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Paul McCartney Goes After MP3.com
sarchasm writes, "Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney's publishing company MPL Communications is suing MP3.com. It's good to see that another poor starving artist is helping to fight the big bad MP3 movement. For more info, see the story on Yahoo.
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McCartney may or may not be taking an active role in this, but in effect he is hurting me, something I do not appreciate. I have not ever downloaded a _single_ thing off 'My Mp3.com' (their commercial-music mirroring service). I _upload_ to mp3.com (links siggified, knowing that slashdot gets royally sick of hearing the same plea 27 times in a row!) and get over 100 megs of web hosting for my music at no charge, in exchange for giving only _nonexclusive_ rights to 'em. McCartney is looking to take this away from me- though I doubt he's even thought it through.
Part of the reason I even picked mp3.com for this, knowing that they are the focal point for these attacks, is because I want to be in a position to take part in a sort of judo-like attack back at the RIAA and these other attackers. If they manage to harm the _original_ part of mp3.com significantly (I really don't care about My Mp3.com) then they are harming me and a _lot_ of other musician types, many of whom take the music mirroring concept a lot more seriously than I do. Can you say 'class action suit'? I knew you could... If these litigous idiots manage to hurt MY ACCESS to media as an independent artist (christ, I'm not even asking for equal time for promotion, or whatever- it's fine if I just sit there on mp3.com having to fend for myself to get publicity- I'm talking about losing access, about building a web presence that gets harmed through a lawsuit to a _separate_ part of the site!) then I will seriously want to be part of a retaliatory lawsuit.
Go ahead and get them to kill the commercial music mirroring, Paul- I can see the argument that this is important and the wave of the future, but it's clearly also a very daring attempt to redefine the law by acting on what it 'should' mean.
But all this defending of the faith is mostly the protecting of a music machine that built _you_, Paul- they have been selling _your_ music for 30 years and more, and have increasingly little interest in making any new 'product'. And maybe you, personally, have had ENOUGH from that work done 30 years ago. You're trying to still be paid to this day from work you did literally before I was born. Record some new songs if you want new money- I personally have no problem with your insisting that every note is commerce and must be bought and paid for- my problem is when your actions begin to step on my ability to have access to media (I'm thinking of the mp3 format in general here, and the mp3.com site in particular as a 'prime location' due to the domain name and size of it).
I hope this all ends up with My Mp3.com either dead or not- but the mp3.com _I_ use still alive. In some ways the mp3.com guy reminds me of Malcolm McLaren, though I know he's not really that clever. If your band can't get a gig- get them arrested. If the band isn't even popular enough to get arrested- get yourself, the manager, arrested! And so he is.
I just hope it stirs up curiosity about what mp3.com used to be- it's incredibly insulting if mp3.com, with tens of thousands of bands and songs of all different quality levels, is treated as just an illegal pirating website for _industry_ music. Putting that spin on it is _amazingly_ insulting.
You are assuming that popular artists make a lot of money, and less popular artists make a little money, and things like MP3 will take money out of all of their pockets proportionally.
That's wrong.
The reality is that a handful of superstars make a lot of money, and all other artists make exactly nothing.
Small artists stand to benefit from free internet distribution of their music because it will get their music heard, since now they can go around the profit-sucking middlemen in the record labels.
This is not about artists losing money, this is about lawyers losing money.
Paul McCartney is NOT suing MP3.com. Be careful; there's a very big difference between an artist and said artist's label.
You know what's interesting? Many record labels have taken up arms against MP3.com and the like. But I have yet to see a single actual artist take a stance against it. Every artist I've seen who's had anything to say about the matter has been in favor of the format.
Guess it goes to show you who really stands to lose here. The recording companies screwed up big time when it comes to digital music. If they'd gotten in on the ground floor, found real ways to market music online, they would have flown. But they didn't, and technology is simply passing them by as it evolves. I suppose it's kind of sad, to see companies fighting to stay alive, when the only people to blame for their problems are themselves.
The American revolution was nothing more then a bunch of freeloaders who didn't want to pay there taxies, after Britain spent hundreds of millions defending the country in the French and Indian war. Please, there was nothing 'movement like' about this revolt.
Ok, so people want free music without paying for it, and there doing it in mass. Is it right? Maybe, maybe not. It's illegal to pirate music, but then most revolutionary ideas are when they go against the fiber of the current entrenched power. Will ultimately harm the music industry? Probably. Will it harm the quality of music? Who knows? Even so, Marxism ended up being detrimental, but you could hardly not call that 'movement'.
In any event, the MP3 'situation' is definitely destabilizing the music industry right now, it is an agent of powerful change, and could have long lasting effects. Despite how you might feel about there motives and objectives, it is a movement.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
And, in turn he owns most of the company. I'm sure he knows whats going on here...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Give me a break. There's nothing "movement-like" about mp3s.
flame(on);
"You say you want a revolution, well, you know.."
Oh dear. Looks like Mr. McCartney is now staring his revolution in the face, and he doesn't like what he sees. Counter-culture hippy turned lawsuit-throwing mogul. Like he's one to talk about "musicians rights"..He doesn't even own his own work anymore! His entire body of work from 1960-1970 is owned by Michael Jackson! Sheesh!
Saying McCartney isn't going after MP3.com is like saying Bill Gates didn't try to undermine Netscape--he just happened to be the one who owned the company! Gimmie a break.
Welcome to the 00's, Mr. McCartney. The cat's already out of the bag, and a hundred lawsuits wont put the cat back in it.
flame(off);
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
...except in Paul's case, it's often not music that he's written. Paul Macartney and Michael Jackson are two of the largest owners of publishing. Paul doesn't even own the Beatles songs - Jackson does. So this is a lot more complex than a poor artist protesting about being ripped off, this is the owner of a business that his done it's fair share of artist-screwing, protesting to preserve the status quo.
The idea that music could be "owned" is a recent concept, probably no older than the Victorian era with sheet music sales. The idea didn't really take hold until the invention of the phonograph, when a few performers could become massively popular.
Two trends have been the result of recorded music:
At one point, every family had at least one musician. Most middle-class homes had a piano; virtually no home was so poor that it didn't have at least one instrument, and someone to play it. But the popularity of heavily promoted popular music has had a devestating effect on home-made music. Too many people see making music as a brass ring - that you make music in hope of making a huge pile of money. The vast majority will not, and forget the main reason to make music - pleasure.
All these carefully orchestrated pleas from carefully chosen artists ignore one fact: the same digital revolution that has made "piracy" possible has made it amazingly cheap to record music. "Project studios" are within the reach of most anyone, and the equipment, including professional quality microphones, has gotten cheaper and cheaper. Recording your own music can now be considered a "hobby".
Cream does rise. Talented artists produce followings, and the internet can enable you to become known outside of your city. But we have been programmed by the recording industry to believe that anyone who plays in only one area is a failure, that success only exists on the country-wide or global scale. But every dollar spent on the massive world-wide tour by the platinium-selling artist is one less that could be spent supporting locally generated music.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
The development of recorded music, which really became an important industry in the mid 40's (even though the first phonographic tubes were credited to Edison's lab in the 1880's, I think) changed the way we understand music in such a dramatic way, it's almost unimaginable to us now. Before that time, the popular music industry consisted of songwriters who would write and sell sheet music: musicians would buy the music and perform locally. Once a musician bought the sheet music, they would pay a royalty for public performance, but home performance was, of course, unlimiited. This practice goes back at least to the 19th century (as did the practice of paying off performers to promote songs.) Musical works in the US were protected by copyright from 1831, The music was preformed locally: that meant that one hit song could provide a modest but real living for a large number of local musicians (remember them?). Radio often consisted of live performances of music, and the same royalty practices would eventually apply to radio. The definition of the recording of a performance as being another performance, and thus something to which the artist had rights, grew out of a series of court cases involving radio and TV broadcast.
With the advent of recorded media - i.e., performances - available as saleable objects, the production of music completely changed. Rather than a large number of local performances and productions, it was much more profitable to resell the same performance over and over again. Thus was born the era of the "pop star;" a musician who would get much, much richer than the composers and songwriters on whom he relied, whose single 'performance' would be renumerated again with each purchase of the media, and again with each public playing of that media. Obviously, most of today's music stars are the beneficiaries of this system: local performance is just an adjunct to the business of creating and distributing media.
This has created a chiaroscuro of winners and losers: for one thing, mediated mass appeal became much more important than before; local musicians often struggled, as did those who relied on serious music audiences (classical and serious music was and is sustained by performance attendance, as well as by public and private grants and academia.) Paul McCartney, obviously, was a Big Winner, as was the whole industry involved in the production and distribution of little pieces of plastic. Some niche musicians were able to distribute their audience much farther than they would have been able to before the development of reel-to-reel, LP's, CD's, etc, so sub-genres of music (folk, punk, goth, trance, industrial, etc.) could thrive, as long as they could find a popular audience - and sometimes a symbiotic relationship with the manufacturers of youth cultures would develop.
The engine of technology is about to exhaust this model, however, and there is no going back. Music is again going to be a service, not a commodity. Some people will thrive in this environment: artists who manage to create live experiences which draw audiences, composers who get grants to create complex works and get them performed, or who have academic careers; musicians who are paid to produce music for games, film, and theatre, and amateur composers and musicians who are motivated by a passion for the music, who then might find themselves with an unexpected audience (ever hear of Daniel Johnston?) The people who will lose are largely those who were winning in the old system. It would be blithe to paint them as spoiled whiners who deserve to suffer now: many of them were talented, creative people whose output might suffer in a post-commodity musical millieu, and some types of music will frankly get less money than before. Also, there will probably be new opportunities for vultures and parasites, for agents and headhunters and plaigarisim lawsuits. But, thanks to the distributed and grassroots aspect of the new technologies, the cat is solidly out of the bag. It's just a matter of how long it will take before enough people are sharing music digitally, that the old industry infrastructure simply collapses.
This is reminiscient of something the RIAA tried to pull about 8 years ago. I used to work in an independent music store and suddenly we got the word from all the big music distributors (Sony, BMG, Uni, Polygram, etc) that they would be pulling ad support for stores that continued to sell used CD's. Their reasoning was bizarre to say the least, claiming that we couldn't resell a CD we bought from a customer because the artist wasn't receiving any royalties. They even lined up Garth Brooks as the industry mouthpiece to say he didn't like it that music stores were profiting from something he created, never mind that he'd already received royalties on that CD once.
Anyone who has ever worked at a music store knows that the profit margins are pretty slim. New product from a company like Sony cost about $9 per and to compete with places like Best Buy we had to resell it around $12. A used CD on the other hand we could buy for around $3.50 and sell for $8.50. Needless to say, we definitely emphasized the used CD part of our business. Eventually NARM (National Association of Music Retailers) got their collective sh*t together and protested and the RIAA eventually dropped it. And poor Garth continued to sell 5 million units every year.
This case will be a little different because NARM will believe they stand to lose as much as the RIAA if mp3's are still distributed. It just sounds like Paul is the designated industry voice in this case, most likely because it will appeal to the people in their 40's and 50's who have more control over what's going on, at least in the legal area.
The whole controversy over mp3's is a smokescreen anyway, just the RIAA wanting control over how music is distributed. The bulk of what you'll find on the Napster is top 40 radio crud that will still sell no matter what. Sure kids'll download a few Britney Spears singles but she isn't going to be missing any of the money. The bands who are really hurting for money, the ones that barely get by anyway, won't miss it either. Bands like that tour and sell T-Shirts. Plus, I've searched the Napster numerous times for bands like Fugazi and I might run across one or two tracks at the most despite the fact that they've sold tens of millions of CD's over the past 15 years. People who like the independent/local bands will continue to buy their product because they want to support them. When the used CD thing happened, I asked a member of a band that was on a major label what he thought and he said to go ahead and buy the used CD because he'll never see any of the money anyway.
Less popular bands are essentially indentured servants to whatever label they are on anyway. The record company might give you a million dollar contract (over 4 or 5 albums, no less) but then they'll want you to make a video and go on tour and guess what, they charge you for that and takeit out of your royalties. Then when it comes time to record your next album, they'll make you pay for the studio time out of your contract as well.
Face it, the RIAA doesn't give a crap about the artist unless the arist is a "radio-friendly unit-shifter" (thanks for the term, Nirvana). They just want to control how the music is distributed.