You do know, right, that companies must turn a profit in order to keep being companies?
IBM and Sun have recently begun open source projects in the hope that free, high-quality software will boost their profits in other areas. It’s far too soon to say for sure that this is working for them, so I’m going to leave them out of this for now.
What’s wrong with your assessment of the equality between the creation of software and the creation of music is two things: the perception of quality, and motivation.
Programmers an composers have different goals. Programmers, particularly Open Source hackers, want to show off what the computer can do, and to show off their mad skillz. While musicians do like to show off their mad skillz, the prime motivation for writing music is to make money and/or get laid.
It is much easier to develop a universal idea of what is a well-made piece of software than it is to develop a universal idea of what is a good song or book.
In an open source software community, it’s easy for everyone to see what changes have added to the software’s quality. The measure of a song’s quality is a much more subjective thing, and an open source song project, in the few instances where bickering didn’t kill the project outright, would almost always result in utter dreck.
Witness you typical “Finish the blank story” thread here on the SDMB. While they may be great fun to participate in, I don’t anyone, including the participants, would every mistake the final results, taken as a whole, to be high literature.
Funny. Let me guess, Hackers was on TV last night?
If you don’t think that happens with software, you’re sadly mistaken. Not all free software is the result of collaboration, though.
And of course, most commercial music is the result of collaboration. Most bands have more than one member, as well as audio engineers for the albums, etc. Clearly, bickering isn’t such a big problem.
Ah yes, nothing like those famous SDMB open-source projects.
Personally, I find discussions of copyright, trademarks, and patents to be fairly tedious; I think there are very few people who hold the view that the systems should be totally abolished, just as there are very few that think the current system is proper.
But the OP question regards what people mean by “information wants to be free”. Today’s New York Times has an article about Google and the way companies in relatively unrelated fields are feeling threatened (though of course, not limited to companies in unrelated fields).
To me, this is a perfect example of the OP’s question: certainly, Google is nothing more than an information gatherer and organizer. Information “wants” to be free in that not only do people want access to it, but that laws must be put in place to stop that access. Hence, we get lawsuits that say a food store’s weekly circulars are copyrighted, for no other reason than to make it more difficult for consumers to price-compare. As is said in the article:
Or, you get examples such as Suzuki suing Consumer Reports for publishing a bad review of one of their products. Or New York City suing for publishing maps and schedules of the subway system. People want to know. It takes the force of law to stop the propagation of information, especially as technology improves.
But the proper level of this discussion, IMHO, is far broader than “musicians want to get paid”; it is more along the lines of “what does free mean in this context”? It can be interpreted as “free as in freedom”, but more in line with the OP’s quote, it can be “free as in beer” (that is, no monetary charge). I tend to see it as the former (at least, that’s they way I see Google’s role in the linked article). However, the two are intimately related; with complete “free as in freedom”, there can be no non-“free as in beer”. With complete control as to whether information can be made “free as in beer”, there is a severe restriction on “free as in freedom” (that is, only information that is explicitly released can qualify).
I see the OP’s question as being exactly this: when people use the term “information” are they using it to mean “freedom” or “cheap”? To which I have to answer, yes, in many cases there is a substantive point being made (see R. Stallman and open source software). But even more interestingly, the given quote explores the relation between the two senses of the term; as technology provides the means for information to become ever cheaper, how (and how much) can there really be restrictions placed on its freedom?
I was going to return to my multiple quotes, but then I came across this little gem, that pretty much gives the whole game away.
What I am trying to get across to you is the fact that we have freely distributed music right now, created under the system you describe. The composers and musicians are paid for their services at the time they provide them, and the results are usually distributed for free, with the company paying for copying and distribution. They are known as “commercial jingles”, and under your system, would represent about 95-99% of the music produced and distributed.
We also have patrons and foundations that provide commissions for works that are not necessarily for the purpose of promoting a business, but these are few and far between. The piece is created, perhaps a recording is made, and either distributed free or sold. I don’t see a mechanism by which the number of these patrons will increase significantly once you take away the support structure of the recording business.
Then there are people with home studios who create recordings and post them online free of charge just because that’s how they get their kicks. They’ll always be around in small numbers.
Before I continue, I’ll also point out that the freely distributed world of music you describe already exists and is perfectly legitimate, for all recordings made before 1923, and in certain select instances of stuff produced later that is in the Public Domain due to artist intent or legal technicalities. You can digitize them, copy them, upload them, download them, rip them, burn them, alter them, and include them in your own creations to your hearts content. It’s only illegal to do it with anything else.
Then there’s the mainstream popular music industry, the part you would do away with (you may not think you’re doing away with it, but read on). I’ll deal in songs only, because the new generation of music consumers is rapidly doing away with the notion of an album as an entity.
Record companies make money by selling songs. That’s the reason they sign artists. That’s the reason they back tours. Period. To sell songs.
If a composer/perfomer wants to make money writing music that appeals to them, rather than writing commercial jingles or fighting everyone else under the sun for grants, or flipping burgers or selling insurance, they enter into a recording and distribution agreement with a record company.
The record company pays for the recording sessions. Now, home recording equipment is of higher quality and much cheaper than it used to be, so actually capturing the performance isn’t necessarily expensive. However, if no one plays a particular instrument that’s wanted, someone needs to be hired for that. Plus they guys who mix and master it get paid too. The record company pays for the recording with advances from potential profits, money they have on hand from the profits of previous song sales. They pay to create copies (cheaper again, as the online world of music takes over) and pay to promote it. They sell it, give the artist a paltry share, and pocket the rest.
Artists know they get more money from ticket sales at tours, so they go on tour. Now, getting a tour started up costs a lot of money. You need to get performance permits, hire roadies, security and drivers, etc., and that’s before you even know if anyone’s going to show up. So the record company puts up that cash, because tours also increase song sales.
Enter Mr2001’s Wondrous World o’ Free music. Sure, as you say in another post, they are free to charge what they want. Riiiiiiight. People pay for Red Hat Linux rather than download a free version because they do not feel capable of supporting the software through their own skills. That’s only reason “pay or not” software works. Songs need no such support, so if your new laws say that “downloading for free” or “downloading for pay” are equally legitimate, you’d have to be an idiot not to figure out that selling recordings once they are made is not going to happen.
So there’s no more money to be made selling recordings of songs. Goodbye record companies. If an artist wants to perform, they will have to do it within the confines of what they can afford to put on themselves. Less hardware at smaller, local venues with their own security. Of course, the security then is not beholden to the artist, so they may be a little lax in preventing recording equipment from entering. So on night one of a weeklong stint at the local VFW, someone records the whole thing and puts it on a peer-to-peer network. Sure, some feel the need to see a live show, and will still pay, but many will not bother. Ticket sales are low. So the artist charges more, and hires their own more vicious security to keep their livelihood viable. Higher prices and oppressive atmosphere also reduce ticket sales, which we see happening right now. So concerts are severely curtailed in this brave new world.
As far as recordings, you will be left with the few who can get foundation grants or many who create commercial jingles. That’s for the people who can not envision themselves making a living doing anything other than creating music, even if they feel like it’s not the music they would like to play. For those who will not compromise themselves in that fashion, a very few who are independently wealthy or otherwise can make a lot of money while still having a hell of a lot of free time will reveal themselves to be fanatic home recorders. The rest will flip burgers and sell insurance, giving up music altogether.
You may envision “fan coalitions” gathering together to pay an artist for a new song for them to give away to everybody, but these would prove to be unfeasible in the long run. The beauty of the current system is that many people pay a little as opposed to a few people paying a lot.
So the amount of new recorded music that’s not trying to sell you something will drop off precipitously. The old recordings will make the rounds until everyone who wants one has a copy or is sick of them.
Now this world you describe is not necessarily unsustainable, but it’s not nearly as interesting, and the culture at large is not well served by it, as large numbers of creative voices go silent. There’s already an example where a moderately successful society in which certain notions of property were turned on their heads sustained itself for a while. It was called Communist Russia, and I hear it wasn’t much fun either. Your world isn’t likely to come about, and if it did, it would really suck.
If you want anything resembling the rich variety of recorded music we have today, you need to give people an incentive to produce it. That’s what copyright is for. You get your chance, eventually, to play with the recordings as you wish, but the law asks that you keep your pants on for a little while, allowing the person who created the stuff to profit from the effort of creating it, in order to keep it worth their while to continue doing so.
IMO, the current amount of time they have to profit exclusively is prohibitively long. But a change in the copyright term is the only permanent result I see coming out of the file-sharing era. As long as the record companies have a dime to pay for protecting their copyright, someone will come up with a technological solution to thwart the downloaders.
Maybe the solution will even come out of an open source project.
Let’s ignore the “owership” issue for a second. I want to talk about your use of the word “discover”.
Stop it.
No one “discovers” a string of bits that becomes a good book, movie or musical composition. They worked long, hard hours. Full time job and all that to create something they hoped other people would want to listen to.
Now you stroll along and say “give me that song, it’s mine because all information is free!”
Bullshit.
You only get what you give (a onetime famous musician once said) and if you want free information you gotta pony up hoss. You contribute something to the cause and then maybe you’ll be entitled to some of that “free information” that someone else spent a long time perfecting.
I said it before and I’ll say it again. The “information wants to be free” crowd is a smokescreen for a bunch of freeloaders.
Yup, and thanks to constant copyright term extensions, it’ll be many years before anything else enters the public domain. In fact, at this rate, it might never happen again.
That is also the beauty of my system, although you dismiss it as “unfeasible” with no explanation.
Now this is just ridiculous. “Eventually”? Do you know how long that “little while” will be before any of the stuff we hear on the radio today will be in the public domain? We’ll all be dead by then, and that’s if we’re lucky enough that Congress stops extending copyrights retroactively just as the old terms are about to end!
Yes, it’s hard work, but it’s still discovery. The fact is, the string of bits that represents a song will produce exactly the same sound whether you discover it or not. You don’t put the song in it.
A scientist who spends long, hard hours at a full time job discovering some physical principle is also making a discovery for the same reason: the laws of physics are the same whether he does his research or not. All he can do is bring it to our attention.
The fact that it’s hard work to discover a song is exactly why I’m willing to pay for the discovery.
I’m not asking anyone to give me anything. I’m just asking them not to interfere.
Yup, keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better. Your arguments are perfectly sound, and your opponents’ are rubbish, because they’re a bunch of mean ol’ freeloaders, and everything a mean ol’ freeloader says is wrong by definition.
For 2003, the demographic groups aged 35 and under bought 50% more copies of their top 3 CDs than those over 35 did. And 2003 was an anomolously high year for the older groups because of the great popularity of Norah Jones’ album.
So when the music business goes kaput, pop artists are going to have to rely on th economic largesse of their 15-25 year old fans, who may still be in school or earning entry level wages. Ain’t gonna happen, at least not in the numbers you’re envisioning.
The only way to make any serious money as a composer will be to write for commercials. The output of new recorded music will slow to a trickle, with commercials making up the vast majority of it.
Well, at least we agree that the copyright terms are too long. My solution is to shorten them. I think mine is more likely to happen than yours.
Isn’t it? As you pointed out, young people already buy popular music, despite the fact that they’re the ones most likely to download music illegally. They spend enough money to keep those artists in business, and I see no reason to think that would change. Spending money on music is spending money on music.
And other reports from the same source suggest that legal sales are that high largely because of fear on the part of the casual downloader about lawsuits.
At that point within the last nine months, even when people had the option to support the music financially or get it for free and risk getting sued for it, 9 out of every 10 downloads was illegally made without paying for it. Yeah, there are tons of fans out there who believe in supporting the artist. :rolleyes:
And your grand change would take away any legal stigma to free downloading from anywhere. Once again, who the hell is going to pay under those circumstances? Especially when they’re making starting salary and the student loans start coming due?
And there’s no indication of altruism on the part of the legal downloaders. Are they really going to pay that much more for the sake of the people unwilling to fork over the dough? Assuming they will, are the same number of people who willing to pay $1.99 per song going to be willing to pay $19.90 for the same song? $199.00?With the knowledge that the music would then be made available to 10 times as many people who are unwilling to cough up a dime? You’d be looking at a sharp drop-off, if you ask me.
Your plan simply does not jibe with reality. Not even remotely.
No doubt it has shifted toward downloads. Who do you think is keeping iTunes Music Store, Napster, Rhapsody, etc. in business? Legal downloads are taking off because they’re finally becoming a competitive alternative to P2P and CDs.
Altruism has little to do with it. They’re paying someone to perform a service. Someone who’s unwilling to pay for a service just because others will be able to enjoy the fruits isn’t just non-altruistic, he’s a jealous asshole.
Paying for a new song to be produced isn’t comparable to paying for an existing song. The price people are willing to pay for a song today is limited by the fact that they can get it elsewhere. iTunes’ price of $0.99 per song has to be weighed against the price of CDs and the inconvenience and risk of P2P downloads.
There are some small free software projects around, but most big ones get funded by big companies. Here is an article about Nokia funding Mozilla to create an open cell phone browser. The Linux companies (like Redhat and IBM) fund Linux for competitive advantage, and have their people work on it. Linus may have written the kernel himself, but you are not going to get any large production open software project written by unpaid people, and have any sort of continuity. The source of funding may vary, but people need to eat.
BTW, my father in law takes commissions. He’s 90, so you aren’t going to get a rap song, but it is possible.
About decompiling: Part of my dissertation was rewriting the Zurich Pascal compiler (open source thought we didn’t call it that) and it wasn’t easy, though it was structured and well commented. (Wirth didn’t believe in variable names of more than three characters.) If you think you can decompile something like Office and make changes that work before the next release comes out, you’re crazy. Maybe with a few thousand really smart programmers working full time, but not in any sort of cost effective way. And especially not if you don’t have someone on the inside to give you hints.
No doubt. But when your whole vision of the music industry under your plan rests on some rich uber-fans willing to pay the bill for everyone else, I look at these services, which, as popular as they are, represented only 10% of downloads in March of this year, and have to ask: "If 9 out of 10 times, people can’t be depended on to shell out a buck in support of the music they love, exactly what pool of people are these uber-fans going to appear from? I don’t know how many ways I can ask the question, and the answer is not forthcoming from you.
“Jealous”, now there’s an interesting, and very revealing word. As in: Resentful of what others have that you don’t or can’t have. What is it these “assholes” don’t have, that they are so jealous of? The willingness to take for free what others have paid cold, hard cash for, apparently. Sure. That’s why thieves like D. B. Cooper are romantic figures.
The question one asks one’s self when presented with such an option is this: “I am being asked to pay for non-vital service X to be done. I will get the fruits of this service. Others will get the fruits of this service as well, but their understanding is that they will not pay anything. Why should I pay so much and they pay so little if our benefit from the service is the same?”
What is your answer to this? “Because we’ll be your best friend if you do?”
No, paying for the two is not comparable at all. This, and human nature, are why your plan won’t work. Let’s say the laws changed the way you would have them change. Someone contacts you, and says: “Hey, Mr2001, we know your a fan of fill in your favorite recording act. We think it’s about time we heard from them again. We’ve talked to them (they don’t have “people” anymore, since they can’t pay them, so they actually picked up the phone themselves), and they’ve said they’ll put together a new song and tweak it until we think it’s pefect so we can put up for free on the web for $20,000. We’ve gone through every channel available, and we’ve gathered about a hundred of us together who really want to hear a new tune and give it to the world. Will you join us with a donation of $200 to the cause?”
I think “Information wants to be free” has more to do with the way information flows, that we use in such ways as to not really respect restrictions upon access to it. Copyright and Patent law are almost irrelevant to this discussion, becuase it’s more about how the information DOES flow, than the idealistic, counterintuitive way a lot of capitalists WISH it would flow.
You know, all of your big corporate examples are far less than compelling. I’ve worked in and around the underground music scene my entire adult life. I’ve seen people who make little or no money keep plugging away at it. Some of them don’t have the raw talent to truly make it, others don’t have the desire to be commercial. Some friends of mine in Denver play live electronic music, improv. They just get up and play, and it’s some of the best music I have heard in years. The last few years has been a serious glut for good music. The big corporate media machines are NOT filtering for quality. The pop music we get on the radio is absolute dreck. It’s rare that you hear a Radiohead or Mars Volta on national radio. Clear Channel controls that market with an iron fist, and MTV is a vehicle for Reality Television now. What you hear is Britney Spears and Smashmouth cloned a billion times. Big acts hardly ever get signed unless they are the same sound as Band X that made tons of money.
If you think the home studio is the exception and not the rule, then you are probably too old to be having this conversation. I have a home studio right here in my computer. I have a 10,000 watt sound system in my basement, and a lot of people I know have their home studios. The Prodigy produced their last album on the same software “Reason” that I would be using to produce music. Everyone I know is getting really into Ableton Live because it’s a method to produce live music on the fly that is intuitive for DJs and can be worked in with turntables.
The future of art is interactive, people increasingly want to be a part of the creation of the art, not be a passive consumer. You know very little about marketing if you think free downloads do not benefit an artist. The more people who know about an artist, the more likely they are to be able to make money off of their work, and that’s the simple fact of it. The Record Companies have shafted musicians for years, giving them pennies on the dollar of their record sales. There are lots of underground artists who have started their own record labels that have sold millions of copies of their albums. The system is changing because the new technology doesn’t support the old system, and that’s just reality.
Copyrights protect a different class of freeloader. The class that thinks that their money should “Work for them”, meaning that someone else’s labor should benefit them, without them having to do anything. That’s the American dream. Money doesn’t work by itself, it requires people DOING things, and most of those people are getting a pittance compared to the stockholders who’s money is ‘working for them’.
You can talk shit about ‘freeloaders’, but there are ‘freeloaders’ on both sides of the argument.
Historically, artists have found very little compensation for their work. We all know of painters who lived their entire lives in poverty, only to have paintings that sell for millions once they are dead. The average artist is poor or has a job other than their artistic pursuit. This is the VAST majority. For every Green Day, there are a thousand punk bands that never made it, yet still plug away and do their thing. Underground musicians I know of dream of having their song licensed by Sony or Mitsubishi, because that means a $20,000 cut every time the song airs. They dream of getting into movies, because they know that’s how bands like Skinny Puppy and Juno Reactor made lots of money, and became famous. Both of those bands got big from the underground, before they had mainstream success.
The very EXISTANCE of the underground denies your entire argument. The underground exists whether or not people are making money, and people do it out of heart. That’s why there is such a stigma on “Selling out”, because a lot of acts lose that heart that made them produce in the first place.
So this brings me to the crux of our disagreement. I WANT to see the record companies go bankrupt, I find this desirable. I WANT bands that are in it only for the money to stop making music. I want to only hear music from people who are in it to EXPRESS their soul, to be making the music I listen to. (which is more or less how it is for me anyway)
I have no commercial contracts, and I don’t make any money, yet I do lots of events, and artwork and such, almost all of it being completely transient, never receiving any pay for it.
Here’s a link for you www.burningman.com Burning Man is a festival where people come together make elaborate artwork and then burn it. Commerce is not allowed within the festival, it is a gift culture by and large, where people are giving things away. When I was there, I avoided the big acts that PLAYED FOR FREE. People were even talking about how the big acts had some of the worst sounding sound systems. The festival itself costs about 175 to 250 for a ticket depending on how early you buy yours. They give out grants to people doing elaborate art projects, and they purchase land for usage by the overall organization in Nevada near the festival. Basic infrastructure is paid for like waste removal, medical staff, a medical helicopter etc… The staff for the event itself is largely on a volunteer basis for people who couldn’t afford the high ticket price. While Burning Man is going on it is the 7th largest city in Nevada with about 50,000 people. All of these people come together to build their artwork. They are not getting paid in any other method than grants for the more elaborate projects. Right in front of my camp was a three story clock, elaborately wood carved. I watched them burn it to the ground on the last night of the festival.
I think that’s one aspect of it, but I also think it’s subsumed by the “freedom vs. cheap” point. Although I’m not sure you can avoid IP law in any such discussion, more relevant than copyright and patent law would be digital restriction management (DRM). By making information less free (as in freedom), it becomes more expensive (in terms of time and effort). The fact that restrictions are constantly circumvented (e.g., DeCSS or adding a suffix to a google address to get past China’s firewall) perhaps shows that information is priced too high?
In line with your point, I find it interesting that we must artificially impose mechanisms on information (be it DRM or law) that essentially makes information expensive by making it difficult to propagate. One interesting issue with that is that the value is dictated by the producer of information; in the OP’s quote, the value is determined by the recipient. While I realize that the free market requires the seller to set a price, there are (again, artificial) strings attached regarding what one can and cannot do with information once it is received. Another is that information is largely useless unless it propagates. Maximal propagation can have some surprisingly positive results that seem to be overlooked by those who wish absolute control.
Furthermore, I think that what often gets forgotten (or just purposely ignored) in these discussions is the “recombine” part of “distribute, copy, and recombine”. To me, that’s the most important part of information use, and should dictate what restrictions are and are not acceptable. “Seeing so far due to standing on the shoulders of giants” works for more than just the academic realm.
Well, I have always felt that if information is priced fairly then copyrights are unecessary. I think .99 cents for a song is way too expensive. They could be charging .25 cents a song and selling a lot more. The capital investment to cover the bandwidth is nowhere near what is needed to package and distribute a physical product, so comparing it to the (artificially inflated) price of CDs when selling it online is ludicrous. If they wanted to make a really good system that could truly challenge file sharing, they would provide a service that makes it better. I’d be willing to pay 2-3 bucks per full album, just for the convenience of knowing I can have it right then and there, it’s not gonna get broken in the middle of my download, and it’s guaranteed high quality. That’s a thing of value.
The idea of a CD is that you are paying for the materials and distribution, which drives up cost. Online I am not doing that, so offering the music for much cheaper is a far better solution IMO.
Wow, I don’t know if I can parse through this on what’s left of my lunch hour, but here goes.
Your emotional appeals against them even less so. Somebody has to pay for the recording. The current system makes it so everyone who wants a particular artist to keep up the good work only pays a few bucks into the pot, in exchange for which they get a copy of what was produced. What exactly is wrong with the system working like that? True, the contracts favor the company over the artist, but then, the artist doesn’t have a gun to their head, now do they?
That’s very nice. I’m happy for them, they sound quite talented. You do know that they have day jobs, right? If they’re actually not making any money at music? Musicians need to eat, is all I’m saying.
All there is to say about this rant is that someone needs to look up “glut” in the dictionary.
“Reason” is a nice package. The folks at Propellerhead did a nice job on that one. Yes, as I noted, a great deal of music is produced on simple, convenient systems like that. It has brought the price point down considerably, to the point that some of the big boys, like The Hit Factory have shut their doors. You still need to spend time laying down tracks, though. And the people taking the time to lay them down, I can’t say it enough, like to eat.
As I have mentioned before, while the youth of just a few years ago downloaded and then bought the CD, the iPod has changed everything, and many young music consumers get all their music directly off the net. If you don’t realize that, you may be too old to be having this conversation.
The system is indeed changing. Tell me, how are the 9 out of 10 downloads in March that weren’t paid for benefiting the artist as much as people actually paying for the music in addition to whatever else they might do would?
Remember before you answer that both CD sales AND concert sales have dropped quite a bit in the last two years. Search upthread for the cites.
I fail to see what the stock market has to do with copyrights, so I’ll just let this one go.
I don’t recall doing so, so I’ll assume this directed at someone else.
I agree, recording artists have historically made very little money off their recordigs. How does ensuring that they make NO money off their recordings improve their lot?
Wait a minute, if all they care about is doing it out of heart, what do they care if Sony or Mitsubishi licenses it? And I hope you do realize that the license is due to copyright laws, correct? And that doing away with copyright would eliminate that $20,000, right? Sony or Mitsubishi could just download their song off the web, and use it to their hearts content.
Are you SURE you want an end to copyright? I’m having my doubts.
Yes, but my question is, if you’re not paying them for it, why should they bother going to the trouble of recording it?
I’d like you to print out this quoted part here, so you’ll have something to chortle at when you’re 40.
Yes, I’ve heard Burning Man is fun, and those who know me well say it’s right up my alley. You do realize that it happens once a year, which is why people can afford to play for free?
You also realize, don’t you, that I have not one thing against people distributing their own stuff for free? I just have a problem when someone else takes it upon themselves to make the decision for them.
Thinking that copyrights ARE obsolete and thinking that they SHOULD BE obsolete are two VERY different things. I don’t really care if the bands on major labels lose their contracts when the record companies tank. Again, I don’t think commerce is a necessary component of the creative process. Some people create just to create, and they find their needs taken care of in the process of just being out in the world and actively engaging it. I see it all the time.
Some have day jobs others do not. Some people get grants, some people do work for hires. Some of them benefit from royalties, but not too many.
So why should I care about a system that encourages that the mediocre rise to the top? Most artists get destroyed by the record companies. Only a few make it to the top. And in my opinion for every band like Tool out there, you have 10 Green Days.
The economy is changing. The “hit” culture is going away. Watch as interactive multimedia installations start to take off, those engineers at the Hit Factory won’t have trouble finding employment in the future.
Like I said, if their profit model was based upon the internet distribution model, and not trying to emulate their physical distribution model, and the prices were lowered accordingly, it would be easier to pay for music than to download it illegally, and people would. The record companies are manufacturing the rope to hang themselves with by continuing a policy of price gouging.
Publicity.
Yeah, I was disappointed that I never got to see Nine Inch Nails in concert, and went looking for some tickets to Madison Square Garden, at which point I passed on teh $55 tickets. Maybe the market isn’t bearing what they think it should bear?
Companies that hold patents and copyrights, while the innovator gets shafted.
I disagree that they will receive NO money from their work. I don’t see that happening.
You’re right they are making money from copyrights. I concede that. However, they produce the music regardless of whether those companies uses their music.
Some people like to share their expression with others.
Umm, no. Burning Man the festival is once per year. There are lots of people doing things year round. There are even regional Burns around the country every few months. Also, Burning Man isn’t the only festival of it’s nature. I could spend the entire summer at festivals similar to it, the entire year if I wanted to travel the world to do so.
Yes, I realize that. I just believe you are advocating we force an obsolete model onto people, something I disagree with.
If only the world could be so lucky. Green Day is the band of my generation and I couldn’t be happier. “Dookie” is probably the most important CD of the 90s.
This I agree. Make iTunes downloads 25 cents and watch downloads skyrocket.
But if you take away copyright and say download all you want, they will get NO money. The only way the download model works is if the download location guarantees a good download for a fare price.
Getting stuff off file sharing P2P servers where the quality is often spotty and the download speeds even more so is not how I want my download experience to work. I will more gladly buy CDs and rip them myself.
Of course, I have a MAJOR problem with record companies wanting to do away with that option.
So here we are. It’s not perfect. But I much prefer the current system to anything you or Mr2001 come up with.
So therefore, those who wish to commercialize their creativity should have no right to do so?
In one of those weird coincidences where you hear the same phrase in different settings in the same week, I’ve been encountering one lately that is entirely apropos of this situation: “You can’t compete with free.”
You are only seeing one side of the coin here. Yes, the thing that keeps so many people downloading for free in the face of legal threats is the cost. BUT: The only thing keeping anyone paying is the sense that free downloads are illegal. Once you remove the legal stigma, the market will choose the best price, which at this time, is free. And I’ve spent the rest of my comments in this thread pointing out how there is no likely pre-paid model that’s going to satisfy the market for new recordings in the absence of copyright protection.
I really didn’t think this one would catch you. I’m disappointed. Now you’re just not reading carefully. Publicity toward what end? You yourself say you’re not paying NIN to see them, and you want to download their music for free. The audience at large are not buying CDs or concert tickets as much anymore, and 9 times out of 10 they aren’t paying for their downloads. Are music acts supposed to eat your adulation? Remember, I told you, musicians like to eat.
I’m not saying there aren’t plenty of acts that will keep playing just for the sake of playing. But one thing the commercial model does is encourage more people to open their mouths and start singing. The culture is richer for it. Remove the profit motive, and you’ll hear a lot less music. How is that supposed to benefit everyone?
