Sorry about the title, but I couldn’t think of a better one.
OK, we all know about the controversy of downloading music and how some bands are all pissed off about it (I.E., Metalica) and how some music companies are threatening to sue over this, but what I want to know is, why was there never as big a fuss made, if any at all, about the ways in which we use to, and maybe in some cases still do, “share” music? I mean, it use to be very common practice to record songs off of the radio, but I never heard of any angry bands or lawsuit threats. And when I was a kid, mixed tapes were extremely common (now they’re mixed CD’s, same thing in my opinion, just better technology). Back in the day if, oh, let’s say Def Leppard came out with a new tape, and my best friend bought it, nobody, or practically nobody, would have the slightest objection to me bringing over a blank tape and asking for a copy of a song or two, or, if I was really cheep, asking for a copy of the whole album.
Granted, technically it may still have been illegal, but nobody cared, and nobody, or mostly nobody complained, including the record companies and artists themselves.
So why is everybody making a big fuss now? The only thing I’ve heard is that file sharing is causing a drop in album sales. I think that that’s a load of BS. By the way, I’m using “album” to be all inclusive. By album I mean tape, CD, record, and all other mediums out there.
Anyway, if a singer or group puts out a good album, they’ll have great sales. But if an artist does poorly, then in my opinion, it seems easy for the artist or group to say “If it weren’t for file sharing, our album sales would be a lot better.” But of course, that’s my opinion.
So, what’s yours? Why do you think we never heard any controversy or debates over recording off of the radio or making mixed tapes, but we hear controversy and debates over file sharing?
IMHO? (No cite here) The recording industry is in an incredible slump at the moment, just like the rest of the economy. Whether they believe it or not, they want someone or something to pin the blame on. File sharind, being of a quasi-legal nature to begin with, is a good one to point at and say, “This is the thing that is screwing with our sales.”
Also, some will point out (and I have no idea the wherefores on this one, perhaps someone else can provide more info and / or statistics) that music file sharing takes what the public listens to out of the hands of the recording industry and the radio stations, and that, of course, is something they’d like not to happen.
Digital transfer is 100% accurate and fast, time after time. Analogue recording - tape from radio or CD - degrades and is slow.
Also, there’s the fact that “recording music off the radio” doesn’t mean you get the whole album. You may get one or two tracks from it, but the rest would require actually schlepping down to the store and buying the darn thing.
Yeah, that’s another good point, kind of similar to my artist releases bad album then blames bad sales on file sharing.
In my opinion, when things start picking up, they’ll also pick up for the music industry, and then their claims that file sharing is hurting them will become really week.
[quote**Also, some will point out (and I have no idea the wherefores on this one, perhaps someone else can provide more info and / or statistics) that music file sharing takes what the public listens to out of the hands of the recording industry and the radio stations, and that, of course, is something they’d like not to happen. **[/QUOTE]
While I see some truth to the recording industry loosing its influence of who listens to what, I don’t think that radio stations have anything to worry about. I’m sure that plenty of people will listen to the radio for a long, long, time. But again, that’s just my opinion.
Yeah, but how many people are sensative to the slight amount of quality difference you get coppying songs from CD to tape, or from one tape to another. Or I guess, nowadays, you can copy from one CD to another I bet.
Anyway, the point is, most people don’t notice or care about the slight sound quality difference.
Actually, from all the other threads on this subject, people seem to believe that the whole making and selling albums thing is becoming obsolete and putting files on the web for download is the future.
But besides that I think people not buying an album because they can download the songs isn’t necessarily true. I not only mentioned recording off of the radio, but copying CD’s and tapes as well. A few of us, every now and then would copy a whole CD or tape, but that was the exception, not the rule, most of the time we’d buy our own.
I think that all the music industry has to do, is put up a good pay per song web site and lower CD prices and they’d see a fast rise in sales.
I think that people see file sharing as OK because CD’s cost so much and usually only have a few songs that people like. Yes, there are CD’s which some people like completely, but it doesn’t happen that often. They look at the millions of dollars performers make and think to themselves, downloading this song or album won’t hurt them any. The same mentality most of us have allways had about song/album copying. I’m guessing the difference between then and now is the number of people doing this. There must be a lot more people file sharing than there are or were people making copies of songs or albums. Of course to me, that just goes to show that the recording industry needs to rethink their prices and they also need to join the rest of us in the 21st century and do a much better job of providing songs for download off of the web. As long as they give us high priced CD’s and half assed pay per song web sites, file sharing will be a dominant force for a long time to come.
Ummm… that’s not the case at all actually.
In the pre-digital era, even before an album arrived in mass production vinyl format, invariably it was at least 5, or 7 generations away from the original session tapes - and remember, in the vinyl era you had to make a master tap, then a “release mixdown tape” which was the actual finished album, then a silver oxide female cutting, which created a male master pressing, which then pressed about 800 or so female production masters, which were then disseminated to pressing plants around the world, and male copies were made of those, and those male copies would then press about 800 females each.
As you can see, this multiple generation scenario resulted in drops in quality at every stage. And then, if you played said album on FM radio, it went through a shitload of radio signal bandwidth compressors which further reduced the true dynamic range of the album or song, and then, it went through your hi-fi circuitry into a tiny tape deck working at just 1.25 inches per second - which is a really shitty tape speed if you know anythig about recording engineering.
Accordingly, in the era prior to PC’s with CD-ROM’s in them, there was an inbuilt sound degradtion process at EVERY turn if you were trying to copy a song without paying for it.
The industry assessed this inbuilt degradation as being sufficiently effective to not get overly worked up about unlicensed music sharing.
The assertion that most people “didn’t know the difference” is only as valid as a case of “what you don’t know won’t hurt you” it seems to me. All of us had mixed artist cassette tapes. Of course we did… but if you tried to make a copy of THOSE tapes… man the signal to noise ratio in the next copy was just a disaster.
But the PC CD-ROM era introduced the ability to make multiple generational copies of a digital file - which just happened to be also be a music wave form. With less that 0.001% data loss per generational copy.
The major labels could never have predicted this of course. They never thought that computers could play this nasty role in their nice tidy landscape. And now, as a result, they’re whining.
It’s irony in it’s most brutal form actually.
You see, a vinyl pressing in 12" form with all the nice open fold out artwork etc was actually quite an expensive thing to produce - certainly in the context of what it costs to mass produce a Compact Disc album with it’s emphasis on plastic and minimal artwork etc. My understanding is that a mass production pressing of an Eminem CD for example, costs (from cradle to grave) a sum total of US38 cents believe it or not. Contrast that with the $2.00 or so that a vinyl album costs and you’re getting an idea now why the major labels were so insistent on pushing CD’s down our neck. They argued that it was our “sonic interests” at heart, but in reality it was the astonsihing increases in profit ratio which drove the process.
And yet, do you remember when CD’s first started outselling vinyl? They always cost at least $2 more unit. Indeed, that 10 year period when CD’s were selling like crazy but BEFORE PC’s with CD-ROM’s started showing up was the most obscenely over-the-top cash cow era of all time in the music industry.
But then? The irony hit! PC’s started copying CD’s - and the cash cow got fucked right up the arse.
Understandably, the major lables are pissed off. But there’s little sympathy flowing their way from what I can tell.
Of course, that was illegal then, too. But the difference is a matter of scale. You borrowing from your friend: $15. You giving copies of the songs out to 5,000,000 people on Kazaa: $75,000,000.
If digital music files were only traded amongst one or two friends at a time, like it was before that POS Fanning created Napster, no one would have cared. But when you start massively stealing music on a global scale, it can’t be ignored, and it must be stopped.
spectrum nice way of whowing non-boas.
Music sales peaked in 2000-2001, along with the peak of Napster. Let the music execs explain that.
Well, from the number of us who made mixed tapes, I’d have to say that even if we noticed the difference in quality, we really didn’t care.
And as for the cost, wow, I didn’t realize CD’s were so cheep to make. I mean, I knew that they cost a hell of a whole lot than $15 or so, but .38 ? Damn! Of course, I’ve allways figured that CD’s cost so much in order to pay the performers and record exec’s multi million dollar paychecks.
Anyway though, you sure seem to have studied up on this and have a lot of knowledge on the subject. I wish I had that kind of knowledge myself.
I’ve noticed that when you share music files, there’s talk about a loss of profits, but when you read an authors book for free from a public library, they don’t complain about profit loss. Why is that?
Great question.
The best analogy I can draw here is, imagine you had a perfect XEROX machine - one which could create paper out of thin air?
Imagine you could put a great book in it, and out of thin air, you could make 15,000 perfect copies?
Obviously, THAT would be a totally frightening concept to the publishing industry. It would mean that books would “possibly” no longer sell in the same numbers because people the country over would “possibly” make thousands of thousands of perfect copies of said books and share THOSE around instead of purchasing originals.
Well, that’s the best analogy I can draw here. THe publishing industry doesn’t mind if you read a classic book from the library - of course not - because you took an original copy, read it, and then returned it. You absorbed the content without keeping a copy.
But file sharing is different - it’s basically software if truth be known. It’s no longer a “tangible” copy - rather, it’s a “virtual copy” which can then be multiplied without limits. And it’s THAT aspect which freaks out the Music Industry.
Solution? Just stop releasing music in a digital form. Put it all back on cassette or vinyl or some other medium.
At least that way, all internet file sharing would be a “theoretical illegal” copy of the copyright material - with a slight “undetermined” degree of quality degradation built in too.
The Music Industry only has itself to blame with hindsight. They introduced a technology which, innately, lent itself to unlimited cloning without trace. Considering the money involved, it was a silly decision. Imagine releasing money which was so easily cloned without trace? It might be wrong, but shitloads of people would do it.
Wave files, and mp3’s on the other hand are copies of the original with no backward tracing. No serial numbers. No in built IP address auditing (within the file).
A silly decision with hindsight. Effectively, the music industry is complaining about human nature itself. Change the technology away from digital. That’ll fix it.
This is not the first time the music industry has got its panties in a bunch over song swapping.
Originally posted by spectrum
Of course, that was illegal then, too. But the difference is a matter of scale. You borrowing from your friend: $15. You giving copies of the songs out to 5,000,000 people on Kazaa: $75,000,000.
I remember back in the mid to late 80's when I was in my heavy metal mullet phase the industry petitioned law makers for a $1.00 surcharge on blank cassettes because "One can reasonably assume these products are being purchased to reproduce copyrighted material.” This was dismissed mainly because of a legal precedence known as "Fair Use".
Not soon after, the major record labels lobbied hard and managed to castrate the capabilities of digital audio tape. DAT never did catch on in the mainstream consumer market as a result.
The "The industry is in peril!!" scenario has been played out before and will be again.
“Television will kill radio!”
I didn’t. Radio is bigger than ever but its role in our lives has changed from main evening entertainment to our constant traveling companion. Also radio improved (FM, Digital satellite).
“Television will kill the film industry”
Nope.The movie biz is booming. Many dumb things were tried early one to make films better and differentiate them from TV (3D, Smell O Vision). Some good thing were implemented as well like a better aspect ratio and improved sound like Dolby and THX.
The end result, the medium got Better.
Sure, there were some painful transitions but the industries survived and eventually became even more prosperous. Technology acted as a kick in the ass. It made companies take a good hard look at their products and marketing. The same old thing just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
I remember buying a copy of Styx "Paradise Theatre" on vinyl.
It was great! Every song was crucial to the theme of the album.
The cover and fold out art were mesmerizing. The record was even laser etched with a cool graphic.The whole thing was physically substantial.
Now you may hate Styx and disagree with my critique of the music. The point is that the product made an impression on me that lasted 20 years. The products of today do not have this impact. (IMO) Little extras are cheesy or not there at all. More to the point, the record companies seem to feel that 1 or 2 good songs are enough for my 15 bucks. Sometimes the tracks are not even mixed well.
File swapping may be quasi illegal but it is also the consumer’s way of saying “enough is enough!”. Give us something worth buying - something we want! and we will pay.
To this end, The record companies are introducing new formats with better dynamic range and 5.1 surround sound. These formats are proprietary and no stand alone recorders or computer drives that can read them will be produced. Time will tell if this is what the public wants. If it is, technology will someday allow us to copy these too and the cycle will start over.
Cite?
Well, you can buy the latest and greatest DVD’s in China (with about a 10% failure rate) for less than a dollar. The pirates are not into losing money, so $0.38 is probably ballpark. CD’s are cheaper
This comparison between books and music ignores the different ways people consume books and music. It’s not uncommon to listen to the same CD over and over again, but people rarely read the same book over and over in a short time.
It’s easy to get all the free “use value” from a book that you’d ever need by borrowing it from the library every few months, but for the library to compete with a music store for CDs, it would need to stock many more copies and lend the CDs for much longer periods.
This leads me to conclude that, in terms of people choosing not to buy content because they can get it for free, the library is just as “harmful” to authors as online file sharing is to musicians. The only real difference IMO is that each library buys a copy of the book, while online sharing could theoretically work even if only one person buys the album.
Indeed. And it has to be said that you can watch a great movie, a classic movie and have the story, and the characters, and the pathos indelibly etched in your mind - forever - without ever needing to see the film a 2nd time.
But that’s not the case for an album. Music seems to have an inbuilt kind of “memory loss” attached to it. Sometimes, you can stick an album in your car’s 12 CD stacker and leave it in there for a year without getting tired of it.
While this may not be a legal argument that’s worth using, I think there is a moral difference between sharing music you own with people you know - and posting it for masses of anonymous “borrowers”.
Also, where I live, a couple of the rock radio stations play whole albums with no interruptions at night.
The “real cost” of a wholesale CD (minus royalties and profits) is difficult to calculate. It is essentially a function of economies of scale. A very popular album (certainly including much of Eminem’s material) would be made in such quantities that much of the cost per unit will be the wholesale price of the compact disc itself. With a less commercial group, that would be less true.