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

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