musicguy, what kind of percentage do you see each time a CD including one of your songs sells?
I wanted to take a moment and explore the idea of artists recording and marketing themselves without the assistance of a label.
Creating a product
As of recently, it is “possible” to record your own CD in your home studio. There are a few factors to consider though. In the first place, most musicians are not recording engineers with years of experience recording and mixing music. That experience is sorely lacking in most of the home-based recordings that I have heard. Sure the equipment is available much cheaper now than it ever was. But if you don’t really know how to use it, you are not going to be very pleased with the results. You also probably don’t have a big, ambient, acoustically pleasing room in which to record a drum track for example, or $10,000 worth of quality microphones to pick and choose from to get just the right sound. In short, recording studios still have a big advantage over home-based systems.
Next, are you going to bring in a producer who has an impartial opinion and the ability to see a coherant vision through the fog of 4 or 5 creative artists who all have opinions about the way it should sound. If you do, it is going to cost you to get someone with experience.
Now you have recorded your CD and mixed it. Are you going to master it? Because if you want it to have same quality as a store bought CD, it needs to be carefully mastered. This costs money. Are you going to do the artwork yourself on photoshop and print it on your $100 ink jet printer or are you going to have a graphic artist create it. Do you want the graphics to be in color and look like a typical CD booklet looks? Now you are having it professionally printed and 4 color printing is not very cheap. Are you going to hire a photographer or shoot on a disposable camera and take the film to Wal-mart. Wanna take a guess which looks better?
Are you going to burn all of these CD’s yourself or go to a duplication facility? Are they going to be shrink wrapped? Are you going to insert the liner notes into 5,000 CD’s or is someone going to do that for you?
All of these things cost money. The record company has a full staff of artists, engineers, producers, photographers, etc… You most likely do not.
Marketing the product
Ok, now you have your product in your hand. What now? You can put some of the files on the internet, put up a website, etc. But the internet is utterly saturated with up and coming artists trying to do the same thing. Finding your product is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack. Want to sell it at a major record store? Good luck, unless you are a distributer. And don’t expect to be on Jay Leno anytime soon. They get their acts from the labels. Likewise with radio airplay. Basically, how are people all over the country or world going to hear about you? Word of mouth? Sure you can gig your brains out and you will need to do this. But are you gigging locally, in which case your music is heard be a very small localized group of people. Or are you going to go nationwide? In that case, you are going to need a promoter with a track record good enough to get a club in Colorado to book you. And who is going to come to the gig? People that found your music, out of the millions of artists on the net? Good luck getting 5 people to your show. You paying for the bus? The gas? The accomidations?
I’m just trying to point out that there are a lot of factors involved here that your typical band may not be very capable of handling themselves. A record company is going to handle all of these things. They are also going to give you some money to live on while you are recording your project so that you aren’t working a full-time job and trying to fit everything else into your schedule. They are making quite an investment and they may never get it back. Yes, they will recoup all of these costs off the top if and when your CD starts selling and yes they will make a generous profit from your work. They will also make sure that people hear about your product, that it gets into record stores, and that you are able to promote it through tours, media appearances, and airplay.
Too many people think that all a band has to do is plug their instruments into their home computer, burn the result onto a 25 cent CD, put some music on the internet, and they are good to go. Not quite. Even if it were that simple, you would still be competing with a million other bands doing the same exact thing.
Nightime wrote
Looking back over the thread, I see this has consistantly been your stance, and in that case I withdraw my accusation that you personally are a thief and sincerely apologize.
As I’ve said, I believe there are plenty of viable business models that include free music or try-before-you-buy options. I don’t have a beef with people who propose such things. What I do have a beef with is people who just flat out take things and argue that money isn’t owed. Looking back, I see that isn’t your stance.
Wrong. Every MP3 does not represent lost income. This is one of the RIAA’s favorite logical fallacies. One cannot claim every pirate copy as a lost sale, because for many people, if they can’t get it free, they aren’t getting it at all, and a lot of people get both. How many people downloaded Eminem’s new CD before it even came out? A lot. How many people went to the record store and bought it when it came out for real? A lot.
ElwoodCuse wrote
And how many people didn’t buy it when it came out for real because they already had a stolen copy? A lot.
Nonsense. That album sold record numbers - it was flying off the store shelves. You’d say it sold well despite file sharing; I say it sold well because of file sharing. What makes you so sure you’re right?
What is your reasoning for calling it nonsense. Isn’t it possible that it sold record numbers AND a lot of people downloaded it and never bought it? I think that is entirely plausable. And, IMHO, the fact that people got it without paying has just as much impact on the artist, if not more, as the number that paid for it because they downloaded it.
And if the concept of letting your entire CD be downloaded is such a great marketing tool, then why is at that so many artists are against it? Not record companies, but artists?
Just to chime in: I fall in with the crowd of those who download and buy. I currently have 524 mp3’s on my computer, representing approximately 1.5 GB. Of those 524, I own on legitimate CD or LP approximately 400 of these songs.
Am I a thief for having the songs I didn’t buy on my computer? Yes.
Do I feel bad for it?
Not really.
Should I?
Probably.
As an avid music fan, I do feel a bit cheated by the industry for having paid more than I should have for a lot of the material I bought. But that could’ve been my fault for not being a savvy shopper or I could blame my lack of willpower. I could’ve just went without hearing the music.
What really chews my ass are these people who download an entire album, sequnce it and then burn the CD just like they could’ve bought it off the shelf (minus the art and case and all that jazz). If you like the music, buy the record. People claim that the record company steals most of the money from an album, and they do. The artists see very little. But they see a little bit. Your money might be sand in a huge hourglass, but the artist still gets the first 5 seconds of sand, which is more than they might make otherwise.
I’m proud as all hell of music sharing. Without it, I wouldn’t be a fan of half the bands I am. For instance, I had been hearing a lot about Rancid though wherever people hear about bands from. One night I logged onto the internet and downloaded three of their songs. Three days later I was buying an album of theirs. A year later I own 4 of their records and wear a Rancid t-shirt regularly. They are one of my favorite bands. Next time they come through my town, I plan on seeing them live and personally thanking them for the music if I can do so. So does Rancid harbor some ill-will toward me because I downloaded some of their music? Quite the contrary, I think they depend on fans like me to keep their fanbase expanding and dedicated.
This can’t be an isolated incident (I could name other bands right now that I have a similar listening history with). The music industry likes the fans like us. But are we criminals? Sure we are, we infringe on copyrights. But are we hurting their business? Hell no, we help it. ** Bill H. **, this is how downloading puts money in the pockets of the indsutry. The people who will buy records will buy records and the people who won’t, wouldn’t either way. I don’t have a cite for that; it’s my personal opinion.
Take umbrage with what I say, but keep in mind I don’t present any of it as fact.
By the way, for those of you who avidly don’t buy CD’s for whatever reason, let me tell you that there is absolutely no better feeling than walking up to a band after a show they played, picking up their CD and personally handing them $10 for it. Everybody wins.
Oh, it’s possible. But there’s no evidence for it - if a significant chunk of Eminem’s fans downloaded the album instead of buying it, you’d expect to see sales go down, not way up.
Bill didn’t just suggest that maybe, possibly, some people downloaded the album instead of buying it. He boldly asserted that “a lot” of people actually did just that. And his choice of words implies that the number of people who chose to download instead of buying is comparable to the total number of people who downloaded it, or the number of people who actually bought the album.
If people who never would have bought the album chose to download it instead of waiting for the songs to come on the radio, then pardon me if I don’t see a problem with that.
The artist sees that his album is available on Kazaa, then a few weeks later, sees it sell many more copies than all his previous albums. Why should he worry about people listening for free, when clearly they didn’t put a dent in his sales?
The same thing happens every day when someone plays a CD for his friends - they get to listen to the music without paying for it.
It also happens every day on the radio. AFAIK, the artist gets the same royalty when radio station KAEP plays his song, whether ten people or ten thousand people are actually listening to KAEP at that moment, since there’s no way to know just how many people are listening. If the station estimates that 10,000 people are listening at 5:00, and 15,000 people actually tune in at 5:00 and hear Without Me, then five thousand people just “stole” that song from Eminem.
The same reason the industry opposes it: they fear change and uncertainty. They fear that they’re one of the bands whose music gets deleted or forgotten after it’s downloaded, instead of one of the bands whose fans buy CDs after downloading the MP3s.
I’m sure you could have found artists who opposed the cassette tape and filmmakers who opposed the VCR as well, when those technologies were in the same situation that file sharing is today.
Mr2001 wrote
Excellent question. What does make you so sure you’re right? A cursory survey of kazaa users tells you that at least some of them (and I’m being very very generous with the word “some”) choose not to buy what they’ve downloaded.
Hmm…this gets complicated…
Taping, and digitally recording with something like Tivo is okay. And, except for a few TV industry folks, most people don’t seem to consider editing out commercials stealing.
Again, TV not stealing, presumably because the commercial spots are paid for up front.
However, radio spots are paid for up front to. So, if I were to record a radio broadcast and edit out the commercials, the station ID, the songs I didn’t want, etc, then I’m not stealing, right? Even if I do it digitally?
One point that should be realised by musicguy and crew is that “intellectual property” is not a concept that is 100% supported by the world population. You can talk all you want about how content creators have a right to compensation, but in Eastern Europe, Western Africa, and China, just to name a few places, people don’t believe that this right exists. Heck, even here in Madrid where I reside at the moment, the sidewalks are hard to walk on because of so many people selling copied CDs, and plenty of locals buying them. Before you talk about “rights”, you should realise that they are relative based on location. Not all of us are living in the ol’ US of A.
UnuMondo
In his work What Is Property? P.J. Proudhon introuduced the view that “Property is theft”. While many can agree with what he’s getting at, most people wbeould wary of instituing his philosophy because, in a world without property rights, there would be nothing preventing breakins and theft, in which physical harm - one thing universally feared by humanity - is possible.
But with “intellectual property”, there is no risk of physical harm, or active destruction of one’s home. Should one sympathise with Proudhon’s point but wish to protect themselves and their family from harm, maintaining physical property rights but abolishing intellectual property protection is a great compromise. After all, many people believe that intellectual property is theft; should any discovery or artistic achievment be made, it must belong to the human community as a whole.
UnuMondo
A problem here is that even though the law stipulates that only the radio must pay the artist (well, the label which gives but a pittance to the artist), music labels have been exerting pressure on governments to force payment for radio broadcasts at other points along the way. There was a story in the news (I’ll look up the cite if you’d like) about taxi drivers in Australia who play the radio while going about their business being forced to pay the music industry, even though the radio station had already paid.
UnuMondo
boggle
Okay, you just capped yourself. Lets recap, shall we? According to you, artists should view their chosen profession as a hobby. The “upper classes” (whoever they may be) should bestow what they perceive as fine art upon the masses because they, naturally, have better taste, and finally we should abolish intellectual property law because some arseholes with computers are stealing everything, and clearly the only sort of possible harm that matters is physical so we might as well let them.
Have I summed up your attitude correctly?
If I may channel Max the homicidal rabbit for one brief moment; that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! Your contention that street hawkers in Madrid are selling their illegal wares because of their deeply held convictions on intellectual property law is just … bizarre, but then rationalisation is a weird thing. Why don’t you just come out and say you’re too cheap to pay for music? Do you really believe that scientists, artists, authors, etc. etc. etc. should all be denied the right to a livelihood so you can download Eminem?
Well, most of these street vendors (don’t say “hawker”, they don’t really “hawk” as such) are from cultures where there is no concept of intellectual property rights.
You seem to have missed the many posts here in which people explain that they file-share to preview music, and are happy to purchase the album should they find it acceptable.
<Sigh> I’m sick of saying it (and other people here have said much the same thing): if they are really any good, they’ll make a livelihood from patronage regardless of sales of their intellectual property. If an artist can find no one to support him, one can conclude that he really must suck. This is the way it was done for millennia, and look at the artistic developments made under that system.
Scientists shouldn’t been trying to deny free access to their work anyway. Science is supposed to be about getting new knowledge and insight for the human race. Of course, some scientists can apply for a patent, but in that case the scientific discovery is still open to the public and can be passed on (and implemented in countries which do not respect US patents).
UnuMondo
Right you are. Such boring drivel as Mozart and Beethoven. Bought and paid for by patrons with more money than taste. How good can a piece of music be if it doesn’t even rate a title from the composer? “Concerto number 79 in B flat.” Than you very much. What in hell is it about? Playing more Muzak for the patron at his next drunken debouch and orgy, pardon me, party with his other high class friends.
Thank you. I’ll stick with the free market. The latest drek from the pop group of the week (which I wouldn’t listen to or purchase for any reason) is light years better than the “Classical” music people think so much of. The latest pop drek at least pretends to have something to say.
Oh, I’m sorry, did I use an incorrect term? Please read “pirates”, then. That ought to do. Gosh, it sounds so much better now. And frankly, given your somewhat weird assertions earlier, I’m not going to take your word for it about their motives. It seems to me that their are two possibilities here:
- They are oppressed Proudhonnians, working their fingers to the bone to “free” the material, or
- They can make a swift buck nicking someone else’s work.
Gee. Tough choice.
No, I have not, I’m just unwilling to extrapolate from this to the conclusion that all sharers are just “previewing”. Who the fuck “previews” hundreds of gigabytes of music? No-one, that’s who. They’ve stolen it, and are listening to it in lieu of buying the CD. Of course there are some people who download to preview, and I concur that this practice is considerably less reprehensible. In the absence of any data to the contrary, however, I’m not going to take the counter-intuitive view that these people are in the majority.
We’re sick of hearing it, too. If your utopian ideal is in fact true, I expect all these copyright thieves on Kazaa are right now busy posting cheques to the artists they’ve stolen work from. After all, they like them enough to download and listen to their work, right? Or by this argument do you simply mean you expect others to patronise good artists, allowing you to freeload?
Yeah, they should be working for free. Fuckers. Selfish gits the lot of them; why should they profit from their work, eh?
So, would you care to expand on how we encourage people to do scientific work when they are unable to make a living at it? Something tells me you’re going to suggest patronage, working for the betterment of the species, and other such very nice ideals. I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you, but it doesn’t work like that. While indeed there are some high-minded idealists prepared to work in poverty for a lifetime, they are sadly in a very small minority. Most people, for some odd reason, want to be able to do their work, make money from it, and go home at the end of the day to their home and family, and be able to pay for dinner. Declaring at a stroke that intellectual endeavour should not be profited from will instantly mean that one hell of a lot fewer people bother with it. So much for the good of the species.
Patents are issued for applications of technology. Basic research is another thing all together.
If I find that an electrical current flowing through a wire can cause the wire to get hot enough to glow, then that is research.
If I read that research, and envision a system (called electrical wiring) and equipment (called a light bulb) for lighting houses, then I have something that can be patented.
The information and the application are seperate things and shouldn’t be confused. One is science, one is applied technology.
A scientist should make the results of basic research publically available. On the other hand, he should be able to patent and profit from any processes and applications that occur to him as a result of his researches. And tough buggers if he misses an obvious application and someone else patents it.