Two Questions about the Recording Industry

2) No, it's about the same as those other industries in terms of screwing its creative talent/drivers (I s'pose gaming would be the exception, but only in horse racing).

Mark, if movies and books are too expensive, try second-run theatres or second-hand bookstores or *GASP* a library.

2) It's a business like any other. Its immunity to judgement (it doesn't care if it's good or bad, as long as it sells) is quite refreshing compared to some dogmatic artists anyway.

I don't see pricing as a problem - big label releases = expensive, small label = cheap. As long as this still holds true, and CD prices keep going down in real terms, you won't hear me complain...

in 2002 cds sell for nz$25 (+20% discount often), while our exchange rate has dropped to .48, so i figure there was massive profiteering in nz in the late '90s

now the industry will try and sell you anything if they can -- let them make a loss -- they're on their kness

all that time prices from forced exposure have hovered us$11 to us$23 or maybe us$15 plus for imports, from a small business that's expanding at a non-greedy rate and keeping staff and customers happy

so i'm not complaining either

the independent scene is alive and well whereas the big record industry, indistinguisahble to me in terms of price fixing, retail price maintenance and most repungnantly parralel import controls from the general "content" industry, will hopefully go the way of the tobacco companies (when CDs don't turn out to last forever, remaster after remaster, etc ..)

The actual question - it doesn't have a massive impact on me since a) I like a lot of the stuff it promotes; b) I don't mind looking around for the stuff it doesn't, and know how to. My gut reaction is that it's more 'evil' than many an entertainment industry but I don't know much about the others - I think the recording industry reformed itself selectively over the last couple of decades so that the 'mavericks' (many of whom were also 'crooks') got replaced by 'businessmen' but the stuff they'd been allowed to get away with vis-a-vis artists stayed mostly in place.

The advent of digital media has in some ways restored a Romantic conception of music - the purest of art due to its transitory presence, its subjectivity, its intangibility. The vaporisation of a CD/LP into code...

Nevertheless, the industry maintains an illusion of ownership and control, against any idea that sound cannot be objectified.

Which iswhy I disliked hstencil's reply. Because I dislike paying through the nose. Just like I like films when they first come out on big screens, and pretty new books unleafed and soforth.

In the end, they're just making a whole bunch of little aluminum (or sometimes vinyl) round thingies in these square plastic thingies with these colored paper thingies inside them... and make the characters on these thingies do loud thingies in front of an audience sometimes. And they sell these shirt thingies with the characters on them to those people. And sometimes posters and dolls.

It seems silly that most of the attention and money and press is spent on the tiny part of the process that determines what digital sound thingies will end up on the aluminum round thingies.

So, my point is: the music industry is notorious mainly because they have a more inflated sense of importance and prestige -- mainly due to that tiny part of the process I describe above, even though they're not that much different than any corporation that sells, well, thingies.

2. It begs the question too much to define the "recording industry" as if it were a single monolithic entity rather than the many microeconomies and gradient markets that compose it. There are some very fair independent labels, there is piracy, yes, there are arguably antitrust violations, particularly in music television, but to say it is evil is also condemning the musical artists who are market participants. As in other glamour industries (like film and publishing -- I don't see software and computer gaming as comparable), vanity comes at a high price.

i've seen lots of excitable promo abt the passage via digital/napster onto the next stage, but not of the music that represents it, all of which battens on tangibility (ok i guess when you download song x and get something else instead, if you are just as happy, then maybe that is the first whisper of the next stage: but until i can download my mac hardware for free we have not exactly fled the previous stage)

re passage to next stage: what is the equivalent with books? (ilx?) (still requires computers...)

what are the actual numbers on priceracking? what shd CDs cost before the theft comes in?

and risk. that's the vigorish.

(ps that's why it doesn't work on YOU simon)

and fuck you both.

but i anyway promise nevah to tease simon again if it upsets you that much

(OK yes the message is "buy me" but how do you know the product is bad?)

...I'm not claiming that I'm not being brainwashed myself also ... and by brainwashed, I don't mean that it's a conspiracy... But promotion is all about persuasion..

Anyway - what a stupid point to dwell on... Is radio, or is radio not, crap? And would you argue that what gets played on the radio is mostly what the record industry promotes? It's a free-market system, but the record industry says "play this, it tested hot" the radio stations say, "we'll do whatever attracts listeners." Business & marketing drives the whole industry, and I think the quality of what is distributed suffers because of it. That's the impact the record industry has on me.

I dont know, I never listen to it either!

Proofreader to thread!

Seriously, though, software is probably just as fine an example industry to compare with the music industry. Video games now easily outsell compact discs, and that industry has the kind of release-day hype that the music industry would kill for now. How do you get kids to keep buying $60 games that they'll figure out in a week? I dunno, but they've done it.

And radio isn't just about what "tested hot." The record companies pay middleman "promoters" who then in turn pay radio stations to play the record companies' music. Esp. in the case of R&B/hip-hop/so-called "urban" music.

All and all it is just a whole shitload of stress I don't have to deal with anymore. Maybe it would help if I was getting paid (technically I was but it barely covered the costs) or if I was willing to chart whatever The Syn or Spector or whoever (rarely the band themselves unless they were Canadian) without anysort of play. Im not normally bitter about it, I have lots of good memories and tried the best I could and just kept learning more and more and hearing more and more good new music. The only thing I wish I could have had is a guide to how your going to get screwed over going in, for the MD of a college radio their is a lovely bitter guide somehwere at Rancid Amoeba but nothing for campus editor trying to turn his section a little more off the beaten path. So sorry there is nothing grand or sweeping about how it affected me.

2) Evil, well at times, this American Idol/Pop Stars is evil. Its way to close to 1984 for my tastes. This is what you WILL like just as soon as we go through the motions. I really shouldnt say too much about American Idol but the arrogance in the manufacture of Sugar Jones was astounding. Its just alot of big egos and asses and alot of bands like Treble Charger who will do anything to kiss it/stroke it.

Wow, thats the longest pointless rant I've done in awhile. lookout Grampa Simpson hear I come.

After speaking with them, I realised that I do this too. Furthermore, similar to what I think Tom said re: The Strokes, submitting to the "hype" of heavily-promoted music (in this case tv spots, big posters and displays, constant rotation on-radio and in-store) can be incredibly enjoyable. Though conversely I'm glad that's not the only method by which I choose the music I want to listen to.

One idea I found interesting is that, if music becomes free, the production and distribution ends of it will have to scale down. Maybe the day of the $500,000.00 recording studio bill is behind us.

This made me think of the disappearance of craftspeople & artisans in architecture. You go to a movie theatre built in the '20s and it's unbelievable about ornate every inch of the auditorium is -- 150 feet in the air there will be these intricate wood carvings that some master tradesmen making union wages carved by hand. At some point it just became too expensive to build this way, pre-fab parts became the way to go. When cheaper alternatives came up, people had to be complaining about the change.

Maybe in the future the idea of expensive, multi-layered recordings will seem absurd, unless they can be cheaply assembed on computer.

I think this is the answer to your question. Relatively inexpensive computer tools have already made it possible for ambitious amateurs on a budget to do recording/mixing/mastering on a level that would have been prohibitively costly only a few years ago. Also, I think there is a law of diminishing returns for albums that cost upwards of half a million clams to make anyway. Just read the Mixerman saga on prosoundweb.com for an example of this. The only reason that someone should need that much money to make a record is that they can't play their instruments worth a fig to begin with, or they have no clue what they're doing in the studio. If this means the death of ultra-glossy production, I won't be the one crying.

i suppose relatively inexpensive non-computer tools (people who churn out romance sci-fi and other escapist novels like robots) have been in publishing for a while -- isn't it amazing that people can still read ?

the computer industry wants to be in the "content" business, want's the "intellectual property" (sortof "miltary intelligence" type term), want's music, films, wants to be able to have the rights to re-hash "robin hood" the way nee disobey did -- well that outfit once prided itself on top-shelf animation cf: industrial strength lite & magic(no k) levels of resolution

the computer tools are there but they're often woefully inadequate or perhaps incompatible with each other -- my point is you need a $5,000 computer rig to stand a chance of not coming in sounding like the kids dancing to the video game down the road -- that computers have somehow democracised manilpulation of pop music content is still imo a myth, except for sub-genres like dance music -- many producers engineers and musicians will tell you that technology slows you down, gets in the way, and these are sometimes people with unlimited budgets

the first ever computers beyond the labs had text editors capable of writing yr great american novel on -- word processing is at least 30 years old -- it's easy to be superstitious but i can't help thinking that anyone aligning the quality attainable from computer tools across different contents has to be part of the industry -- not that i'm accusing anyone here of anything other than using a computer in the ancient tradition