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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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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?
"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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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
/me attemps to trade JennaJamesonmovie.asf.vbs and hopes that nobody notices