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Prince Gets Wordy About Napster
pezpunk sent in a link to an ABC News story about Prince putting his two cents in about Napster. Prince has actually been on the cutting edge of distribution technology for years. Say what you want about his style, but Prince knows where it's at. He's been running his own label, Paisley Park, for a while, and he features artists like George Clinton.
Dr. Wiggy Wrote: /. readers spend their lives writing algorithms. They spend their time effectively regurgitating mathematics. They often get paid for it. Hang on, does that mean that we are all claiming that mathematical algos. are not free? That you have to pay us for them? Dispicable!
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In the same sense, the majority of
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Mathematical algorithms are (and should be) free. I don't pay anyone
for use of the metropolis algorithm nor SVD decomposition. If someone
wants me to be around to tell them what algorithm they should use and
how to best implement it for their purposes, they will have to pay me.
BUT they are not paying for the metropolis etc. algorithms. I don't
have to pay royalties to the inventors at Los Alamos anymore than I
have to pay royalties to Newton/Leibniz for calculus or Halbert White
for the latest fix for deviations from normality in data. You should
realize how much the work we do depends on the UNCOMPENSATED sweat
and tears of other talented people.
I'm getting really tired of reading posts by people who are silly and
arrogant enough to think that they actually marginally contribute a
lot and that all real work needs to be payed for. Hey dude, unlike
the creators of the Metropolis algorithm, if you died today, the world
of science/technology would progress in a fine manner. But most
merely competent techie people, if they so choose, can make much more
money than these great scientists/technologists.
...shouldn't that be:
The Application Formerly Known As Napster??
We are still accepting entries for the new unpronouncable symbol to describe The Application Formerly Known As Napster.
I rember when he ran afowl with his recording studio and had to give up his recording name for a while (a loophole in the contract.. they owned music recorded under than name if he recorded music under a diffrent name it was his).
// with a $2,000 sound card, and lots of really expensive ram and a really expensive 20 meg hard disk would be able to record music digitally and reproduce it at CD quality.
The problem was he's a prolific artist and wanted to release all his music. The recording studio didn't like that idea and would only release a fraction of his stuff.
I suspect the contract expired. We are talking the 1980s and it was probably a 5 year contract.
So getting away from all that and doing stuff under his own lable gives him a connection to the fans that he as an artist can be emethetic to.
Also his experence with a recording company controlling his music (in his case simply saying how much he can produce) gives him a heathly distast for the traditional recording companys.
In the mean time I'd like to add something.
Recording companys had plenty of warning as to what's to come in the 1980s.
An Apple
Also really expensive sound sample keyboards could record short samples.
Computers were imporving and it was purely a matter of time when that $2,000 sound card was $50 that 20 meg hd was in everybodys computer and the ram was cheap (however not expecting that everyone would need that much ram for the OS but every time there is more ram there are apps to use it).
Audio tape allready existed and was costing the music industry. But the losses were limited as anolog loses quality per copy.
They didn't look forward. They didn't see a threat comming at them at a snails pace.
Then digital audio tape. They paniced and got that banned. Ok now ferther warning of what was to come.
Did they think they could just get the sound cards banned?
Late 1980s the sound cards came down in price. 1990s they reached a point where every computer had a sound card and a CD rom drive that can rip music. Then the Internet.
Still not worryed.... MP3s.... panic again...
What is it with thies people? A little forsite they'd have from the early part of the 1980s to the late part of the 1990s to prepair for the eventual arival of MP3s. The unavoidable.
They had that long to create a busness plan that would handle this situation.
I'm not gona dream up a busness plan for them to folow in under 5 seconds someone could pick apart pritty easly.
The point is the music industry could have spent the time working with busness experts to devise a busness plan. Come on people you had 10 years you think your own busness managment experts couldn't come up with a few good ideas in that time?
They got one item banned. They think that is goning to happen forever? Just becouse it's inconvenent to them?
I wonder what they'd have done if the Dat was released in it's origial form with no anti-piracy technology? I wonder what would happen if the white house felt the industry needed to addapt to the new technology instead of passing laws restricting technology in the name of protecting industry.
I wonder what they'd do if that law was eliminated and DAT could be sold un-encombered.... Politics are fickle things people. It can happen. Elect a techno friendly presedent and maybe it will...
BTW.. dose anyone know of anyone with a tech clue running for the presedents office?
Gore.. no: Encryption
Bush.. no: he dosn't seem to have much of any clue (My personal bies)
I don't actually exist.
the original article as found at yahoo.... if you are interested.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
His other rants are available here.
Obviously a troll, but I'll bite.
First off, I'd like to ask just how much credibility does one have who writes "to" as "2" and "be" as "b".
I shouldn't even dignify this with a response. But I will: if you are willing to ignore the message because of the manner in which it is delivered, then the fault lies with you -- not the messenger.
Just look at what he did with his title, he became "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" just to show his disdain for the RIAA.
Ooh, he changed his name to exercise independence from an oppressive contract. Let's criticize him. (And never mind the fact that the RIAA isn't the entity in question; it's Time-Warner.)
Yet he fails to realize that without them, he would have no fame or fortune.
That might well be true. That's why he's trying to change the system so future artists don't have to enter indentured servitude to make their music available to a wide audience.
I think Prince know exactly how much the RIAA has done for him, and that's probably why he's pissed off at it.
(Disclaimer: I'm still hoping you were ironic, in which case, I just didn't get it.)
Yet he fails to realize that without them, he would have no fame or fortune
You come to the wrong conclusion from the right argument. What he points out is that the RIAA shouldn't be the one to decide which artists get the fame. Sure he benifited from that, but he realized that many didn't have that chance and that it shouldn't be that way.
What you say is the equivalent of saying that anybody who is rich shouldn't critisized the society that made him rich. Prince benefited from a corrupt system and realized that. Now he wants to push for a system that's more fair... just like you can participate in "anti-poverty" actions even if you are not poor.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
If that's the sort of thing you want to hear, the current system works.
12 million people bought Britney Spear's debut album. Music like that is what most people want. Are you going to tell 12 million teenage girls that from now on in order to find the best music they will have to wade through web sites of songs containg old men singing around the campfire in order to locate the music they like? They have more important things to worry about -- like algebra, boys, and passing the driving test, and want things as spoon-fed as possible. Like it or not, Britney Spears's fan's money (12,000,000 @ $15) counts a lot more than the money of people who listen to non-mainstream music, and artists such as her will lead the industry into whatever direction it will go in.
Now consider this. If you go over to MP3.com, you can listen to whatever songs are posted. These songs come from artists who are able to put together their music on their own, without a record company behind them, and obviously it didn't take them $500,000 to put it together.
Yes, and little of the music on MP3.com is good. And the little which is good was sponsored by record companies. All of the self-produced MP3.com artists which I have listened to sound like garbage (both artistically and production-wise). I have mostly downloaded their classical offerings, and they don't compare to the CD issues. They are done by amateurs, not world-class professionals.
If you think something is crap, you simply move on to another artist.
That's not practical. See, when a company puts out a CD, they risk two things. First, since production/distribution is so expensive, they can't afford to put out bad music which nobody will buy. Second, their reputation rests on the quality of the music. MP3.com will accept any artist, and has no "reputation". It costs nearly nothing to host music, so they will take anything. A reputable record label -- such as Rounder or Harmonia Mundi -- will not admit fluff to their labels, and the name alone guarantees that it will be quality. With self-produced music, anything will be admitted, the market will be saturated, and you will have to wade through hundreds of hours of Glenn Gould wannabee's in order to locate a decent performance of the Goldberg Variations. How is this supposed to be better?
How much was that again? You mean you can get an album for less than $10, and the artist gets more per CD than they would have from a record company?
Proof please? MP3.com lists the amount of money artists have earned and almost all of them are in the 2-3 digits. Please prove that they receive more money this way than with a record company.
And horror of horrors, there's noone preventing you from listening to the music, for free, as much as you like before the purchase?
You can preview music on web sites such as amazon.com, cdnow, and emusic for free. Furthermore you can listen to the CD in many stores. What's the problem?
Those quoted recording costs do not always have to be the case these days!
When I'm not busy spending time in front of a computer, I spend the rest of my time playing in bands and recording them. My setup is rather modest, but I've managed to put together some pretty good cd's for friends bands and for my own. No one I've recorded has spent over $2000 for the complete process of duplication plus recording. My band's last cd cost $700 in all (and you can add an extra $200 if I actually charged myself for recording) split 3 ways. Besides myself, there are plenty of other small to medium studios out there with significantly better equipment and results than I generate and still accessible rates ($30-$50 per hour).
Part of the reason for this is the large boom in the consumer recording industry market. Take a look in the music periodicals section of Borders or Barnes and Nobles and see how many magazines cater to the home recording industry. And even in Mix magazine, one of the major professional recording magazines, you'll find ads for equipment a reasonably well paid schlep can afford.
Now, the product coming out of a smaller studio is obviously not going to sound like it was recorded at Abbey Road, but for many people who just like to listen to good music, it's not going to make a big difference how expensive the production is. Often you'll find the most involved productions on the lowest quality music as an attempt to compensate -- polished turds. There exist many anecdotes about mainstream cd's put out with tracks taken from a 4-track rather than the same song recorded on expensive equipment because the "energy and feel" were significantly better than a studio take.
Another point of importance: when an artist or group is given a large sum of money to work on a recording for a label, sometimes the artists actually spend the time in the studio working on composing the music itself. In some situations that's a necessity, especially with electronica, etc. But why would a "Led Zeppelin" of today need to compose songs in studio? And that's not even considering the time and money spent on digital editing equipment so your pop diva can record 12 versions of the vocals for one song from which you can extract and combine your favorite lines to create the perfect single take (note: this is the norm, not the exception). Talk about sanitized! "Look kids! Thanks to effects that can correct your pitch and rhythm, you don't have to be a competent musician anymore!" Bear in mind, I'm not against digital equipment, but using it to take the place of talent and skill is pretty pathetic.
The indie music scene has thrived on lower fidelity recordings. And that's not to mention that the media format du jour is the Mp3. Personally, I hate the way they sound, but that's more because I spend my spare time trying to make the best recordings I can. Your average joe doesn't seem to mind, as evidenced by Napster's popularity.
I'd just like to emphasize that in many cases, the cost of recording is NOT an issue anymore, thanks to newer cheaper recording technology and the grand majority of the population's less-than-audiophile fidelity standards.
There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses.
No, it used to be "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince".
Now he's changed his name back, so I guess it's "Prince, Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known as Prince."
But I'll just call him Bob.
--
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
"The notion of copyright was not invented by artists to protect themselves from honest individuals sharing their enthusiasm about their work," he writes. "It was invented by artists to protect themselves from dishonest and hypocritical individuals and companies exploiting their work without their consent."
The notion of copyright was not invented by artists.
You can't handle the truth.
The hypocrisy of of Napster is one thing, but as for artists willingly signing their contracts, so did indentured servants. That doesn't change the fact that it's a horrible, corrupt system.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
One point that he touches on, which is not commonly expressed, is that motivation- love vs. consumption. If you put in some work (years of it) studying music, production, sound engineering, you gradually become more able to target the median of consumer desires, and you learn how to avoid including anything that would offend a consumer- and then you get to be mainstream, possibly a million seller, if you're properly hyped.
This is not art, but commerce.
Prince has in some ways used 'commercially popular' techniques (good production, intense vocals, high squealy notes and high squealy guitar solos etc etc etc) but he is also one of the few who's genuinely shown an experimental spirit- perhaps best illustrated by one of his monster hits, 'When Doves Cry'. The production of this remains unusual but at the time that it came out, was quite shocking- sparse, largely empty, producing more impact by virtue of the sheer bareness of the track. Prince was known to record many parts in the studio and then work by subtraction, taking out this and that track and seeing what combination of parts worked best- in "When Doves Cry" this subtractive technique was carried to an extreme. It breaks all the rules for 'popular' music production, and breaks them so well that it became a breakout monster hit.
The important thing to remember about art is that it is individual, and it's not possible to achieve artistic peaks and still avoid making enemies of your work. Love and hate are two sides of the same coin- the nearer you come to some person's love, the more another person will hate what you've done. A real artist (and I do consider Prince a real artist) will ignore this, accept the hate, refuse to water down their artistic vision.
Naturally I consider my music art ;) more significantly, _only_ since I started to accept it as art have I liked it worth a damn. I produced music for years, in an agony of trying to tailor it to what I thought people would like. (This is all pre-Internet and little remains of this stuff.) It was OK- never managed to get beyond my own idiosyncracies and never succeeded in making truly commercial music. Then I started again, and for particular reasons (access to mp3.com) I decided to do some music that was just what _I_ felt like doing- to do a lot of different music based only on what I felt like playing and composing and hearing.
Since then, it's been freaking awesome! :) I've talked with a lot of other musicians, made a lot of really rabid fans, a lot of really rabid enemies, and a kinda-lot of money (to me, a couple hundred bucks is a lot). I've seen people fixate on the strangest things and be delighted, and I've had people take GREAT PAINS to convince me and anyone else reading that I'm a complete loser who's not good enough to be commercial. And I love every bit of it. My artist side was long suppressed and restrained, but now when I see someone come off all negative and totally scorn my music, I'll laugh at them and tell them to listen to stuff like the 'Hard Vacuum' noise album, or 'Bone Dragon' or 'Water Dragon' from the Dragons album which are downright weird, or I'll just sneer back at them and go off and produce some more music that they'd hate even worse. Because I do what _I_ like- I do what I think is good, and I like a lot of truly peculiar music :)
I've tried to arrange my mp3.com page so that it explains to people a little better what they're getting into- but what I'm about is not being 'the Microsoft of music' or pinning down the widest possible range of consumers. What illustrates me best is the picture of me running a roaring shortwave radio through homebrewed multiband compression and screwing with the controls to produce a definitive Noise track (White Dwarf), something which most of the world might think is just crap! But there are Noise fans out there, protesting at the tendency for industrial techno to genre-trespass into Noise charts, people who understand _immediately_ just what's being attempted in 'White Dwarf' and instantly recognise it as canonical Noise, from a hitherto unheard source. Or the image might be the composing of 'Water Dragon', spending _days_ painstakingly filling in the froth of flickering piano notes around the spacey lead piano theme, and composing a drum part that is so relentlessly experimental that it seems to stretch and contract in a peculiar disjointed rhythm- which evokes the unforgiving wasteland of the sea. You can't dance to the sea. You could drown in it. You can't understand it. It's not necessarily pretty- but there's a validity to trying to express it in sound and music- and when Prince talks about people listening to music for love of it and teaching themselves to understand it, he's not talking about making more crappy manufactured hits, he's talking about the forces that eventually got me onto my own artistic path- of people exchanging and learning from stuff that's beyond what the major labels feed 'the consumer'.
How many of you have used Napster or something like it to try and find something really _obscure_ or weird or unpopular? Never mind if you found it- that'll come. Have you searched for something that Warner Bros. would not sell you, because there's 'no market' for it? This is what Prince is really talking about. This is the reason I've so often asked for my music to be openly traded on Napster This is the only way towards cultural education now that there's no market for culturally educating people in school...
I think the most important point he makes in this article is that Napster gives people a chance to develop taste individually; they can just get a bunch of things to try, and listen to music they actually like. There's not the advertising that gets done in the traditional channels telling people what they should like. In fact, there are parody songs and mixes which are actually reasonably well known (e.g., the Eminem+other stuff mixes) which probably haven't even got spare-time ads.
It's a very different world where people only have to invest the time of listening to try something new. There's much more pressure to have the music actually be good, because that's all the exposure it'll get; only word of mouth is a fast enough advertisement when you listen to whatever you happen to want to at the moment. Of course, there still needs to be an incentive for people to make their music do well, but that'll certainly come eventually-- whether tour sales, nicely packaged CDs, or direct fan support.
OK, firstly the infrastructure costs money. It's not free. You have to pay for it *somehow*.
The cost of the distribution infrastructure (read: internet) for digital art is already borne entirely by the end user, in the form of ISP fees and the local equipment to view, download, and store, and share such art. This is a non-issue which completely misses the point.
The cost of putting together an album is actually quite inexpensive, unless it is the recording companies (as opposed to individual bands) doing it, in which case the prices are artifically inflated by orders of magnitude. Why? Because this is a cost that is charged by the recording companies to the bands, thus, the higher the (artifically inflated) cost of recording, the more money goes into the pockets of the record company and is taken from the pockets of the artists. That is a very strong incentive for the recording companies to inflate their prices, and they do.
Even if we say that we can reduce all these costs by making all music purchasable on-line, somebody somewhere is going to have to pay for servers and bandwidth. A popular artist is going to use a lot of bandwidth. Especially if we're talking about 6Mb tracks.
Napster, GNUtella, and FreeNet have all already addressed (and solved) this issue. Bandwidth is paid by the end user (ISP fees). Servers and clients are peer to peer -- each user is paying for storage of the art, both for their personal use and for the use of others (as "servers") who wish to download said art from their local drives. Again, this is a non-issue. (I wonder, do you actually even understand the technology you are trying to critique?)
What I was trying to get across originally was that music will not, and will never, be free.
Music was free for most of the three million years of human existence. It is only within the last few hundred years, and primarilly within the last century, that it has become at first a luxery for the wealthy, and then a commodity for the masses (to be traded like so many pork bellies). This is not a "natural state" for music, it is an anomoly stemming from an imperfect interim technology and the distribution channels (and cartels) it engendered. Those times are now past.
Much music is and will be free. You do not pay for music you hear on the radio, do you? No. You pay for the radio itself, and that is the end of it. When I was growing up, that was my sole source of music. It did not cost me a penny, it was free.
What I did pay for were concert tickets, tee-shirts, and posters. Later, when I made money, I did get sucked into buying the records (and later CDs), a habit I have mostly broken thanks to my boycott of the RIAA.
It's called capitalism, it works, and it benefits those who contribute to "the system".
Capitalism works (with modifications such as anti-trust legislation) for systems in which there is natural scarcity. Physical products fall into the category.
However, there are other categories of products for which capitalism is at best dysfuncitonal, and at worst completely inappropriate. Areas requiring human compassion (care for the elderly, medical care) map very imperfectly to the capitalist model, with some very alarming deficiencies as a result.
With digital products, where there is no scarcity whatsoever (unless artifically applied through draconian legislation and the force of the gun), capitalism falls completely on its face. The Free Software/Open Source phenomenon vs. the ever less successful "closed source" approach is one example. Digitized music is another.
Now, the alternative is to maintain an incorrect paradigm (capitalism) against the real world reality (no scarcity, abundance for all), but in so doing you will need laws of such draconian strength and breadth as to make the communist regimes of Asia and Eastern Europe look like liberal democracies in comparison (these regimes were, ironically, a mirror example of applying an incorrect paradigm -- communism -- to the real world of physical scarcity). This is far too high a price to our society simply to maintain the profitability of an obsolete institution, or even to promote the much more noble cause of insuring the artists get compensation.
As others have pointed out, there are numerous alternatives for the artists to receive compensation, making the notion of a choice between "draconial legislation or starving artists" a false dichotomy of the highest order.
As to your last point, you are in no way qualified to determine who is and is not "deserving" of their music, much less to set an arbitary benchmark to define such.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
With apologies to Mark Knopfler ...
...
Look at them yo-yo's, that's the way you do it
You be an exec in the industry
That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
Money for nothing, and checks for free
That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
Let me tell you, them guys ain't dumb
Maybe get a band wrapped around your finger
Maybe get a band trapped under your thumb
We got to exploit popular artists
Keep the rights and delay the release
We got to sign more indentured servants
We got to lower their royalties
That little maggot with the lawyers and the contracts
Yeah buddy, his deals are fair
That little maggot's got his own jet airplane
That little maggot he's a billionaire
We got to exploit popular artists
Keep the rights and delay the release
We got to sign more indentured servants
We got to lower their royalties
No need to learn to play the guitar
No need to learn to play them drums
Let the bands do it, then we'll take all their money
Man, what could be more fun?
Look at that, what's that? MP3 downloads?
We'll sue 'em and we'll squawk like we're chimpanzees
That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
Money for nothing, and checks for free
We got to exploit popular artists
Keep the rights and delay the release
We got to sign more indentured servants
We got to lower their royalties
That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
You be an exec in the industry
That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
Money for nothing, and checks for free
I want my, I want my, I want my SUV
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
George Clinton released whole albums of remixes JUST TO allow rap artists to legally sample songs that were technically owned not by him but by the record companies. You couldn't necessarily legally sample "Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication" (G. Clinton, B. Collins, B. Worrell, G. Shider)- but George Clinton would do a remix of it so that you could sample the backing tracks! He literally remixed loads of songs explicitly to get around that record company-imposed limitation, and allow people to sample his tracks.
George Clinton deserves _much_ respect for the actions he's taken to back up his beliefs.
"First off, I'd like to ask just how much credibility does one have who writes "to" as "2" and "be" as "b"."
About as much credibility as Salvador Dali, a man who never painted a scene *I* recognized...
"Obviously, this is just another disgruntled musician denouncing the very agency which protects him. Just look at what he did with his title, he became "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" just to show his disdain for the RIAA. Yet he fails to realize that without them, he would have no fame or fortune."
Heh. With friends like these, who needs enemies? Have you even read Courtney Love's breakdown of the numbers? I think he shows a lot of courage by speaking up. Normally it's the people that know what side their bread is buttered on that keep their traps shut. Do you think three kids in a VW that call themselves the Turnipheads are going to get this coverage?
"Instead of speaking out against the RIAA, he needs to grow up and realize just how much they've done for him."
I think that maturity is taking in life experiences and acting on them with integrity. What do you think?
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Okay I'm replying to an obvious troll, but he makes a great overlooked point. The only people, currently, who can afford to pull off non-traditional economic models are those who have benefited most from the old one. Prince and Stephen King are as big as you can get, they could literally get away with any wacky pay-me-if-you-like model off their celebrity alone.
These two have recieved more than their fair share of marketing and promotion from the companies their complaining about. I don't see them as hypocrites, but as exceptions. What we don't need is advice from famous rock-stars and pop-authors, but a real distribution system that works to not only deliver content, but promote talented nobodies without turning them into media stars. Just think of all the wasted time you spent on the last crappy King novel when you could be reading something great from a nobody you currently have no access hearing about.
Napster isn't just the latest crap on the radio.
Yes it is.
Lately people have been putting up some rather obscure stuff. I downloaded some tracks by a band called Camel (Heard of 'em?, didn't think so...), and while listening, I heard some faint noise in the background. Vinyl scratches!
People think Camel is obscure now? Wow. They are definitely one of the most popular 10 or 15 British progressive bands of the 1970's, and aren't anything even remotely close to obscure. I find it extremely odd that you would consider Camel obscure. I own almost every Camel album on the original vinyl, and a couple on CD, both of which are readily available in any independent store in the US. Some of their music is OK, but nothing to fight over. Some of my favorite progressive bands are ones like Echolyn, Anglagard, Anekdoten, Museo Rosenbach, PFM, and a bunch of others. I wouldn't consider any of those obscure, but only a couple have any presence at all on Napster!
Every serious music lover I have ever met loathes the selection of music on Napster, because it is just teeny bop top 40 type music. Try to find classical (the main embarrasment of Napster!), folk (no selection except a couple of tracks for the most mainstream artists), African pop (no tracks whatsoever), or jazz (OK selection for the biggest old names, but poor for newer and more obscure artists).
I think the problem is that people who are relatively new to music find somebody who isn't played on the biggest top 40 stations, and finds it on Napster, then declares that Napster has obscure music. When you try anything remotely obscure, something that doesn't have a huge following amoung junior high school students, you get no hits at all.
No, copyright in the written word was invented by publishers - it was felt that writers would create regardless, but publishers needed an incentive. However, copyright in music is a much more recent developement, and I believe artists (or more specifically composers and songwriters) were very active in first applying copyright to sheet music, and then to public performances. Not sure where copyright on recordings first appeared, but presumably its derivative of the idea that a license is necessary in order to perform.
For a long time I thought Prince was a joke, patricularly that business where he changed his name. Some time ago, I found out why he'd done it: the contract he had signed gave his masters the rights to the name 'Prince' and any name he later changed to, even if he left the label. Bound by this provision, and wanting to depart, he changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. I presume that, since he's gotten his name back, there must have been some time limit in the contract. No one I've ever spoken to about him has been aware of this story, attributing his name change to some sort of flighty 'artiste' whim. I still don't like his music, but the guy's not stupid. His opinions on Napster are therefore of interest.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Might this further illustrate just how much the record companies control what music people get to hear?
It isn't about the "internet" adopting a stance on copyright. It's about the artists. With the internet, artists will soon see that they have more control of their art and their labour. I agree that this "bribe for free stuff" idea is one of the many more intelligent methods to disseminate one's product, but there are many more. However, it should be entirely up to the artist to set the terms of their labour, not some pimple-faced kid who happens to think that said artists product must be free, or an orginized profiteer selling stolen art.
Let the artists decide which method they wish to get their work out into the hands of consumers, not some amorphous, undefinable entity like "the internet".
Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the ruler formerly known as prince of this world will be driven out.
Ignorence is blis.
Prince and Stephen King are as big as you can get, they could literally get away with any wacky pay-me-if-you-like model off their celebrity alone.
Quite true. We have yet to even see the means for a new artist to break through to the public via Internet marketing alone. What you seem to be missing here though is that where Prince most likely holds zero rights to his earlier work, Stephen King still own all the rights to his work. King can utilize whatever means of marketing he wishes, where as Prince had to wait out his contract with Time-Warner before he could even use his original stage name.
The RIAA owns all the keys to all the gates. They've been very effective at slamming to death any new gates being constructed, such as DAT. I'm not 100% comfortable with the notion of Napster being the primary means of distribution, but I am very sure that something needs to take the keys away from those bastards that have had a 100% lock on the flow of music for better than 5 decades now. It may be that we need to tear down the whole fence and start over.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
"Bootleg recordings are of course quite different from ripped CDs, but the issues are still quite similar. At the time of this earlier discussion (when I remember it, anyway,) there were mostly tapes and some CDs being distributed in pretty small quantities."
Just about all bootleg stuff is made in small batches. Only the real hardcore fans tend to buy the stuff, and the fly-by-night producers who make the bootlegs can't waste money pressing too many. These CDs are also quite expensive ($25 at least). Most of the bootleg stuff floating around on Napster were ripped from (or CDRs of) these rare, expensive CDs. And that is my main use of Napster, to get these hard-to-get (and some cases out of print) bootlegs. The bands on these haven't seen a dime when they were released, and ripping/uploading them won't make any difference. The people who made the CDs have stopped. Try finding a copy of a bootleg Pink Floyd show from the Swinging Pig label. If you can, you'll be paying an arm and a leg. The only people who profit from these rarites are sellers (who tend to be rather on the con-artist side) who drive the price way up, EVEN FOR CDRs OF THESE CDS!!!
Now by using Napster, I can hear all of these for nothing. The bands lose nothing (unless they release the material, which rarely happens) because they never got a dime from the release in the first place. And it is possible for artists to make money from bootleg CDs. A while back (when he was still alive), Frank Zappa put out a collection of shows that were being bootleged, and made his CDs cost less than half of the bootleg version. He "beat the boots".
An artist publishes his work on the internet. for free. no charge. this way he builds a reputation. Once his/her reputation is sufficient, he may then look for ways to get paid. Suppose, for example,I write a book, and I am well known as a writer. I set up a system where my book is held by a trustee, who is collecting fees in an account for me. (This person/business does not have to be anyone terribly special, a nominal lawyer fee at most.) When the account reaches a predetermined $ amount, the book is released to the internet, I still hold the copyrights, but allow non-commercial use. The bank account is released to me, and I have been paid for my work. No middlemen, other than the accountant(or lawyer). This benefits everyone. If publishing company X wants to print it, I have more leverage, because its proven to be a success already. I win again. How is it that artists are still not getting paid for thier work? As long as it is quality, there should be no problem. The road is more difficult to get published via the traditional channels, IMHO. It is not the companies who need to be converted to making money on the web. It is the artists who need to learn how to promote themselves, and stand on thier own two feet. I love books, and I love music. I have written both. I would rather publish it the way I want it published than let others manhandle my work, if I wished to have my work published.
But again, don't worry about getting the companies onboard. The paradigm has already changed. Let the artists know what to do. Everything else will follow.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
The page has this lovely gem up at the top:
if (top.location == self.location) {
top.location = "../../freedomnews.html"
}
I can't wait til somebody hacks mozilla to add useful buttons to the toolbar. Like an enable, disable javascript button instead of the useless home and search buttons in netscape. It wolud help a lot with abusive javascript like this.
Well, this really isn't technology related, but I find it kinda telling... You see, while the major labels can definately be said to have ignored the entire MP3 debate until it has become bigger than even they can control, this isn't the first time they've ignored and then tried to squash something when they realized they had no control.
Back in the 50's, you know back around the time of Johnny B. Goode, Rocket 88 (hope that ones right) and the early Elvis recordings, when rock n' roll was new and cutting edge, the major labels had no part of it, all this was released on independent labels (Sun, Chess, etc) in fact the recording industry/major labels tried to introduce various fads to stop the spread of rock (I'm afraid I fail to remember exactly what they were) and when that didn't work tried to subvert it by having squeaky clean manufactured groups (the Crew Cuts) remake the songs into a more 'commercial' (acceptable by industry standards) format (anyone see a corelation between this bit and the SDMI?)
Finally, when they realized they couldn't stop it, they bought it out, that IMHO is what we are going to be seeing next in the RIAA vs. MP3 cases, the labels are going to buy the means of distributing the MP3's so they have full control.
(Off-topic maybe, but I still think its interesting)
-GreenHell
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
"The man is the king of interplanetary funk."
-Moles(PCU)
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
That doesn't make it any less silly. I just wanted to make a clarification.
Oh. and if you're old enough to remember his first album... fascinating.
Why was this moderated down?
Napster isn't just the latest crap on the radio. Lately people have been putting up some rather obscure stuff. I downloaded some tracks by a band called Camel (Heard of 'em?, didn't think so...), and while listening, I heard some faint noise in the background. Vinyl scratches! This was copied from a out-of-print album! This shows quite a bit of dedication on someone's part, that he/she liked this music so much, they took the time to copy it and share it. Why? They must have known it was rather rare. So it's a numbers game. If enough people use Napster, there is a better chance someone will have something you like, even if it's rare.
If Napster was just a bunch of greedy bastards, you couldn't download anything because nobody whould be SHARING anything. Some people have to look at their music collection, figure that someone may like this stuff, and serve it up.
Trciky one this. The exec hasn't made himself clear. The media, distribution of media, etc. is all non-free. The people who sell you the music in the store want to make money, the artist who recorded it wants to make money, the execs who look after the logistics (and they do matter - do you think that your favourite artists really could organise world tours, album launches, etc. on their own) all require a salary.
/. readers spend their lives writing algorithms. They spend their time effectively regurgitating mathematics. They often get paid for it. Hang on, does that mean that we are all claiming that mathematical algos. are not free? That you have to pay us for them? Dispicable! Well, in that case, I'd best ask my boss not to pay me anymore because all this stuff should be free.
To argue that all music should be free is a romantic notion, but one that is actually pretty hypocritical when you think about it. I like to drink lots of water, and water is free, and if anybody tried arguing against that I'd get really upset. I'm still prepared to pay for a bottle of Perrier though. In the same sense, the majority of
It is very easy for Prince to argue that the music industry is all messed up and that Napster is fantastic. It's easy because he's so damned rich that he doesn't need any more money. How did he get this money? By any chance would it be because of those execs down at the record company pushing his music? So, after he's made all this money (note: he didn't complain at the time, did he?) he now makes a sweep at the record company. He score a few popularity points, gets his name in the media, and everybody thinks he's great. Does he give his money back to the fans? Ummmm...
Ultimately, the fact music is not, and never will be, free is not due to a limitation of technology. It's because the people who make music have to eat. I know there have been some rumours going around that Michael Jackson is actually run from mains electricity, but it's not true. He eats and craps on the toilet and pays taxes and has friends and family just like the rest of us. Get used to the fact that you have no right to listen to his or any other artists performances, in exactly the same way my boss does not have the right to expect me to write code whenever he wants free of charge.
I hate this argument already. It's so clear to me now that those who insist that music should be free just haven't thought about what the consequences of that.
"The notion of copyright was not invented by artists to protect themselves from honest individuals sharing their enthusiasm about their work," he writes. "It was invented by artists to protect themselves from dishonest and hypocritical individuals and companies exploiting their work without their consent."
I couldn't put it better. It isn't the technology of Napster that is feared, it's the distribution channel.
...but doesn't it look a lot like Prince is doing 2 things 1) Getting back back at the BIG BAD company. 2) Getting free publicity.
Sorry, No sig!
George Clinton was the lead member of the funk band Parliament, he has created some of the best funk on this planet. I'd reccomend the "Tear The Roof Off: 1974-1980" 2 cd set if you can find it. Good stuff, many of today's rap artists sample clinton's funk of 25 years ago.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Nope..... as of 2000 he changed his name back to Prince...
no symbol no more.....
You've got a company exec who says, "An increasing number of young people don't buy albums, so we are not only losing that immediate revenue. They are growing up with a notion that music is free and ought to be free." Who says that it shouldn't be free? Who appointed this exec God? Or, who appointed "tradition" as fact? The idea that sound is a commodity is a rather strange development that arose due to the limitations of technology and some clever businessmen.
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automatictaxistopelectriccigarettelovebaby
I was going to write a big speech decrying what you have said, but I'll keep it short, and a bit offtopic.
Libraries.
Do you hate those things? They dictate terms as to the distrubution of media that the artist cannot control. They allow people to enjoy media for NO immediate cost. And any costs for the media become so watered down that the author likely only makes $0.01 per "impression" for their work. The worst part about libraries must be that they often require (and almost dictate to you, the seller) certain terms for works if they are to buy them. And, another thing libraries often do is have much more selection than your local bookstore and record stores combined!
Infact, I wonder if you have a burning hated for the library of congress? I beleive (but may be wrong) that, without question, all copyrighted American works MUST have at least one copy in the library of congress. I may be wrong, but that doesn't sound like you have any choice in the matter.
I think I'll make a trip to my local library and enjoy a CD for free. Maybe it will be yours.
So, tell me, do you hate libraries?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
First off, Napster users aren't claiming they have "the right to take whatever they want" in general, only that music should be freely shared over the Internet. It's an important point to make, because your first sentence is dishonest in portraying napster users as current or would be felons.
In addition, I think the notion of intellectual property, particulary for music is ridiculous. "Their music"?! Claiming ownership (through licensing agreements, contracts, etc...) is simply a useful tool for extracting profit. Particulary when as you pointed out, most artist actually don't own their music, the major labels do.
For most of recorded history, the notion of music as intellectual property didn't exist. The idea that profit could be garnered and control extended even after the initial sale is essentially new to the post-scarcity world of information production. So no I don't think the music is "theirs" after it is sold, and I don't think money should be made from artists after the work of creation is done. Revenue can still be generated through concerts and performances (like it was before the invention of tapes and records) and artists can go back to being self employed labourers instead of aspiring capitalists or record industry slaves.
Perhaps if you disagree with all of this, you can start by paying the inventor of the mp3 format money for their intellectual property (which I presume you use). Then again, the inventor was probably a high tech wage slave and is receiving nothing but salary for the invention. So please tell me why the intellectual work of musicans should be privledged over others?
Prince's passion has always been dance clubs. It's really what he lives for. His music. Not so much the money, And it's nice to be able to not have to make the money elsewhere, but through all of the years, It really seems he's in it to make his music. Some of his latest albums (Emancipation, Crystal ball) Were 3 and 4 cd's respectively. And released right after eachother.
And although his biggest issue DOES seem to be his annoyance with record companies, I've always enjoyed his music and always will..
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
In the case of digitizable art, such as digital music, the infrastructure already exists to deliver it to many people at very low costs. If I listen to a song, I am not depriving anyone else of the song. It is not a depletable resource. It is bits which can be duplicated over and over and over with trivial cost. The best outcome for the consumer is a maximal amount of art that they enjoy at the lowest possible price.
OK, firstly the infrastructure costs money. It's not free. You have to pay for it *somehow*. At the moment the primary form of music distribution in most countries is still through the "hump boxes onto a truck, drive them out to store, unpack and sell CDs in store" which costs money. The music itself also costs money to produce professionally, studio time, promotion (no good in making music if nobody knows it's out there, right?), and the artist might want to do some live stuff that needs to be managed. All in all it's pretty expensive.
Even if we say that we can reduce all these costs by making all music purchasable on-line, somebody somewhere is going to have to pay for servers and bandwidth. A popular artist is going to use a lot of bandwidth. Especially if we're talking about 6Mb tracks.
Your last point about maximal amount of art at the lowest possible price is fair. What I was trying to get across originally was that music will not, and will never, be free. It will always cost money, even if it's a small amount and there are reasons for that. Even if we started seeing an uprise in GPL'ed music (for want of a better description), just like GPL software, somebody, somewhere pays for it. It might be the author who puts in the money he has earned in his real job, or it may require the intervention of a company to assist that project. Either way there is always some commercial element to it. It's called capitalism, it works, and it benefits those who contribute to "the system".
All I'm saying, is if you want good music, don't winge when it costs you less than 0.5% of your monthly salary. If you do, you don't deserve it.
I've perused these Napster discussions and have not noticed any mention of how the "jambands" are doing things. For those not familiar with this method, here is the 2 sentence version. The bands tour as much as humanly possible. Fans tape the shows and trade them for free amongst themselves. It's not much more complicated than that. Most of these bands have some sort of Grateful Dead influence because they were the ones who started this whole thing back in the sixties. In truth, they got the idea of allowing bootleggers from the bluegrass festivals that Jerry Garcia would go to in the fifties.
The point is this. Their fans, for the most part, are music lovers. The issue of copyrights only comes up when some jerk tries to sell the bootlegs, but this is so heavily frowned upon that it is really not that big of an issue. The bands are compensated for performing their music and hocking their wares at the shows or off their website. Sounds good in theory, but does it work? Well if you look at Phish, the most popular of the bunch, only 10% of their gross revenues come from album sales. The other 90% comes from concerts and paraphernalia. As a side note, jambands are just the most commonly acknowledged group that does this. DJs, for example, have relatively few album sales and make most of their money by performing music.
"It's like polishing a turd." -FZ
I'm from Minneapolis, and we hear about Prince a lot because he's local.
Personally I think that Prince is talented and I liked a lot of his work.
But after his split from the recording industry he went downhill. I think part of the problem was that he wasn't allowed to play his older stuff. But he also unfortunately didn't come out with any newer stuff that was near the quality of his earlier stuff.
Now it's possible he did have some good stuff, but that wasn't what I was hearing. He'd occasionally get played on local radio or TV and I didn't like it such that I'd buy the CD.
Anyway, as a result, his sales plummeted. As a result of that his income plummeted. There was a huge amount of speculation that Paisley Park was going to go bankrupt. I know he had trouble keeping his house in repair, etc.
Last year in honor of "1999" he came to some deal with the record company that let him use his old songs and his old name. Which was cool. He came out to the local music festival and wowed the crowd again, and of course this was all followed up with the Party of 1999 on Pay Per View for $75 or something like that.
He appears to be back in the black again, making some money... that's cool and I wish him luck.
But before going around touting him as the savior of Napster and the only one who just really gets it.... Prince isn't a very smart musician. While I certainly can agree with him that the recording industry was ripping him off, he missed a point that there is a symbiotic relationship there. That being, he never would have had any popularity if it had not been for the recording industries publicity machine.
Think about it. I'm waiting for the really really popular grassroots artists who has "made it" as a result of mp3.com, Napster and other alternatives who will tell the people "You don't want the Recording Industry"
Hasn't happened yet. Instead we have some washed up older artists whose popularity is waning... Hmm.
I just finished looking over many of the details of how Prince disseminates his music now. Its very similar to what Stephen King is doing with his new e-Book. The basic idea is, 'If you all want my book to freely use and trade etc, at least X amount of you have to buy it'. Or, to subsidize it, for it to be free to everyone else. I think this is Exactly the model the Internet should adopt to compensate artists. Its very elegant.
http://www.npgonlineltd.com/freedomnew s.html
/. post is "Prince gets wordy about Napster", but reading his article was shear hell....
The site will not let you link to the article directly, so its the first one listed...
Also the name of this
If Prince wants people to really take him seriously..
2 = to
4 = for
4m = form
u = you
Plus lots more... its worse then trying to read that 31337 crap...
I remember trading mp3s several years ago. Almost everyone you chatted with (people would sometimes do that back then) had taste in music. I wouldn't say everyone had good taste, but they knew what they liked and they cared enough to try to figure out what else they would like.
Napster and similar services may make life easier for someone trying to find the latest Christina Agulargagainabottle to sonicly beat off to but it doesn't do much good if you love music and are looking for like minded people to trade tips with.
I'm sure there's still a few dark corners of the internet where people who love music still gather, far from the bright lights of commerical pop, but for know I think I'll just go back to hanging out at the record store every now and then and shoot the shit with people who care.
EOF
Add Prince (Artist Formerly Known as?) to the list of artists who support the new music technologies such as Napster. It's nice to see respected artists come forward against the record labels and their quick to sue attitudes.
Prince's Statements (4 the love of music) are smart and straight-forward. He points out hypocrisy among the record labels own statements about this whole issue. He sets forth a good distinction between music "lovers" and music "consumers." I don't care for the way he chooses to write, reading his article with all those strange contractions and abbreviations gets kind of annoying, but it is well written and intelligent.
If only more artists saw the issues at hand the way Prince does. Thank You Prince.
"The notion of copyright was not invented by artists to protect themselves from honest individuals sharing their enthusiasm about their work," he writes. "It was invented by artists to protect themselves from dishonest and hypocritical individuals and companies exploiting their work without their consent."
Many people see napster as falling into that second group who is exploiting the work. True or not--- that is the image. And, when you have kids all over the place saing things like "dude, i downloaded Artist XYZ's entire album last night, so now I dont have to buy it...."
well, its tough to argue.
Prince cites Napster as an illustration of "the growing frustration over how much the record companies control what music people get to hear."
If thats true, then why is napster over run by mainstream songs. Do a search on any top forty hit song and you get 100+ hits back on THAT SONG. And yet, there are well known artist out there and you can't get 100 hits on ALL their songs together.
I guess what I'm saying here is --- it cuts both ways.
"I mean, All you can definately say about a fellow who thinks he's a poached egg, is; He's in the minority." James Burke
--
If by 'making mixtapes for friends' you mean 'letting everybody who asks take unlimited copies of your music'.
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/me attemps to trade JennaJamesonmovie.asf.vbs and hopes that nobody notices