The bigger question: Why isn't art/music free?

WERE once used to...

http://www.boblog111.com/images/trike.gif

I don't know anyone else, but that's only because they're all closed up in their bedrooms or garages with no platform to display or share their creations because the whole system of idea distribution has changed -- mostly, within the last 100 years.

if someone wants to share their creations for free, for no return whatsoever, more power to them. but it is certainly not something that should be demanded. and referring to musicians who earn money as 'whores' is as ludicrous as stating the same about anyone who works for a living. For some people, being creative is as much their occupation as washing dishes is your idea of a career.

Some may also argue that prostitution is a reasonable career choice, but that's not relevant to this discussion.

art and music are still used to freely educate people. like in elementary school, remember? it's just that i enjoy passing money across the counter at the record store.

as for the marketing and profiteering architecture, the same used to be true of fruits, vegetables, wood and pet rocks. it's not like music is special in that regard.

I know. My convictions usually fall to pieces when I'm forced to argue the philosophy behind them.

(free, that is)

BUT ONLY IF

youre quite happy to do your job for nothing

Several of my favourite musicians create without the expectation of getting paid, or at least without any expectation of earning a living from their music. It seems to bring a certain amount of freedom from pressure-to-create which is a good thing. It can also involve terrible time pressure and a sense of frustration that the art has to take a back seat to paid work sometimes.

The world would be a significantly better place if I had the cash to be a Medici-style patron of the arts, obv.

That's why you'd have to pay the same for http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0000003H4.01._PE25_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg as you do for http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000002LGL.01._PE_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg.

File sharing technology means people WON'T pay for it. Certainly they don't want to pay to support an industry. And some won't pay even the artist. (Who here always tips buskers?) So artists will see a gradual decline in income. Whether the collaps happens slowly (because the music biz needs to make over a certain threshold to keep going) or whether they negotiate a steady decline; the payment will keep going down. And we have no reason to think that there's a bottom limit to the downward curve.

The curve could bottom out at the point neessary to sustain enough music making. But there are already millions of people around the world who do make music for love, or fun, or stupidity. They may dream of getting rich, but they don't stop making music just because they don't. And once the commercial product dries up, they'll keep the file sharing world topped up.

Music will be amateurized.

Copyrights for cover versions protect only the sound recordings, not the underlying compositions.

My answers are:
(1) probably not
(2) probably not

I view this strictly as a consumer. If musicians/artists can no longer make money by making music/art, then I think the quality of music/art production is going to suffer. Take a simple example: the symphony orchestra. If all the sources of funding for orchestras dried up, there would be few, if any, orchestras in the world, and the ones that survived would be staffed by amateurs. This would not be a good thing for classical music fans. The same argument applies to all art forms to some extent.

US libertarians think that taxation is stealing : the government uses a threat of violence to deprive you of your property. In the UK, we don't tend to think anything of the sort.

The pharmaceutical industry says Brazil making cheap, unlicensed clones of anti-Aids drugs is stealing; though Brazil is the most succesful 3rd world country at controlling Aids.

New Zealand Maori's think Lego using Maori folkloric stories and characters in their Bionicle toys is stealing.

Some primitive tribes think you steal their soul by taking their photo.

The football association think it's stealing to take video of football matches w/out paying them a license.

I'm currently using the office computer net connection to download everything I can find re cyber-ethics etc, then printing it out so I can read it at home.

You may find these interesting

http://shirky.com/writings/music_flip.html

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.10/download_pr.html

"given the changes we are seeing in the ways music is being delivered it's possible that the economics of pop will change, regardless of the morals of the matter. If there's no way of preventing people from sharing high fidelity digital copies of recordings over the internet, the bottom may fall out of the mass market for recorded sound. In that case, people who want to make a living out of making music would no longer be able to do so by selling large numbers of records at a cost palatable to a mass market. Those musicians would have to find a different way of earning a living: this might be live performance, for example, and it may well be that the number of people able to earn a living from music would be dramatically reduced..."

I'd think that was a fairly defensible position.

The people who are the most threatened by this are the record companies because the lion's share of CD sales are already going towards them, not the artists. Possibly the biggest impact the death of CDs would have is that labels would go under and a new distribution system would have to be put into place to get music onto the radio. The types of tours would change, as few artists are wealthy enough to fully fund a tour on their own without label clout behind them, but the amount of touring probably wouldn't change all that much.

So, there's already a wide culture/expectation of getting stuff from PRince for free, yet he's still getting money because people are still willing to give it to him.

How do people feel about the application of these arguments on music publishing (that is, income derived from the use of original music compositions)? Publishing royalties are a significant proportion of the price a consumer pays for a record and publishing (both in the form of mechanical royalties and non-record related licenses), with the exception of bad old Tin Pan Alley/Motown days, can be a very substantial source of income for artists.

In a sense, publishing presents the issues raised by phil in a purer form, in that the logical extension of his argument would be that once a song is writen and recorded, it would be in the public domain. This has an artistic as well as a commercial dimension. Leaving the record companies out of it for a minute, how would people feel about anyone having the right to make any use of any song in any way they wanted? Thoughts?

I have no doubt that there will continue to be professional musicians, but it does seem sensible to think that their income may well come more and more from sources other than CD / vinyl sales (your example of Prince, as Ben says, tends to support this rather than contradict it, doesn't it?)

Perhaps that would lead to more travesties such as "Fortunate Son" being used in a commercial for jeans. No thanks.

My answer to the publishing question is that I think it's probably morally unsound that songwriters wouldn't get publishing/royalties for sales or for covers of their songs. *If* CD sales were replaced by free distribution of music, that unfortunate situation seems unavoidable to me.

(Knock on effect = possible end of professional behind-the-scenes songwriter + further rise of singer-songwriter = the Rock(ist) model = bad thing.)

(If I had written a song which - say - Britney wanted to sing *first* I suppose I could charge her a fat fee for it, hm)

more travesties such as "Fortunate Son" being used in a commercial for jeans

Artistic control is part of what you pay for when you pay the piper buy into the copyright scheme.

If I had written a song which - say - Britney wanted to sing *first* I suppose I could charge her a fat fee for it, hm

Yes, a first-use mechanical license typically goes for more. After that it's still not free but you can get a compulsory license.

People have said this in other words but I think the salient aspect of this is the notion that the uniqueness of particular songs recorded by particular artists is what makes them valuable. I mean, I could say, "Music IS free -- here, take as many CDs of these Sc1ent0logy hymnals as you like" but I don't actually have any.

"ILX - NICER than ILM". Discuss.

And lawyers, well everybody knows they get paid for nothing, so that's kind of a bad example. ; )

This one's on me.

The other day, I was talking to a musician I admire very much. He was saying that he would love to give up his day job to concentrate on making music, at least for a while. I asked him what would be necessary for him to do that and his response was a certain level of record sales. CD income is still key to him, at least.

I could imagine a position where CD sales stopped being the substantial focus for people like him, and by extension the music industry in general. That seems to me a major change, and it would mean that is you didn't want the pretty pictures or the shiny vinyl, the music would be close to free.

I don't have any idea what "Fortunate Son" is, but I can imagine more and more corporate sponsorship of popular music (heh The Body Shop presents... PITMAN!).

Ew this flight of fancy business is uncomfortable.

Agreed, but in the case of a pop song (or LP), if what a consumer wants is a high-quality means to listen to a particular performance repeatedly, and that exact recording is easily available for free, then what value does the recording itself retain?

(Some consumers - like me - want more than just the recording of course, but enough? Dunno.)

Basing your golden target on CD sales is risky and wrong when dealing with a larger or unscrupulous label because the amount of money you make back on CDs is not very large, plus when you get advances from the label to create the album and promote it, those are deducted from the amount you would normally get off of CD sales. So, if you're basing your income solely on CD sales, you need to sell a good number of them just to break even, which just isn't going to happen for most artists.

Now, if the artists deal with distributors directly (or through intermediaries that they control, rather than the current system of intermediaries that control them), they will see much more of the profits from CD sales and won't need to sell nearly as many CDs to make the same amount of money. It's all about your points, and the current system is deeply weighted against the artists (again, hello TLC).

I can believe that conditions on larger labels are tough. What's in it for a pop group to sign direct to a major under the current arrangements?

An advance of a lump sum of cash (recoupable from royalties earned later), large enough to permit the group to work on music full-time, go on tour etc. for a period of a year or so. And access to a large marketing/distribution machine that can, if you're lucky, generate much higher sales.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/23/228210&mode=thread&tid=141

"An entire marketing and profiteering architecture has been constructed around art and music that didn't used to be there. Songs aren't tangible like jewelry. But jewelry isn't ideologically expansive like songs are. Performers have no more claim to their art than their appreciative public admirers do. The notes, the melody -- they were ALWAYS there. The song chose to reveal itself to a willing recipient. It wants to be heard, and it's your duty as a skilled musician to make that happen."

By that logic, Shakespeare had no right to expect compensation because, hey, the alphabet has always existed. The words were always there, waiting to be heard/read....

A desk...the wood, nails, etc., they were always there, but chose to reveal themselves to the carpenter whose DUTY it is to construct it.

Ayn Rand to thread.

"Opsound is a record label using an open
source, copyleft model, an experiment
in practical gift economics, a laboratory
for new ways of releasing music."

a good tool to add nuances to the copyright debate: http://creativecommons.org/

I still think so...

http://www.marriedtothesea.com/050714/we-should-be-sculptors.gif

paul you're talking shite
I know. My convictions usually fall to pieces when I'm forced to argue the philosophy behind them.

― paul cox (paul cox), Friday, 24 January 2003 05:40 (11 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

folded early

I actually remember starting this thread and, within three seconds, wishing I hadn't.

lol @ me in this thread

BTE

I actually remember starting this thread and, within three seconds, wishing I hadn't.

― Johnny Fever

Ahhh, I think your sentiments were rather lovely.

Maybe one day comrades.

cartoon otm

they make shit ugly pots no-one wants and then post a loada garbage on facebook about not being able to make a living from it

haha i don't know why i was so down on the flaming lips in this thread, but young me otm.

also dave q was tremendous here.

http://gawker.com/taylor-swift-complains-about-shit-ass-garden-in-wall-st-1601355436