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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
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?
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 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.
I know all their tracks are 128 kbps. This doesn't tell me a whole lot. A good codec at 128 sounds great, Xing on fast mode at 128 sounds terrible.
I had a 30-day trial subscription to Emusic this past summer (didn't continue it because their selection wasn't as broad as I would have liked). If they haven't changed codecs since then, then according to EncSpot, they are indeed using Xing.
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of the Corporate States of America...