime are those who have already profited from years and often decades of major-label publicity and career-building, so have a built-in large audience. see also radiohead. so it's a fuck of a lot easier for thom yorke or neil young to say "this is the new reality, deal with it" than somebody trying to build a career in music or even sustain a longer career without the kind of mass adulation those dudes apparently take for granted.

And believe it or not this is where the problem with Spotify starts. The internet is full of stories from artists detailing just how little they receive from Spotify. I shan’t repeat them here. They are epic. Spotify does not exist in a vacuum. The reason they can get away with paying so little to artists is because the alternative is The ‘Net where people have already purchased all the gear they need to loot those songs for free. Now while something like Spotify may be a solution for how to compensate artists fairly in the future, it is not a fair system now. As long as the consumer makes the unethical choice to support the looters, Spotify will not have to compensate artists fairly. There is simply no market pressure. Yet Spotify’s CEO is the 10th richest man in the UK music industry ahead of all but one artist on his service.

xxp mog is basically the same as spotify. $4.99 a month gets you unlimited listening. spotify has a slightly better interface, but we can stream mog through roku and mog has some artists that are missing on spotify.

Yet Spotify’s CEO is the 10th richest man in the UK music industry ahead of all but one artist on his service.

This is apples and oranges, though. There's a lot more money in tech than there is music.

David Lowery tackles the intern

There's a lot more money in tech than there is music.

funny how that's worked out

the npr intern killed vic chesnutt with the internet, holy shit

well it's kind of an OTT point but to be sure lots of full-time musicians on the fringe were already financially scuffling along before downloading came along so i can see how the sea change possibly destroyed some careers insofar as them being something that could support someone's ability to live a decent life and pay the bills.

xp nah, it goes back to way before people ever dreamed of online access to music. Bill Gates already had more money before Radiohead's first album than that band will make for their entire career.

i am late to this thread and am surprised this para was not commented on:

But I didn't illegally download (most) of my songs. A few are, admittedly, from a stint in the 5th grade with the file-sharing program Kazaa. Some are from my family. I've swapped hundreds of mix CDs with friends. My senior prom date took my iPod home once and returned it to me with 15 gigs of Big Star, The Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo (I owe him one).

the last sentence and arguably the second-to-last contradicts the first.

well yeah, she basically doesn't understand what "illegal download" means

My senior prom date took my iPod home once and returned it to me with 15 gigs of Big Star, The Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo (I owe him one).

would all of those band's catalogs, at say 256k, even equal 15 gigs?

maybe she meant live bootlegs?

i assume those are just some of the bands whose music her boyfriend copied for her.

it's a bit bizarre that somehow to her copying 1,000s of songs en masse off an iPod is somehow better than downloading off a torrent site or whatever. the kids of her generation have really made rationalization into an incredibly subtle art.

no subtlety about it

Not enough time spent disparaging Canadian rappers imho.

pour one out for rollie pimperton

and Buck 65!

Maestro Fresh Wes

did Wes ever post on ILX?

Man I wish

"subtle" was kind of ironic, she just uses some tortured logic to ease her conscience, that's all.

xposst Yes: her understanding appeared to be that it's only illegal downloading if you do it from a file-sharing service. It's not illegal downloading if you copy 11,000 songs, laboriously, from other people's CDs.

Uh isn't that basically a correct assessment?

No

So burning a CD is illegal downloading (regardless of the # of songs)?

Illegal copying, I think the owner of the original can make backup, but not give it to another person

Or were you being pendantic about the word ”downloading”?

^^^

I am being pedantic, but I sorta rankle at the idea that this is all settled law like we can point at every activity and be like "yeah this is all the same and clearly wrong and illegal and people who do it are disgusting savages", etc.

cracker david lowery

http://oi47.tinypic.com/2wozlsg.jpg

well the bottom line is that either way she is getting a boatload of music for which nobody has been compensated.

you can decide on the ethics of that but to imagine they are profoundly different things is, like i said, kind of tortured logic.

Everyone copies the odd CD. I'm sure David Lowery does. But the time and effort that she put into copying several thousand songs off CDs – if she's being truthful about how she accumulated her music – rather puts the lie to her claim that she only wants music that is convenient and instant and backs Lowery's assessment that what she really wants is not to pay for anything.

“Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive”-Stewart Brand

To be honest, per Lowery's point I had never heard the latter half of this quote before, either. Full 1985 quote:

"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."

Nuance is your best entertainment value.

"backs Lowery's assessment that what she really wants is not to pay for anything."

Hmmn no Lowery's assessment is really that she doesn't want to pay for mp3s and that she really really should because it's the right thing to do according to him. He acknowledges that she is likely paying (at least indirectly for quite a bit)--it's just that all of that money is going to Apple or Motorola or AT&T or whomever and very little (possibly none of it) is going to Yo La Tengo.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/travis-morrison/hey-dude-from-cracker-im_b_1610557.html

Dismemberment Plan singer on how he used to listen to music for free in the old days (and how this is the same as the NPR intern). I don't buy all of his argument

we've been discussing the Lowery piece (and the Huffpo response) on this thread: The RIAA Armageddon has begun

but that one's kinda gone to shit so maybe we should just resume the convo here

That thread is all over the place.

And now of course it's just frogbs.

i'll take some blame for the haywire nature of that thread. i'm easily distracted...

So burning CDs for friends is theft? And illegal?

theft is usually illegal bruh

in terms of the actual law? yes

xp

that ted lucas album is cool

"in terms of the actual law? yes"

Is fair use is actually clear on this? Or have there been changes to the law in the past couple of years that have clarified? It's clearly illegal to sell the aformentioned CDs, but actually making them and giving them away I don't believe is settled law (regardless of the stance of the RIAA).

fair use by nature is not clear. it's a four tier test to determine if something reaches it. http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

like you could make a copy* for classroom use, only use it in the classroom, and you'd be okay. making a copy of a cd and giving it to a friend? much less ok when it comes to fair use.

*as long as the original album was purchased legitimately

Right, but I don't think there is a law on the books that allows for prosecution of a person for burning a CD and giving away (now obviously if you burn a WHOLE ton of CDs and give them away that's a different matter.)

Man if you want some histrionics:

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120619lowery

Right, but I don't think there is a law on the books that allows for prosecution of a person for burning a CD and giving away (now obviously if you burn a WHOLE ton of CDs and give them away that's a different matter.)

Well yeah. A single CD no big deal, a ton of CD's would be.

(10) You are a major part of the problem.

ned
YOU are part of the problem

how does that make u feel, as a man

Feels fuckin' AWESOME, bro.

Is the 'DJs post your mixes for download' thread currently in SNA illegal?

"I think the owner of the original can make backup"

i don't think this is legal, but have never heard of anyone getting hassled for it.
also those bmg/columbia house deals were probably just as bad for artists as spotify.

"i don't think this is legal, but have never heard of anyone getting hassled for it"

If you can find me a law I am happy to be proved wrong.

you can make a backup

you can't make a copy and give it to a bunch of people

Again what law is that breaking?

it has something to do with bypassing copy protection -- might be DMCA? there doesn't seem to be a minimum hurdle as to what constitutes copy protection so it makes every kind of copying illegal.

For example, if I am reading the No Electronic Theft act correctly (which I believe covers exactly this sort of case because no money is exchanging hands) in order to be in violation of that statute the copying needs to be exceed a retail value of $1000...

one ironic aspect of the DMCA thing is that if you develop some kind of nu-napster software with encryption to avoid the RIAA and RIAA dudes "infiltrate" your music-sharing club, you could theoretically sue them for breaking your encryption under the same law.

Again what law is that breaking?

If I stab you in the eye over and over again with a fork, technically, I am not breaking a law. There are no laws on the books I know of involving forks. I would probably get arrested though.

Title 17 of the US Code says that making a copy of an original work without the creator's consent is illegal--nothing specific about CD's as far as I know, but still illegal.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/501

"If I stab you in the eye over and over again with a fork, technically, I am not breaking a law."

Uh no "technically" you are breaking any one of a number of laws. And yes you would definitely get arrested.

I don't see that title 17 applies in the case of personally making a copy of a CD you own and giving it to another person (RIAA would say otherwise but again I am not concerned with their reading of copyright, but rather how laws are actually enforced). If you have legal precedent which indicates otherwise I would gladly read it.

I don't think you're reading my posts. Go back and read them. You could make a backup. You could make a single copy, give it someone, and you'd probably be okay. I am not suggesting otherwise. If you made a bunch of copies and started giving them away, you would probably get sued.

there may not be legal precedent, because it's possible that no one has ever taken a bunch of cd's and copied them and given them away and then gotten sued for it. this doesn't mean that doing that isn't against the law though.

if giving them to five people is against the law, why wouldn't just giving it to one person be against the law? CDs don't usually come with a "for you and (1) pal" license (except maybe those cool vinyl releases that come with a bonus CD)

xxp Okay all of this was in the context of the original Emily White article wherein she said that a lot of her music was obtained via people copying songs on her iPod or whatever. People seemed to be making the claim that this was exactly = downloading a mess of music from the web and clearly illegal. I pointed out it isn't same and it may very well not even be against the law at all.

"If I stab you in the eye over and over again with a fork, technically, I am not breaking a law."

Uh no "technically" you are breaking any one of a number of laws. And yes you would definitely get arrested.

haha seriously what the hell even is this argument

forks

people downloading forks

"if giving them to five people is against the law"

Is it? Really? I mean the operative word here is "give" and the threshold as I understand is a retail loss in excess of $1,000.

people downloading forks

― Mr. Que, Thursday, June 21, 2012 4:36 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

uh oh th' tofu hut is in trouble

no one said five. except Philip.

bored lawyering

kinda want someone to write a piece arguing that olds want to stop youngs from easily and freely accessing music because they want to be the sole guardians of "cool music," and if kids can easily hear all the "cool music" themselves and form their own opinions about it then they won't need the guardians/gatekeepers anymore to tell them what's cool. like the flipside of a system where people have to pay for everything is going back to what travis morrison touches on in that article which is facing a huge collection of all of history's music and not being able to hear most of it (how i felt when i was a kid). so much music would fade away because people would have to choose what to buy and what to ignore. anyways i wouldn't read that piece because it would be dumb but someone should write it.

going back to lowery's article, it seems like he's "right" about most of that stuff but he's really annoying and a crappy writer

he's a mathematician!

facing a huge collection of all of history's music and not being able to hear most of it

kids today don't even face it, most of them don't give a shit

like, they know it's all out there, but they don't want to bother wading through it

oh c'mon there are a TON of wikipedia experts who think they can hear and appreciate everything worth appreciating, and try, no matter how misguided or unwittingly narrow their attempts are

if you are a little kid and your parents get you a computer and you go online and there is all this music everywhere and your friends tell you about cool sites with music you can download and you download all the music and you grow up this way why the hell would you care about anything ever? it would just be normal to download cool albums and maybe you wouldn't even know that people paid for music. it takes a village...

"no one said five. except Philip."

five feels like a bunch. like if i bought a bunch of grapes, how many grapes is that? maybe five grapes. i don' think i've ever stolen more than five grapes before.

as someone who grew up on MTV and major label CDs bought at chain outlets i personally feel no right to tell a younger generation that their way of discovering music lacks the kind of character and excitement that turned me into a sophisticated music lover

i have no ideas wtf you guys are talking about, but if i felt that feeling 20 years ago of being in a record store and wanting to hear like 100 albums that were there just based on band names and covers and vague things i'd read about them, i sincerely doubt that impulse has completely evaporated over like one generation

like the extension of what scott and shakey mo are saying is that kids nowadays don't care about music anymore? which is demonstrably untrue

kids are dumber now though. cuzza the corn syrup.

^ great post

http://www.thenoobdad.com/wp-content/uploads/Dumb-Kid.jpeg

it's not that - it's that they're largely separated/isolated from any historical narrative about music.

xp

1. that's not what you said
2. so what?

someone has his arguing pants on!

it's not that - it's that they're largely separated/isolated from any historical narrative about music.

xp

― a dense custard of infinity (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, June 21, 2012 5:00 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if anything kids today have way too much historical narrative about music. they're up to their eyeballs in Beatles/Nirvana/Biggie lore.

plus i didn't say that kids don't care about music just that they have grown up not paying for music. its normal for kids now to not pay for music. that is the norm.

if they don't pay for music we'll make em pay for ringtones

i mean i have witnessed a decade of ilx skweeeeeeeeeeesoulseekoinkinvitespotifylastfm etc etc etc decadence. and you will all pay in the afterlife.

and before anyone gets on my case I'm speaking from anecdotal experience of course - kids don't go into a store and see things laid out in chronological order by artist, or hear about things from music "authorities" (be they Xgau or Bangs or the snobby indie guy behind the counter). The internet disperses content such that everything is available all the time, but it's largely context-free. They discover and absorb small pieces of the musical landscape but have no idea about the larger map - which is how I wind up with younger colleagues who for some reason know a bunch of old Carter Family songs but have never heard the White Album.

This is way different (not saying worse or better) from when I was younger and was accutely aware of the history of music - either from magazines, or record store clerks, or older relatives - but had limited access.

xp

and if they don't pay for ringtones we'll make em pay for zwinkies

I seriously have too many zwinkies I just need to get rid of them

if i were 14 or 15 now i would have 400 million albums on my computer. i stole everything that wasn't nailed down when i was that age. i didn't give a shit.

so you guys didn't have bmg and columbia house?

of course if i were 14 or 15 now i would never make it to 16 what with all the free porn out there on the web. i would have a serious coronary episode. jesus i was like a monkey back then i shudder to think...

it was pretty funny talking to my pre-teen cousins (who all have computers, ipads, etc.) about music a couple weeks ago. i learned that:

1. they know some michael jackson songs, but think he's "ok"
2. "rappers are really in right now", like nicki minaj, flo rida, and lmfao (?)
3. not so into adele, because too many of her songs are boring and slow

they weren't steeped in too many (any) historical narratives about pop music. one had a change jar that she had to put money in every time she bought a song off iTunes using her mom's account.

xp

between the bath salts and the meth and the porn and the corn syrup man oh man i was really lucky to be born when i was.

the one narrative I hear from kids is that all the best music was made a long time ago. exactly when and where and by who tends to vary.

dadstep

like hearing one of my college-age cousin complain about how all modern music sucks and all his peers want to listen to is the Dave Matthews Band (still!) was sort of depressing. He wanted to copy all my 70s soul MP3s.

kids don't go into a store and see things laid out in chronological order by artist

Does this mean that the record stores you went into had things laid out in chronological order by artist?

Also, what do arguing pants look like?

"Does this mean that the record stores you went into had things laid out in chronological order by artist?"

No it means that kids these days organize things really anally on their harddrives.

believe it or not, records/tapes/CDs used to contain information about when they were released! kids downloading shit don't necessarily get any of that.

Then how can they organize things really anally on their harddrives?

the information on my BMG order form told me stone temple pilots was in a genre known as "grindcore"...

personally I don't know any kids with hard drives of music. it's all on their ipods or phones or streamed from services and it isn't organized at all.

xp

but that's just my world of young people

and before anyone gets on my case I'm speaking from anecdotal experience of course - kids don't go into a store and see things laid out in chronological order by artist, or hear about things from music "authorities" (be they Xgau or Bangs or the snobby indie guy behind the counter). The internet disperses content such that everything is available all the time, but it's largely context-free. They discover and absorb small pieces of the musical landscape but have no idea about the larger map - which is how I wind up with younger colleagues who for some reason know a bunch of old Carter Family songs but have never heard the White Album.

This is way different (not saying worse or better) from when I was younger and was accutely aware of the history of music - either from magazines, or record store clerks, or older relatives - but had limited access.

xp

― a dense custard of infinity (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, June 21, 2012 5:06 PM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark

ehhhh i was only a big music consumer for maybe 5 years before getting on the internet and 10 years before it was really easy to google almost anything you wanted to know about any record/musician -- by comparison the '90s felt like a lot of groping around in the dark for info, patching together discographies bit by bit and then realizing that there was a whole album before that that i didn't know existed, etc. and that was cool, i enjoyed the hell out of it, but i think you're romanticizing the time when people had to work a little harder for information into some absurd scenario where they actually absorbed more info than they do now.

but that's just my world of young people

"The Sandusky defense rests."

n/a and some dude otm. Nothing more depressing than standing in a Sam Goody store in the nineties with only $20 to spend and the Suede album is $18.99.

how about when you heard that suede album

i remember buying my first 7 cds and it costing me close to $140 w/tax. saved up my money for weeks!

how about when you heard that suede album

it took me o-vah

I'm not trying to romanticize anything, it's just different now

it was super-annoying to not be able to afford/find stuff! I hated having to save up money and then drive an hour to find a fucking Velvet Underground CD

even so:

some absurd scenario where they actually absorbed more info than they do now

people remember things that require effort! in lots of ways, something that doesn't require effort has no value.

It's better now! I don't know how I survived the eighties and nineties without Wikipedia.

LIFE IS PAIN

like, why learn anything about music? it's all out there for free and you can look up whatever you want whenever you're bored and then forget about it as soon as oh hey look what's that over there

xp

Look, I agree that not being able to find an Essential Logic album in the nineties helped it accrue totemic value but I'll gladly sacrifice totemic value to (a) downloading it free in seconds (b) finding it used for a couple bucks on Amazon

Remember me? I had a book report due in science...
http://img122.echo.cx/img122/6549/britannica8wh.jpg

like, why learn anything about music? it's all out there for free and you can look up whatever you want whenever you're bored and then forget about it as soon as oh hey look what's that over there

On the contrary, nothing's changed: kids who are music geeks have MORE resources available to them. Casual music fans -- those who like you say show no interest in history -- have more options too. My sis, who's no critic, amassed several hundred cassingles through the nineties, a collection of bewildering range. It's really no different than some kid's iPod.

maybe I'm just disappointed none of my world of young people are music geeks. altho even my ostensible music geek coworkers have mystified me on occasion

i don't know any young music geeks irl, but tbh i don't know that many old music geeks!

college radio stations still employ young music geeks. Older ones too.

Emily White seems to care a bit about music, just saying.

letting the kids bring their laptops and rip music was kind of a "look the other way" way of saying thank you if you were volunteering at the college stations, isn't it? though some kids would actually steal physical records.

I would rather meet a young person who knows a bunch of random Carter Family songs than one who's heard the White Album.

I know a young person who has illegally downloaded hard drives upon hard drives of music. He also spends more money on new music than anyone else I know irl.

I would rather meet a young person who knows a bunch of random Carter Family songs than one who's heard the White Album

no, she was cool! full disclosure - I convinced her to come with me and some friends to a performance of Stockhausen's "Hymnen", whom she was unfamiliar with (okay no big deal there), and when she asked me what to expect the closest point of reference I could think of that she might be familiar with was "Revolution No. 9"... which she had never listened to.

which ironically is the only beatles song sarahel hears at bars constantly

lol

in terms of history, context and chronology isn't learning about the Carter Family before The Beatles actually the correct path?

http://gordonwithers.com/post/25597091567/reflections-on-white-lowery-and-a-way-forward

musician wants you to buy first from the artist's website and/or a local independent store

10 years before it was really easy to google almost anything you wanted to know about any record/musician

we had google back then but it was called trouser press

yeah i mean i devoured music mags and books back then, but you still kinda took whatever info you could find, instead of searching for exactly what you were curious about

when i was a kid, i didn't even know what to be curious about -- no one i knew personally enough to talk to had ever heard of more music than i had. no older brothers to talk to until high school. the library was really important.

During my lunch hours and esp for a couple hours after school each day, I would search obsessively for Sonic Youth and Pixies articles on my high school library's electronic magazine database.

I did this a lot when I was 15, 16.

i dubbed a lot of cassettes, still remember getting this awesome two cassette + tuner + turntable thing at jc penney's and knowing it was going to make me an unstoppable copying machine once i could get to the library.

lotsa stealing!

it just took a lot more effort, time, and physical storage space.

Oh my library had no cool albums or CDs. I didnt have a CD player for a long time.

when i was a kid, i didn't even know what to be curious about -- no one i knew personally enough to talk to had ever heard of more music than i had. no older brothers to talk to until high school. the library was really important.

― nicest bitch of poster (La Lechera), Friday, June 22, 2012 10:22 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah -- i remember loving Carla Bozulich's voice on Mike Watt's first record and then it taking me 2+ years to stumble upon something in Alternative Press that mentioned that she was a member of the Geraldine Fibbers and i quickly hunted down their records. sometimes i think of those 2 years like shit if i had google back then i might've gotten to see one of my fav bands live before they broke up.

AMG's database might've been pretty dependable by then but i don't think i even discovered that until a couple years later

haha one of the features of the music store where i worked in the LATE 1990s was a dedicated amg station where we could "look things up for you"
at that point people still had to go to the store, stump the employees, and then resort to the machine

most people, that is
we also sold some stereo equipment including a 5 disc changer + CDR machine thingie and had a liberal return policy
out of business, obvs

oh yeah, i had a friend at Barnes & Noble who had one of those little AMG stations in the CD section (xpost)

employees could also check out whatever they wanted (5 per week, no box sets) sort of like a library too. we were encouraged to learn about new stuff. it was pretty cool, really. in spite of the horrible oversized uniform shirt that came down to my knees and had to be tucked in.

again ---> lotsa stealing!

the high price of CDs in the 90s was one reason i stayed with cassettes until about 1994. used cassettes were a bargain--complete discography of the smiths, $30. in general i bought used stuff much more than new back then. except that in the late 90s best buy used to have catalogue title CDs as loss leaders, so you could get reissues of the byrds for $6.99, etc.

the high prices of CDs are probably what drove me back to vinyl ultimately, for which i suppose i'm thankful.

btw i don't know if t his has been cleared up but "kids these days" don't go to record stores. they also don't go to libraries. i asked one of my classes of incoming freshman how many of them had physically gone into a library and checked out a book and about 40% said they hadn't.

just wanted to frighten you all.

also the last thread this thread has taken is feeling very "hey nineteen."

xpost -- Oh believe me I know about that. The more fundamentally depressing thing is when they do come in and ask if they can 'rent' books. I always point out, as casually as I can, that we don't do that -- because I hate the idea of them thinking that a library is monetized in that fashion. NO.

funny, if kids only knew the type of intensely inappropriate stuff that awaits them in libraries. better than any r-rated movie!

The more fundamentally depressing thing is when they do come in and ask if they can 'rent' books.

(off topic)--does your library loan textbooks? do you allow students to get them on ILL?

tylerw massively otm

xpost -- Yes to both.

I was really pushy once with a Boise State library aide ––– they weren't supposed to check out LPs but I persuaded him he had to let me check out this Stockhausen record. I got a call later that night from him imploring me to bring it back. He'd gotten in a lot of trouble. I felt pretty bad because I knew it ruined my chances of ever holding hands with this handsome library guy who liked Stockhausen.

Some of my best, most mind-blowing music experiences were just from scrounging around at the library. American Anthology of Folk Music!

I've bought like 5 albums since this thread started and made significant cuts to my holds queue at the local library.

My kids looooooooove the library. I have no idea how they could possibly ever unlearn that love.

I blame the parents who are not me.

my son does too. he got his first library card yesterday (he's almost 6). it's a godsend for kid's books.

I lived at the library when I was a kid/teen. and I've copied my share of music. I kind of feel like I get a pass considering how much music I've purchased over my life and how much I still buy. I don't download much anymore to be honest; I feel like it was a phase that I've gotten past. It kind of cheapened music consumption for me, I wound up with things I just had no time to listen to. I've gone back to buying vinyl so I can't even listen to it on an ipod and have to sit down and pay attention. It's nice.

But yes to the idea that having it all is a weird thing. I loved the Beatles when I was a kid. I remember distinctly each purchase; getting the odd album at garage sales and living with that one for like, a year, because my parents didn't let me get things willy nilly. My son is six and has already heard every album and hours of outtakes and isn't in any position to differentiate between them really. I never heard a fucking beatles outtake until I was in my 20s! He thinks of Leave my Kitten Alone as a song like any others!

I know I sound old but that's just how it is.

Via maura, another thing:

http://www.futurehitdna.com/is-stealing-music-really-the-problem/

going "lowery's argument is invalid because HIS music isn't being downloaded by many people" is the dumbest gotcha bullshit

In the 90's, not all cds were so expensive. Ajax, Merge, RRR, kill rock stars, simple machines, i remember ordering them for 10 sometimes 12 dollars. One mail order catalog that was really great was called 'Good As Any, Better than Some' great prices.

yeah a lot of indies were real cheap. even drag city. i bought a bunch of drag city stuff for real cheap. i also bought some merch, wish i had all of it still.

major labels on the other hand.

remember this joke from the mid 90s?

"what do you get when you pay for that new page/plant album with a $20 bill?"
"no quarter."

that dates me.

I once checked out a Fairport Convention Cd from the library of a college I was attending. That's it.

But I am obsessed with libraries, which are awesome. There's a couple small colleges about ten-fifteen miles from where I live, and when I get on huge writing kicks, I'll totally drive to one of their libraries a couple days a week, find a quiet floor and get some work done.

Like, libraries are literally my favorite things about this country right now.

amen

i asked one of my classes of incoming freshman how many of them had physically gone into a library and checked out a book and about 40% said they hadn't.

The university library staff goes "Look, our only customer!" whenever I check out books. All students use it for is to get study rooms and laptops.

Like, libraries are literally my favorite things about this country right now.
This. Amazing to me how many people either take them for granted or don't use them altogether. In Rhode Island, I totally abuse the Interlibrary loan system. There's always a book or a Blu-Ray from the other side of the state waiting for me to pick up at my hometown library. Makes me feel like I'm getting away with something.

The Brooklyn library is always packed with people, many of them looking at porn on the computers

https://encrypted-tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSSyYGyIKHkCFvSvJE9YqQ6yWO2WJNt_mUCCEX7J1O7bSdadcIAzA

xposting myself, obviously with libraries we all contribute $$$. It's the perfect example of how everyone can benefit when everyone ponies up, willingly or no.

it's better than that. rich people (and aspirational people who also think libraries are 'icky') don't go to libraries.

Like, libraries are literally my favorite things about this country right now.

Me too. Though I probably use them differently than most people. The books I check out usually haven't circulated since the 1970s and are the ones getting sent to storage or the bullshit library sales. I mean, really, no one has given a shit about Wendy Walker since 1988? Hang your heads in shame.

Who is Wendy Walker?

do you have fingers? or a keyboard? figure it out alex.

I googled her name and writer and the results seem out of place with what you are talking about.

Unless you are lamenting that no one gives a shit about Chicken Soup for the Soul: Power MOMS since 1988 when it was written in 2009.

power MOMS

really? talking about a great writer published in the late 80s by Sun & Moon press whose books are pretty much unknown seems out of place to a post where I talk about checking out books that haven't been checked out in decades. I'm not sure where the confusion lies.

No I'm saying I used the keyboard and the results were not consistent to what you were talking about.

I guess you found some other author named Wendy Walker. My bad for picking a kind of generic name. No--I'm talking about the awesome weirdo fantasy novelist (married to Tom LaFarge) who wrote "The Sea Rabbit" and should be way way more popular than she is.

Though this misconception pretty much underlines my point that even in the age of Google and whatnot, no one has given a shit about Wendy Walker since 1988 or so. Which is why University libraries are awesome for idiots like me. Because we troll them for neglected books.

No I'm saying I used the keyboard and the results were not consistent to what you were talking about.

Sorry. I was too harsh there, but googling wendy walker and sun & moon gets you here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-Service-Moon-Classics/dp/1557130841

My main point is not "Everyone should know who this obscure author is" but "Libraries put me in contact with a bunch of obscure authors who I now waste my time trying to tell people on a message board about in a hostile and unlucrative way."

You're otm about university libraries being awesome. I have spent some time reading goofy lit crit.

"bullshit library sales"

this is the only time i go to the library.

the sea rabbit! an underwater rabbit squad? awesome.

As as bullshit library sales:

My library in Iowa City had a n awesome collection of Jazz vinyl and Comedy lps. checked out record after record for years. But some idiot decided that vinyl was dinosaur so we should sell off the whole collection for 10 cents an album, first come first served.

Sure that's great for the one jobless prick who showed up first and snagged everything good, and probably sold it online. (I'm still murderous toward some of the swine I witnessed at these sales.) But it screwed everyone like me who actually used the library as a resource.

Fuck library sales.

As far as

and scott if you only go to the library when there's a sale then we are not of the same species.

LPs take up a lot of space and are probably more prone to getting warped and damaged -- it's probably way too burdensome to keep a collection up, and is probably a great argument for piracy as a social good.

i mean i'd sure feel ethically better about stealing some mp3s than having checked out a super-rare record and left it in the sun, ruining it for everyone else.

yeah the whole let's-get-rid-of-all-of-our-vinyl rush was regrettable.

that said, huge academic library i use has literally 10,000s of LPs, still. and you can check them out. BOOM.

x-post then everyone in the community is forced to download rather than check out, because you can't keep your shit out of the sun?

that's essentially what happened. sorry vinyl dudes.

i asked one of my classes of incoming freshman how many of them had physically gone into a library and checked out a book and about 40% said they hadn't.

The university library staff goes "Look, our only customer!" whenever I check out books. All students use it for is to get study rooms and laptops.

it's better than that. rich people (and aspirational people who also think libraries are 'icky') don't go to libraries.

Don't any of you guys have kids? The small branch library near me is full of people all the time, probably 75% parents with little kids, 15% high-school aged kids, 10% old people reading the paper. Plenty of these folks are rich, too.

i'm pretty firmly on the side of vinyl on the 'which sounds better' debate but on 'which format is melt-resistant and seems to be built for the near-sole purpose of pirating to anyone who wants to listen to it' digital wins.

i'd argue that the prevalence of digital helped save the existing vinyl collections because the people who tend to check them out aren't just trying to hear the music, but care about the whole experience, and therefore take better care of the stuff. pre-napster, all the records I ever checked out were scratched up to hell.

yeah it sucks that people went to a sale and...bought stuff.

'Plenty of these folks are rich, too.'
If they were rich they'd just buy the thing they wanted instead of fighting with a family who canceled their blockbuster membership for the latest pixar dvd.

x-post stuff that other people could have checked out and enjoyed

i'm not blaming the buyers but the sellers

"and scott if you only go to the library when there's a sale then we are not of the same species."

oh yeah i know we aren't it's okay i just have a disorder. my disorder involves libraries, schools, and museums. won't go into it here. done that on ilx before and i regret it. i'm not here to bum people out.

how much did you buy the stuff for? ten cents? fifty cents? i'm sure that went a long way towards helping the library buy new shit.

one of my fondest memories in college was listening to phillip glass' "music with changing parts" on vinyl at the library. we weren't allowed to exit with LPs so they had to be listened to in this library. only annoying part is the piece is supposed to be one hour-long track, so this got chopped up into 4 sides of vinyl.

LPs take up a lot of space and are probably more prone to getting warped and damaged -- it's probably way too burdensome to keep a collection up, and is probably a great argument for piracy as a social good.

Seriously dumb shit right here

occasionally i buy a book from abe or thriftbooks or something & it turns out to be an ex-libris copy. it's always really nice, to have, adds another dimension, comes with the imprimatur of ILLINOIS STATE COLLEGE or something & then i remember that whenever you buy a second hand book & find it's from a library collection it means that a small library died, like when you say you don't believe in fairies.

yeah, it's not likecwhenever a library sells off a book or an pl, it offers a digital download of said item to its patrons. the item goes from public to private, which is suck.

re: dumb shit
why is it dumb? you want as many people as possible who want to to listen to this stuff -- that's the point of having the LPs there at a library -- the lower the costs, the more easily that goal is achieved.

pl=lp

i remember that whenever you buy a second hand book & find it's from a library collection it means that a small library died

Naw, it could mean that they just got rid of old stuff to make room or something.

yeah they get rid of old stuff all the time. if they didn't they would have to keep building new buildings or something.

i don't mind libraries selling stuff, just when they sell ALL their stuff (i.e. the entire lp collection.)

Most of the initial article makes some sense, but this seems odd:

The fact that artists are spending much less TIME recording can only mean they have less money or expect to make less money.

Couldn't at least part of the explanation be that artists record on their own equipment, on time that doesn't equal money in such a literal sense?

Full album sharing of in-print music is very weird to me. But I wonder what this guy would think of O.O.P. stuff being shared--or with a track being used in a mix, rather than an entire album being given away. Of the dozens of artists/labels with whom I came in contact with when making/distributing the '1981' box (a few hundred physical copies, probably a few thousand "copies" in equivalent downloads) only one was unsuportive and asked to be removed from the project. It seems like most artists might know the difference between theft and promotion, on the internet. I'm not sure if listeners do, though--I hear young people regularly say things like "who buys music anymore," even people who make music themselves. Whereas I bet a lot of us whose music-geek years straddle the pre- and post-file-sharing eras download stuff--but then go buy it, if it's any good. And probably subconsciously we assume others do the same, which is contrary to all of the evidence Lowery presents.

Which artist was unsupportive? Was it Prince?

same thought i had .

president keyes libraries actually have a pretty good handle on what they need to have in their collections to serve their community/patron base (and they need to in the face of budget cuts and crumbling infrastructure and lack of $$ for collections in general)--go to a library director and act all pissy that they ditched a bunch of jazz lps that took up space, barely circulated, and weighed a fucking ton and (s)he would be gracious not to laugh you out of the friggin' room

you mean they took up the space underneath the CD racks--space they never filled with anything else. i suppose they were heavy when they lugged them out to the parking lot of sell, but otherwise no. yeah, i work in a library and i do get pissy about the stuff we get rid of, and the decisions are not always good ones, usually some suit wants to see some progress into the digital age. libraries should be about dust and mold.

Uh oh librarian fight...

My local library was great for CDs growing up although their selection was quite weird - some indie/alt. stuff, lots of AOR type things like '90s Jackson Browne albums - ok, fair enough but then they'd have Black Sabbath's Born Again and two copies of Deicide's second album and no other metal whatsoever.

At my university libary you could hire out films on VHS, which was great but they also had - bearing in mind this was the turn of the millennium - laserdiscs.

Which artist was unsupportive? Was it Prince?

― robert mcnamara in reverse (loves laboured breathing), Saturday, June 23, 2012 9:39 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha! Never heard from Prince. . .

It was actually one of the most totally obscure artists on the box, for whom the ~500 or so people who heard it initially and then the couple thousand who would've heard it online might have doubled the number of people who had ever heard their music. But that's totally their right, obviously--ethically as well as legally. I was just glad most people I talked with understood I wanted to help artists, not hurt them. (Or they just didn't give a shit about such a tiny thing, at least not enough to sue me. . .)

The fact that I'm currently in the middle of something like thousands of librarians (or it feels like it) here at the annual ALA convention makes this discussion very amusing -- and relevant, these are all very much hot issues in terms of archiving, storage, digital collections and much more. Will be hanging with a couple of very smart librarian friends for dinner and if we get into this discussion at all I'll post some thoughts later.

Not sure i want to read something that makes liberal use of the word "Digerati".

ned: be sure to post details on the ALA after-after-party too, if you know what i mean.

Dave Allen of Gang of Four fame craps on Lowery's claims[/url].

The constant whining by David Lowery (this isn’t the first time) proves only that, whether he knows it or not, he doesn’t understand the Internet and how people use it (more on this later in the post.) Like many, many people who have had their lives or businesses upended by the Internet, his nostalgia runs so deep he wants everything to be the way it used to be. Ain’t gonna happen. If he looked long and hard in the mirror he might confess to himself that the way it used to be was a tragedy for the majority of musicians, and probably not that great for himself either, as his bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, like Gang of Four, were not exactly in the upper echelons of fame. We scraped out a living by touring and yes, David, selling T-shirts. The adage that musicians always pay back the mortgage to the labels but never own the house is entirely true in so many cases. We can’t blame the Internet for that.

This is where Lowery outlines his case. I take issue with it in its entirety because Lowery is attempting to solve the wrong problem. He is attempting in the present to solve a problem of the past – lack of music sales; ergo, damage to musicians income levels or lack thereof since the advent of the Internet. (Oddly he doesn’t mention that the music industry is most likely the only industry to ever, ever, sue its own customers. An inconvenient truth.) He even lays out in fine detail how much Emily would owe if she’d paid for all of her music (most of which came from the labels as “promos”. Once again Lowery doesn’t mention how music writers and radio DJ’s sold those promos to record stores..just saying.) He then asks her to cough up the dough for starving musicians.

He also rather insensitively points out, while undermining his argument, that “the average income of a musician that files taxes is something like 35k a year w/o benefits.” That’s almost $10k more than the current US median wage. There are around 8 million unemployed people here in the USA, many without a place to call home, who would gladly take that income. I find him so condescending that I want to break something right now.

http://www.north.com/latest/the-internet-could-care-less-about-your-mediocre-band/

dave allen sounds like a guy completely resigned to trading one unfair system for another; not the best look imo

I wouldn't think so either, but I didn't really have a huge problem with that excerpt.

dude is a serious whiner

reassuring to know we're still divided

xxp read the whole piece

reading in his archives allen's angle seems to be that musicians need to be responsible for some amorphous 360-degree "branding strategy" so they can be the fittest survivors of the internet, or something. but it seems like he would just stare blankly if you asked him straight-up with people should be obligated to pay for recorded music, if enforcability were out of the equation.

that ad exec who used to be in a situationist-marxist punk band is gung-ho about branding and kinda vague about an individual's duty to pay for stuff? weird.

tbf i don't know what his current job is, nor have i stayed up to date with him, nor do i really care about his band, so this is all news to me!

sounds like a super-cool dude tho!

definitely had a more interesting political platform than Cracker fwiw.

pretty lol when he goes on about mediocre bands needing to get out of the way!

The Camper Van Beethoven bashing is sort of sad-making, actually. Having read the comments to Allen's piece, I'm craving a graphic of a cowboy saying to an indian, "I am very proud of the mobile-first beer finder I helped launch for Deschutes Brewery."

^^^ For all the "YOUR BAND SUXXORZ" at Lowery's expense in the responses, I bet more people on the street would recognize "Low" before any song from the Gang of Four catalog.

oh unquestionably

Not around here they wouldn't.

fact: there are more people on the street in america than in the uk

factor in those that would recognise neither..

My sympathies in this debate are with Lowery, but as all these elderly men – Lowery, Lefsetz, Allen – weigh in, there's an increasing feeling of bald men fighting over a comb, with increasing viciousness, while most of the world wonders what the fuck those old crazies are doing.

yeah but if you read ilx you really can't throw stones

I'm cool with Lowery guilting a kid who writes blog posts about how they've never spent a dime on music and blame it on a lack of catering. I'm cool with Travis Morrison mocking David Lowery for pretending "kids today" don't have the same respect for artists' rights as previous generations. I'm also cool with Dave Allen pointing out other bits of malarkey in Lowery's rant. But then I read ILX so I'm obviously down to hear some grumpy dudes talk confidently about The Music Industry and its ills.

i'm sick of all these people. that's my grumpy dude on the internet endgame.

i was talking about a band i like on facebook and this band only put out two hard to find/obscure 7 inch EPs and within a day someone who wasn't even facebook friends with me sent me a dropbox link or whatever on my facebook with files of the two EPs that they had remastered(!) and files of the cover art. things move fast these days. i had to pretend to be thankful. but i never listen to music files on a computer so it was kinda lost on me.

That reminds me of the time someone emailled me the lyrics of "Do the Standing Still" by The Table, the day after I had played it in the car stereo, and despite my not actually talking (or posting) about it at all!

im sure this has been said elsewhere on ilx and the internet so forgive me cause i have been off the net but lowerys letter to an lost intern makes a p good if obvious ethical point in a comically ott sloppy manner, like yeah the internet did not kill yr friends and is there any evidence that downloadin caused all of the industry decline etc, but really the worst part is that he assumes that because this problem is a moral one the solution must be moral too when obvs just like taxing iphones is a thing that could actually produce irl $$$

ho wait the dismemberment plan guy is 'Director of Commercial Production, The Huffington Post'

http://www.north.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/npr_emily_white_dave_allen.jpeg

this is the most morally indefensible thing thats appeared itt tho

what
barriers?
do WE
encounter

NORTH is a compass pointed forward. Part ad agency, part creative boutique, part crash-pad for artists, designers, film makers, bloggers, bands and big-thought thinkers. Unlike older paradigms, we not only strategize and conceive stuff, we usually draw it, film it, score it, tweet it and construct it too. In the vernacular: We eliminate the middle man and pass the passion on to you. Peruse this site and glimpse what this more collaborative, agile, streamlined approach can yield.

no thank you

Lol yea. "You can download all the free music your hard drive can store but first you have to read through two years' worth of blog posts about audience synergy and the magic of 'branding'."

NORTH is a compass pointed forward.

no, actually it is a compass pointed....north

lol @ "know your competition" [drawing of guy with 'hello my name is competitor' nametag]

Lol yea. "You can download all the free music your hard drive can store but first you have to read through two years' worth of blog posts about audience synergy and the magic of 'branding'."

― robert mcnamara in reverse (loves laboured breathing), Monday, June 25, 2012 10:05 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

makes mid-90s sam goody prices seem like a str8-up bargain

Weak when people continually call out the record industry as the only group that sues its own customers, as much as I find the practice unseemly. I wouldn't call people downloading music for free "customers," just consumers in the most general sense. And for sure they're not the only people getting in trouble for taking something without paying for it.

Again, not wanting to defend the RIAA or whatever, but it's sort of to our benefit that they have no other real recourse. A 7/11 clerk can just call the police. Record industry forced to burn-bridges and make a mockery of itself by playing whack-a-mole. It's like an abused blind dog that now snaps at everything within reach.

This actually surprised me, even though it's as bogus an indicator as anything else that's been trotted out (multiple editions of things, etc.):

Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #54,582 in Music

Entertainment
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #64,980 in Music

Is it the term "branding" you lot find offensive or just the idea that selling music is a business and therefore impure?

i find allen's new-agey adspeak offensively vapid and hollow

But his point about your band needing an identity is valid.

i don't really know what that means

This actually surprised me, even though it's as bogus an indicator as anything else that's been trotted out (multiple editions of things, etc.):

Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #54,582 in Music

Entertainment
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #64,980 in Music

― dlp9001, Monday, June 25, 2012 10:51 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

Kerosene Hat
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,778 in Music

Oddly he doesn’t mention that the music industry is most likely the only industry to ever, ever, sue its own customers. An inconvenient truth.

pretty sure this 100% not true

To summarize the summary of the summary, people are a problem:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2012/06/digital_music_arguments.php

Right, that's sorted.

Looking at Dave Allen's North website, I feel totally disconnected from the real world. I feel dumb but I had no idea what any of the articles where about. What does he do all day at work?

download music probably

at work he's an essayist.

everyone go download every single gang of four song ever released. illegally. for free. do it for stalin and trotsky.

only if i don't have to listen to it

this whole comp is great. listen to it here for free!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ic62ty_2D4

past couple of years i've really enjoyed listening to first 3 GO4 records after not listening to them in ages. production is killer.

How does one go from being a situationist-marxist punk to branding? From my understanding of situationist-marxist ideology aren't the two oppose? Maybe I don't understand what branding means these days. I have the feeling David allen and co. at North have just created a need and employment where one didn't exist before.

lol @ "David allen and co."

weren't UK punk very aesthetics-oriented? like they spent a lot of time making the cool ZZ thing in the buzzcocks logo.

gang of four's lyrics were always kind of shitty. a bunch of psuedo-literate sloganeering. nothing worth thinking about unless you're greil marcus. the music was kind of interesting i guess.

also david allens leads w/ "you can't litigate human behavior."

this is one of those asinine statements that seems really righteous for about half a second.

you can certainly change somebody's behavior by suing them.

you can also pass laws that change people's behavior en masse.

duh.

its what litigation is for iirc

gang of four were awesome. despite the lyrics. i don't really pay attention the lyrics though. my spine is the bassline.

officially licensed crass tote bags kinda makes me cry a little.

http://www.punkandpissed.com/crass-classic-circle-logo-tote-bag.html

lmao

is this
looooooove

no, just a confusion.

there wasn't/isn't one single retro-80's band/artist from the 90's or 2000's that came up with anything as cool as any one of a dozen gang of four songs. and i'm not even a superfan or anything. just stating a fact.

who was i reading an interview with....someone from gang of four was producing their album...red hot chili peppers! anyway the gang of four dude kept telling them that they HAD to make the album more commercial and slicker the whole time they were in the studio with him. and that was all they way back in like 1983.

The recording of the album was not a smooth process. Andy Gill and the band fought over creative issues, with Gill directing them towards a more "radio-friendly" sound. This caused a lot of tension between the band and Gill which made the recording process particularly difficult. The band pulled many pranks on Gill, in spite of him, throughout the recording process, one being Flea giving a pizza box filled with crap to Gill, and one of the mixers running away screaming from the studio.[1] In Kiedis' autobiography Scar Tissue, he says that he was devastated when he saw that Gill had written the word "shit" next to the title of the song "Police Helicopter" on a notepad, as it was one of the first songs they had written and in Kiedis' words "It embodied the spirit of the band which was the kinetic, stabbing, angular, shocking assault force of sound and energy". The band were said to not be pleased with the production on the album, preferring the demo versions they had recorded earlier with Slovak and Irons.

officially licensed crass tote bags kinda makes me cry a little.

http://www.punkandpissed.com/crass-classic-circle-logo-tote-bag.html

― scott seward, Monday, June 25, 2012 5:50 PM (10 minutes ago)

I feel your pain

crass commercialism

if G04's one experiment with recording a commercial breakthrough is any indication, then, heh, Andy Gill had no business telling the Chili Peppers how to record a commercial record.

How does one go from being a situationist-marxist punk to branding?

I've always wondered how Gang of Four went from Marxists to crossing a picket line in order to play a show (which they did in British Columbia in 1982).

Well they were basically a bunch of full of shit students dudes in a rock band that ultimately didn't care that much

Good band though

most punks from the past have sold their souls a little bit at least. and in most cases a lot. no big deal. its called survival.

Yeah I mean, listen it was a bunch of jive that sounded cool when they were 20, anyway ppl that are really trying to do something usually become activists or get into politics instead of rock bands

Maybe joan baez is the exception, she seems pretty punk in terms of keeping it real

I guess fugazi never sold out but at the same time most of their politics seemed like they were about being fugazi

rollins on the other hand...

henry is keeping it real by buying five zillion chillwave and noise tapes a year.

Pete Seeger never wavered. Dude's closing in on 100, too.

Yeah seeger is right on

henry gives a shoutout to my favorite current record label utech on his radio show thing so he's okay with me. plus he bought a pricy record from me this year that nobody else would buy so he's doubly okay with me:

http://www.kcrw.com/music/programs/hr/hr120623kcrw_broadcast_170

i thought everyone hated on pete seeger for the whole stealing song copyrights thing.

I never dug his music, but I never new/heard anything about stealing copyrights (thought that was mostly Alan Lomax' territory). He refused to name names for HUAC, so for that alone he's OK in my book.

ugh new = knew

well, there is the famous wimoweh thing. and he would also take traditional songs and copyright his versions of them. but i guess that's not a big deal.

actually looking at the wiki stuff on it its all very complicated and involves weavers management and god only knows what happened there. there was a good new yorker article about it once. and a movie!

but i don't really think that too many people hate pete seeger.

my only problem with pete is all the old folkways albums he would barge in on. dude had to be on everything. Music of the Saharan African (featuring Pete Seeger, banjo)

Pete Seeger, the Bill Laswell of his era.

Yeah I mean, listen it was a bunch of jive that sounded cool when they were 20, anyway ppl that are really trying to do something usually become activists or get into politics instead of rock bands

― wack nerd zinging in the dead of night (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, June 25, 2012 7:39 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^

weren't UK punk very aesthetics-oriented? like they spent a lot of time making the cool ZZ thing in the buzzcocks logo.

Yeah there were quite a few notable design-type people involved in UK punk. Jamie Reid obviously, Barney Bubbles' work for Stiff. Malcolm Garrett did the Buzzcocks covers and they also used Linder artwork once or twice. Go4 started off on Fast Product, which had quite a strong aesthetic too. I love all that stuff, so many 7" sleeves from that era look great.

Yeah I mean, listen it was a bunch of jive that sounded cool when they were 20, anyway ppl that are really trying to do something usually become activists or get into politics instead of rock bands

― wack nerd zinging in the dead of night (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, June 25, 2012 7:39 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^

― like a musical album. made by a band. (fucking in the streets), Tuesday, June 26, 2012 1:07 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^

which makes it all the more embarrassing that greil marcus et al wrote entire essays on the subversive brilliance of the lyrics to "anthrax" etc.

anthrax is great though! and totally worth writing about. i mean i've never read an essay on the song, but i could see it. there are two versions of the song too so there's plenty talk about. okay "subversive brilliance" might be going to far, but i'd rather read about that song than a clash song or something.

i would read an essay just about the bass sound to be honest. when is someone going to write an entire book about the post-punk bass? if i were smarter i would write a book about u.k. love of bass. from freakbeat and rock to reggae love to punk and postpunk to goth to drum & bass and dubstep, etc, etc. maybe simon will do one.

you should do that scott, you are smarter

i dunno, i always thought Go4's lyrics were fun, and thought-provoking. i don't need every lyricsheet to read like lucinda williams.

i wonder if any writer has ever complained about ppl borrowing books from libraries, buying them at used bookstores, etc., and thus depriving them of any possible royalties.

i sent a fan mail to a writer once saying how much enjoyed coming across his books in the library and he politely suggested i buy his books in the future. he also called the library, "the libe"

What else did Dean Koontz say?

that he'd send several wraiths to suck Philip's blood.

Typical.

LMFAO Lowery is such a corporate shill, word has it hes been compensated to write this piece by certain insider members of the RIAA...so this isn't even a fuckin noble effort.

hard to believe that once out of the vaginal orifice we call his mouth music used to come

"hard to believe that once out of the vaginal orifice we call his mouth music used to come"

this is quite a sentence!

kinda like shakespeare.

"Hard to believe that once out of the vaginal orifice we call his mouth music used to come!"

http://transmedialshakespeare.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/hamlet2.jpg

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/43338/hey-internet-girl-everyone-had-something-to-say-this-summer/

honestly that article is a few 100 (1,000?) words adding up to nothing. what the article calls condescension and sanctimony i'd call debate. frankly emily white's post was so unreflective and took such a preening tone that i think she deserved a little condescension, even if it's not necessarily the best debate tactic.

what's especially weird about the article is that it doesn't even provide us any sense of whether the woman who inspired this whole debate has been changed by it. does she regret anything she wrote? have her opinions shifted, or made more complex? is she sticking to her guns, and if so, what are her counterarguments to e.g. mr. lowery?

even tolstoy in his grave said "TLDR" when he saw that article.

Everyone had something to say this summer about NPR intern Emily White and her generation's attitude toward music—everyone, except Emily White

It's weird that the internet responded so forcefully to someone who apparently never wrote a thing about herself or her generation's attitude toward music. It must have all been started by a picture or her or something.

i do feel a little bad for her insofar as she is young and did something foolish (as we all do, particular at that age) and thanks to the interwebs she can't just bury it or walk away.

but by most measures bowing out of a debate after setting it off is kind of a crappy move. it suggests that she hadn't really thought about her ideas enough to try to back them up in an open forum.

good luck getting a job as a music coordinator btw--it's not like the people who would hire her for such a position are indifferent to issues of intellectual property. she'll have to walk back her written opinions if people will take her seriously as a job candidate.

according to the article she was barred by NPR from responding. Sure.

the article is very strange--the internet was wrong about her because...she's really passionate about music?

if anything that just makes her more of a hypocrite.

They're doing a chat

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/music/2012/10/16/wednesday-chat-with-emily-white-and-lindsay-zoladz-about-streaming-piracy-and-um-emily-white/#more-80996

Amateurist should send in his questions:

what's especially weird about the article is that it doesn't even provide us any sense of whether the woman who inspired this whole debate has been changed by it. does she regret anything she wrote? have her opinions shifted, or made more complex? is she sticking to her guns, and if so, what are her counterarguments to e.g. mr. lowery?

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Thursday

"i do feel a little bad for her insofar as she is young and did something foolish (as we all do, particular at that age) and thanks to the interwebs she can't just bury it or walk away."

For some reason I am not thinking this is going to harm her in any real long term way.

That piece did not require 3600 words.

From the internet chat now going On:

Emily, have you changed your mind at all regarding the ethics of your ripping of your boyfriend and college radio station collection's since the response to your article?
Wednesday October 17, 2012 12:38 troublemaker
12:39 Ally Schw**tzer: (OK, obviously, the ethics issue has not petered out completely.) Wednesday October 17, 2012 12:39 Ally Schweitzer
12:40 Emily White: That access to music made the person I am today-- and I don't regret it. Because I recieved that exposure to such a wide variety of music, I am a more engaged fan. I attend more concerts, I promote more local bands, I buy more merch and I dedicate the majority of my free time to music

the Future of Music Coalition and the SF Music Tech Conference are peeved with Lowery and he's battling back.

From David Lowery

Casey Rae the Deputy Director is of The Google Funded Future Of Music Coalition
has called for a boycott of my band Camper Van Beethoven because I posted a blog
which explained why I had been banned from speaking at SF Music Tech. It
indirectly involved his organization.

According to Brian Zisk FOMC co-Founder and director of SF Music Tech it was
because I tweeted a picture showing that Google sponsors Future Of Music
Coalition.

and:

David Lowery raised two questions about the Future of Music Coalition
because they submitted testimony to congress asking that they “represent”
artists in the Copyright Reform process.

http://j.mp/126gPxF

1. Who selects your advocacy positions?
AFM, AFTRA, NARAS, Nashville Songwriters Assn, and ASCAP all have democratically
elected boards who set the organizations’ positions. Do you have members who
vote for leadership? If not, who is making those decisions?

2. Who funds your organization?
Google is listed as your first sponsor of your primary event.
http://futureofmusic.org/events/future-music-summit-2012

How much money do you get from Google? Do you think you should be taking
funding from a source many artists believe to be opposed to their interests?

http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/jazz_guitar/message/129453

Cracker's lead singer and songwriter, David Lowery, has posted his most recent statements from various media on The Trichordist, reporting a mere $16.89 profit from more than 1 million Pandora plays. He said that amount is less than he makes from selling a T-shirt.
Lowery went on to specify that the $16.89 was his 40 percent cut as a songwriter, and he actually made a little more (but not much) in performer royalties. The artist also encouraged other songwriters to post their royalty statements in order to "show the world just how terrible webcasting rates are for songwriters."

Point:

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/04/david_lowery_silicon_valley_must_be_stopped_or_creativity_will_be_destroyed/

Counterpoint:

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/12/dave_allen_stop_blaming_the_internet_it_has_always_been_hard_for_musicians/

Countercounterpoint: Lowery has already responded in comments to that second piece.

Conclusion: STARTING NOT TO GIVE A FUCK which is a bad idea but Jesus H.

Has Lowery or anybody else arguing something similar made a case for what they think a good streaming rate would be? Because if there was some sort of reasonable consensus about that, then the question would be what kind of business model could be developed that would pay that amount.

I'm otherwise sympathetic to Allen's argument that current businesses like Spotify or Youtube already exist, do operate legally, and that someone who has made hundreds or thousands or millions of dollars from tons and tons of streams is probably not too unhappy about it.

That would tend to follow...

I don't need to read the Dave Allen piece to know that "It has always been hard for musicians" is a pretty stupid idea for an article.

That would tend to follow...

I guess the point being that it's a different business model and that someone making a lot of money from it now might be less inclined to compare it to what their income might conceivably be if their viral hit had been accomplished through the distribution of a physical medium.

x-post-- I skimmed the Allen piece, and read something earlier this year he had on his blog. He admits to once being anti-Spotify, but his current position is that artists only have themselves and their labels to blame if they don't like the rate that Spotify is paying them. As if some unknown band can dictate the same rate as Taylor Swift. Eh. Plus he contends sorta that since artists post stuff on Youtube they should not complain about Spotify. Perhaps I am missing something in his response to Lowery's we're doomed stance.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/media/david-lowery-sues-spotify-for-copyright-infringement.html