PressPlay and MusicNet vs. Artists

gilroy writes: "According to a New York Times article (free registration, yadda yadda), despite taking the moral high ground (that they want to see artists compensated, as opposed to all those evil downloaders), the record companies have actually set up pay schedules so as to -- wait for it -- rip off the artists who record the music. Some figure they will earn less than $0.0023 per download -- yes, that's hundredths of a penny. Best quote from the article: 'For many acts, suddenly there appears to be little difference between the illicit file-sharing system and record-label services.' Good to see they're fighting for the artists, n'est-ce pas?"

Comments

This is actually good...

[Sixyphe]

The greedier the industry gets, the better it is for the artists and the public in general, simply because it will eventually reach the point where everybody (and, hopefully, Metallica too) will just want to bypass them. The nice thing is, we now have the means to do so. It's much easier to convince a judge that a publisher does not deserve protection if it's obviously ripping everybody off.

Re:This is actually good...

[Znork]

Guess who pays for it today? The artist.

The recording industry forwards an advance to the artist, which is then used for recording and marketing costs, and the artist gets to live on whatever is left (a helluva lot less than what you make on most computer industry jobs). This money is then recouped out of the artists share of the profits (the few cents they get from the record, or in this case out of the 0.00fraction cent they get per download). When an albums sells about half a million records, the artist will begin getting any money at all. Needless to say, artists getting paid doesnt happen very often.

End result for most artists: An interesting adventure in getting screwed that makes them less money than a job asking if people want fries with that.

With the costs for recording and marketing getting much lower with cheaper technology and the net, it's likely that the artists would make very much more money by going independent. You dont have to be independently wealthy anymore.

if you want to help the artist...

[night_flyer]

Purchase tickets for their concerts, they recieve very little in the way of compensation from CD/tape sales.

Someone has to

[SilentChris]

"Good to see they're fighting for the artists, n'est-ce pas?"

I'm glad someone is. Though I agree with the idea that record companies aren't the elite "doers of good" in the industry, the fact remains that many geeks (myself included) have basically been fucking over the artists by downloading free music. Admit it. The first time you saw someone download something from Napster/GNUtella/whatever, you had a pang in your gut that said "Isn't there something wrong with this?" It's called guilt.

There are hundreds of record labels that get screwed over by these practices - there are millions of artists who get the same. Unfortunately, without a massive revamping of the entire industry, you can't fuck one and not the other.

Re:Someone has to

[Jon Howard]

I disagree, but let me explain why:

I don't have a lot of money to spend on CDs, and even if I did, purchasing music which you haven't heard is a total shot in the dark. In the past, I would hear music my friends listened to and buy CDs from the artists I liked, if I had the money to do so. With the advent of the big P2P networks, I was able to check out a much wider variety of music, though I still only bought what I could afford. When I was exposed to so much music which I liked, I found myself making greater allowances in my budget for music - though you would be correct in the assertion that I downloaded much more than I paid for. I purchased what I found to be most interesting, rewarding the musicians which I felt deserved it most - many of whom I would never have heard if I had continued learning about new music through my peers. I now spend more money on music than I ever have in the past, though I listen to more music than I could afford to purchase - and at the same time, I have diversified my cultural input by stepping outside of the clicques my friend have ordered themselves into.

Who is this hurting? Musicians whose music I don't like who were relying on name recognition for shot-in-the-dark sales.

How is this good? It helps create a more evolving music market which can function via natural selection (ie, survival of the fittest) rather than survival of the best-funded (advertised).

I spend more money on music now than I did before, nobody is losing sales to me - I can't buy any more music than I do.

Re:Someone has to

[SilentChris]

I'd consider you more the minority than the majority. Most prior Napster users were teenagers who simply didn't want to shell out a few bucks to get the latest Britney album. Most aren't adults, and most certainly DO NOT share your view of expanding one's musical horizon.

It's almost answer a realistic problem with a philosophic argument. It looks nice on paper, but real life dictates otherwise.

Re:Someone has to

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

Most prior Napster users were teenagers who simply didn't want to shell out a few bucks to get the latest Britney album. Most aren't adults, and most certainly DO NOT share your view of expanding one's musical horizon.

There were upwards of 60 million Napster users when it got shut down. "Most" of them were not anything. ("Most" of them were certainly not teenagers; there are only ~12 million teenagers in the US total!) And, as there were something like 40 million unique mp3s floating around Napster, I guess "most" of them actually were listening to more than just the latest Britney album. (Otherwise that's a pretty long album...)

If you want a "most", here it is: most Americans with Internet access in early 2001 used Napster. The overwhelming majority of those who could feasibly use it (i.e. those with broadband connections) used Napster. And while I can't speak for all or even "most" of them, I know I have never, not once, felt guilty for downloading music from the Internet, nor has anyone I've spoken to about the subject.

And, like the original poster, I most certainly increased my CD buying as a direct result of Napster. I can't say whether such behavior reflected the majority or minority of Napster users, but considering the almost precise correspondence between growing (then suddenly falling in spring 2001) online music trading and growing (then suddenly falling in spring 2001) record sales, the statistics strongly support the former.

Laws are supposed to arise from the consent of the governed. When most of the governed are engaging in an activity with a clear conscience, it probably shouldn't be illegal, unless it carries some hidden negative consequences unseen by the uneducated majority. In the case of Napster, though, there were two hugely positive consequences: free access to the largest cultural repository the world had ever seen, and increasing CD sales to boot.

The argument that we should suddenly rewrite and reinterpret the past 200 years of copyright law (in which noncommercial infringement was generally held to be inactionable) just to kowtow to what the misguided oligopoly trying to retain their control over mass expression and culture mistakenly feels is their own self-interest is utterly absurd. The fact that you feel "guilty" about it (and project that guilt onto 60 million others) is just pathetic.

No Reg URL for NYT.

[thesolo]

Go here: http://archives.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http:// www.nytimes.com/2002/02/18/technology/18SONG.html to get around their registration process.

91% of the Revenues?

[TheMatt]

Holy Hannah, the labels and Pressplay get 91% of the revenues? I want in that racket. And think, after 1000 downloads, the artists will have a shiny 2 dollars 30 in their pocket...reasonable compensation.

Even better is this tidbit: Another irritant for the artists, several lawyers and managers say, is the distribution of the $170 million settlement from MP3.com, an Internet company that offered a music storage service in violation of copyright law.

The labels were to share that money with artists whose music was put online without authorization, but several artists' representatives said nothing had been distributed.

Raise your hands, who here didn't see that coming.

Re:It's a sad thing..

[night_flyer]

I do think that file sharing is a good thing, but it is also destructive to the current economic structure of the music industry.

It needs to be destroyed, with a LARGE number of people on the net, there is NO reason a new promotional system cant be set up. I hardly listen to the radio anymore, but I do check out new music on the net...

Royalties

[PowerTroll 5000]

As one rock manager computes it, if a consumer buys the standard Gold Plan on Pressplay, paying $19.95 for 75 songs downloaded to a hard drive and 750 streamed so that they can be heard only once, an artist, after these deductions, gets $.0023 per song downloaded. To earn a penny, more than four songs must be downloaded.

Aren't the artists getting shortchanged? According to copyright law, the current statutory rate for a U.S. copyright is 7.1 per song. (See, 37 C.F.R. 255.3(h)) This minimum rate is effective until January 1, 2000, after which it will go up every two years until 2006, at which time it will remain at 9.1 per song until changed.

There's a lot more to royalty calculations as well. More info on Freeadvice.com.

Oh yeah, I want to become a rock star

[donglekey]

Because when my one hit wonder song goes platinum and recieves 1,000,000 downloads, I will have made a wopping 2,300 dollars, almost enough to compensate the recording studio for greeting me. I think I will stick with the 'making money from my computer' SPAM I get from my joecool@aol.com email address. I'll bet Scientology wishes they thought of it first.

Where do I send my money?

[south]

Well now we know how much songs are worth, I figure my 11gigs of mp3s work out to around something in the range of $5.33. I can afford that, where do I send my money?

What do the artists have to complain about?

[Waffle Iron]

They just need to shed their glamorous images and spend more carefully. By my math, if they choose cost-effective food such as a McDonald's Value Meal for $2.79, it would only take 1213 dedicated fans downloading their song to pay for lunch.

Even better, the fans have to download broken formats that will be unplayable in a few years, so the artists can have another Big Mac later on, courtesy of the same 1213 fans!

DMCA raid?

[Animats]

Maybe the artists who want their music off can arrange a DMCA raid on Pressplay.

Submitted this yesterday

[Krelnik]

Yeah, I know, its pointless to post this, but I guess I like tilting at windmills.

I submitted this yesterday and it was rejected:
2002-02-18 15:32:33 Record Companies Facing Revolt of Artists (articles,music) (rejected)

I've read all the FAQ's on submitting (several times) and try as I might I cannot get a story accepted on this site. It makes one wonder what other stuff gets overlooked in the submission queue.

More to the point, it makes me wonder what issues are important to the editors of this site but which are not being clearly articulated in the FAQ's on submitting. I.e. I must be doing something wrong, but for the life of me I can't figure out what.

That's f**king INSANE

[Chris Johnson]

This is just crazy!

I've been using OMDs (internet Original Music Distributors) for some time now- was with mp3.com for a while until they got bought out by Vivendi and changed their contract in really negative ways, have stuff on BeSonic, and now I'm setting up shop on Ampcast.com.

I get FIVE CENTS per full download from Ampcast. (This is why they have you register- otherwise artists would cheat)

That is more than twenty times the royalty the RIAA is willing to pay...

Why, how? First, Ampcast really wants to be selling its CDs (a primary reason I like them so much is that they burn-to-order from genuine (rippable) Red Book CDs. The one I have for sale there is a Red Book, full 44.1/16 from high-resolution masters (done with my GPL mastering software Mastering Tools), I'm trying to negotiate a cooler tray-liner artwork but it's 'live' and buyable right now. If you buy one, I get a few bucks, and Ampcast gets a few bucks, and the RIAA gets absolutely fscking nada, zip, zilch, zero, thank you for playing. Secondly, Ampcast ain't a free OMD or trying to be one. It charges a fee like a hosting service, and that's where those five centses come from, plus from the CD sales. They're good that way- they have sense and have managed their budgeting intelligently so they have control of their business.

I'm still putting up other work and remastering my back catalog, but go check out 'Full Day', buy the CD (with a little bonus track not listed on the page) if you like it. And then ask yourself: is it fair that RIAA major label artists get a less than a twentieth of the download-royalty I'm getting from Ampcast? That _stinks_. The RIAA has _more_ money than Ampcast! They could well afford to do a HELL of a lot better than that. It's pathetic, outrageous, insulting. I'm not saying my music isn't as good- I put a lot of work into it- but TWENTY times as good? I think NOT... yet that's the discrepancy in pay.

By the way, if you don't like the idea of me getting paid off downloads, the streaming plays don't pay anything, you could check out those. Or, if there are people who've bought the CD, I write right on it "please copy this CD for your friends" and it's totally rippable, so you could look for the tracks on Gnutella or something- I hope people do share my music that way. If someone has a problem with dealing with Ampcast registration etc. and wouldn't buy my CD anyway, they should still be able to have mp3s of it... I don't need their nickel that badly that I should insist on putting them through a hassle...

Linkin Park

[cybercuzco]

I think the best example of what MP3's can do for the music industry id Linkin Park. Las year, guess who sold the most records and CD's? Britney? Outta synch? Backdoor boys?, nope it was Linkin Park, a band that formed ::Gasp:: on their own! But surely Linkin Park Must have been spotted by some smart record exec and signed immediately. Nope, in an intrerview in the jan 28 issue of time, the band says that WB turned them down the first time they tried to get a deal, so what they did was plaster their MP3's all over the internet. They would go into chat rooms and pretend to be random people, saying "hey, have you heard the great new band linkin park" or something to that effect. Eventually they built up a legion of loyal fans through mp3's and the net, and THEN they were signed by WB. Would they have been able to do this without MP3's? maybe, but they sure made it easier. And WB certainly wouldnt be sitting on the goldmine they are neow, afte rall they turned down the band the first time!