Do you like American music?
I like American music
Don’t you like American music, baaaaaaaaby?
Hey, cool! I went the other way; I started with Icon of Coil and VNV Nation and noticed that Apoptygma Berzerk had done remixes for them, so I dropped over; I have four of their CDs that I would never have cared about otherwise.
It’s mostly coincidence; I won’t think differently of a band whether it’s American or not. I keep picking up music and thinking, “Whoops, broke that streak…” and finding out that it’s really a band out of Vancouver or something.
This behavior is nothing new. They tried to get cassette recorders banned because they would destroy the music industry. They tried to get VCRs banned because they would destroy the film industry. Now they want to ban digital file sharing because it will destroy the film industry. If previous history holds, their ban will fail, and the digital file sharing will turn out to be an awesome new market for the corporations, as happened on all previous occasions. Just how stupid can one trade association be? The RIAA obviously intends us all to find out.
Now they want to ban digital file sharing because it will destroy the music industry. :smack:
Not much to add except I wanted to address this:
600 is a large sample size. That gives a 4% margin of error. That’s a lot better than some reputable studies.
The MPAA thinks it’ll destroy the film industry as well, so your original statement wasn’t totally inaccurate. 
[conspiracy mode]
The record companies have had a decline in profits during roughly the same time span as there has been filesharing. By blaming filesharing, they can point to something as a reason for lesser profits than 1985-1998 and not have to address what the real reasons are:
Crappy distribution.
People are done replacing vinyl with cd.
You can only re-package and re-sell When a man loves a woman so many times before the market is saturated.
A general attitude that peremates the media industry: It’s better to have a major blockbuster, than ten moderately profitable acts / movies. This in turn affects the media outlets (radio, tv, theatres).
As long as there’s a bogeyman, like P2P, to blame RIAA and MPAA members don’t have to do anything about the crappy way they conduct business.
[/off]
Yes you are. The question you should be asking yourself is, “Do I belong here?” 
Do you really believe that? Because it’s sad if you do. People may not be concerned about “defective” music, because let’s face it, bad music won’t kill you. (Although you may wish you were dead!) And in any other industry, companies will bend over backwards to satisfy their customers. If you don’t like this chair you bought, or this head of lettuce, or whatever, you can always complain and get a refund. There are exceptions, of course…but with music, fuggedaboutit.
That’s really what scares the music industry, after all. So much of their profits come from the “current flavor” teen idol or whatever ditzy blonde is getting pushed on MTv. They know full well that the music sucks, that it’s not even music really – but they don’t care. And those CDs which sell for $18 when they’re hot wind up filling the 99 cent bins in a few years, until they’re sent off to the landfill. Who cares? It’s all profit, and what’s really sad is that the actual singer gets very little money from the deal, if any at all.
MP3s have been a tremendous boon for independent artists and “small label” bands. The only groups that are really at risk are those manufactured boy-bands and teeny-bop artists that will be forgotten in a year anyway; frankly, I see this as a GOOD THING, and all of us should!
Nowadays, all you gotta do is buy a home studio kit for like $5000, record mix and master on your computer, and burn your own CD copies to sell over the Internet. And you keep ALL the net profits. The RIAA hates that because they only exist to keep lining the profits of CEOs and label presidents and other non-creative professionals. Hell, they would get rid of all the musicians and writers in the world, if they could.
Why yes, I do remember last week. 
Same old shit, just a different decade…
middleman: Cite?
KGS: Dude! My buds!
Cecil Cries.
:smack: 
To play devil’s advocate a bit, as a teacher I see that the rising generation of music-buyers have a very different attitude toward buying music. Above and beyond anything else, buying a CD doesn’t mean anything to them–those of us that came of age before Mp3s really cherished the CD (or tape or album) buying process–we read the linear notes, we argued about cover art. Buying the album was the natural culmination of liking a song/artist, and I think that paradigm still holds. From what I have seen, that’s not true for the current crop of teens. Many of my students have NEVER bought a CD in their entire lives. It doesn’t even occur to them. They don’t own a CD player, just an Ipod. They may buy music from Itunes, they may pirate, both from friends and P2P–usually a combination of both, but they don’t buy CDs. The physical object has no appeal, no relevancy, no place in their lives.
Is this true for all teenagers? No, of course not. But I do see it as a growing trend, and this is a big shift.
I’ll just add my anectdotal evidence to the pile. I’ve been through a few different modes of downloading/purchasing, and I think it’s obvious what’s best:
Non-customer: Pre-napster I didn’t listen to a ton of music, and what I did listen to was the radio even though I disliked the vast majority of what was played. I had dial-up internet at home before I moved away to college to live in the dorms, so I didn’t download any music.
Music Thief: With a free ridiculously fast connection to the school network and filesharing at it’s peak, I started downloading the crappy music from the radio and not buying most of the CDs. Sometimes I would branch off into slightly less mainstream music, learn about new bands and such, but generally my computer was filled with stuff I didn’t like enough to buy, or just didn’t want to spend money on.
Downloader+Customer: Then I started looking past just what’s on the radio and downloading MORE music from a greater variety of bands. That’s when I started buying more and more records. Like Larry Mudd I would find somebody with music I like and check out the rest of what they listen to and acquaint myself with all kinds of music I wouldn’t hear elsewhere. Or bands I had heard of but didn’t know what they sound like. I’ve found most of my favorite bands via file-sharing.
As the average person who only listens to the radio and buys CDs rarely, I was worth almost nothing to the record companies. And as some kid in college who just downloaded a bunch of crap because I had access to it, I wasn’t worth much either but it’s not like they were losing business I would have given them otherwise.
Now, the thing that matters isn’t so much that I can “download and preview” before I go buy music (which I do) but that an interest in music combined with access to it CREATES ENTHUSIASTIC CUSTOMERS. If I had never downloaded any music I’d likely still be worth about 30 bucks a year to them, but instead, because I’ve had a ridiculously easy way of learning about music and surrounding myself with it and finding artists and so on, I buy music all the time. And if I were to lose the ability to download music free and easily, I’d just have to cut back. I’d listen to my current CD collection. I’d buy only the bands I KNOW I’ll like without hearing them. I’d buy maybe 5 CDs a year instead of 100.
They should know because they’ve been operating on this assumption for decades: What you put in front of people, what you make available, is what people will take an interest in and ignore if they don’t like it. When the whole music world is at my fingertips, that does a lot more for my interest in listening and buying music than being given a rotation of about 100 songs on the radio. They keep pretending that tons of people are going from active customers to music thieves, and I just don’t buy it. If anything, filesharing turns run of the mill music listeners into good regular paying customers.
Manda JO,
I wrote a whole response about how it might be the quantity of music that people are listening to that’s changed but when I really thought about it I think you’re right. With ipods and mp3s and digital music in general, the album as a physical object really doesn’t mean as much to me. I still buy them to have the CD in my car to listen to, but the case is just put on the shelf.
However, I don’t doubt that a major part of that is the relative compactness of CDs themselves. They are made to come out of their cases, away from their liner notes, and into a CD case. Records and tapes had the benefit of never being far from their artwork.
Right, but the generation younger than you doesn’t even do that. They see a CD player in a car as a relic, and a pain in the ass because they have to convert their Mp3s to CD format and burn them on the a disc. They see a CD player that can play Mp3s as a reasonable option, but they really prefer to play Mp3s directly through their Ipod/ Mp3 players. Many don’t own a single factory produced CD.
My prediction: That will come full circle as iPods now have color displays that show album covers, and in-car displays are more and more common. Give it another 10 years and they’ll be plugging in the ipod to the dashboard and getting the original cover, liner notes, and an artist commentary track
10 years? Probably three!
Somehow, I don’t see the technology to read liner notes in your car ever taking off. Pesky safety regulations and all that.
Never seen an episode of “Pimp My Ride” have ya?
[sub]Neither have I, but that’s beside the point…[/sub]
There was also an article about it in today’s New York Times:
How Payola Went Corporate (registration possibly required).
I know that the ongoing scandal of payola doesn’t constitute a legal defense for those charged with copyright infringement, but you can understand why some people might say to the recording industry, “I’ll stop breaking the law when you do.”
Oh, it’ll take off. And then, when every third accident is due to some nimrod reading the track list on P Diddy’s Greatest Hits, Congress will pass a law banning that technology from all future cars. Eventually, NHTSA will set standards for driver distraction, limiting how much information the driver can access while operating his/her vehicle.