Yes, they’re trying to protect the sales of their own tab books, but that doesn’t mean they have any ownership of anyone else’s tabs. Tablature is not sheet music. It really only amounts to a symbolic description of one instrumental part of the song. This really is the equivalent of telling people that they have no right to teach other people how to play the songs.
I agree with most of what you say Sam, except for one point. I don’t think the concern is that artists will self-market albums that compete with traditional distribution. It is very cheap to make great music, but very expensive to market it. Word of mouth might work occassionally, but not enough to be a real threat. I think sky-high marketing costs are used to raise the cost-of-entry and keep competition out.
The main concern is that corporations with strong brand and marketing muscle will enter the industry and distribute on their own. For example, if one can build a successful music unit by working with four legit music-sites, four national broadcast companies, and two satellite radio companies – what is to stop Pepsi from launching such a unit?
Copyright law (and any intillectual property law) is about as convoluted and byzantyne as it gets and I am no kind of lawyer, but as I’ve always understood it writing down someone elses words and getting something in return (without permission and/or payment) is frowned upon by the “State” and actionable by the copyright holder. That’s why this board has rules about posting coprighted materials.
Lyrics are words. Like books, essays and poems. Those are going to be the precedents used by the lawyers that sue your ass for using copyrighted materials that don’t belong to you. (And if you make a lot of money or even draw enough attention, you can damn well bet they’ll be along.)
Theoretically, a cover band is supposed to pay a fee for every non-original song that they play, just like a radio station. (Read again; I am no kind of lawyer.) In reality, I’ve never heard of a bar-band doing so. Maybe they do, but I’ve never seen it. So, is it illegal to sing a song? Illegal is too stong a word, but there are (at least theoretical) legal considerations.
On preview: What **Sam Stone ** said! I’ve been telling friends for years that the recording industry has become the “horse-buggy” industry of the new age. They have yet to recognise their need to “adapt or die”. The modern musician just doesn’t need them.
This has come up a couple of times, so let’s make a distinction. Tab as a notation is very powerful and can compete with sheet music for expressing a guitar part. Guitar tab from the mainstream guitar magazines or tab books tends to be really good. And while note-durations are not specifically stated, they are accurately rendered with whitespace. I will point out that these tabs tend to include the corresponding sheet music as well.
In practice, guitar tab from the internet typically stinks at providing more than the chord progressions, main riffs, and occassionally solos.
So yeah, blocking tab downloads prevents instructional use. And of course, the MPA has a self-interest in being the only provider of instructional material.
Well sure, that’s a concern. But it’s also a concern that artists will skip the middleman and go directly to their fans.
The internet opened up a communications channel between artists and consumers of art. Digital technology made it possible to create that art inexpensively. The one piece of the puzzle that is still missing (but is coming along quickly) is the ‘content filtering’ - the role of an editor, reviewers, publicists, etc.
But that’s coming, and one of the places its coming from is the Blog world. They’re like the internet equivalent of Oprah’s book club. Take for example Instapundit (forget the political stuff, let’s talk about his role as promoter of everything from music he likes to books to video games). When Glenn Reynolds posts a ‘this is great’ article about an obscure band, people read it. Hundreds of thousands a day. But more importantly, other bloggers link to it. If they like it, they they say so. Word spreads, and filters through the blogger community. I’ve already seen books that he’s mentioned shoot up to the top 20 on Amazon just on the strength of his recommendation.
Right now blogging is in its infancy. As it matures, you’ll see multiple tiers of bloggers become established in different categories. There will be highly-rated music bloggers, movie bloggers, etc. They’ll help separate the wheat from the chaff.
In addition, independent web sites like allmusic.com, pitchfork.com, and even Amazon are increasingly becoming important content filters. And web sites like the SDMB are going to be more and more important in this role, as well as in the role of ‘editor’. I’ve already noticed threads like this: “Listen to my song, and tell me what you think of it.” I imagine the dedicated musician boards have tons of this stuff.
Then there are the artist web sites. Wilco released “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” on their web site a year before it was available on CD. Every hardcore fan already had all the songs when the CD came out, but they ran out and bought it in droves anyway and made it Wilco’s best selling CD by far.
Which brings me to the next point - there’s one marketing method for CDs that is dead, dead dead - the practice of ‘manufacturing’ a star, creating a hit, then building an album of filler around that hit and making beaucoups bux off it. Illegal downloads are definitely going to be the nail in the coffin for that.
But downloads don’t hurt the bands that have an actual following of fans, and who put out complete albums of good material. Notice Green Day sold a zillion copies of “American Idiot”? That’s because people want the CD, even if they have the songs. Because true fans want to own what the artist creates, but also because the CD is good music from start to finish. If they had produced an album of junk with one hit on it, people would download the hit and the album wouldn’t sell.
Quality music will survive and thrive. The scope and breadth and culture of music will grow like mad due to the internet. The pre-packaged pop and tightly controlled distribution networks and ‘hit machines’? They’re dead. They just don’t know it yet.
And music is just the start of this trend, because it’s the easiest to ‘digitize’ and the file sizes are small. But video is on the way. We’re already seeing the rise of independent short film makers like the Loneliy island guys, and sites like iFilm are becoming increasingly popular ways to get movies made. As CGI technology becomes easier to do, high-quality digital camcorders become more accessible, and bandwidth increases on the internet, I think you’ll see a renaissance in film-making, too. Maybe not big blockbuster type movies - that still requires a big studio budget - but smaller independent films, cartoons, animated shorts, etc. There is anothe Pixar out there somewhere, only this time it’s a bunch of talented guys in their basement, waiting to put their stuff out on the net.
Oh, I’m reasonably sure the lyrics themselves are copyright protected, I’m just wondering if one could make a defensible argument that way. Not sure if Fair Use would stretch that far. It’s a very broad stretch, but a good lawyer might be able to make it.
I think the clubs where bands play generally pay ASCAP to play music and have it performed by others. So it’s not like the local band writes out a check for $1.28 to Van Morrison every time they fuck up “Brown Eyed Girl,” but he gets payed.
As for the lyrics (or chords) being such-and-such a “percentage” of the work, it’s urban legend that the law has any language about percentages. If you go to the FAQ at the copyright office’s website, you will see this old chestnut properly roasted:
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html#change
Copyright law is byzantine in the intricacies of how artists get paid for their works, but what’s fair use of material that isn’t your is not byzantine so much as vague. It can be summarized easily in four short, cloudy points:
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
Note how “educational purposes” gets you a pass, and music lessons fall into that category, while putting tabs online do not. Back in the halcyon days of ftp.nevada.edu, we put a statement on every tab that the material was “for reasearch purposes only,” which was supposed to keep the whole thing in the domain of fair use… educational use includes research and scholarship.
Putting tabs online gets into trouble with item 4, if people are downloading tabs instead of buying the books. However, it would probably have to be demonstrated by the publishers that they are. It’s a very fuzzy area.
Has there been any legal action against writers of fan fiction? I think it’s in the same area where people are clearly using material that isn’t their’s, but it would be awfully hard to demonstrate that the proliferation hurts the copyright owner, and it might even help them by building the popularity of their material.
I’m just wondering why the mods haven’t come in and shut this thread. I think Sam’s pretty much nailed it. The record companies are desperately trying to figure out a way to ding us for every time we listen to a song, not realizing that they’re driving consumers away from them and into the arms of the various P2P programs. When those get shut down, people will find some other way of swapping files. Hell, Sony spent something like $1 billion on a copy protection scheme only to have it defeated by a fucking Sharpie marker.
Supposedly, the next gen PCs will have hardware DRM components as a way of preventing people from ripping CDs and sharing the files. The industry touts it as uncrackable, but I’d be willing to bet that someone will figure out a way around it fairly quickly. Hell, you can bet that studio muscians will release bootlegs of stuff when they get pissed at the label/band/studio they’re working for as a way of getting revenge. And some young guy who wants to impress the hot young thing he’s trying to score with, will probably slip the hottie an advance copy (which doesn’t have any copy protection crap on it because it’s taken directly from the studio masters) of this or that band that he’s working with. IIRC, one band got so pissed that they’re label wouldn’t release their album that they dumped it onto a P2P site, knowing that their fans would snap it up, and the label would be forced to release it, if they wanted to have any hope of making money off of it.
Oh, I’ve got ad blocking software installed, so could someone tell me if the google ads at the bottom of the page are for illegal filesharing sites where you can download music and or TV programs? I find that funny that the Reader allows those ads, but if someone opens a thread about a filesharing site it gets locked down (like the recent GQ thread about allofmp3.com).
Even if they come up with an uncrackable scheme, it doesn’t matter. If you make it that much more difficult to listen to your artists, that will just push people into the alternative music scene. That’s already starting to happen. I will not buy a CD from a Sony artist, because A) I don’t want their DRM crap on my computer, and B) When I buy a CD, I expect to be able to burn it for my MP3 player, Put a copy on my computer for listening to at night, and have another copy at work. Fair use allows this, their copy protection does not. So I’m buying an inferior product compared to one that is open.
If their copy protection really does become intrusive and makes it difficult to use their product, then a lot more people will feel the same way.
Pandora’s box is open, and the harder the industry tries to shut it the more it hurts them. Not just in the cost of developing the DRM software and promoting it, but lost revenue and litigation. Their last copy protection fiasco cost Sony huge bucks - probably a lot more than what the illegal sharing of their music does. If it actually even costs them anything. There is almost no evidence that file sharing costs the industry a nickel. Maybe the added new customers offset the losses from copying. How many people have found their musical hobby rejuvenated by MP3 players? TONS. I know a lot of people my age that had completely dropped out of the new music scene. We’d play our classic rock discs, listen to classic rock stations, and that’s about it. But now with MP3s and the internet, people are talking about music, sharing playlists, giving each other burns of favorite songs, and before you know it, people are interested again and the market as a whole is growing to offset the losses from people who copied when they would have purchased had the copies not been available. They’re listening to new music, and they are buying more CDs, because before this they weren’t buying any at all.
It seems to me that Mp3s have rejuvenated modern music, and rather than figuring out how to change with the times and remain relevant, the music industry is trying to litigate their way back into the past. Maybe things are starting to change with the rapid growth of online music shopping through iTunes and the like, but from what I can tell the suits are now starting to talk about charging more and killing the whole venture.
I’ve played in several bar bands and can tell you that the venue is responsible for paying that fee. I think it’s like a set rate regardless of how many different songs are played. The venue is making money off of the music your playing. You are making money off the venue.
I’v played in a lot of bars and I’ve never once played in one that ever payed a dime to the bands that we covered. I played in very few where the owners even knew the names of the songs or the band that originally played them They may have a technical legal responsibility but I’ve never heard of a bar actually paying anybody.
They payed fees to ASCAP. You just didn’t know it. The clubs pay licensing fees for public performances of ASCAP material, and the artists get payed based on a complicated formula that determines the popularity of various songs.
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