Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Music Conference
wiredog writes: "The Washington Post reports on the Future of Music conference. A gathering of musicians,labels, music publishers, unions, lawyers and others. There's also an overview of the pay sites, none of which seem worth the effort of looking at." A good recap on the conference that we mentioned earlier.
Most people out there wouldn't mind paying for quality music. But when you combine the watered down crap put out by the majors with the clearly adversarial attitude of the RIAA towards us music buying folks I can't help but think that they are getting what they deserve.
Long live the free market. The genie is clearly out of the bottle.
-- Remember Johnny,
That's right! Technology will end the recording industry and destory music! I read this article about some new gadget that lets people record and copy music! They can buy music from a store and make an exact copy for someone else. With this existing, those struggling musicians have no hope left.
It was called the "tape recorder."
Plus, used in conjunction with a pirate stream of music, called a "radio," you can record even more.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
...They didn't explicitely mention Free Music mouvements, such as GNUArt.
Doing it for the pleasure instead of doing it for a living doesn't mean it's bad.
BTW, we have professional who gave us some of their songs (not all) which helped their fame propagate.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
There's alot disheartening about the current music world, from a musical point of view, if you observe the bikini clad n'sync britney fest that our musical culture has become, but in the end, history has been written, and will forget all of those people except for in novelty clubs of the distant future. Alot of really excellent things have come about in the music world, only in the last few years. this is only going to be more radical when virtual presence is a reality through higher bandwidth internet connections and lower cost audio/video equipment. Location will cease to be a barrier to musical collaboration.
First off, the level of international collaboration between quality musical acts has been astounding. Anybody who's heard the chieftains, the gypsy kings, strunz & farah, or any of the "underground" world music that is in virtually every upscale boutique here in downtown riverside these days, can attest to a new pallette of global styles to work for that is now available to composers across the globe. The legitimizing of ethnic folk musics as a respected art form, elevated to almost classical stature, will hugely broaden the music that will be popular once the anti mtv-marketing backlash begins with generation y. Alot of it is starting now, as 16 year olds look back and are embarrassed as ex-clown posse/limp bizkit fans. These kids are getting into euro-trance, local punk, and a whole range of other more interesting and less polished venues. as they hit college and begin maturing as people and music connesieurs, the music industry will be picking up smaller artists and expecting less mega stars, and the diversity will expand and begin to become polished as well. I think this is phenomenal.
Secondly, the post napster world means that people won't buy albums anymore, and will eliminate the pressure for artists to put out albums full of worthless studio time and one or two hits. every song will be given the quality time it needs, and maybe even "albums" will begin to disappear as artists release singles and then eventually collections, giving every song it's fair shake.
Also exciting is the recording technology available today. small time artists are able to record stuff at a quality that was never able to exist outside of million dollar studios before. this new robin hood style music industry is going to mean alot of bands will make it on merit, at least the merit of popularity, and not investment hype. mp3.com is littered with well recorded/poorly funded material that has a very high fidelity.
And then the obvious revolution, free music on the web. this is not going away. the implications are huge, predictions about how this will effect future generations of musicians and listeners alike will all be off as the landscape radically transforms in it's wake.
Those of you who like to download mp3s (that means every single
The funny thing to me is that the RIAA even bothers trying out watermarking and cd mod copyright schemes. They are playing music for a party that nobody wants to be caught dead at.
RhY
http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/194/communizt_v
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
labels still fret that consumers will pirate great gobs of downloadable music and put them out of business.
In that case I'm going to purposely pirate Backstreet Boys to make them go bankrupt.
Kind of seems arogant to call it "The future of Music Conference". Music will always have a bright futur regardless of the *Music Industry's" futur. It's like saying that if it's not published by the music cartel, it's not music.
But, then again, maybe not.
Any field which has a future dictated by lawyers, other than the legal field itself (and, maybe, politics), is in trouble. If the industry was interested in giving artists a fair shake, they'd leave their sharks and sheisters at home and deal with the artists as creative partners, not product to be bought, sold, manipulated, robbed, pruned, and dismissed. And that's such a fantasy I can scarcely believe I thought of it.
The artists can't budge (what are they going to give up? They don't have rights to their music, their name, sometimes not even their own style of music. Most of them don't get paid. Many don't get much despite their success) and the studios beat strawmen to death (like Tower-fucking-Records is somehow to blame), never address serious issues, and have their cadre of bloodsuckers sitting at the table the whole time, just to say, "The future of music is the present of music." Nothing's going to change. I'd say it was a game of control, but, well, games have some competition, some odds for the other guys to win out. That's a fat chance, here.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
The analogy with the music "industry" is clear. The rich musical heritage of humynity is a common good, like education, public health, or the environment. In this "cyber" age, music is controlled more than ever by corporations seeking to hold this public good in thrall for private gain. A point illustrated by this statement from the article: (n)ow everyone is paralyzed, horrified by the idea that this online world will rearrange the portions and leave some people with less than they had before. Weapons are drawn. Lawyers have been retained. Nobody is budging.
A conference about the future of music,music --everything from the simple act of whistling a happy tune, singing "Happy Birthday", teaching the ABC's song to a child, or contemplating the sublime accomplishments of Ockgehem or Poulenc-- is today nothing more than a massive multi-party lawsuit waiting to happen.
The representatives of the recording and radio industries stand like villagers ready to bust each others' heads open to give their sheep the best oppportunity to graze the commons to the dirt. They care only about profits, and are willing to ever more intrusive, cumbersome, and expensive technologies to protect their precious bottom line. Compared with these soulless greed merchants, those strong, free souls who use peer-to-peer software to share .ogg and .mp3 files can be seen as latter-day Robin Hoods, living by their wits, using their tech savy to ensure that the public good of music is not depleted by the wealthy few.
Probably OT- I really believe that music swapping increases CD sales (at least until Philips is done with 'em). Ancedotal- myself and several others just don't buy music anymore (could it be because current music sucks?!), unless we sample a few songs first. So we are now at the point were you download a few songs and (generally) buy the CD/DVD, or you just say fuck it.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
We've gone through this whole mess before folks. This is round 2 and with the Internet added, I don't think the record companies want to lose this fight, even if they have to completely screw up computers and the Internet in the process.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
We all remember the "Tragedy of the Commons" lesson back in basic economics class: the commons is an open green field (common property, hence the name) where all the residents of a village are allowed to graze their sheep free of charge, with no limitations. The tragedy of the title comes about when all the villagers, beholden to no one as to the use of the commons, blithely allow their sheep to overgraze the precious grass. Soon there is no grass for anyone, because everyone got too greedy.
The analogy with the music "industry" is clear.
Excellent point, but there's something that should be made clearer. The reason that the limited land that was the "commons" was overgrazed was because the nobles had already taken most of the land from the people. Now make the analogy and it becomes even better. Corporations (nobles) have taken culture and turned it into a commodity, thus cheapening and plasticizing (overgrazing) it. They keep wanting more and more that once belonged to the commons; a few of the artists gather fortune and fame, while others are ignored and work at other jobs. Before all this happened, artists worked on a small scale for a small audience, and yes, they probably did something else for a living, but they were respected members of the community. Now they are either ciphers or hyped up false gods in the eyes of mass media.
Mark my words, the real terrifying part of what the music industry fears is not song trading - it's artists connecting to the community without middlemen, without "the star-making machinery behind the popular song" (J. Mitchell). It's people deciding that what they download from Joe Blow's web site is as entertaining as what they could buy at Tower Records on an RIAA label. The industry is trying the same kind of freeze-out and trash talking tactics with today's real music and the way it's distributed that they tried in the 50's and 60's with that awful rock and roll and those uppity independent labels that were releasing a lot of it. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. Probably in the '10s they'll learn how to deal with the new world of music, but by that time, much of what they're used to will be irrelevant. I have news for the execs. The reason they can't make money on an artist before they sell 500,000 units is they spend too much money recording and promoting them, too much effort sterilizing and marketing them so they might, might be a big, big hit and make them zillions. Meanwhile, artists who record themselves and throw out their goods to whoever will listen to them often break even after a few thousand sales. They'll never be big, but they don't care.
Gosh, if they have digital rights management on every digital device in existence, I sure hope that doesn't prevent people like me from recording our own music and distributing it for nothing, if we want to. Wanna bet they'll try stopping us?
Yes, the thought that music should be free for the listener scares them. The thought that it should be free for the artist scares them even more.
Has anyone investigated the release of music under the GPL? I mean, a copyright should still be on the music so people can't rerelease stuff you've made and take credit for it. But could the GPL be used in any way to do this?
We've hosted Roger McGuinn's Folk Den project for about 5 years. Now Roger has made a CD, Treasures from the Folk Den, which has just been nominated for a Grammy! Not bad for a rock star who told the labels to go jump in his Senate testimony.
We also host collections of tape traders, jamz and tunetree, of bands that want their fans to hear their music (and pay to come to their shows).
Eben Moglen is right (see NYTimes article on FoM); it's about love.
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
This slip of the tongue came from Miles Copeland of Ark 21 records
"It's not just music. If we don't have strong Intelectual Property Laws, nobody will invent new diseases so they can sell cures for them"
(sorry, no link. this comes from memory.)
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Is that pronounced like "humidity"?
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
The only ones I know that don't are relentless self-promoters... they generally run their own small labels, often supporting other, similar musicians. Music isn't something you generally make money at. Granted, most small businessmen would tell you that business isn't something you make massive amounts of money at either...
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
As an attendee of the conference I have to say that it was an educational and eye opening experience. While there were some tense moments on a couple of panels, (Major Labels Panel and the Copyright Panel) The New Models panel was excellent, Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls and Daemon Records, David Fagen of th Rosenergs, And Ian MacKaye explained their business model, and how well it works for them and their artists. Partnership, no copyrights, and a lot of hard work.
Artists and Musicians left with the feeling that "We can do this" and that sure the major label model may be fine for some, but most don't need it. A musician or band doesn't need to sell millions of records to make a decent living.
One of my favorite moments came when Mark Cuban (yes that Mark Cuban) gave Cary Sherman a lecture on embracing file-sharing as a way to make money rather than suing them into oblivian.