The Speech of the Present of RIAA

uhh, whereas the Big Five pay their recording artists squillions of dollars for their efforts and don't try to jerk them round with contractual obligations and legal loophopes? uh, yeah.

That this is a case of "bloke with quite a lot of sin casting the first stone" doesn't actually mean that what he was saying is wrong.

I disagree with the often quoted (but rarely critically analysed) 'findings' that P2P actually encourages purchases of intellectual property. It doesn't in my case, and I'm nearly obsessive about respecting other peoples copyrights.

And its going to get much worse. Memory is getting so cheap that mpg players will soon be the easiest, cheapest and best way of listening to music. Broadband is going mass market so getting a 30Meg CD image and saving it to a compact flash card (less than 20 quid at the moment) will be far easier than buying the thing.

My iPAQ with MS reader is already better than a book and there is plenty of room for improvement in the technology. The 'bookz' and 'textz' sites already creeping into the net suggest that this will be as big as the music P2P.

All intellectual property is about to be napsterised and there is no economic model to compensate the creators of intellectual property.

When the money goes out of the creation and distribution of music or written word what happens? People stop being able to do it.

Perhaps it is so that many deserving people are only getting crumbs from a feast they created, but replacing that model with no crumbs at all is not being done for altruistic reasons.

Damn it all. In the future I guess I won't be getting paid to write these posts at ILM. Jeez. But I guess I AM paying AOl Time Warner for the privilege of writing this, aren't I?

Perhaps Debord has been vindicated and capitalism really will undo itself through its own success. Or not.

Who are they kidding? Last time I looked, AOL Time Warner is making a pretty penny from all the online time the kids are paying for in order to download the latest poptunes; Sony must make a killing on CD- R/MD sales (and don't forget these products carry with them a special tax that goes right back to ... AOL Time Warner and Sony Music to make up for the sale of the record they otherwise didn't sell because you, ah, bought blank media presumably to pirate and plunder, even if that's not your intended use), not to mention the Sony-branded hardware that makes it all possible.

What a crock. They don't stop being *able* to do it. The financial incentive/rewards might not always be as apparent -- a different matter.

In the UK at least libraries pay a penny per book lent to the author, a friend of mine was able to determine that he could give up his full time job based on his library lending finances of the first few of his crime novels even though they sold fairly poorly. He currently has two books on amazon.co.uk's top 40.

That people are willing to undercut the paid writing found in magazines by freely contributing (better) writing to ILM and FT is a different thing altogether. I am unaware of anyone being able to devote their full time writing to free websites. That these magazines will close and the paid writers stop writing would probably bother me more if I had any regard for those writers.

Funny you should mention Debord, he's heavly featured on the textz sites.

Ned: I disagree my opinions are 'a crock'. One word. Loveless.

It was surely obvious from the pejorative terms used above about 'crumbs from the table' that my point is not that I care either way about Sony's finances, I care about Sony funding Alan McGee funding Kevin Sheilds. The haphazard trickle-down model of funding that enabled Loveless is terrible.

All I am saying here is that I'm not optimistic the inevitable napsterisation successor is a better model for the artists funding.

Now, if a correlation between those two facts can be established, then the RIAA should shut the hell up. Unfortunately, this can't be proven any more concretely than the RIAA assertions of P2P filesharing adversely affecting the profits of the recording industry.

As stated before, artists get eff all as is from actual record sales, once all the costs for making the record are taken from the profits generated. It's been quoted / paraphrased before, and I know I'll butcher it, but making an album for a label (at least, one of the Big 5, and maybe some of the Not-So-Big Bazillion) is like paying off a mortgage and having the BANK own the house and charge you rent. (There's an interesting article in the Best Rock Writing 2001 Nick Hornby Blah anthology that summarizes these points, and offers actual facts & figures.)

Simply put, if the SYSTEM (that is, the way labels & artists do business) were less skewed towards feeding the rich and starving the poor, then perhaps music artists & other industry folks wouldn't be crying poverty from the back seat of a limo.

My take on it is that now that actual commercial radio is so locked into very narrow formats, file-sharing is the people's radio, one with the broad range to cover all the different types of music out there.

By the way, anyone wanting to look into the Albini piece about the problems with the way artist are treated by their labels can spot an unauthorized copy here.

To take a simplistic analogy, a talented mediaeval minstrel with his lute could entertain a finite amount of people. If he was lucky enough to be a favourite at court, say, he could do modestly well in terms of perceived social status and wealth but little more.

With the development of recording technology (and mass marketing techniques) his equivalent in the second half of the twentieth century (Sting, say) can sell his music to a colossal number of people. He can become rich beyond the dreams of avarice by the build up of millions of small amounts of royalty. Fine, this is how the mechanics of the market place works at a particular point in history. But this does not mean that Sting's talent gives him moral entitlement to that level of wealth: at no other point in history would a relatively modest musical talent have lead to such wealth. He was just in the right place at the right time.

If the technology changes so that music is easier to record and easier to share among large groups of people the economic model changes once more. If the logic of this development is that popular artists become less fabulously wealthy, or that the industry required to record and distribute music is hugely diminished, then that it the simple logic of change. There is no moral obligation to try and preserve the rather freakish situation that prevailed during the past 50-100 years.

Which in this case it did not. Sony only bought into Creation a full year after the release of Loveless, which was funded solely by Creation money during its recording. Dave Cavanagh's book makes it incredibly clear that said recording process clearly made a hand-to-mouth situation for the label almost infinitely worse, so there's something to be said for financial control, to be sure. But your exact example wasn't the course of how the album was created.

No, but then I never see any money we may or may not make, in fact the band costs me money which I don't have to give, but you know what? I still love it and I still do it. In fact, the most important thing here is: did you like it?

I do see your point, but honestly I think that the problem with people _not_ buying what they download is with the mainstream musics, where people get the whole album and just don't care. And if Sony/AOL type people get something from that, it doesn't matter. People like, well, like the ILM crew, who have wide tastes which incorporate many many smaller artists do tend to use the downloads as a try-before-you-buy system. And besides, vinyl is still around, which means a)that rumours of our death have been greatly exaggerated, and 2)as long as there are fetishists, there will be physical sales.

My point being that Loveless wouldn't have happened if we were depending on Kevin Sheilds funding the recording himself with his job at the bank and his industrious 'paypal' account on the website him and Belinda knocked up.

Can anyone find a source for these mysterious reports about percentage increase in sales versus amount of P2P trading? As I said, I think, from my experience in the world of software, that they are suspect in their conclusions.

Precisely my point concerning CD-R/MD levies: the money goes to the corproate coffers and not the "artists" they are so vehemently whining about "protecting". And when said CD-Rs and MDs are manufactured and distributed by branches of the very same multi- national corporations who subsequently collect said levy (and do not distribute this windfall to said artists), well, you do the math and tell me whose interests the record label is really concerned about "protecting".

You also neglect to mention how the RIAA and MPAA attempted to sneak in a rider to a recent anti-terrorism bill that would have made the downloading of copyrighted "intellectual property" a TERRORIST ACT, and subject to punishment under (US) federal terrorist guidelines (military tribunals perhaps?). Yes, it's true. (It was, fortunately, defeated, but they're not about to back down, as the vitriolic Goebbels speech at the Grammy's demonstrates.)

This industry has made it quite clear that they will happily put kids in cages for many long years for the simple act of downloading an mp3.

Mr. Blair, it appears that you have swallowed the industry discourse hook, line and sinker. As pointed out elsewhere, music and art predates both capitalism and aural reproduction technology. To state that any threat to the monopolistic market share of major recrd companies signals the "end of music" is both inaccurate and inane; I'm bothered by your casual and, yes, disturbing use of Newspeak - "content providers", as if art is mere data subordinate to and in service of corporate interests, grist for the accounting and "intellectual property" law offices. Which is, of course, exactly what the likes of Microsoft and the RIAA would lead you to believe.

Strangely, no one on this thread has yet mentioned the obvious reason why the record industry in this mess in the first place. They have been gouging their audience for years, selling a vastly overinflated and overpriced product that hardly anyone can afford. In other words, they created this mess, and I don't sympathize one whit.

I think for most of us that went without saying, which is why we didn't say it.

Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Advisory Senate Hearings This Week on Dramatic New Digital Controls SSSCA Hearing, Thu. Feb. 28 For Immediate Release: Wednesday, February 27, 2002 Washington, DC - This Thursday, February 28th, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation will hold hearings on draft legislation, the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA). Sponsored by U.S. Senator Fritz Hollings (D-SC) and Ted Stevens (R-AK), SSSCA would require government mandated copy prevention technology in future digital devices that would give Hollywood control over how consumers can use digital content. Senate hearings had originally been scheduled for October 25, 2001, but were indefinitely postponed after much public opposition to the proposed legislation. Thursday's re-scheduled hearing will allow testimony only from major copyright holders and electronics companies; no public interest or consumer rights groups have been invited to provide input on the draft legislation on how information may be used in a digital environment.

Witness List: Panel I: Mr. Michael D. Eisner, Chairman and CEO, The Walt Disney Company

Mr. Peter Chernin, President and Chief Operating Officer, News Corporation

Mr. Leslie L. Vadasz, Executive Vice President, Intel Corporation

Panel II: Mr. Andreas Bechtolsheim, General Manager/Vice President of the Gigabit Systems Business Unit, Cisco Systems Inc.

Mr. James E. Meyer, Special Advisor to the Chairman and formerly Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Thomson Multimedia

Mr. Robert Perry, Vice President, Marketing, Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America, Inc.

Info on hearings: Chair: Sen. Hollings to preside Feb. 28, 2002, 9:30 a.m. ET. Title: "Protecting Content in the Digital Age" Location: Hearings will be held in Room 253, Russell Senate Office Building (unless otherwise noted), Delaware and Constitution Avenues, North East District, Washington, DC 20510

You seem to be bringing a lot of baggage to this discussion or setting up straw men in what I am saying.

Whatever.

Point taken that your original statement concerned the alleged compensation of artists. However, you are merely paroting RIAA press releases with your statements.

Your thesis rests on the dubious "fact" that money is the primary (if not the only) motivation for people who create art, and I take exception to that in no uncertain terms. The fact is, the VAST majority of people who create music are not making a cent doing so, and love of money or hopes of financial gain is not the engine which drives the artistic impulse. Should they be compensated financially, providing anyone is interested in buying? Sure. (And should all of the blues and R&B artists who have had their records reissued by RIAA member Rhino Records be financially compensated? Yes again, so tell Rhino to pay them [they do not and will not]). But ... to say that the record industry is hurting for profits will result in the general discouragement of the artistic impulse IS sheer nonsense. (And, correct me if I am wrong, but that IS what you stated, is it not?)

So, yeah, dude, *whatever*. Uh-huh.

Flash forward a couple of years and Sony snaps up CBS and introduces MiniDisc (Philips, then owner of PolyGram Music, simultaneously unleashed DCC). The main reason MD was allowed on the market (aside from incorporating SCMS) was that Sony, by now owner of a major Hollywood film studio and CBS Records was a major software player in the US market and of course would not oppose its parent company's schemes.

I recall seeing a TV interview with the Sony founder/CEO at the time, who stated baldly that the purchase of the film studio and the record label were shrewd moves which would facilitate unimpeded hardware development and distribution. He said that he wasn't about to allow his company to be put into a Betamax-type dilemma ever again. He was certainly no fool.

I agree with you that this is an endlessly fascinating subject. Oh, and Bill Gates IS snapping up everything he can. He is maneouvering to hold the rights what he hopes will become the industry standard, proprietary "secure" digital music standard (WMA), has bought the company which holds the patents on HDCD technology, and god knows what else. His company is also moving into consumer hardware - witness the X Box. There is a real fear in both Hollywood and in the music industry that Gates will soon hold all the cards in his hand. And if history is any indication, he probably will.

Now, I do my own music, so obviously the issue affects me in a way. I'd obviously be a bit pissed off if someone who could have bought a record of mine downloaded it off the net, that would be a lost sale. But if someone who's never heard of me, or wasn't intending to buy my stuff, downloaded one of my tunes, that would be a completely different matter, as it would mean a potential new sale. And if not, well, would they have bought it anyway? (Saying "XXXX squillion dollars lost due to piracy" is one of the more shaky arguments used in the MP3 piracy debate- ditto with software piracy- because it assumes that if there was no piracy, everyone would have bought the software legit, which is highly speculative to say the least.)

To be honest, apart from the "I bought XXX's CD because I heard it on Napster first" type argument, I haven't heard too much of the latter scenario, specifically the question: "Is downloading the song of an artist whose records you wouldn't have normally bought actually that bad for the artist, given that it doesn't equate to a lost sale- and might indeed lead to an additional one?" Obviously it's still illegal, but is it actually bad? There is of course the aspect of people hearing your tunes for nowt, people who might not bother getting your record, but you could say something similar for radio airplay. (And be honest, how many times do you hear a tune on the radio and say "Hey! I must buy that record!"?) In fact, the above arguments were used by many major labels against playing their records on the radio, back in the 40s-50s when it was still a new concept.

Such attitudes evidently underpin thinking behind the SSSCA, (An additional "S" for extra added menace?) which effectively outlaws any digital media without content control agreed upon by the industry. This includes your entire CD collection, your PC and anything media-related you've done with it (whether Napsteresque or otherwise.) The bill also seeks to make it illegal to switch content control off, and even to make it illegal for a computer without content control to connect to the internet, or any network. No wonder there's been a storm of protest against this bill. So many things we take for granted would be affected by such a bill: playing your CDs at a friends party, DJing, free/opensource software, legit free music, independent labels, CDs you can actually play on any CD player, etc., ... And what about the effect on new talent if the majors can effectively choose what anyone can hear through a unified hardware level content control system? On an even more practical level, what's the fucking point of content control on a rehearsal tape? It's as ludicrous as having a demo tape that only plays on some machines. New talent is either going to have to beg and scrape at a labels door because that'll be effectively the only way to do get their record out, or do it their own way, mwhich means either outside the law, or as close to the edge of it as possible. ("At last, some real rebellion in rock!" I hear some of you shout!) Basically anything digital-related you do that's not officially sanctioned by the majors is verboten- that's the message of this bill. The $64,000 dollar question is- if content control was enforced in the 60s, would hip-hop exist today?

OK, enough ranting about the SSSCA. Here's my theory: the music industry and the underground/warez are actually two sides of the same coin. That is, it's almost a symbiotic relationship, with one needing each other. The underground/warez dudez obviously need legit product to rip off, and a mainstream record industry industry to define themselves against, whilst the record industry need the underground for it's word-of-mouth PR power, as well as new trends to pick up on. (We're already starting to see stuff in the MP3 scene eg remix bootlegs, MP3 DJs, even more complex "remix" stuff like Richie Hawtins DE9. In fact, there's already been the equivalent of a bootleg mix in the UK charts with "The Ladyboy Is Mine" last year.) If the balance between the two shifts more to one side, it's bad for both sides. Talking of which, we hear a lot about piracy hurting artists, but shouldn't there also be a serious look at how some record labels treat their artists? If I remember correctly, there's a bit of a question mark in the Napster case about what copyrights the record companies actually own....