Also a musician, I love it when people listen to my music, but I would also love it if I got paid for it (If I was a pro musician, or not).
I agree that the music industry rapes the musicians. I heard something once, that went like: when Michael Jackson was at his height, and his CDs were going for like, $13, he was only getting like $2, or some number very close to that, per CD. Unbelieveable!
I think it would be great if a group, say, Aerosmith, had their own site, and you could buy their new album, via MP3 format, for $8 or so. They would make a ton more money.
Patrick Ashley
“For those who believe, no evidence is necessary; for those who don’t believe, no evidence is enough.” -Unknown
If he got 2 per CD he got more than most musicians. More typical would be around .25. The exposure is the important thing - so that people will attend your concerts where the bulk of your profit is made as a professional musician.
I agree that getting music via Napster instead of buying it is immoral, and technically stealing.
But compare these two scenarios.
I feel like listening to a song that I do not own. I could:
Get in my car
Go to the music store
Find an album with the song (hopefully)
Buy the album for anywhere between $8 (used) and $18 bucks
Go back to my car
Drive home
Unwrap that %$@*& cellephane that you practically need a laser beam to start unraveling
put in stereo/PC to play
This will take an hour, absolute minimum, plus money.
OR, I could
load Napster
find song
start download
If it’s coming down quick enough, start playing it even before it’s done dowloading.
This can be as quick as 20 or 30 seconds, and is of course free.
How the hell can I resist? I’m only human fer Christ’s sake.
I’m not saying that makes it OK. But the simple truth is, it’s so damn easy and convenient that I will do it, even though I see some immorality in it.
And I can find shit with Napster that astounds me. Guys I work with have been coming up with obscure 1 hit wonders from the 60s for me to find for them, and I’ve found almost all of them. Good luck finding that stuff at Blockbuster Music.
[sarcasm]Well, when you put it that way, I see your point! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go stare at the stacks of money behind the counter at the bank. I’m hoping an irresistable impulse comes over me.[/sarcasm]
Bricker, to answer your question I don’t think ANYONE should be getting rich off recorded music. Any true musician doesn’t make music for the money. I love music and it is an honor to be talented and able to write and perform.
That said, I am far from naive. If there’s a way for money to be made, that way will be found, exploited and protected. This is what the labels are doing now and have been doing for the last several decades. A CD costs pennies to press and print and several dollars to market and promote. The total cost of a new CD should be about $4. This is how Virgin, Sony, Atlantic, Columbia, RCA (etc.) can afford airplanes, glass & steel building complexes, high quality drugs, prostitutes, lavish parties, and limos. They do nothing but leech off the artists and the gullible public, especially people like Bricker, who will back them from the moral highground.
As a musician I have little choice when it comes to signing. If I want global distribution and promotion and the use of the best studios and producers I MUST play ball with the big guys. They force young, inexperienced artists into faustian deals wherein if that group fails to sell X number of albums the group actually owes the LABEL money! This is why so many groups are dropped and end up owing money after having huge hit songs and videos.
If someone must profit from my songs, it damn well better be me. I have no illusions, though - if I knew my album could make $300 if I distributed it and $30 million if Sony distributed it, even if I get only 1/1000 of the profit, I’d sign in a heartbeat. Current technology is slowly turning the system on it’s head - gotta love it!
Yet to be reconciled with the reality of the dark for a moment, I go on wandering from dream to dream.
I’ve never used Napster, but I’m cheering them on.
Why? Because the record companies have had a monopoly (legally still do) on what they sell, and can charge whatever the market will bear. And the five big record companies have essentially set the price on music, and set it as high as they can get away with.
For instance, when the sign in the record store says that the albums are $13.99 on CD, but $8.99 on cassette, does anyone think it costs them an extra $5 to put that music on a CD?
This is a wake-up call to the recording industry to sell people music they want to hear, at a more reasonable price. I’d like to see a system like Euri suggests, where we type in the tracks we want, by the performers we want, and they burn them into a CD which they mail to us.
My guess is that they would make less this way than they’re making now (if they sell the individual tracks at reasonable prices), but if they don’t make some sort of compromise, they may find that they aren’t making much money at all, a few years down the road, since .mp3 files are easy to make and swap.
Yes, it’s theft to take mp3 copies of other people’s music and use it as your own. But for a bunch of middlemen (which is what the record companies are) to use their monopoly power to charge artificially high prices for their product is also extremely immoral. Just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right.
I’d like to see the record companies challenged through legal means (I can think of a few ways it might be done), but it’s not really likely to happen. And if it does, it will take a long time, and may not be successful: our system increasingly exists to protect the corporatocracy, if that’s a word, at the expense of the people.
Meanwhile, the swapping of mp3 files is, for most people, the only path of protest, since most of us don’t have the bucks to hire really good lawyers to take on the music distribution monopolists in court, nor enough influence to get it on our congressperson’s radar screen as an issue of concern. When the system’s stacked in favor of the corporatocracy, and against human beings, I’m rooting for the human beings.
[more sarcasm] You’re right Bricker! Stealing money from a bank is exactly as easy and as immoral as using Napster! Thanks for clearing that little moral dillema for me! [/more sarcasm]
Here’s the problem with your logic, Coop: Let’s assume for the moment that record companies go the way of the dodo, leaving artists to distribute their music basically by themselves. Now the artists no longer make “pennies on the dollar” for their record sales (as currently it is the label getting the lion’s share of the record sales)-- if they distribute music themselves they will theoretically reap 100% of the profits. But unfortunately for them, they’re not going to sell many records, since anyone with a computer and a phone line can go find their music for free. It’s better to make pennies on the dollar and sell 100,000 records than it is to make 95 cents on the dollar and sell 10. You contend that live performance revenues compose the bulk of the musician’s income (cite?–nah, nevermind, we’ll take this on faith for the purposes of the discussion). Who exactly do you think books these dates? Who lines them up with opening acts? The record company. The destruction of the record label would be horrendous for artists, and on another level as well: today, artists are protected by the gang of lawyers that all major labels have in their employ. If record companies are dismantled, leaving artists to essentially fend for themselves, there’s much more potential for them to be victimized by things like, well, piracy. I know that if I ever get into a band that hits it big, I want a major label to promote my music and book big dates. I want an old-school label owner to market for me. I want record companies to be around, damn it.
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” -Winston Churchill
Sake: I had no idea it was that bad for the recording artists, too.
So to sum it up: you’ve got the musicians, who are getting screwed. You’ve got the listeners, who are getting screwed. And in between, you’ve got a handful of huge record companies, who are raking in the dough. Ah, the joys of capitalism.
Personally, I’d be for gathering a mob, and storming their headquarters, armed with torches and pitchforks. It would be a great photo op for the media, but I doubt it would do much good. I’d say swapping mp3 files has a better chance of dumping them on their asses than anything I can think of.
Enough of voting for the lesser of evils - vote Cthulhu 2000!
Not true, in my experience. Until 2 years ago I played with a band who never threw down with a major label but played and toured almost exclusively with bands that had. These were groups like (pardon me while I simultaneously name-check and reveal musical bias) No Doubt, Rancid, the Offspring, Sublime, and other ska/punk types.
At the time, many of these bands were at the top of the alt.music game. None of them received “tour support” $$$ from their labels. Bookings were made through the band’s own independent management and/or independent booking companies and both local and national concert promoters. I don’t even know if there is such thing as “tour support” money from labels any more–but if there is you can bet it comes out of the artists’ pockets sooner or later. Other than that, I never saw any form of label involvement with these workaday type bands (who, Britney and Ricky notwithstanding, make up vast bulk of the active music scene).
To address your distribution concerns, this is precisely what makes Napster so exciting. We’re witnessing the ushering in of a new era, a new paradigm for how entertainment is bought and sold. Is Napster our Moses? Probably not. Like Mosaic and other famous precursors, Napster is too flawed and limited to be a genuine killer app. But Mosaic opened the way for Netscape and IE, and a whole new means for interacting with the WWWorld. I predict a similar legacy for Napster–one that will open up similar channels of connectivity for musicians, filmmakers and other artists.
Make no mistake, the revolution will be slow, with plenty of intermissions. After all, despite cable, independent filmmaking and Ross Perot, you don’t hear any credible death knells for the Networks, Hollywood or the Dem/GOPs. But the big-five labels are right to get nervous.
By the way, they’re also right to sue. It’s illegal to copy and use copyrighted material. It may not be in the artists’ best interest to limit this widespread flow, but that’s a moot point. After all, they signed on the line and sold their birthright. Hopefully future artists will have another option.
I’m not sure the Record Companies are the Great Satan and Musicians the Little Lambs as described by so many in this thread.
If it weren’t for Record Companies, there would be no music. Don’t kid yourself that Musicians create, and Record Companies are just middlemen that leach off of them.
Record Companies create the business, find the talent, finance the recordings, tend to manufacturing, delivery, and sales details. They are ultimately responsible for delivering the product to market. And don’t kid yourself, music is a product like soap or soda or any other.
The person who invented Irish Spring soap was probably paid pretty well, but you can bet it’s the Irish Spring manufacturing and sales machine that gleans the vast majority of the profits. As it should be. Edison was right about 1% inspiration and 99% persperation. The Music Companies are the perspiration. To imply that the inventor is solely responsible for the creation is naive.
Oh, one more thing. Sake Samurai wrote
[quote]
I don’t think ANYONE should be getting rich off recorded music.**
I don’t think Music is above Money. May I recommend an Ayn Rand passage or two?
Obviously there are two key differences. As you point out, it’s not nearly as easy to steal from the bank. Moreover, if you do manage it, the bank no longer has the money, and you do. But when you pirate the mp3, the original owner still has it. And you have it too.
We protect intellectual property from theft because that policy encourages more intellectual property. If any computer manufacturer could steal MS Windows without fear of retribution, there would be no MS Windows. It doesn’t make sense for a company to devote money and time to develop an operating system if they are not compensated for it in some way.
So, too, with Sake’s vision of creating music for the sheer joy. Even if I accept that, I would point out that studio time is not cheap. A musician creating quality music for no pay will end up losing money on his hobby. I’m sorry – I don’t believe we would have near the panoply of music in this country if there were no way to make money on it, just as I know I wouldn’t be talking to you on this web site if there were no way to make money from computer systems.
Sure, there are worse crimes. But the point of original sarcastic post was to suggest that “I’m only human - what do you want me to do?” is a wholly inadequate defense to the crime. People own the rights to that music. When you take it, you steal. The fact that it’s a small theft only means that you’re apparently willing to sell your honor for a very low price.
You make a good point: the music of a contracted artist is the record company’s product, and a lot of work goes into the marketing and distribution of that product.
But don’t go giving the industry too much credit for creating the product itself. In my experience, many record companies regard their artists as a necessary evil. If there were some way to get the product without dealing with all those flaky musician types, you can bet the industry would find it and use it. (Come on, the Irish Spring inventor never demanded 20 pounds of chilled green M&Ms in his rider!)
Also, the creation of the product has undergone its own democratizing revolution over the last decade or so. Digital recording technology has placed the power to produce professional-quality recordings in the hands of any high school geek with an ADAT (or better yet, a good computer equipped with ProTools). Nobody needs a record company to make a CD. Currently, they need one to gain widespread distribution for that CD, but that is the paradigm that Napster threatens to change.
BTW, I agree that, for me, art does not exist in a vacuum. If I can exploit my talents to make money, thereby avoiding the indignity of a McDonald’s uniform, then dammit, I’m gonna! My talent is mine, to use as I see fit. Others may also chose to pay money to enjoy my talent, or they may not. If Sake chooses to not turn his talent to profit, that’s his choice as well.
In other words, you’re not prepared to defend your position. You just wanted to loudly trounce the sinners, but not actually defend the faith.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard copyright law called `clear,’ but I understand what you mean. What is done by means of Napster is forbidden by law.
But even if I stipulate that it’s wrong, and I do happen to think it is, it’s still not clear exactly what wrong is being done. If the law chooses, for the purpose of expediency, to use the language of theft' (which it doesn't -- it uses the language of rights’) does that mean it is theft? It is not clear what manner or extent of harm is done to the owner of a song which is copied and distributed unlawfully.
What someone is violating when they distribute songs on Napster is the copyright holder’s exclusive right to “print, reprint, publish, copy and vend the copyrighted work.” To the extent that we believe that we ourselves should have the right to such control over the use of our own work or to sell the rights to a given work to others, we must extend that same right to everyone else.
In many practical ways, a copyright functions as a form of property which can be bought, sold, traded, and so on. But to treat holding or distributing a copy of a work as a form of theft brings up a number of sticky issues.
For example, is there any measurable difference for the copyright holder between my never buying a song and not having it and my never buying a song and having it? If not, then in what sense is the holder deprived of property?
Yes, it is a violation of the holder’s right. And the holder’s copyright is a form of property. But violating someone’s right qua rights doesn’t deprive a person of his right qua property. The holder still owns that right.
The reason that it’s illegal is not because violations on the individual level (Joe Schmo owns a copy, for example) are serious wrongs but because if it happens on a large enough scale the value of the copyright holder’s property is diminished. Napster is on such a scale. But diminishing the value of someone else’s property, even if it does profit the diminisher (diminishing returns, if you will), is not sufficient to constitute stealing.
Notice, I am not justifying the unauthorized replication and distribution of music, I am only saying that doesn’t meet the criterion for stealing.
I believe it, for one simple reason: I’ve seen it.
Any baby-boomer who has eyes to see, knows that (even adjusted for inflation) there was far less money involved in rock n’roll in the late '60s than the late '90s. Was the quality of the music inferior then? No. Did the music somehow fail to get from musicians to listeners then? No. So it’s not the money that makes the music, or even gets it to the listener.
This would make sense if the creator of the intellectual property were the one making most of the money. But as those familiar with the music biz have pointed out here, the people making the money are middlemen who have managed to exploit their monopoly position as distributors. Those who swap mp3 files may be violating the letter of the law, but they are definitely not in violation of its spirit. That’s already been broken by the record companies.
billehunt:
See above.
If that was so, I wouldn’t even be in this thread; I wouldn’t care about it. I’d rather be a quadriplegic than lose my hearing and know I’d never hear another new song. If you believe that music is just another commercial product, I feel sorry for you,the way I’d feel sorry for someone who’d never fallen in love.
That may work just fine for Irish Spring, where (if demand is sufficient) a competitor will sooner or later come up with a passable imitation of Irish Spring, and sell it at a much more reasonable price. (That’s probably long since been done, but no matter.) But it’s not necessarily the same in music, where a passable imitation of U2 or Alanis Morrisette, or whoever, is just garbage (without the capital G ;)). (A passable imitation of the Backstreet Boys, OTOH, can (and has) been wildly successful, but there the product is like soap.)
Please, use the woman’s own words to demonstrate her soullessness. I won’t hold it against you at all.
Enough of voting for the lesser of evils - vote Cthulhu 2000!
Thank god the Music Industry came along and brought music to mankind! Thank god for the Film Industry to, for inventing color - things were so quiet and drab before multi-million dollar capitalistic idustry!
They do not create the business. I am not signed right now and people still pay $$ to come to my shows and buy my CDs. It costs from $5 - $10 to see my band (some weekdays you can catch us for free) and about the same for a CD (if you’re really sexy, you’ll get it for free - or barter ;)) Yes, record companies find talent (though it often comes to them through the mail, internet and word of mouth) and finance studio time. The do not manufacture or deliver the vinyl, CDs and tapes. They do arrange for payment, however.
Music is not like soap. It is an interesting combination of good AND service. We all want a nice, varried CD collection, but we also want to see an energetic live band on Friday night, hire someone to play at our wedding, we yearn for music to inspire us and elevate our mood and emotions, and we await new and exciting forms of musical creation. It’s a bit more complex than Irish Spring.
That’s an unbelievably ignorant statement. The creator is soley responsible for the creation. He may not be soley responsible for the sucess and profit of his invention, but that idea, poem, tune, building, etc IS his and his alone.
Recommending that I read Rand is like suggesting that the Pope pick up a copy of the King James. Objectivism centers around the inate strength of man and how society and government must not interfere in the honest invention and competition of free men and woman. It is I who must recommend that YOU peruse The Fountainhead and tell me what lesson you learn from Howard Roark’s struggle with society and government over his brilliant architectural designs. Why do you think he destroyed his building, his labor of love? It belonged to no one but him, that’s why. Despite investors and bankers and stockholders and public laws, he held that it was his creation and therefore his responsibility to exhalt or destroy.
Bricker, studio time is ultra-expensive. A cheap local studio costs about $40/hour, a decent studio with great mics, ADATs, etc costs more like $80/hour and a professional studio can cost from $120/hour up. It takes a couple of hours to mic the drumset properly and tweak all levels and run a soundcheck. Then the actual recording begins which, for an LP can last several days. Then you’ve got to mix every track. Usually the tracks are sent elsewhere for mixing and mastering. Then sent somewhere else to be mass-produced. We’re talking about huge sums of money, here, especially for musicians who are often barely employed.
However, my band just created a 4-song studio-quality (well, small studio) demo in my house with a couple Shure mics, a Yamaha multitracker, and this computer. A still can’t believe how good the CD sounds. We’re making great progress against the music industry - this wasn’t possible 5 years ago. Software prices are dropping, hardware is very powerful and musicians are becoming extremely computer-literate.
Record companies will be around for a long time, but their power is waning. Napster is a good step towards liberating musicians in this country.
Yet to be reconciled with the reality of the dark for a moment, I go on wandering from dream to dream.
While the record company may organize a little bit of free publicity (such as talk show appearances) it is soley the job of the band’s manager to book engagements. The record company has nothing to do with it. The promoter of the concert and the band’s business manager will then promote the concert. The only resource record companies really provide is the studio and recording engineers - and they do so at an exhorbitant price (considering the tiny amount of money an artists gets paid by the company…you can rent enough studio time to make in album for less than $5000, or you can rent good equipment and do it yourself for much less).
A few quibbles. This is really a seperate debate, but I think that Sake is also being nieve When he says:
This is the classic individulistic American glorification of the creative process, and it has precious little to do with real life. While I am not defendeing the record company system as it stands today, I think that music artists need producers in the same way that writers must have editors. What is happening in the music industry with Napster happened years ago with literature. Text has always been freely transferable, and any number of writers have used the net to self publish. What they have published is almost universally horrible; in fact, the “internet poet” is fast becoming a running gag. People who create almost never have the ability to assess their own creations. All creative ventures require the presense of a third knowledgeable party to say “That’s a pile of shit. But there is a gem in the third paragraph that you ought to expand on–that could be a masterpiece.” Almost every famous author you can think of from the last 200 years had an extremely competent editor that he/she worked with throughout the years. The thing that worries me about Napster, morality aside, is that if the record companies were to disappear I do not know what would rise up to fill this position. In my experience, young musicians and writers both see outside critisim as unnecasary and, in fact, an imposition. I don’t see many of them volentraly hiring an indapendent producer and listening to their advise, and without that input and control I think the quality of music will suffer.
I also find this very disturbing:
I understand where you are comeing from here, but this attitude carries with it the implicit assumption that music is not as valuble as things that we are willing to pay for–garbage pick up, Oreos, underware. You may scoff at this, but remember that alot of people in the world do not consider the “arts” to be as valuble as “the real world”. Statements such as yours inadverdently reinforce that thinking.
Finally:
I don’t know much about Rand, but is their an irony here that I am unaware of? You do know, don’t you, that the Pope would never reach for the King James? Is their a purer version of objectivism that predates Rand?