Janis Ian on the Internet Debacle

Datasage writes "Janis Ian, famous songwriter and artist, writes about her views of free music downloads, the music industry and the evils of the RIAA in this article." Yet another artist with substantial first-person experience speaking out, reminiscent of Courtney Love's speech.

Comments

Junis?

[wheany]

Does this have something to do with Junis from Afghanistan?

famous?

[Anonymous Coward]

Janis Ian, famous songwriter and artist

how famous can she be if I've never heard of her?

sounds more like another wacko who just couldn't cut it the old fashioned way.

Re:famous?

[SirSlud]

oh, the sweet sweet irony of hearing an AC call somebody, more or less, an anonymous wacko.

*fffsszzzt* hello, kettle, come in, come in, this is the pot *fffsszzzt*

Re:Famous?

[TMB]

Admittedly, she was best known back in the 70s (At Seventeen is probably her best known song), but she's certainly not unknown...

[TMB]

Re:Famous?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever since Andy Warhol, fame only lasts for 15 minutes. Her 15 minutes was around 1967.

-steve
springfield fragfest

Re:Famous?

[bytor4232]

She was pretty famous for a few songs back in the 60's and 70's. She is quite a talented singer-songwriter, a musicians-musician if your into that genre.

Re:Famous?

[HiThere]

Famous: someone who's written songs that have been remembered for decades. I.e., someone who has written several famous songs. (This ignores her reported continued fame within a subculture that doesn't "benefit" from widespread media coverage.)

Certainly this isn't the only meaning. Famous is frequently used as a synonym for nortorious, though most consider that to be an incorrect usage. It is also sometimes used to mean someone who is widely known at some particular instant in time. This brief and (hopefully) episodic meaning for famous is a correct usage, though many consider it to be less valid than the more enduring meanings. Thus Rodin is still a famous sculptor, though he has been dead for quite awhile.

Re:Famous?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry to be the one who has to tell you this, TMB, but fame now means people that yatest5 has heard of. I realize it does make for a small, grubby little world, but it keeps yatest5 from having to learn anything - and that's what's really important, isn't it?

Re:famous?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dead Fart Warrior

Damn if I had thought of a name that good I wouldn't be an AC. I mean that, no irony or sarcasm involved.

Not the same AC you were replying to either, just I usually read and don't do much replying so I haven't bothered with a name. But dude, "Dead Fart Warrior" is some funny shit. I was reading the comments and started reading yours and looked up at the by line and then it was Diet Coke out the nose laughter.

No way in hell I can't steal that to use somewhere else.

Made my friggin day man.

Though seriously, some of us AC's just don't need another login name and password. Doesn't mean we are working the fries, just not as involved as you are.

Re:Famous?

[sql*kitten]

This must be a new meaning of famous I've never come across before. Come on /., sort it out.

She says she normally gets 75,000 hits on her website a year. I think /. is making her more famous than her ISP would like ;-)

Re:famous?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are just too young and don't know anything about the 70's.. Poor thing. But, I guess you know "The American Pie" and things copied from the 70's, right? So, be curious and do some research!

Re:Famous?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, she is very well know for the songs she wrote in the 60's and 70's and at the very begining of the 80's.. not only in the US.. many countries, like Japan, Australia, UK, Holland, Israel, Chile, etc... Or,, you are just too young and immature...? A chick?

Re:Famous?

[K8Fan]

Yes, famous.

Her column on the "Monumental Mistakes" she has made in her career is amazing. She talks about taking drugs with Jimi Hendrix, turning down the opportunity to play Woodstock, was offered Rhea Perlman's part on "Cheers"...

Is she curently famous? Nope. But she was very famous at several different points in her career and will make one hell of a "Behind The Music".

By the way, read her article about her stolen guitar for a deeply moving story that will reassure you that there are decent humans on the planet.

Re:Famous?

[yakfacts]

Really great story, in particular the way the
way they both wanted each other to feel okay about it.

Re:Famous?

[SilentOne]

Thanks for the links mate. :)

Re:famous?

[CuppaJoe]

1) Your ignorance is not the standard against which fame is measured. There are millions of people around the world that have never even heard of the Beatles. Perhaps you're one?

2) It's one thing to be ignorant, it's quite another to advertise it proudly to the whole internet. But then that's probably why you posted anonymously.

3) It's even worse to be so arrogant as to assume that you're the epitomy of knowlege and that your experience defines the entirety of human inerests.

Janis Ian "another wacko who couldn't cut it the old fashioned way". Now I've heard everything!

Re:famous?

[Anonymous Coward]

I too am too young to know this person, and to hear her tell it, beside her own file sharing presence, the recording industry keeps it that way.

more artists against RIAA

[Jucius Maximus]

"Yet another artist with substantial first-person experience speaking out, reminiscent of Courtney Love's speech. "

I don't remember it appearing on /. but recently Michael Jackson had some really scathing marks regarding the recording industry and how it rips off artists.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[JimPooley]

Oh yes. Jacko was complaining that the recording industry was racist (And we all know how proud he is of his black heritage, don't we.) and not trying to bolster his faded career at all...

Re:more artists against RIAA

[prisoner]

Be careful about this. I remember seeing something on the news about it. My recollection is that MJ's point of view is the "white recording industry" is ripping off black artists. He singled out Tommy Matola (SP?) for particular criticism. I have 2 problems with this:

1. The music industry seem to me to be fully integrated: they rip off everybody, black, white and other.

2. It's hard to take anything that that child-molesting freak says seriously.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[Lord_Slepnir]

And we all know how proud he is of his black heritage, don't we

What? He's black?

Re:more artists against RIAA

[JimPooley]

I remember when he was. That was a long time ago, mind.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[will_die]

michael jackson problem is with sony and is all financial. Back when he was actually making money and performing he would ask sony to loan him huge amounts of money, which they gladly did. Well thoses loans are due, the interest is high, and he is not making any money. So now he is complaining that they are racist, and basiclly anything so he does not have to pay back his loans and fulfill some other contract obligations.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[igottheloot]

what's really great is jackoff's last record cost something like 30 million to make. (!!!) what the fucking hell? ok, it's probably inflated and wrong, but anywhere even close to that range is just an insult to any musician on the planet.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[morgajel]

his career isn't the only thing that's been fading.... :)

Re:more artists against RIAA

[FreeUser]

Oh yes. Jacko was complaining that the recording industry was racist (And we all know how proud he is of his black heritage, don't we.)

You ignornant fuck.

Michael Jackson suffers from a rare skin disorder that results in very pale splotches (like reverse birthmarks, big, ugly, and prominent) all over one's body and face. He had the rest of his skin lightened to hide the blotches, not because he had some desire to "be white." To insinuate such is bigotry at its most despicable.

Having said all this, I don't particularly care for Michael Jackson's music and his personal habits are, to put it mildly, questionable. I have no idea if the pedophile accusations had any merit or not, but the skin whitening accusations are totally bogus and profoundly racist.

He is very misguided IMHO to be solely emphesizing the racism of the music industry (though I'm sure it exists, it is clear that you can find labels that actively promote such black music as Hip Hop, Rap, Gangsta Rap, Blues, Jazz, etc. so where it does exist, it can be worked around). The "oppression" he is feeling is likely the oppression virtually every artist, black, white, green, or purple, who has dealt with the recording industry has felt: the cold certaintly that you have been forced into a form of indentured servitude and are being taken, firmly, to the cleaners. This form of artist misuse and abuse is so profound, so widespread, and so dramatic, that one wonders if any racial components aren't dwarfed in comparison.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[Anonymous Coward]

What? He's black?

Isn't America great? Some poor black kid can
grow up to be a rich white woman.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[Anonymous Coward]

so these inverted birthmarks, appeared when he was > 13? hm.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[Anonymous Coward]

And we all know how proud he is of his black heritage, don't we.

Yes MJ obviously has plenty of self-hatred. I'm sure growing up in the spotlight he encountered plenty of racism. I'm also sure that there is more than a correlation between the two.

I can hear it now: "Boo hoo, poor rich boy!" right? I feel less sorry for him than for us, the society that created him. If you ask me he is a terrific personification of just a few of the features and issues surrounding black heritage in the US.

It's not the poor rich boy I think of when I think of MJ: It's the poor US.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[FreeUser]

so these inverted birthmarks, appeared when he was > 13? hm.

Yes. That is what happens when you contract a disease at > 13. The symptoms (skin blotching in this case) set in at > 13.

Batting about 60 on the IQ test, aren't you.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[Bonker]

What? He's black?

Throught he wonders of plastic surgery, computer animation, and modern robotics, Michael Jackson has transformed himself from a 40-year old black man into a 12 year old Japanese girl. Keep an eye out for the accompanying sailor costume and magic wand in his next video.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[EllisDees]

Yeah, and I bet his nose was accidentally burned off by a jar of acid.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[KnightNavro]

What? He's black?

You're obviously old enough to know how old Janice Ian is.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[archmedes5]

Vitaligo is not "Contracted", it's inherited, and many who have it aren't born with the white splotches. Since it's an autoimmune disease, It can be set off by another infection or by getting immunity shots (rabies shot in my case), both of which trigger an immune response.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[Pig Hogger]

Yeah, and I bet his nose was accidentally burned off by a jar of acid.

Actually, he had his nose caught in a vinyl pressing machine.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[FreeUser]

Vitaligo is not "Contracted", it's inherited, and many who have it aren't born with the white splotches. Since it's an autoimmune disease, It can be set off by another infection or by getting immunity shots (rabies shot in my case), both of which trigger an immune response.

OK, if we're going to be pedantic you are correct. I should have said "set in" or "became active" at > 13 rather than "contracted." The point remains that the disease didn't become noticable, and the symptoms didn't become apparent, until Michael Jackson was a young adult, and the racist series of posts insinuating that he somehow "wanted to become white" to which I responded remain just as asinine, and profoundly idiotic, as before.

Re:more artists against RIAA

[desideria]

I read his comments as well, they can be found here .

Reminiscent.

[saintlupus]

reminiscent of Courtney Love's speech.

Why? Did someone else write this one too?

--saint

I want an apology

[SirSlud]

.. from all the 40 year old morons who keep reiterating that 'artists have to be compensated for their work, so filesharing is inherently as bad as stealing' and then, to add insult to injury, accuse me (a musician) of cheating musicians.

I said it before, I'll say it again - absolutely nobody is listening to the musicians. For all the lawyer bashing that goes on here, you'd think some of those 'filesharing is the devils work' posters would clue in that the parties with the megaphones in this debate arnt even remotely interested in the welfare of artists - only the lucrativeness of the music industry.

What a great article. It should be required reading if you want to be a music consumer.

Re:I want an apology

[sandman935]

This 40 year old "moron" uses P2P frequently and I always sample before I buy.

Re:I want an apology

[SirSlud]

Well you're not a 40 yr old moron then. :)

Sorry for the agism, but so far my collective opinion gathering points to most of the 'there is no room for a grey market' posters come from a more bricks and mortar time.

It wasn't my intent to diss 40 yr olds .. only the ones who insist that filesharing is tantamount to stealing, straight up - was actually kind trolling to see what kind of ages have what opinions.

> I always sample before I buy.

Yeah, thats what most people do! There's a reason nobody buys cheap shoes and has somebody paint on the swoosh - people want the official gear, as Janis pointed out.

Re:I want an apology

[onion2k]

Yes Napster et al make great sampling points. Try before you buy blah blah blah.

However, if you happen to be a formulaic nobody churns out the same old dirges album after album (mentioning no names Lars.. oops), then people are going to be sick of paying 15quid (I'm English, dollars to you I guess) for an album with perhaps 2 or 3 reasonable tracks. And what do they do? They download/copy/rip the stuff they like, and don't pay for the filler. And as far as record companies are concerned, filler pays.

You see, people who download aren't really hurting the artists who have been around for a while, and have a hefty back catalogue that will actually be aided by new listeners. No. The people that are 'harmed' are the so-called 'musicians' who are happy to stamp out track after track, album after album of the usual cookie-cutter chart crap. These are the tunes that appeal most to the very people who can't afford to buy a 15quid/dollar CD, Children. They're the very same people who haven't the intellectual ability to crack some encryption or whatever. So whats left? Downloading.

Sure, Janis Ian is right. People downloading a 27 year old hit isn't going to hurt sales of an ancient Ian album. But thats not the same as saying its not going to hurt anyone.

I'm as bad for this as the next pirate. I would never have gone out and paid for the latest Puddle Of Mudd album, theres only 1 good song on it, but I have it. I've not bought the Blade 2 OST, but I'm listening to it. Just a couple of examples as to where the recording industry has been hurt.

If artists want me to pay my hard earned cash for their music, then they ought to make albums I'd be happy to pay for.

Re:I want an apology

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a reason nobody buys cheap shoes and has somebody paint on the swoosh

Yes, there is - Trading Standards come and arrest them if they do, just like they should arrest music pirates.

Re:I want an apology

[sandman935]

No worries. Just had to chime in and let you know that not all of us 40 year olds have grown old enough to become our parents. :)

Re:I want an apology

[blane.bramble]

There's a reason nobody buys cheap shoes and has somebody paint on the swoosh

Except Nike themselves of course

Re:I want an apology

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you assume that the anti-filesharers are 40? Us old farts have been trading tapes long before you punk kids and your J-Lo and M&Ms came along and ruined music.

It was my impression that the anti file sharers were clueless twentysomethings that parrot what they hear the record industry tripes without any thought whatever.

You don't see many middle aged people sheeping along like that, they've been screwed over too many times to not question and question hard. Did you hear any forty year olds say thet "the internet changes everything and you don't need revinue to succeed?" Nope, that was the clueless tewntysomethings.

In case you haven't noticed, the author, Janice Ian, is around 60.

You can learn from your elders, as long as you don't assume they're all morons, son.

-steve
Springfield Fragfest

Re:I want an apology

[SirSlud]

No, Nike buys cheap slavery and has them pain on swooshes. ;)

Re:I want an apology

[dinotrac]

Why? Artists should be compensated for their work --- if it creates sufficient value that you wish to exploit (hang a copy in your living room, listen to it in your home, etc) it.

This is different from saying that the recording industry shouldn't be piled high on a bonfire and doused with lighter fluid.

The problem is that you 20-to whatever morons want to exploit the artists even more than the recording industry. You don't want to pay them anything!

If you were to seriously campaign for artists' rights and to propose somethng that would help artists at least as much as your personal music collection, it might be easier to take you seriously.

Re:I want an apology

[SirSlud]

I dropped the age in there precisely to get replies where people who put forth their stance and age.

I dont really believe age has much to do with it (but I believe "clueless twentysomethings that parrot what they hear" is quite possibly right on the money) ... I admit, it was an ontopic functional troll designed to get people to discuss their age.

Re:I want an apology

[dbc001]

How can people continue to miss this each & every time the discussion comes up? You wouldnt buy the Puddle of Mudd album because its crap! You said it yourself. Would you buy an album with one good song for $5? I can think of 20 albums that I would buy for $5 that I won't buy now because they're too expensive.

New artists arent hurt by p2p either, because even though a new fan may not buy the album, it will increase attendance at their shows, and as Ms. Ian explained in her article, that's where the money is made.

-dbc

Re:I want an apology

[SirSlud]

> You don't want to pay them anything!

Dont you ever tell me what I want. I know what I want, and I want to pay artists.

Re:I want an apology

[Anonymous Coward]

.. from all the 40 year old morons who keep reiterating that 'artists have to be compensated for their work

! ! ! !

Golly! What do you have to say to all the niggers and waps?

Re:I want an apology

[Anonymous Coward]

My daughter wanted a pair of Nike trainers. I said "You're eleven, make some."

Re:I want an apology

[ScumBiker]

My CD collection vastly outweighs my mp3 collection. I mostly download mp3's to fill obscure bands like "Captain Beyond" discographies. I do sample *every* band before I buy their CD though, unless they're a local, then I "sample" them live. What the hell is the difference?

Congratulations to Janis Ian for the excellent article she wrote. As a musician myself, I completely empathize. I've said this before, I'm planning on starting an Internet on label. I could use some help. Drop a comment in my journal if you are interested in getting involved.

Sandman, that really strikes home. My other half and I frequently ask each other if our parents are coming home soon. Gotta love being 42...

Re:I want an apology

[crosbie]

Here's a solution:

The Digital Art Auction

It let's the audience pay the artist, doesn't need copyright and doesn't use encryption.

Re:I want an apology

[Spruce Moose]

Dude, WAP is dead.

Re:I want an apology

[DEBEDb]

My CD collection vastly outweighs my mp3 collection

I'm sure. How much does an mp3 weigh?

Re:I want an apology

[Computer!]

Your journal isn't accepting comments it seems.

Re:I want an apology

[ScumBiker]

How strange, I remember telling it to. Use my bulletin board on my personal website: Jack's Junkyard

Re:I want an apology

[Bat_Masterson]

I said it before, I'll say it again - absolutely nobody is listening to the musicians.

Even if they can't take their old music with them, what stops them from setting up a new distribution system for their music and, therefore, bypassing the RIAA?

Re:I want an apology

[Anonymous Coward]

This 40-something downloads many many of his favorite tunes from free services.

I am anxiously awaiting for the cease-and-desist order from attorneys representing the "Strawberry Alarm Clock"...

Re:I want an apology

[AntiNorm]

I'm sure. How much does an mp3 weigh?

To (greatly) simplify things, assume that one bit of information can be stored in one electron, and that no overhead is added for filesystems and the like.

The mass of an electron is 9.11e-31 kg. As a sample mp3 to use for comparison, take the Beatles' "Hello Goodbye." My rip of this is 5,494,880 bytes in length. This translates to 5494880*8 = 43959040 bits of data. So, using the simplified one-bit-one-electron method, Hello Goodbye has a mass of 43959040 * 9.11e-31 = 4.0044e-23 kg.

How much does a CD weigh? Assume one half ounce. In reality, they weigh less, but this will be close enough for comparison purposes. 1/2 ounce is 1/32 of a pound. Since pound is a unit of force and not mass, you can use F=m*a to convert this to the equivalent mass unit in the English system, which is the slug. 1/32 = m * (32.2 feet/s^2) yields a mass of 9.705e-4 slugs for a CD. A slug is equal to 14.5939 kg, so 9.705e-4 slugs is equal to .014163 kg.

Now you can compare directly. The MP3 weighs 4.0044e-23 kg, and the CD weighs .014163 kg. Simple division indicates that the CD is about 3.537e20 times heavier than the mp3.

Does that answer your question?

Re:I want an apology

[AntiNorm]

The MP3 weighs 4.0044e-23 kg, and the CD weighs .014163 kg.

s/weighs/has a mass of/;

Oops.

A little tip...

[HiQ]

# Sales of blank CDs have grown? You bet. I bought a new Vaio in December, and now back up all my files onto CD. I go through 7-15 CD's a week that way, or about 500 a year. Most new PC's come with XP, which makes backing up to CD painless; how many people are doing what I'm doing?
Not too many I guess; some of us use rewritable CD's. Why don't you try that too?

Re:A little tip...

[joshsisk]

If she is backing up _music_ files (and by music, I mean bits of songs, samples, etc.) then the files are probably quite large (as they need to be in a high quality format, not MP3), and she probably doesn't want to overwrite them in case she wants to use them again later.

Re:A little tip...

[HiQ]

fair enough. When I record music, I keep a log on the different versions of a song, and I number the different versions as well. I only backup files that have changed since [timestamp]. That saves on CD's. I mean 500 CD's a year is an awful lot of CD's to store in your house, and it is quite an amount of plastic as well. How long will you keep all those CD's. And when you don't need 'em anymore, do you throw them away?

Re:A little tip...

[2g3-598hX]

Hey, don't knock her; she seems quite techno-literate:

"We'll turn into Microsoft if we're not careful, insisting that any household wanting a copy for the car, or the kids, or the portable CD player, has to go out and "license" multiple copies."

I just hope she doesn't give the record companies ideas.

Re:A little tip...

[joshsisk]

My friend is a designer and he keeps ALL the files for all his projects... All the source graphics, all the PSD files (which can be a few hundred megs each) on CDs... He uses one CD every few days, probably (one for each project).

What he does is date them and then just put them on a spindle. He keeps the spindles on a shelf. Doesn't take up much space, since each spindle holds 100. It is a lot of CDs, but he figures better safe than sorry. If a client calls back a year later and wants "something like that last thing you did for me" and he's deleted the files, that's a lot more work for him.

Re:A little tip...

[paradesign]

damn, thats like 325 Gb per year!
i have a feeling that the numbers are being skewed here

Re:A little tip...

[Alsee]

[CD's] do you throw them away?

I always thought they would make really cool wall paper if I had enough junk CD's to throw at the task. I would like to thank MSN, Compuserve, and most of all AOL, for helping me build my collection.

-

Re:A little tip...

[word munger]

We used to use them as coasters.... Had a whole stack of them in the conference room. Clients really got a kick out of it: "So you finally found a use for those 500 free AOL hours!"

Re:A little tip...

[Hammer]

and she probably doesn't want to overwrite them

Rewriteable only means that you can write on any unused/unwritten part of the disc not that you can overwrite the recorded portion??

Re:A little tip...

[rnturn]

``a copy for the car, or the kids, or the portable CD player, has to go out and "license" multiple copies." I just hope she doesn't give the record companies ideas.''

This is already pretty much their official position. The RIAA thinks you're pirate if you burn a copy of a CD to play in the car. Any recording of a CD distributed by one of their members is contributing to the destruction of their industry. Hell, even loaning a CD to a friend is taboo according to what you see printed on most major label CDs.

What the record companies are failing to realize is that they will eventually make it such a hassle that their potential customers will find silence far preferable to having to deal with the restrictions that are placed on listening to music. Who will they blame for the falloff in sales then?

Re:A little tip...

[joshsisk]

You can most definitely overwrite the info on a rewriteable (CD-RW), by formatting it. It becomes, for all intents and purposes, blank again.

You can also write to the unused portion of a "normal" CD-R as long as you don't close the disc.

Re:A little tip...

[Anonymous Coward]

Any computer that's used in recording new music will have a lot of .wav files of verious tracks, songs, samples, and such. Many in various stages of editing. A snapshot in time of this editing process would be very valuable to an artist if they want to go back to a certain point and re-do things. 325 Gb a year is nothing to a serious professional using large size files.

Bork!

Re:A little tip...

[Hammer]

You learn something new every day :-)

Re:A little tip...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's true, Musicians often do their own digital recording when writing songs, and it takes up a lot of space. My roomate does the same thing, and goes through as many CD's. The problem is each track is a wav file and one song can have 12 to 15 tracks.

Debate reveals artists' true colors

[patmandu]

This really boils down to "who's in it for the self-validation" vs "who's in it for the music." It seems that much of the response to the music swapping debate just goes to show where these folks' alliances are. Mettalica was in it for the prestige and decided to suck up to the record company who was promoting them and making them 'famous'. Janis Ian (and others) is showing herself as someone who is in it to make music, not to get famous.

The fame-junkies are going to ally with the record companies no matter how much or little they get paid. But to quote Bowie, "Fame...makes [someone] loose and hard to swallow."

The ironic part is, if they ditched the record companies and made a *real* effort to come up with an internet-based music distribution system with micropayments, they'd all probably make more money, AND get more direct control over their work...which is a much more 'real' power than the record companies' 'fame' they peddle.

Re:Debate reveals artists' true colors

[FatRatBastard]

Mettalica was in it for the prestige and decided to suck up to the record company who was promoting them and making them 'famous'.

No, Metallica was in it because, unlike 90%+ of the artists signed to the big five, they actually *own* their recording rights. Look at a Metallica CD. It doesn't say (C)(P) Electra (their lable).

Now, this is not to say I agree with Metallica's stance, but its understandable why theirs and Janis' view points are different.

Re:Debate reveals artists' true colors

[e-gold]

The ironic part is, if they ditched the record companies and made a *real* effort to come up with an internet-based music distribution system with micropayments, they'd all probably make more money, AND get more direct control over their work...which is a much more 'real' power than the record companies' 'fame' they peddle.

I keep offering the micropayments ingredient (and I'll even throw in worldwide, instead of just-USA) but I lack the proper hype-budget. (Actually, there's both irony and profit-opportunity there, too, since e-gold shares the spend-fees, but I'll resist doing that math this early...)

I think that widespread web-tipjars (see sci.e-gold.com for how) would not only help musicians, they'd help "our" side in the debate over music downloads. (Yes, as I've repeatedly said, I have a business interest in this whole idea, too.) Whether a tipjar or a pay-per-download model prevails, though, a closer connection between artists and fans is one of the things the web promised, and we can help deliver on a bit of that promise, IMNSHO.
JMR

Speaking ONLY for Jim Ray, Userid nothwithstanding.

Re:Debate reveals artists' true colors

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah. You didnt even read the article.

She makes plain statements of fact. She makes no claims or allusions to something as nebulous as "moral high-ground", thats the RIAA's axe.

She says that freely available examples of an artists work leads to an increase in *sales*.

She points out they had the same reaction to eight tracks, cassete tapes, vhs, et all. She also makes a n interesting point on why they didnt object to CD's in particular (Since they were a Read-Only media to start with).

She says the whole thing is being pushed by the industry FOR the industry, and pointedly TAKES ISSUE with their clames about "doing it for the artists" and gives examples how they are actually "doing it TO the artists".

Re:Debate reveals artists' true colors

[FatRatBastard]

Whoops... hit 'Submit' too quickly:

The ironic part is, if they ditched the record companies and made a *real* effort to come up with an internet-based music distribution system with micropayments, they'd all probably make more money, AND get more direct control over their work...which is a much more 'real' power than the record companies' 'fame' they peddle.

As I said before they already HAVE direct control of their music. Their label is simply a marketing/distribution channel for them. They own their own sound recordings, their own voices, and quite possibly (I'm not sure about this) all of thier own publishing rights. They are one of the few bands (along with Springsteen, Melloncamp, REM that I can think of off the top of my head) who have full control over their music. Frankly, I'm constantly amazed at how quickly people are willing to sign away all of their rights to record companies in the first place.

Re:Debate reveals artists' true colors

[niola]

I think you have the wrong impression of Metallica. While they did ruffle a lot of feathers with the way they proceeded, their argument somehow got lost in all the hoopla. Their stance was do not share their studio albums, but share bootlegs etc. to your heart's content.

Anyone who has gone to a Metallica show knows that they ENCOURAGE recording of their shows fror your own enjoyment. In fact I have even heard instances of them letting people jack recording gear into their console at the show should you happen to be close enough.

Their argument, whether you agree with it or not, was that artists should have final say on what is shared and what is not. On this point I would have to agree with them. It shouldn't be the fan's or the label's decision. The decision should be the artists that created the work. If they want to selectively allow some works to be shared and others not, it should be their perogative.

--Jon

Re:Debate reveals artists' true colors

[SirSlud]

> I'm constantly amazed at how quickly people are willing to sign away

Certain bands have leverage to negotiate their own terms. Some bands don't. Unfortunately, us westerners are uncomfortable in beliving that anybody but the uber-best deserves any fair treatment at all, so those artists that dont have the leverage are usually glibly dismissed as 'sucky' or whatnot.

Of course, thats not the point. Diversity, lots of smaller acts would be good for music and musicians. The more powerful *any* entity becomes, more likely they become the next RIAA or MPAA, so not having the leverage should be dealt with by asking, "Why do the labels seem to have *much* more leverage than most artists." rather than "Why do so many arists sign their life away so quickly."

Remeber, us musicians cant become experts in legalese. If we put too much time into studying what we have to do protecting our interests, we dont have any time left over to write music.

I guess this is where the market is supposed to step in - if the musician camp hunch is right, the music industry will essentially die at some point because labels will only be able to sign the flash-in-the-pan idiot bands to their draconian contracts. Doesn't seem to be happening however; if anything, the western world's addiction to flash over substance appears to be ever increasing.

Re:Debate reveals artists' true colors

[Lumpy]

the problem is that EVERYONE is getting way too greedy and is forgetting WHO and how they got sucessful.

The fans turned on Metallica like rabid wolves because they went directly against what they said and stood for. Bootlegs is what MADE metallica. Photos shot with crappy throw away cameras is what MADE metallica. the fans are what MADE metallica. not their genius, Lar's F**King drumming abilities (there are tons more and better drummers than lars) or anything to do with what they did.

The same is with current bands.. I saw Nickleback this past tuesday, they insulted and made mad a large number of fans as they over searched everyone TWICE looking not for drugs,liquor,or weapons but CAMERAS. enough to get a large group to complain about it.

it's time that people get tired of the crap that bands and the labels pull. Me taking a grainey/far away photo at a concert is not going to cost anyone anything.... not letting me do so costs a fan and sales.. as I will no longer buy anything that they are affiliated with and let everyone know that they are fricking greedy bastards.

hopefully more artists will have the moxy and arent corrupted too badly to follow Janis's view.

Re:Debate reveals artists' true colors

[Art Tatum]

Metallica has the weight to be able to do that. Most musicians don't. It's one of the reasons I'm not in any way interested in getting involved with the big labels. Maybe an independent or digital distribution, though.

Re:Debate reveals artists' true colors

[Rogerborg]

• Their argument, whether you agree with it or not, was that artists should have final say on what is shared and what is not. On this point I would have to agree with them. It shouldn't be the fan's or the label's decision. The decision should be the artists that created the work. If they want to selectively allow some works to be shared and others not, it should be their perogative.

This is absolutely correct. It's the letter and spirit of copyright law.

Unfortunately, it's also largely irrelevant, because the vast majority of artists don't own the rights to their own work. They have chosen to sell them to big labels, and have no legal or moral rights to comment on how that work is used.

The only people that can comment on the work are the weasels in suits at the labels. Whether you agree with it or not, that's the law, and I suggest that it's also what's right, because artists are persuaded to sign away all rights not by being beaten with a stick, but by being shown a huge carrot.

You can argue that artists don't have a choice, that the only way to get wide distribution is to sign in blood to a label. Bullshit. If you want wide distribution, put your music on gnutella. Signing with a label is about greed, it's about gambling that you'll be in the 1% that actually makes money, and makes it big. Oh, delicious irony, that 99% of artists are wrong, and get screwed. Dumb, greedy fucks.

I was one of the few people that actually agreed with the substance of what Metallica were saying. But the trouble was that they should have stuck to just talking about themselves, rather than appearing on a platform with repulsive label weasels, and dribbling on about other artists' rights (most of whom have none). If they were being honest, they should have said "Screw everyone else. Just don't pirate our stuff, because we've been good to you in the past, you selfish fuckers." But they didn't, they toed the corporate line and tried to imply that the respect that they'd earned also applied to the hordes of talentless meat puppets that infest the airwaves and MTV-a-like channels. Bzzt, wrong, both legally and morally.

Re:Debate reveals artists' true colors

[Moofie]

Replace "huge carrot" with "huge fraudulent carrot", and realize that artists are routinely conned by their label reps, and tricked into selling themselves and their work into indentured servitude, and then you're on track.

The record companies have zero moral authority, because they exist only by fraud and deceit. I'll steal as much as I can from them. The artists, unfortunately, are the dupes. Hopefully, they'll learn.

Re:Debate reveals artists' true colors

[Pig Hogger]

Unfortunately, us westerners are uncomfortable in beliving that anybody but the uber-best deserves any fair treatment at all

Excuuuuuse me, but as a westerner I am profoundly offended by that comment. Perhaps anglo-saxons feel that only the best deserve to be treated fairly, but this is NOT the case of other westerners whose whole societies revolve around the notion that *** EVERYONE *** should be treated fairly.

Re:Debate reveals artists' true colors

[Anonymous Coward]

No. The artist gets to make the inital decision to release the work or not. That is it. Copyright just states no one else gets to sell it. The artists DO NOT get the right to pick and choose who gets their work and what that person does with it short of selling it.

Re:Debate reveals artists' true colors

[PianoComp81]

The same is with current bands.. I saw Nickleback this past tuesday, they insulted and made mad a large number of fans as they over searched everyone TWICE looking not for drugs,liquor,or weapons but CAMERAS. enough to get a large group to complain about it.

That's odd. I went to the Nickleback concert that 99x was putting on in Atlanta at the beginning of June, and they didn't even search us for anything. It was definitely a show worth video taping (especially since I don't think there's an official tape of it). I wonder why it was different.

Compassion for the artists?

[LeiraHoward]

I find it interesting that the artists are that badly mistreated (as far as low royalties, etc.) And this artist does have a point. I know I myself have bought CD's from artists that I had never heard of until a friend sent me an .mp3 of their song. I liked it so much, I wanted more, and went out and paid for it.

I think that the RIAA is just frightened that they are losing control. If they were really worried about the artists, they would be paying them more, and not resorting to some of the more unethical practices that have become standard in the music industry.

If they really wanted to help the consumer, they could lower CD prices everywhere, so that more people could purchase more songs.

If they really wanted to help the artist, they would funnel more money to the artist, rather than their own pockets.

The truth is, though, that they only want to help themselves, and as such, there isn't much we can do about it. We can let our voices be heard, and hope that one day, CD copying will be just as legal as taping something off the radio or television.

Re:Compassion for the artists?

[ziggr]

We can let our voices be heard, and hope that one day, CD copying will be just as legal as taping something off the radio or television.

Folks are working on making that illegal, too.

Re:Compassion for the artists?

[Andrewkov]

I thought it was illegal to tape songs off the radio, can anyone confirm or deny this?

Re:Compassion for the artists?

[lugonn]

The truth is, though, that they only want to help themselves, and as such, there isn't much we can do about it.

Hey! Your a consumer, exercise your consumer rights buy not buying RIAA endorsed products (like CD's). Support the artist directly by going to their shows, and bootleg the hell out of their music. If you can get the CD directly from the artist, then do it.

The only way to make them change is to stop supporting them. I'm glad the Artists are finally seeing this as well, without them bailing too, it would never work.

Great Article...

[2g3-598hX]

And David Bowie had some pretty good stuff to say, too.

Just a thought, but it would be great if more stars of the 60s spoke out against the record companies on this one. Those decrepit baby boomers owe it to us later generations...

Lobby your favorite aging rocker. I bet their back catalogues make up a sizeable portion of record company revenue, and the've already made a fortune so they have less to risk by speaking out. And once we get Ozzy Osbourne et al on the case...

Re:Great Article...

[wrax]

Getting older artists speaking out against the lables when they have nothing to lose is not going to accomplish anything in the long run. All this type of article does (no matter how well written, and i admit that it is very well done) is to rekindle debate on the issue, and not even among people who matter. Lets face it, if we are discussing this on slashdot then we are not discussing it in Ottawa or Washington. Writting letters to congress or the senate is also worse than useless. Any letter that even sounds like it is fighting for the little person is filed in the "crazy file" and anything comming from national lobby groups are filed in the "wishes of America" file.

Re:Great Article...

[yelligsc]

I think getting Ozzy Osbourne on the case will just hoplessly confuse everyone involved with the issue. Have you listened to him talk?

Scott.

Re:Great Article...

[IPFreely]

Those decrepit baby boomers owe it to us later generations.

Yeah, everyone OWES US something.

Do you think you could elaborate a little more on what WE owe THEM? I never see anyone talk about that. Or maybe you think you (we) don't owe anyone else anything.

Re:Great Article...

[Anonymous Coward]

Two words man, Social Security

They suck my paycheck dry to support these old dipshits who didn't have the sense to plan a retirement.

nuff said.

Re:Great Article...

[Moofie]

I think what "we" owe "them" is going to be well covered by the no-lube assfucking we (the younger generation) are going to get from Social Security. But thanks for raising the question.

Re:Great Article...

[Chris Johnson]

Heh. Yeah, like Janis Ian made a fortune. Another example: Roger McGuinn (The Byrds, 'Eight Miles High', 'Mr. Tambourine Man') never got paid anything either.

You are right that his back catalogue makes up a sizeable portion of record company revenue.

The trouble is... take another example, John Fogerty with the Creedence back catalog. He got a hosing that was unusually bad even for the record industry. The tune 'Vanz Kant Danz' was originally 'Zanz Kant Danz' (but he steal yo money..), about Zaentz (sp?) the head of Fantasy records. You'd think he'd be raring to fight the music industry... but his experiences hurt him SO bad that he eventually had to let it go, give up and stop caring about it. He probably lost years off his life because of the rage and betrayal and the emotional toll of it all. It is just too high a price to pay, and he should be left alone if he doesn't want to fight.

How many of the favorite aging rockers have been hosed that badly and ended up just giving up and writing it off? You really can't fight forever. Eventually people have to turn the fight over to others, and rest, or they just plain burn out and die. I'm just glad some of their stories are on record...

Very interesting article

[pubjames]

I think the point is, Napster-type services are not destroying the music industry. That's what the big multi-national record labels want you to believe. Rather, it is destroying a specific part of the music industry -- their part of it.

For the vast majority of musicians and performers (the vast majority not being Madonna or Britney...) the Web is a very positive thing - a way for them to promote themselves and distribute their music at very low cost.

One of the ways the big multinational record labels have defended the price of CDs in the past has been by saying that selecting and promoting an artist or band is very expensive. Not any more it's not - bands can promote themselves, and we the collective Joe Public can do the selecting, thank you very much.

Re:Very interesting article

[rhadamanthus]

So very true. I wrote a letter to several congress-types, in which I wrote:

"Furthermore, the advent of Napster in 1999 was followed by an overall increase in record sales by the RIAA for the next two years! The RIAA sold 10.8 percent more CDs that year even after increasing the price on those discs by over 12.3 percent. In 2000 this trend continued with another increase in CD price (from $13.65 to $14.02 on average) and an increase in sales again by over 3,600,000 CDs. It is worth noting also that in the last nine years the RIAA has tripled their annual income during a supposed economic downturn. For the years 1999 and 2000 the total profit made by the RIAA went from 14,584,500,000 dollars to 14,323,000,000 dollars. However, they lost 579,500,000 dollars on vinyls, cassettes and music videos, areas that Napster cannot possibly have an effect upon! In the formats Napster can trade, the RIAA made 318,500,000 more dollars than before!"

These numbers don't lie....

The fact is that Napster's popularity appears to have spurred CD sales to new levels. This makes sense, if you think about it: The large majority of people are not on fast broadband connections to the Internet. On a 56K modem, downloading an MP3 can take some time, certainly enough to make downloading an entire album seem like a lot of effort. Then, more time is required to get the songs onto the CD. Common sense says that if people using Napster liked a song enough on MP3, they would probably go out and buy the album, just as if they heard it on the radio. Napster gave people the chance to experience music they otherwise might have been loathe to pay money for, only to find out that the music wasn't something they particularly enjoyed. Need more proof? In 2000, CD sales were up 8 percent, even with Napster usage at an almost all-time high. At the same time in 2001, CD sales were down 8 percent, but the RIAA's lawsuit had all but halted Napster usage. See the correlation?

---rhad

Re:Very interesting article

[SirSlud]

> is very expensive.

Yup, thats their own fault, really. They are responsible for clogging the communicative channels betwixt the labels and the consumers, and they have nobody to blame for the 'barrier to market' than themselves. Its like they're shouting at the top of their lungs, and then turning around and complaining that they have to be loud to sell an artist.

Screw em. I know constraint isn't in the playbook of multinationals, but they should eat their own deserts if they cant control themselves.

Re:Very interesting article

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, so you're saying that the RIAA has nothing to worry about as long as the majority of people have dialup?

Re:Very interesting article

[Anonymous Coward]

Promotion? No. Distribution? Yes.

You still need to get some sort of promotion deal to get your name known before anyone will download and listen to your music, that means MTV.

Re:Very interesting article

[darkonc]

The RIAA sold 10.8 percent more CDs that year even after increasing the price on those discs by over 12.3 percent.

Do you know where I can get some of those sales stats? I pointed them out to Jan in a feedback on her site, and she responded with a query as to where I could substantiate those claims. (I originally saw them on a slashdot response many moons ago). A proper pointer to a source of those stats would be very useful.

samuel(at)bcgreen.com

I fear

[rhadamanthus]

That nothing will change though. There is simply TOO much money at stake here--but its the same old problem with the RIAA and friends...

Basically, corporations such as Disney and industry groups such as the MPAA and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) cannot seem to fathom the existence of a customer who is both honest enough to not steal, yet smart enough to not let him/herself be ripped off.

The opposing view: A study compiled by the Yankelovich Partners surveyed 16,000 Americans between the ages of 13 and 39 who say they listen to more than 10 hours of music a week and have spent at least $25 on music in the past six months. Among the findings: 59 percent of those who said they heard a certain piece of music for the first time while online ended up purchasing that music as a CD.

What is truly patheitc is how they rant and rave about how they want to "protect the artist", all the while doing just the opposite--and GETTING AWAY WITH IT. What the RIAA does not want you or I to realize is that they most certainly do NOT represent the artists contracted to their labels. They represent nothing more than a coalition of companies milking copyright to its fullest extent.

Copyright is no longer a good thing. It is sad that such a good "idea" has become such a misused and abused facet of corporate ideology and overwhelming greed.

----rhad

Re:I fear

[HiThere]

They're too late for that goal. It's been years since I've encountered anyone who believed that the music industry benefited musicians (as a class, rather than as a particular selected individual). And I don't think I've ever met anyone who believed that it was run for the benefit of the consumers.

But it sounds like a good answer to a reporter, and won't usually be openly scoffed at. If for no other reason, then because the publisher doesn't want to offend a large advertiser.

Re:I fear

[wfrp01]

Basically, corporations such as Disney and industry groups such as the MPAA and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) cannot seem to fathom the existence of a customer...

I would put the period right there. Too many corporations cannot fathom the existence of a customer.

I was watching some talking head on one of the tv money shows the other night. They were discussing, what else, corporate mismanagement. This guy was some kind of hot-shot investor, and he was all hot and bothered because company executives had forgotten their one true purpose: to serve the shareholders!.

WTF?!

The ignorance is so rampant, no frickin' wonder we're witnessing such a show of corporate suicide. What about the goddamn customer?! What about developing, manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and supporting a product that customers want to buy!?

The tail is wagging the dog. Customer satisfaction has taken a back seat to corporate profitability and shareholder value. Selfishness is regularly promoted as the root of all that is good and holy. It should be the other way around. Hence the expression "the customer is always right." - it used to be a maxim of good business practice. When is the last time you heard anything resembling that expression on "Money News with Pinstripe Boy"?

Look no further than that epitomy of self-serving capitalism - Microsoft - to see just how far awry this philosophy has taken us. If they can't compel people to buy their products because they want to, then damn it, let's force them to upgrade by continually changing file formats and protocols. Oh, and let's not forget lobbying Congress to create new laws declaring certain undesireable competitors criminals.

Re:I fear

[albanac]

What about the goddamn customer? It's called a free market (well, kind of free: I'm aware that the music industry is not one of the world's most free markets). But the fact remains that in a capitalist economy, the only duty of a company is to stay solvent, preferably profitable. The company does exist to serve it's shareholders or ownders. Not its customers.

~cHris

Re:I fear

[xxyyxxzz]

The key for most successful companies is to serve the customers, because they give the company money, which serves the shareholders' interest. Sometimes - every so often - a company can please the shareholders despite how they treat the customers. Just look at regional coding on DVDs.

Re:I fear

[TWR]

Um, the investor you heard was correct: the shareholders of a corporation are its owners. The people running the corporation have a primary responsibility to the owners (shareholders) to run the company such that the owners get a return on their money (through dividends, which are not all that common any more) or to increase the value of what the owners, well, own.

If a corporation is too abstract of a concept, let's do a thought experiment. Pretend you have a child who wants to start a lawn-mowing business. The child needs money to buy a lawn mower, print up fliers, pay for gas, etc. You agree to give your kid the money in exchange for, say, 25% of the profits. In effect, you have just bought 25% of your kid's company.

Who is the kid responsible to? If you have a consciencious child, you hope that he wants to pay back your faith in him by making money. After all, that was the deal. The primary responsibilty, as you can see, is to the person who made this little company possible in the first place.

If screwing customers is a good plan for a company to make money and increase its value, you can hardly fault the company beacuse the customers put up with being screwed. Long-term, companies survive because the put out a product that people want. Generating ill will doesn't work long term. Unfortunately, the Enron/Worldcom/Adelphia/whoever's next bastards don't care about the long term, don't care about their customers, and don't care about their shareholders. If they did care about the shareholders, they wouldn't have been lying to them. The system needs fixes because it's too easy for lying weasels to get away with hiding things from shareholders. After that, everything else will fall into place, including customer satisfaction.

Heck, if you don't like how record companies are currently working, start buying record company shares. Don't like how MS works? Buy MS shares. Set up a fund. Every time you want to buy a CD or DVD or piece of software, use that money to buy stock instead. Let lots of people pool their money, get a large voting bloc of stock. Then change the policies. That's how the system works.

-jon

Re:I fear

[Jobe_br]

The one big thing that the consumer needs to realize, though, is the thing that my fiancee (a designer, artist, audio engineer and song writer) has been pounding into my skull since our first conversation (argument?) about copyright, MP3s, etc: if the artist decides to provide MP3s at a cost or for free, that's the artist's decision. If a consumer takes it upon themselves to rip MP3s and share them on Napster, Audiogalaxy, Limewire, Morpheus, Kazaa, etc. then its stealing . If in doing so you increase sales for that particular artist is irrelevant if you've stolen to do so. The artist has certain rights, amongst those is to decide if he/she wants to release things for free (these rights may in many instances be ristricted by the artist's contract with their label). Nevertheless, sharing music files without the artists/label's permission is stealing. It is up to the artist to work on the labels and get them to realize that sharing some (or all) of their music in MP3 format will improve their sales. In some circumstances, a particular artist may feel that this would not be the case. Moby comes to mind as such an example. Consumers may not take it upon themselves to decide that all artists would share their music if they could. Some artists don't prescribe to that philosophy, that's their business (or problem).

Big point: sharing music files without permission is stealing. If you're cool with that, so be it. But, don't try to hide behind a veil of "I'm really increasing sales for the artists whose music I'm sharing." Bullshit. You're stealing. Plain and simple.

Read the Audiogalaxy story, many of the items being shared were not illegal (at least, that's what I got from reading that story ;)). Obviously, many things were which is why they had to filter, but the point here is that this story outlines a benefit to P2P sharing that is far greater than simply illegally getting copyrighted material for free.

Re:I fear

[wfrp01]

In a certain sense you are right - the people who own stock in a company are its "owners". But they are certainly not owners in the sense conveyed by your lawnmower example. By in large, people own stock in companies because they believe they will get a return on their investment. They're in it for the money, pure and simple. Hell, most people investing probably don't even know where their money really is - it's just thrown into a mutual fund or some such thing. They are certainly not taking an active interest in the operation of the company.

Alas, however, I fear you are right. You are describing the way most people expect the sytem does and should work. I just beg to differ. I think it should be otherwise.

Really, though, we both want the same thing - companies that provide value to their shareholders and value to their customers. I just happen to think the customer should come first. When customers come first, the rest will follow quite naturally. When shareholders come first, sometimes the customers don't even count anymore.

Re:I fear

[wrt2]

It would be nice to believe that buying 100 shares of MSFT makes you as much of an owner as Bill Gates. If corporations were democratically run, one-person-one-vote institutions, it would make sense. However, corporations are one-dollar-one-vote institutions. Your 100 shares mean squat, therefore. Many activist groups do show up at stockholder meetings for companies in which they own shares, and they make great theater. But they don't make corporate decisions.

Re:I fear

[ckaminski]

Yes, but you don't stay solvent, or profitable by scaring, screwing, and generally ignoring what your customers have to say.

I work for one of those companies that has scared, and ignored what our customers are saying, and in the process, we're screwing them because we're going out of business.

If you don't take care of the customer, NO ONE will buy your product. Hence, you can't remain profitable or solvent, and your shares are worth the TP they are written on.

Granted, by serving the customers TOO much, you can easily tip the scales in the other direction and STILL not be solvent or profitable, but that's not *usually* the case.

Re:I fear

[Aceticon]

Heck, if you don't like how record companies are currently working, start buying record company shares. Don't like how MS works? Buy MS shares. Set up a fund. Every time you want to buy a CD or DVD or piece of software, use that money to buy stock instead. Let lots of people pool their money, get a large voting bloc of stock. Then change the policies. That's how the system works.

Assume that a person buys in average 1 CD per day. For that person to aquire 1% of Microsoft shares (at 31 March 2002 - my source - market capitalization = $286.6B) would mean saving their CD money (assume $15 per CD) for a period longer than 523112 years.

The other possibility is for 10000 persons (that's a small stadium full of people) to save their CD money for 52.3 years and then get together and use their 1% of the company to try and change things (assuming they all agreed on the direction to take).

The whole idea that the Average Joe Shareholder has any influence whatsoever in managing corporate Americe is pure hot air (and the smelly type, at that)

Re:I fear

[Moofie]

"get a large voting bloc of stock." Oh! OK! I just happen to have a couple hundred mil sitting here in my checking account that I'm not using. I'll just pop on down to the broker's and buy a bunch of stock in a company I believe is evil, thereby reinforcing their evil behavior, and I'll ask them ever so nicely to please stop being evil. They'll say "But, you poor wretch, if we stop being evil, YOU will lose MONEY!" and all the other stock holders will rip out my throat and use my organs in their diabolical experiments.

Great plan. I'll get right on it. Never mind those social commentaries or regulatory options...the REAL answer to corporate greed is BUY MORE STOCK!

Re:I fear

[JoeWalsh]

If screwing customers is a good plan for a company to make money and increase its value, you can hardly fault the company beacuse the customers put up with being screwed.

Does anyone else see this philosophy of "get away with as much as you can" as one of the primary problems of our time? Or is it just me that sees this as the source of our Enrons, Worldcoms, and Arthur Andersons, as well as our self-serving politicians, our sue-first-ask-questions-later culture, the general decline in product quality, and the overall malaise among the worldwide population?

Or is it just me?

Re:I fear

[Moofie]

Then they shouldn't be surprised when their customers say "Ummm...gofuckyourself." THEN how are they going to pay for their shiny new Benzes? Corporations do not have a right to exist. They do not have a right to continue using unworkable business models. I happen to believe that they don't have any rights at all, but unfortunately due to the greatest legal cock-up in history, they have the same rights as I do. Since they have infinitely more money, that makes them quite a bit more equal than any of us.

Today's corporate system has nothing to do with free-market capitalism. It's an oligopoly, plain and simple.

Re:I fear

[TWR]

Your numbers are WAY too small. 10,000 people in a stock fund? Please. CALPERS (retirement fund for California state workers) has 1.3 million people, according to their numbers. It has $108 Billion in investments.

Do you think the highly-paid geeks of America and the world can scrape together more money than the paper pushers for California? I bet the answer is yes.

As long as people like you are going to sit on the sidelines, pissing and moaning about how little they can do, nothing is going to happen. Welcome to self-fufilling prophesy land...

-jon

Re:I fear

[TWR]

The problem has not been that shareholders came first. The problem was that the MANAGEMENT came first. Sure, management owned shares, but if Ken Lay was a majority owner of Enron, you could be damn sure that he wouldn't have pulled the tricks he did. He owned just enough to get rich through tricks, and then when the house of cards was about collapse, he cashed in and ran.

What happened in the various corporate failures is that the farmer put the fox in charge of the henhouse, and didn't complain as long as there were lots of eggs. When the eggs stopped coming, the farmer realized the fox had eaten the chickens, and had been supplying eggs to the farmer by promising chickens to another farmer down the road. Whose fault is it that the chickens are gone? I think it's the farmer. He should have either realized that he put a fox in charge, or he should have been checking up.

-jon

Re:I fear

[Anonymous Coward]

> Yes, but you don't stay solvent, or profitable by scaring, screwing, and generally ignoring what your customers have to say.

You do if you're a monopoly, or part of a well-run oligopoly.

Re:I fear

[5KVGhost]

I was watching some talking head on one of the tv money shows the other night. They were discussing, what else, corporate mismanagement. This guy was some kind of hot-shot investor, and he was all hot and bothered because company executives had forgotten their one true purpose: to serve the shareholders!.

WTF?!

Both of you are correct, actually, but I think you're a little bit more correct.

Shareholders have to get some return on their investment or they won't stay shareholders or attract new ones. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Of course, the proper way to give them a return on their investment is please the customers who buy their products, thereby keeping the company healthy, and ultimately delivering some profits that can be distributed back to the investors (and/or re-invested to fund the continued operation of the company.) So, yeah, make money for the shareholders by having lots of happy, paying customers.

But pleasing consumers and making competitive products can be hard work. So some CEOs, for their own immediate benefit and to satisfy impatient shareholders, have taken advantage of all sorts of short-cuts to make profits appear without the hard work of actually offering decent products or services. It might be massive "cost cutting" that fires the most competent employees or sells off strong but unglamourous assets, accounting tricks to hide poor sales and bad investments, or lots of other things. All of these get rich quick schemes tend to maximize short-term financial gain at the expense of the long-term health of the company. So it's not really matter of selfishness vs. pleasing the customer. It's more a matter of enlightened self-interest vs. immediate gain with no interest in the ultimate consequences.

Something I think is just as bad is the current demand for constant growth. It forces otherwise sane companies to overextend themselves with pointless acquisitions and other silly corporate strategies simply for the sake of keeping irrational market advisors happy. Corporate growth, like growth in living things, must be directed, purposeful, and carefully controlled or it weakens the body rather than strengthening it.

(I think obligatory MS-bashing there at the end is a bit off base, BTW. MS can do whatever it wants with its products, and they're really no worse than many other companies as far as rampant upgrades are concerned. MS has supported some bad legislation in the past, but they're boy scouts compared to really nasty companies like Monsanto, which can do way more real-world damage than any computer company ever dreamed of.)

Re:I fear

[wfrp01]

The problem has not been that shareholders came first. The problem was that the MANAGEMENT came first. Sure, management owned shares, but if Ken Lay was a majority owner of Enron, you could be damn sure that he wouldn't have pulled the tricks he did.

Why?

Re:I fear

[TWR]

Because he would have had more to lose. Lay was, by and large, being paid in OPTIONS to buy shares. Since his options were priced low, if he could temporarily drive up the price of the stock, he could flip his options and make millions. Of course, this is exactly what he did (along with most of the people who made money on worthless businesses in the 90s). The way options work as a tax write-off gives further incentive to use them to compensate employees, and they look like they are increasing shareholder value, so shareholders tend to go along with large option grants.

If Ken Lay had OWNED the stock outright, then the long-term survival of Enron would have been more important to him, as hiding debt in fake overseas corporations is not a long-term strategy. He would just have been screwing himself. Attempting to sell off a large chunk of stock (which must be registered with the SEC) has the effect of lowering the stock's price, and it tends to tip people off that something's up. Excercising options waves a lot fewer red flags.

I guess you could argue that Ken Lay is an amoral weasel who would have been corrupt no matter what. Perhaps. But let's recognize what incentives he had to be an amoral weasel first.

-jon

Re:I fear

[nomad_monad]

>As long as people like you are going to sit on
>the sidelines, pissing and moaning about how
>little they can do, nothing is going to happen.
>Welcome to self-fufilling prophesy land...

That's an unfair characterization of Aceticon argument. I think it was meant to illustrate the problematic nature of your suggestion when taken out of the realm of pure theory and into the field of pragmatic action. To interpret this specific criticism of an equally specific solution as a general proclivity towards "sitting on the sidelines, pissing and moaning" is an accidental lapse in understanding at best, a strawman at worst. Granted, if you don't like the current state of things, it's better to seek out avenues of change that exist within the current socio-economic structure, which is what your money pooling to voting bloc idea embodies. However, the criticism leveled against it also demonstrates that sometimes, that very same criticism reveals the inadequacies of current mechanisms of power and representation, and the need to think of changing or adding to those mechanisms in the search for a viable solution. In other words, the answer is not always found by working with the rules of the game as they exist today, but by changing those rules (or by changing the game itself). Unconstructive negativity has no use when pursuing goals of social progressivism, but that doesn't mean criticisms of proposed emancipatory solutions represent mere naysaying. It has to be a rigorous process.

Re:I fear

[TWR]

It might be unfair, but it's more or less accurate. It's not like presented another way to solve the problem of corrupt corporate management.

And while "changing the rules" always sounds nice, it's also a dangerous game. Communist systems always fail because they expect human nature to change eventually, and in the meantime, we'll keep a gun pointed at your head to force you to change.

For all the awful things about the capitalist system, it is designed to model how humans actually act, which makes it a heck of a lot more likely to succeed than systems that rely on human nature to be different or that rely on a central body of "experts" to dictacte how things should be.

Current regulations in the US are more or less limited to disclosure: make sure that people are honestly reporting the state of the company. Dot-bomb failures were due to people pouring money into companies stupidly. There's not much that can be done about this. Enron et al are due to lying bastards who fudged the books. This needs to be fixed. The ways that they cheated need to be made impossible to replicate.

As for changing corporate policies, vote as a consumer; let these companies know that if they support building DRM into everything, you won't buy their products. Buy up their stock and get your guys on the board of directors. There are ways to do this, all within the system.

Let your elected officials know that if they pass laws requiring DRM in everything with a D/A converter, you're going to campaign to get them out of office. If it REALLY matters to you, you can do something about it within the system. Fritz Hollings will be up for re-election sooner or later; get him voted out of office. Form GeekPAC (which is something a lawyer friend of mine advised a year ago). Just do something, if it really matters to you.

-jon

Re:I fear

[Aceticon]

Your numbers are WAY too small. 10,000 people in a stock fund? Please. CALPERS (retirement fund for California state workers) has 1.3 million people, according to their numbers. It has $108 Billion in investments.

The fund is the result of people associating with the objective of making money (amazing - just like any other company). There is no other common objective - this is not an association of people with an aim to change anything in any corporation in America.

In practice the example you pointed is just another layer - a company with the aim of profit that manages participations in other companies with the aim of making money.

How can such a mechanism be used by Joe Average With Money In Fund to change Corporate Amercia????

Re:I fear

[humphrm]

You're looking at it from the wrong direction. I'm not saying it's right or wrong; in fact, I'm fairly agnostic about the whole concept of corporate right vs. wrong. But, in a capitalist society, the shareholder is the top of the food chain. Consumers, and fulfilling consumer demand, is not the first and foremost requirement of captialism. Capitalism is all about raising, well, capital. To do that, you need shareholders. Without shareholders, you have no product to sell, and consumers lose. Again, right or wrong, that's the way it is.

Not that consumers don't count into the picture. Capital-providers require return on investment. Consumers provide the return on investment. Don't even get me started on Elasticity of Demand, but suffice to say that there are some macro market-driven limiters that control the balance of consumer vs. company. Still, the point is, if we as consumers don't like what is being sold to us, we stop buying and shareholders stop getting (as big) dividend checks, or share value growth. Shareholders will then leave the market (or on a micro level, the company they have invested in) and put their money where it earns more. Consumers have probably already started buying that new company's product, or will very soon, and shareholders continue to receive value increases or dividends.

How does all this apply to the RIAA? Forget about encouraging artists to not sign with RIAA labels; they are on the supply side and ne're shall demand and supply cross-contaminate each other. Concentrate on the demand side. Don't buy albums from RIAA-affiliated labels. If there aren't any, start one. If you don't have the money, get some. If you can't, well... sorry! (Hey, that's capitalism.) Maybe someone else with your passion and a few more bucks will.

Re:I fear

[TWR]

I just told you how; can't you read? There are mutual funds that only invest in companies with certain economic policies, that make certain products, that have certain political agendas. It's not much of a stretch for the fund to take a vote among its owners as to how it would like the fund to vote during shareholder voting periods. It could even propose items for vote, if it held enough stock.

Really, learn a bit more about how economics works.

-jon

Re:I fear

[neocon]

It doesn't make you as much an owner as Bill Gates, it makes you proportionally as much an owner as 100 shares is to the number of share Mr. Gates holds. Want more ownership? Buy more shares.

Re:I fear

[nomad_monad]

It might be unfair, but it's more or less accurate. It's not like presented another way to solve the problem of corrupt corporate management.
True enough, an alternative solution wasn't presented... at least not yet. But my point was that a lack of an immediately proposed alternative doesn't necessarily imply that the person noting an objection is simply a naysayer. Rather, such conclusions should be reserved until the end of the discussion, not the beginning. Maybe I'm being a little pedantic, and in any other context I'd agree with that, but when discussing proposals for social change.... best to be thorough.

And while "changing the rules" always sounds nice, it's also a dangerous game. Communist systems always fail because they expect human nature to change eventually, and in the meantime, we'll keep a gun pointed at your head to force you to change.
Where did I ever mention communism? Actually, this is demonstrative of the current problematic when critiquing the current state of capitalism -- criticisms have a tendency to be mischaracterized as favoring communism (or socialism) as an alternative simply because of argumentative inertia (i.e. this was how the debate was framed for 100+ years, so it's easier to think of it like that). That's another kind of thinking we need to get away from. There are many variants of capitalist systems, as any debate between laissez-faire and regulatory economists will reveal -- to level a critique against its current incarnation is not always suggestive of a desire to do without the idea completely. This is the case with me.

For all the awful things about the capitalist system, it is designed to model how humans actually act, which makes it a heck of a lot more likely to succeed than systems that rely on human nature to be different or that rely on a central body of "experts" to dictacte how things should be.
Agreed. Never said otherwise. Although the latter half of your statement seems to be reflective of our current reality in the U.S., lack of communism notwithstanding.

As for changing corporate policies, vote as a consumer; let these companies know that if they support building DRM into everything, you won't buy their products. Buy up their stock and get your guys on the board of directors. There are ways to do this, all within the system.
This is why I used qualifiers such as "sometimes" and "possible" and "perhaps" in my last post. Sometimes change can be effectuated using the mechanisms that already exist. Sometimes new approaches need to be created. Oftentimes, a combination is the most successful. Boycots can be effective (as can selective investments, such as Green Funds), but it's harder selectively target a company that doesn't depend on end-consumer products for profits, but rather profits by selling materials to other companies... like Enron and Andersen Consulting..

Let your elected officials know that if they pass laws requiring DRM in everything with a D/A converter, you're going to campaign to get them out of office. If it REALLY matters to you, you can do something about it within the system.
Or you can do something to add *to* the system, or something to remove something *from* the system, or pursue activities *outside* the system. What's dangerous is drawing a false dichotomy between acting through what may be inadequate means, and not acting at all, because not only does it tend to constrict creative thinking/approaches, it's underlying assumption -- that the system works AS IS -- only reinforces the status quo.

Think of this all as a qualifier to your argument, and not necessarily an objection to it.

Re:I fear

[wrt2]

According to Yahoo! Finance, Mr. Gates sold 10 million shares in June, worth a collective $500 million (give or take) at their respective times of sale. This sale, of course, did not effectively dilute his stake in MSFT or his control of the company. That means you'll have a hard time affecting the company's decision-making process as an owner "buying more shares," unless you've got cash (or equivalent) in large piles lying around and can either a) find a willing insider/institutional seller or b) happen to be standing around while MSFT pulls an Enron.

Re:I fear

[TWR]

Ah. I think we basically agree. Whenever I hear people talking about "changing the system", I start thinking of bomb-throwing revolutionaries and their intellectual backers on college campuses. Invariably, the "people's revolution" involves the idjits with bombs partnering with the idjits in college to tell everyone else what to do, say, and think, while they get to live in luxury off the forced labor of everyone else. Too many people on /. still subscribe to this belief system, because they think they're going to be the intellectual overlords rather than the dog-boys pulling El Presidente's chariot. Glad to hear that's not what you're talking about.

Perhaps a better phrase would be "fixing the system," because there sure are problems with the current one, but all in all it beats all the other systems that have been proposed.

-jon

Re:I fear

[neocon]

It is certainly true that the amount of ownership you can have in Microsoft is proportional to the amount of money you are willing to spend, just as the number of hamburgers you can eat tomorrow is proportional to the amount of money you are willing to spend. If you are willing and able to purchase as many shares as Mr. Gates owns, then you would own Microsoft as much as Mr. Gates does.

Re:I fear

[wfrp01]

For all the awful things about the capitalist system, it is designed to model how humans actually act, which makes it a heck of a lot more likely to succeed than systems that rely on human nature to be different or that rely on a central body of "experts" to dictacte how things should be.

Huh? Who said that a "body of experts" should dictate how things should be?

No one is arguing against capitalism here. I was merely proposing that that what /used/ to be the capitalist status quo - corporate behaviour resulting from consumers voting with their pocketbooks - was, and is, a better system than corporate directors gaming the system in whatever fashions best suits shareholders.

Can you give some examples of how shareholders acting in their own selfish interest have benefitted consumers in a fashion that retail economics could not have accomplished?

Certainly any number of industries, particularly high-tech, benefit from by using venture capital to do R&D. You can't finance R&D with as-of-yet non-existant product revenue. And because such enterprises are inherently risky ventures, the risks should correlate with corresponding rewards.

There are different types of shareholders. Some certaily deserve a particularly high level of attention. But the bread and butter of Wall Street is the institutional investor. They are attempting to provide return on the dollar. Period. They have no interest in corporate policy, corporate oversight, or in many cases even corporate profitibility. All they care about is whether or not they can sell their stock for more than they bought it. These are the bread and butter "shareholders" I'm talking about. And they are definitively not the backbone of healthy capitalism.

Re:I fear

[albanac]

This was the reason I mentioned the un-free nature of the music and film industries. What I was getting at is that companies do not have a responsibility to play nice. They have a responsibility to make money, and to make more money every year if possible. If circumstances and the law have placed them in a position of oligopoly, they do not have any ethical or moral responsibility to diminish their ability to make money by opening up the market. The market or the law has to force them to do it. They have enough money to own the law. And therefore ...

~cHris

Re:I fear

[Moofie]

Each individual decision maker does have a responsibility to Do The Right Thing. Corporations may SEEM like seamless wholes, but there are always individual humans calling the shots. Those people still have ethical and moral (and legal!) responsibilities beyond chasing money.

They just never remember that fact.

Re:I fear

[albanac]

Legally, a corporation or limited company has an independent existance. The company's acts are not legally the same thing as the acts of the disparate directors.

~cHris

Re:I fear

[Moofie]

Hence my major objection to the idea of a corporation. The creation of an entity that is not responsible for its actions is a Bad Idea.

Re:I fear

[Aceticon]

There are mutual funds that only invest in companies with certain economic policies, that make certain products, that have certain political agendas.

I am well aware of that. There are even some fund managers that will aquire strong positions in badly managed companies and actively turn that company around (usually they start by firing the top management). Unfortunatly they are a minority.

I seem to have been unable to clearly show my position. Let's try again:

a) To influence a company as a shareholder one needs to aquire or control a significant portion of it's shares with voting rights. Let's say 10% (it will vary from case to case).

b) To aquire the shares you need a lot of money. In the case of Microsoft, 10% of it will cost around $26B. This is not even considering the fact that the price of the shares in the open market will go up when such a big quantity of them is aquired and that to convince certain owners to sell you their shares you will have to pay significantly more than their current value in the open market.

c) Alternatively you can take control of a significant portion of it's shares with voting rights by getting together several persons each with a comparatively small ammount of shares. So for example, to take control of 10% of Microsoft you either gather a small number of really rich persons or a really big number of Joe/Joanna Average persons.

Let's go back to your inicial example - " Every time you want to buy a CD or DVD or piece of software, use that money to buy stock instead"

- That would definitely not match the criteria for b) (be really rich) - unless it's someone that buys 10000 CDs a day.
- So - to option c) (get a lot of people together).
Lets start with a small group of people (say 100) with a lot of money. The problem here is getting everybody to agree. The more people there are, the less likelly they are to all agree. Also, the more specificaly defined your objective is the more likelly it is that some people will not agree with it (for example, while most people agree that Global Warming is bad, most disagree on how to solve the problem, or even on if there is a problem). This is why those "funds with a cause" have a very broad objective ("save the earth", "cleanup badly managed companies", "help party X", and the favorite of all times "make more money").

If we grow the size of the group not only is it less likelly to find enough people that agree on the common objective (and willing to put their money in for it), but also we start to get into information problems - that is: the people that put the money in have less and less (real, precise and certifiable) information on how it is spent.

In practice, a big enough gathering of people with a common objective has the same problems as a company:
- Broadly stated objectives so that a big enough number of persons is willing to put their money in to achieve said objectives (for companies the objective is "make more money").
- Lack of precise, authentic and easy to compreend information on how the money is being managed to achieve said objectives (Enron, WorldCom, a lot of actively managed funds that had lower returns than funds that simply tracked the market indexes, ...).

This is why i believe that the theory of "The power of the small shareholder" is utter bolocs.

Famous?

[yatest5]

This must be a new meaning of famous I've never come across before. Come on /., sort it out.

Control

[EvilBudMan]

Very simple, it's all about control. Only by selling 10 million CD's can an artist make money off of album sales. 95% of artists make most of thier money from the live shows which their CD promotes. If they don't need the RIAA to promote them then what are they good for? If they try to over do it, then the artist will promote themselves on the internet. The next step for the big corporations will be to try to control the internet itself. Watch OUT!

--
the oxen is slow but the earth is patient..SP.

Re:Control

[swm]

it's all about control

This absolutely correct, and Ian seems to not quite get it

If you think about it, the music industry should be rejoicing at this new technological advance! Here's a fool-proof way to deliver music to millions who might otherwise would never purchase a CD in a store...It's instantaneous, costs are minimal, shipping non-existant...a staggering vehicle for higher earnings and lower costs.

All true, and if you think about it, you realize that this is why the music industry is terrified: if you have the internet, you don't need the record labels.

Further discussion at How The Internet Will Make The Record Labels Evaporate .

Re:Control

[j_w_d]

It looks to me as if you missed Ian's point. The only really viable data - from the RIAA itself - indicates a very clear gain for the labels during the heyday of Napster. In other words, sharing sells CDs. It also sells books and other forms of content as well, but that's irrelevant.

As you say the labels are very scared, but not because of the idea that some how the internet will displace them from the market. Remember, Napster made money for them. What they fear is that with time ARTISTS will abandon them. Labels control artists. With the internet and available recording technology any serious artist can begin to build their own "label" and burn and market their own CDS without being subject to contracts that are so thieving they would make Fagin proud. Without artists, the swimming pools dry up, the Mercedes run out of gas, and the estates become low income housing. The members of the RIAA have to get real jobs.

More first-person experience

[pfankus]

Following is journal entry from a band out of Boston with a substantial fan-base and touring and recording credentials (reprise, sire, steve lillywhite produced their last album, toured with john mayer, bare naked ladies, dave matthews, etc). Although the entry is pre-napster demise, it still brings valid points from the mouth of a band...and quotes Prince (or is it the Artist formerly known....)

http://www.guster.com/artists/board/show?topic_id= 2&show_jump=0&table_width=&start_date=2001-01-01&s ort=reverse&end_date=2001-01-01%2B1m

For those who don't know ...

[pyramid termite]

... Janis Ian had her first hit in 1967 with a controversial song about interracial dating, "Society's Child". She was a young teenager at the time.

She released several albums on the Verve label in the 60s and gradually sank into obscurity. After signing with Columbia, she made a comeback during the mid-70s with the hit "At Seventeen". Again, she wasn't able to follow it up with another similar hit and sales gradually dwindled until she was dropped. Due to mismanagement and bad accounting she ended up with tax problems and eventually went broke.

She's managed to keep herself going in the music biz in the last few years, although I have no idea what kind of music she's doing now.

Re:For those who don't know ...

[robkill]

Her latest album is "God and the FBI." She spent close to 10 years using the FOIA to see the FBI files collected on her father. It turns out her father was branded a communist. Every 3 or 4 years they'd have to move because her father lost a teaching position. It turns out that the FBI would come by, ask a few questions, and then folks would get scared and fire him.

She's one of the regular columnists for "Performing Songwriter" magazine. She and Christine Lavin have written several good commentaries on the music industry and how the Internet has helped independent singer-songwriters. And she's a big Science Fiction fan to boot!

Re:For those who don't know ...

[bytor4232]

Mod parent up. Quite informative. I wish I didnt spend all my moderator points yesturday!

Re:For those who don't know ...

[Hack Shoeboy]

It turns out her father was branded a communist.

You seem to have accidentally inserted the word "branded."

Re:For those who don't know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Omitting it would make it look like a justification for harrassment.
Adding it means you add the ambiguity of whether he was or not, but also makes it clear that the author doesnt believe it a negative distinction.

Re:For those who don't know ...

[_xeno_]

In other words, her opinion is meaningless.

Well, that's a bit of a troll statement if I don't then try and explain what I mean. This is subjective, of course, but I still think it should be heard... this is more "devil' advocate" then what I really believe, and may be overly-pessimistic.

I dunno how well thought out she wrote the piece. I dunno anything about her, if her music is any good, or anything. But the fact that she wasn't recording and releasing mainstream, popular stuff during the time of massive filesharing means that if your average Joe or Jane hears this used as an argument he's going to come up with one of two things: "Who?" or "So?"

"Who?" is bad because some unknown person who at one time had popular songs is meaningless in an argument about file sharing and being able to make mix CDs - she isn't currently producing any music and having her livelyhood ruined by the record companies. Or, it can be argued that the reason I never heard about her is because all that file sharing and evil fair use stuff made her too obscure for me to ever have heard of before.

"So?" is just as bad, and is the main argument against Courtney Love's tirade against the recoring industry. (In Courtney Love's case, just about everyone who hasn't read the article dismisses her as some drugged-up bitch who has no real clue about the real world. Which makes saying "well, Courtney Love says..." turn against you really, really quickly.)

In Janis's case, her problems happened a long time ago, and so can be seen as being a moot point - after all, she wrote her music 30-40 years ago, which is far enough back for many people to consider practices may have changed, even if they haven't. It's too far back for people to accept her views as being relevant to today's culture or practices.

What we really need is someone who is currently in the limelight to come out against the record companies - not someone who was already fallen. This is a catch-22 though - if they are currently riding their way to fame, they probably see nothing wrong with the recording industry that is still their friend. After a fall from popularity and fame, they're opinions became only the complaints of someone who has fallen off and wants to complain about being popular, and are easy to write off.

I really don't see any way to make this a winnable argument with most people - the recording artists that come out against the recording industry are usually seen as being "too old" or "too out of the current industry" to be taken seriously by most people. Which leaves us right were we started... the recording companies telling people what to believe about becoming a rock star.

Re:For those who don't know ...

[adewolf]

This is a prime example where gossip and heresay is listened to more than the facts. I say that someone who was recording 30 years ago is more credible than the neighbor who read someting on some news group or BBS. This artist has had a chance to see the changes that have/have not taken place and has some idea of what affect file sharing really has on artists.

Re:For those who don't know ...

[Moofie]

Damn, never mind reading what she has to say and evaluating it...if she's not an "authority" her opinion is meaningless. Of course! How could I be so stupid! I'll just bop right on over to the RIAA's website and get some rightthink to put me back on track.

Re:For those who don't know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's possible for anyone to read her article and not see the reason why her views are relevent to todays culture of practices then I am simply stunned.

That's like saying you see the sign that says stop in the color red that means stop and you have been told repeatedly what stop means but you don't know what to do.

It's there in black and white in the article in great detail and spelled out so the simplest person imaginable could understand it.

Re:For those who don't know ...

[lovelaceAtWork]

And she's a big Science Fiction fan to boot!

Yes, she is quite the sci-fi fan. Enough that she performed at Endercon this past weekend for free. I was actually at that concert and she mentioned her article there. I believe her exact words about copying/downloading were "It's your legal right. Don't let them tell you otherwise."

Re:For those who don't know ...

[PatientZero]

In her article, she stated that when she puts up mp3s of a song, she sees an increase of her CD sales of all off her albums, past and present. Thus, shutting down the sharing of music costs her money, plain and simple. Read the article next time (duh) and you'll have you answers without having to chew on your foot.

Re:For those who don't know ...

[darkonc]

No "branded" is quite appropriate. It matters not whether the branding was accurate or not. He would have had no opportunity to clear his name. The effect is the same on both innocent and guilty.

Besides -- being sympathetic to communism is not a crime. Neither is speaking about one's thoughts about communism and/or capitalism (remember the first amendment?).
Things like advocating the violent overthrow of the government would be a crime, but only the most radical communists advocate things like that. -- of course, the same things could be said about laisez-faire capitalists, on the right wing.

Re:For those who don't know ...

[Hack Shoeboy]

And the FBI following, watching, and logging the activites of some of the communists they managed to "brand" was not a crime either. Nobody said that this guy was detained or anything.

Some choice quotes

[Olinator]

[T]he music industry had exactly the same response to the advent of reel-to-reel home tape recorders, cassettes, DATs, minidiscs, VHS, BETA, music videos ("Why buy the record when you can tape it?"), MTV, and a host of other technological advances designed to make the consumer's life easier and better. I know because I was there.

The only reason they didn't react that way publicly to the advent of CDs was because they believed CD's were uncopyable. I was told this personally by a former head of Sony marketing, when they asked me to license Between the Lines in CD format at a reduced royalty rate. ("Because it's a brand new technology.")

[...]

You can't hear new music on radio these days; I live in Nashville, "Music City USA", and we have exactly one station willing to play a non-top-40 format. On a clear day, I can even tune it in. The situation's not much better in Los Angeles or New York. College stations are sometimes bolder, but their wattage is so low that most of us can't get them.

[...]

If the music industry had a shred of sense, they'd have addressed this problem 15 years ago, when people with websites were trying to obtain legitimate licenses for music online. Instead, the industry-wide attitude was It'll go away. That's the same attitude CBS Records had about rock 'n' roll when Mitch Miller was head of A&R. (And you wondered why they passed on The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.)

[...]

The industry has been complaining for years about the stranglehold the middle-man has on their dollars, yet they wish to do nothing to offend those middle-men. (BMG has a strict policy for artists buying their own CDs to sell at concerts - $11 per CD. They know very well that most of us lose money if we have to pay that much; the point is to keep the big record stores happy by ensuring sales go to them. What actually happens is no sales to us or the stores.) NARAS and RIAA are moaning about the little mom & pop stores being shoved out of business; no one worked harder to shove them out than our own industry, which greeted every new Tower or mega-music store with glee, and offered steep discounts to Target and WalMart et al for stocking CDs. The Internet has zero to do with stores closing and lowered sales.

And for those of us with major label contracts who want some of our music available for free downloading? well, the record companies own our masters, our outtakes, even our demos, and they won't allow it. Furthermore, they own our voices for the duration of the contract, so we can't even post a live track for downloading!

"You go, girl!"

It's interesting to note that this is not someone who could be dismissed by an RIAA flack as a no-name musician whining because the Internet might get her recognition that she's not gotten from "The Industry" -- she's had nine Grammy nominations, and her music has been recorded by just about everybody at one time or another.

Ole

Re:Some choice quotes

[Anonymous Coward]

If the music industry had a shred of sense, they'd have addressed this problem 15 years ago, when people with websites were trying to obtain legitimate licenses for music online

Who had websites in 1987, four years before the HTTP protcol was invented?

Re:Some choice quotes

[Pont]

If the music industry had a shred of sense, they'd have addressed this problem 15 years ago, when people with websites were trying to obtain legitimate licenses for music online. Instead, the industry-wide attitude was It'll go away.

Um, the web is only about 10 years old.

Re:Some choice quotes

[Anonymous Coward]

The web is 13 years old (started by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989). Closer to 15 than 10. Though no one was trying to obtain music licenses from web sites that long ago.

Re:Famous songwriter and artist?

[eyegor]

That may be true. But her point about music downloads increasing sales (even for forgetable artists) is true.

Most music out there is utter crap. I've been burned badly so many times by buying discs by highly-hyped, but untalented "artists" that I'm almost afraid to buy anything.

Enter the Internet.

Now I can preview music and give it a test drive. Do I find a lot of crap? Yep. And I don't buy the discs, nor do I continue to listen to it.

BUT... I do find a fair amount of good stuff and do you know what? I actually BUY the disks. Really!!

I have 20 - 30 CDs full of MP3s that I've downloaded from the 'net and about 1200 CDs that I've purchased from the store (approx 250 since I've been "stealing" music from the Internet).

Are there people who just download the music and never buy a disc (effectivly stealing the music)?

Yes..

They need to pay for the music they listen to in order to reward the artist for producing it. Otherwise, why should the artists continue even trying?

Things need to change. The record companies need to lighten up and people who download and listen to the music need to get some ethics and pay for what they use.

My 2 cents.

Several reasons

[jhines]

The first batch of rewritables I got could only be read on some computers and not others.

CD-R is a more universal platform.

And the media is cheap and un-reliable enough, why not one time use it?

For perhaps daily backups in business RW media is ok, but for any kind of archival sitation, read only is actually prefered.

The media is cheaper as well.

Please send me spam and viruses (virii)!

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it!
Office1000367a12@bahraimail.com
cristosalva@hotmail.com
onlinepitboss@hotmail.com


Thanks!

great article, one small flaw...

[sootman]

As an alternative to encrypting everything, and tying up money for years (potentially decades) fighting consumer suits demanding their first amendment rights be protected (which have always gone to the consumer, as witness the availability of blank and unencrypted VHS tapes and casettes)...

One word: Macrovision.

Re:great article, one small flaw...

[shepd]

Good point, but at least is isn't illegal to bypass Macrovision.

Why Courtney Love doesn't worry about piracy

[sjonke]

Her talent died in 1994.

Union

[cmdr_forge]

I think the people in the industry that want free downloads should form a union that supports....oh wait thats RIAA suppose to be..damn

An interesting article about record companies

[gowen]

and their competency with money, written by a minor popstar, appeared in The Guardian this weekend.

Maybe the distribution of cd sales is the problem

[bmf033069]

The article is very good and brings up a point that I have been seeing in my latest cd purchases. I haven't bought a top40 cd in a long time, but now that there is greater access to music online, I'm buying many cd's from bands I have never heard of previously.

The number of cd's that I have bought has gone up, but they aren't any of the one's that are being promoted by these companies. I really wonder if these count in the sales numbers or not...

Here, Here

[mangr3n]

Amen, I'm not an artist, but I feel for the artists, the stuff I've seen and read convince me that real artists (as marginal) as you may think they are, are getting f***ed by the Recording industry. Unless your a megastar you only get money from your shows... Bottom line without exposure you don't get sales, or concert attendance to grow... The RIAA is trying to force a tighter stranglehold onto the marginal artists by forcing all music to come through them, but they're going to create (if they haven't already) a large underground music scene, where the quality (non-commercial) artists will go.

Re:Here, Here

[duck_prime]

Amen, I'm not an artist, but I feel for the artists, the stuff I've seen and read convince me that real artists (as marginal) as you may think they are, are getting f***ed by the Recording industry.

Excuse me, but...

Aren't the music downloaders the ones who are really exploiting the musicians? At least the labels pay the musician something for every CD sold.

There are those who say, "sure, but after downloading the music I went out and bought X albums". It doesn't matter. It's still theft, even if you have normal transactions in the future.

Have people become slaves to expediency? You should not download music for the same reason you don't hack into someone's server:

You don't have permission It's just not something you have the right to do.

Since this was well thought out, researched and ..

[burgburgburg]

written, it will be promptly vilified by the RIAA and NARAS (and the MPAA because they always like to attack anyone/anything that might peripherally affect them), but mainstream media will ignore it because it isn't as sexy a story as "pirates on the Internet" (Arghh, matey). Oh well, I shouldn't let facts get in the way. The industry doesn't.

sing it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

everything is free now
that's what they say
everything i ever done
gonna give it away

someone hit the big score
they figured it out
now we're gonna do it anyway
even if it doesn't pay

i can get a tip job
gas up the car
try to make a little change
down at the bar

i can get a straight job
i've done it before
never minded working hard
just who i'm working for

every day i wake up
write a new song
but i don't need to run around
i can just stay home

sing a little love song
all by myself
and if there's something that you wanna hear
you can sing it yourself

--

Give It Away
Gillian Welsh

How could you miss this one?

[drew_kime]

We'll turn into Microsoft if we're not careful

Wow. Anti-RIAA and anti-Microsoft in eight words. The girl can write.

RIAA are the real pirates.

[uncoveror]

Many artists understand now that the RIAA are the real pirates. "I made you a star. YOU owe ME!" has been repeated like a mantra by recording company leeches. Fans, not the leeches, make artists stars. Boycott the recording industry. Don't buy CDs.

A better deal for the less well known artists

[MikeDw]

My hope is that internet distribution will enable
artists who are being ignored by the record companies
to get their work known.
Part of the problem with the recording industry, is that it is
obsessed with the million-sellers. If you don't
sell that many, you're regarded as a nobody. The
internet distribution system could make it viable for
a small or part-time artist to get their work
distributed economically. It could also give the
music fan a wider choice

Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

1. She wouldn't have a career at all if it weren't for the exposure she got on major labels in her early years.

2. The major labels are being facile if they ever pretend to care what happens to the Janis Ians of the world. Those are the artists they're losing money on. What they really care about is what happens to the Britneys, because that's where the bulk of their revenue is coming from. But the money Britney earns them is their fund for giving other artists a chance. If downloading cuts into Britney's sales (and that seems quite possible to me), it will lead to "marginal" artists getting dumped and fewer getting signed in the future. No exposure, no career. Make a list of all the successful professional musicians who have succeeded without any major-label help. Kind of got bogged down after Ani DiFranco, didn't you? So yes, until there's a viable promotion infrastructure outside of the current major labels (and efforts at this are underway), downloading can hurt the Janis Ians, and the aspiring Janis Ians, despite her simplistic observation that incremental downloads aren't currently costing her anything.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[uncoveror]

Janis owes nothing to the labels. You are still believeing the "I made you a star" lie that record companies have been telling artists since the invention of the phonograph. They are leeches. www.dontbuycds.org

Re:Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

So go ahead, give me a list of musicians who have built viable professional recording careers without the major label help you say they don't need.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[Soko]

Well, I'm feeding a troll, but now I have a nice little rant to e-mail people on why the RIAA shouldn't get into the Technology and Law business. Here we go... *dons Troll feeding suit*

1. She wouldn't have a career at all if it weren't for the exposure she got on major labels in her early years.

Nice theroy. Proof please? .......... Thought so, troll.

2. The major labels are being facile if they ever pretend to care what happens to the Janis Ians of the world. Those are the artists they're losing money on. What they really care about is what happens to the Britneys, because that's where the bulk of their revenue is coming from. But the money Britney earns them is their fund for giving other artists a chance.

That's that's a major problem with our "culture", O Large Ugly Green One, when how much money an artist makes a corporation takes precedent over how good they actually are. Taking away my freedoms to protect the musical Pablum from Brtitney? Again, Mr. Troll, you've got your priorities seriously screwed up. Nice tits != Good Music. (No, I know how to spell her name. Think about it.)

If downloading cuts into Britney's sales (and that seems quite possible to me), it will lead to "marginal" artists getting dumped and fewer getting signed in the future. No exposure, no career. Make a list of all the successful professional musicians who have succeeded without any major-label help. Kind of got bogged down after Ani DiFranco, didn't you?

No kidding. Look, I don't wear a tin foil hat or anything, but if you think for one minute that an artist who gets popular on the 'net - without being in a record labels stable - would get any further than that, you're crazy. I'm sure that the RIAA has more than a few A&R people scouring the web for new band that might get popular without needing them. If they let that happen, it would prove just how ridiculous the RIAA's current business model actually is. That's why, troll - Ani DiFranco is the "One That Got Away". Rest assured that there will be others as well, once artists figure out that with the Internet, a CD maker and a bit of exposure, who needs the RIAA?

So yes, until there's a viable promotion infrastructure outside of the current major labels (and efforts at this are underway), downloading can hurt the Janis Ians, and the aspiring Janis Ians, despite her simplistic observation that incremental downloads aren't currently costing her anything.

Other than bandwidth, what, pray tell, are those downloads costing her? You said yourself that the record companies don't care about her, so why should she care about them? Putting up with 30+ years of RIAA Bovine Fecal Matter would not lead to a simplistic opinion. You'd rather trust Brtitney to inform you of what goes on? Now, that would be a simplistic opinion.

I'd better stop feeding you, Mr. Troll, since you're likely already ben stuffed full of RIAA platitudes and pure bullshit. Go away.

Soko

Re:Janis is missing two points

[Erasmus Darwin]

Amen. She seems to completely miss the point that free downloads are exposure at a cost, where the cost is the opportunity cost of having the music available for free (i.e. lost sales since the songs in question are already available).

In her case, there's no question that the benefit of the exposure (180 CD sales) exceeded the cost having the songs out there (almost nothing, given her obscurity). Unfortunately, it's naive to automatically assume that this extrapolates to any circumstance.

Does this remain true for an already well-known/pop artist? Maybe, maybe not. On one hand, quite a lot of people are already getting bombarded with the artist's work via the radio, MTV, and even TV show soundtracks. On the other hand, there's a definite reinforcement value in that when you're in the store, you're more likely to remember the name of that artist who's mp3 you listened to quite a few times.

Does this remain true for the case where the entire album is available as an mp3? This is even less likely to be true, as the "free download" is rapidly approaching the value of the album. You'll still have people who want to "support the artist", but you've now got a business model that relies on the willingness of your customers not to cheat the system. That's not a very good business model.

Fortunately, getting an entire album off the P2P services currently requires quite a bit of effort. However, I honestly believe that we're just a few engineering tweaks away from achieving it. Pick and choose the best of the P2P features seen so far, throw in freenet's anonymity, and create a wrapper file to keep an entire album together as a continguous chunk -- BAM! You've just negated a lot of the unique value of a retail CD.

As it stands currently, I've already seen people distribute (via non-P2P means) collections of multiple CDs by a single artist, all encoded at a decent bitrate. It's really only a matter of time before it catches on.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[PMadavi]

On your second point:
Even if downloading does cut into Britney's sales, what is it that we're going to lose? Enirique Iglesias? Mandy Moore? How about the Goo Goo Dolls? Music that is good will most likely come from an independent source. Why? Because good music is art and recording companies are not interested in producing works of art, they are interested in making money. Thus, the lowest common denominator is catered to.
Also, other bands that have had success without initial major label help: Remy Zero, Ash, Soul Coughing, They Might Be Giants (best band ever), Tom Waitts, The Neilds, and Moxy Fruvous. Are they the most popular bands in the world? No. Are they succesful in their own right, and have a strong and numerous fan following? Yes.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

OK, so "troll" now means "person who has thought about the situation for longer than thirty seconds". I agree with you that the RIAA are assholes, and top-40 is crap, I'm just trying to explain why the major labels are right to be worried for themselves, and to point out that "minor" artists stand to lose their record deals or not get them to begin with as a trickle-down result of whatever happens to Britney et al.

As for proving that Janis Ian wouldn't have a career without her major-label time, obviously I can't run an alternate timeline in which she writes the same songs but just mails them to friends on cassettes, but the near-total absence of counter-examples (famous musicians who got famous without major-label support) is pretty suggestive.

As Janis almost realizes in this piece, the currency major labels deal in is attention. Sony can get songs not just onto the radio, but into movies, played in supermarkets, used in commercials, etc. They buy exposure. "the Internet, a CD maker and a bit of exposure" is all you say an artist needs. The exposure is the hard part. Without it you're working a day job and feeling lucky when putting a couple free MP3s on your band's website leads to selling 180 of the 2000 CDs you had made.

What several groups of people are trying to do, as a result, is create music-promotion companies that are run by artists, with contracts structured for the benefit of artists. Someday, maybe these companies will be able to compete with current major labels, the artists will flock to them, and the RIAA will die a long-due death. But not soon, and don't be too surprised if in the process of defeating the major labels these alternative companies become them.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[TheWickedKingJeremy]

So go ahead, give me a list of musicians who have built viable professional recording careers without the major label help you say they don't need.

You dont seem to understand... Those artists you hear on the radio are propped up by the recording industry... They are simply "selected" based on marketing decisions... They are constructs.

So naturally - You could listen to the radio/MTV for the rest of your life and never hear an artist who has "built a viable professional recording career without the major labels help" - because it is the recording industry which is choosing to play these particular artists. Your point is... well... pointless.

This article was about the Internet, and how it has a chance to change all of that... Whether you think this is a "Good" thing, or whether it will actually happen is not my concern... I for one would absolutely love to see the day where a band that I like comes out with a new album online, but "suggests" you electronically give them 3-5 bucks via credit-card over the web... That is 3 dollars profit that they would not have seen while enslaved to the industry. It would go directly to the artist.

As for the "exposure" that the industry gives artists... You are correct - but only with regard to about 1% of the LUCKY ones... Artists like Limp Bizkit, Britney Spears, etc, are given massive exposure and are force-fed to the public, thereby creating a "successful" career almost by default. Again, they are constructs. But don't hold the rest of the music world at gunpoint so the industry can prop up a few contructs and sell at top-dollar.

Finally, for what its worth, virtually all of the music I now listen to was introduced to me online. I am at the point that I cannot even imagine the days when I used to listen to the radio/MTV crap... I thought I liked and appreciated music then - now I realize I had no idea what real music was, or how wonderful it could be... and I am scared to death of the day that I will no longer have access to them.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

Remy Zero were on Geffen, which counts as "major" in my book. Ash's debut was on Reprise, Soul Coughing started on Slash (distributed by Warner), TMBG have been on majors for more than a decade, Waits got his start on Asylum, Moxy Fruvous were on Velvel (itself small, but started by major-label veterans). These are exactly the sort of artists that might suffer at the other end of the major-label squeeze. Even the Nields, whose story seems to have more Ani-ness to it, have benefited from the resources of Razor & Tie and Zoe, both of which exist somewhere in between the majors and random people with CD burners.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

Yes, that's my point, the major labels are creating their stars. I'm not endorsing this system, I'm just observing that it's very entrenched and very hard to fight. I don't listen to the radio, either, and you'll be hard-pressed to find anybody who knows and supports more commercially-obscure bands than I do. But very few of them stand to make a professional career out of producing music.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[TheWickedKingJeremy]

Make a list of all the successful professional musicians who have succeeded without any major-label help.

Already responded to this in other post...

So yes, until there's a viable promotion infrastructure outside of the current major labels (and efforts at this are underway), downloading can hurt the Janis Ians, and the aspiring Janis Ians, despite her simplistic observation that incremental downloads aren't currently costing her anything.

But what other "infrastructure" is required, other than being a fan of a particular genre? Say, as a generic example, I liked techno music... By sharing music with other fans of the genre, I would quickly and easily be introducted to a myriad of techno artists - all of which I can virtually guarantee would NEVER have been played on the radio, or otherwise "exposed" by the industry. By then attending shows and concerts, I would be contributing to the artist and helping them earn a living. Not sure if you are aware of this, but most artists get their money from fans attending shows - not from buying albums.

I find it absurd that you are arguing against music-sharing on the basis of artist exposure - when music-sharing is virtually the only exposure 99% of artists get! The entire industry could easily revolve around file-sharing and fans going to concerts - the RIAA and the rest of the industry no longer serves a point! What about this is eluding you?

The ONLY ones who would suffer under this new system would be the 1% of artists who would have been selected and propped up by the industry (e.g. Britney)... Under this new system, she would be forced to get by on the merits of her music - in other words, no more Britney... Sounds great to me.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[TheWickedKingJeremy]

I'm just observing that it's very entrenched and very hard to fight. I don't listen to the radio, either, and you'll be hard-pressed to find anybody who knows and supports more commercially-obscure bands than I do.

Glad to hear about your tastes in music - but I disagree that the industry is difficult to fight.... On the contrary, you are "fighting" just by doing what you are already doing - not buying into industry crap. Ill go one further and say not only is the industry very easy to fight, but its already losing! Average radio-listening times have fallen an estimated 10% in just a few years... People are getting sick of the industry, and rightly so... I think their days are certainly numbered.

But very few of them stand to make a professional career out of producing music.

This is probably true - but in what other types of art is it not? Most of humanity's best painters died penniless... Have you ever heard of the term "starving artist?" While I certainly do not think artists should be made to starve - quite on the contrary. :) But I would certainly hope that the artist enjoys what they are doing enough to warrant the effort, while at the same time making an adequate living. Keep in mind that I am not saying take money out of music altogether - I am simply saying lets give a smaller amount to the artists themselves, instead of a larger amount to some big fat corporation.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

OK, now I'm just repeating myself, but I'll try one more time: The 1% are not the only ones who might suffer. Those major labels who aren't paying Janis Ian any royalties? They paid for her to make her albums in the first place. They bought her studio time, paid her producers, and probably even paid her a royalty advance. Her saying she doesn't get any money from one additional CD sale is only one part of the balance sheet. She's been paid, and arguably more than her output turned out to be commercially worth. She had opportunities, paid for by others, that a precocious 15-year-old today might not get, because the people that would have given it to her are spending their time and energy trying to figure out how to copy-protect the next Britney album.

I'm not saying that the RIAA are justified or sane, I just don't believe music-sharing is going to lead any kind of populist revolution. Little self-contained subgenres existed before Napster, and will keep existing no matter how many variations on Napster get shut down, but very few of the musicians working in them will make livings that way. It that bad? Is it OK if music turns into an entirely amateur/semi-pro enterprise pursued by people whose livelihoods come from other jobs? Perhaps not, but that's a different debate.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[robkill]

Amen. She seems to completely miss the point that free downloads are exposure at a cost, where the cost is the opportunity cost of having the music available for free (i.e. lost sales since the songs in question are already available).

Check out some of her other articles in Performing Songwriter. She is very aware of record sales, exposure, and the interrelated cost. For artists who don't sell millions of CD's, the biggest source of revenue is touring, unless another artist has a mega-hit with a song you wrote. The cost of exposure via downloads is worth it if it means larger attendence at concerts.

Christine Lavin had a great article on the cost, and why it was worthwhile in Billboard. She has a copy of the article here at her website

Re:Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

People are sick of the pop-star industry? You and me, maybe, but millions still seem quite taken with it. Maybe radio-listening is falling, but I bet TRL-watching has more than compensated.

And when you're doing your payment accounting, don't forget all the money "big fat corporations" spend on getting albums made. 1000 people paying an artist $5 each, directly, may not even cover the money the artist already spent on studio time. To state the converse of what I said in another reply, just because an artist makes a tangible amount on an incremental sale doesn't mean they aren't losing money overall.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[TheWickedKingJeremy]

The 1% are not the only ones who might suffer. Those major labels who aren't paying Janis Ian any royalties? They paid for her to make her albums in the first place. They bought her studio time, paid her producers, and probably even paid her a royalty advance.

I am aware of this argument, but do not think it even comes close to justifying the RIAA's existence. The guy sitting next to me (a network engineer for a small business) has made two CDs for his band... They covered the expenses of recording and printing themselves, and I can honestly say the quality of both the sound and the print is as good as an industry-backed CD. It simply isn't that expensive anymore - hell, computers are even allowing people to do a lot of this right from home! Not to mention that the distribution costs of electronic files (once created) is virtually nill...

I just don't believe music-sharing is going to lead any kind of populist revolution.

I agree, and as a general rule I do not throw the word "revolution" around lightly... But I will smile if I no longer have to pay a greedy industry any more of my hard-earned dollars and can instead give it to the artist themselves.

... but very few of the musicians working in them will make livings that way. It that bad? Is it OK if music turns into an entirely amateur/semi-pro enterprise pursued by people whose livelihoods come from other jobs? Perhaps not, but that's a different debate.

Ok, we are just not going to see eye to eye on this... What I am proposing would give equal, if not more money to the artist... I do not want to take a cent away from them - just the coporate industry.

Other branches of the art world do not operate in this manner... Painters, for instance, create a portfolio of work and then attempt to get noticed... perhaps by a gallery-owner who would agree to split profits, or something as simple as designing a menu for a local resturant, etc... You don't see corporate backed painters with sky-high production costs and producers, do you? Does this mean the world of "painting" is suffering because it is some kid with a copy of Photoshop versus some corporate-backed Yanni-look-a-like with a paintbrush?

Any artist worth their weight in salt would and should be able to make a comfortable living doing what they do - My sole argument is that the RIAA need not be part of the equation, at least not any longer.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[pmc]

but the near-total absence of counter-examples (famous musicians who got famous without major-label support)

Let's see: J. S. Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Dvorak, Verdi, Puccini, Offenbach, Wagner, and so on. There are hundreds (thousands!) of famous musicians who became famous before the record label was even invented.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

I'd love to believe that any decent musician should be able to make a comfortable living making music independently. But that really does not appear to be the case. Ask Ani DiFranco how "comfortable" her relative success has been. You're going to need tens of thousands of fans to support you, and making tens of thousands of fans is hard enough that most people won't ever manage it, no matter how good their music is.

I'm with you on declining production costs, though. If there's a revolution coming in the music business, I suspect it has next to nothing to do with file-sharing, and a lot to do with more musicians having the sense and resources to fund their own recordings, and then sign distribution deals under much more advantageous terms. We'll see.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[Anonymous Coward]

And you missed a major point. The reason that the record companies are needed is because they keep the barriers of entry so high.

But technology has dropped the barriers of entry to nickles and dimes. The record company oligarchy is, while more powerful than ever, perversely more anachronistic than ever, too.

--Haisan

Re:Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

Yes, patronage by the nobility is another viable economic model. It has kind of fallen out of use since the examples you cited, though. And it wasn't much different than the major label model in spirit, anyway.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[Anonymous Coward]

she would be forced to get by on the merits of her music

Well, she could get by on the merit of her body. I would be very willing to pay 50$ for half an hour with her... alone... The only thing I would reuqest, is her to shut up.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

The main barrier to entry is not the cost of production, it's the cost of getting people's attention, and technology hasn't changed that and never will.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[PMadavi]

Touche'. However, while TMBG has been on major labels for a decade, but have been producing albums for roughly 2 decades. I believe they started in 83. The first time I heard of Ash and Soul Coughing was through a friend's independant music magazine, but that doesnt mean too much. The first time I saw Soul Coughing live was in a broke-ass theatre in NYC, with obviously very little funding thrown at the show/tour.

I think the point I should have pressed was that I heard of all these artists through means other than the typical manner (i.e. music industry radio/MTV). And the people who introduced me to this music had been exposed by their friends, rather than mass media.

Honestly (and especially now more than ever, what with the internet and all), I think that musicians really don't need a big music company to become popular, unless they plan on having a meteoric rise. Take Remy Zero, whose first album, Twister, did squat in the marketplace, but by the time their second album came out, got huge returns from the fans. Mostly because of play on college radio, MP3, and word of mouth. TMBG used Dial-A-Song to get their music out there.

Much of this, I believe, should be based on how artists want to do things. I think it's wrong that artists feel that in order to make a living they have to sign with large companies who will dictate the way they go. It just seems wrong that a few record companies should dictate (and entirely on their own terms) the futures of so many people.

Anyway, I've got the blabber mouth right now, and could go on an on about how all those bands I mentioned still don't get radio play, and still make the majority of their fans based on word of mouth and the internet. I've known people to rent studio time and make pretty impressive CD's by themselves, I've known them to distribute these CD's, and in the case of Josh Ritter, even get widely popular in places like Ireland, so unless you want to be a megastar, I just don't see what the record companies have to offer.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[Chris Johnson]

Um, no.

You have to succeed on your own initiative before a major label will get behind you.

Period.

Ask Metallica- few bands ever worked harder to get in a position to get signed. They may have worked so hard that they've been paid royalties- Janis Ian has never been paid one cent in royalties over her entire career.

Which raises the question, if you have to succeed on your own initiative in order to get signed and do serious tonnage of shipped CDs, but you won't get paid even if you do, then what is the point? Is it really all about wanting to play star for a month or a year? Is that enough? How hosed will you be when the month or year is up and the record company is not 'behind' you (if indeed they ever were)?

Re:Janis is missing two points

[TheWickedKingJeremy]

I must confess I have very little knowledge about Ani DiFranco - either her music or her financial situation... But if she has tens of thousands of fans I would suspect that she *should* be more than able to live comfortably... If she got even five bucks a pop from only 20,000 fans , thats already 100,000 bucks... (and I suspect she has a lot more than 20,000 fans willing to give her 5 bucks) ... Add to this profits from live shows, t-shirts sales, etc and you more than cover the production costs (which cost my co-worker a paltry 3 grand for a quality recording!)

Then again, MC Hammer made millions and is now broke - How they spend/manage their money is not my concern.

Also, keep in mind that any struggles Ani DiFranco has to contend with is not entirely relevant to my argument, given that she is operating in a still-RIAA controlled music industry, and hence I am sure it is much harder for her... My argument is, for whatever its worth or lack thereof, based on a musical industry sans the RIAA.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[pmc]

Ah - moving the goalposts.

Chopin made his living primarily through teaching and performing. J.S. also made his living primarily though performing: violinist, organist, and conductor. Mozart, contrary to what you would believe from seeing the film, lived most of his life as a freelance composer and performer: his piano concertos and Don Giovanni were all freelance pieces. Dvorak also made his living through private teaching and composing (winning of competitions as opposed to patronage). Offenbach - guess what - he made his living though composing (mainly for the theatre) with no support from patronage. Puccini - he composed opera on a commerical basis (and became rich doing so). Verdi - strangely enough he was paid by the La Scala opera house to write operas. Wagner - he as also wrote operas commercially.

None of these famous musicians were supported to any degree by patronage - they all worked hard to develop a reputation and then were paid (sometimes well, sometimes not) to perform their trade - either teaching, composing, or conducting (or a combination).

The most notable difference (and what really blows your argument out of the water) is that nobody gets patronage from the nobility until they are famous. Mozart, probably the one on my list that got most, was already famous before any nobility ever came near him. So here we have a list of musicians who became famous without major label support (or any substitute you see fit to drag in). They became famous because they were talented. And that is completely different in spirit to the record label model.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[Grunschev]

I suppose it depends on what you call "viable". If you mean they can support themselves and their families for, say, a decade or more, there are thousands. I'll start you off with a short list.

Trey Gunn
Bert Lams
Hideyo Moriya
Paul Richards
Matt Seattle
Fernando Kabusacki
Curt Golden

Now, if by "viable" you mean "earning millions and retiring by age 30" or "so famous everybody recognizes their names" this would be the wrong list.

Igor

Re:Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

You're pretending you were serious? And it was me that got accused of being a troll? I meant a current musician, one who has prospered completely outside the major-label system during the period of history in which the major-label system has existed. And not a classical musician, a soundtrack composer, a music teacher, the leader of a wedding band or a military bugler. I mean a person who has had a successful musical career of the same type as a major-label signee, but without any major-label connections.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

I don't know where you've been, but there are plenty of examples of musicians signed to major labels on the basis of demo tapes or less. See, recently, Vanessa Carlton or Avril Lavigne.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[pmc]

As I said, you're moving the goalposts, from "Musician" to "Someone who is a member of an incredibly small subset of musicians that I haven't actually defined but every time you find a counterexample I'll change the definition so that I'm still right."

Not content with redefining your definition of musician, you have redefined what they need to have done to satisfy you: from "famous musicians who got famous without major-label support" to "one who has prospered completely outside the major-label system during the period of history in which the major-label system has existed". Which is a fairly substantial change.

In reply to your original definition acts like Genesis (originally Charisma), Pink Floyd (originally Harvest), REM (originally IRS Records) all became famous without the help of a major label.

Now, watch you don't hurt your back dragging your goalposts back under your bridge.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

King Crimson had major-label distribution for their early albums, without which Discipline Global Mobile might never have existed, so these people still aren't the examples I'm looking for.

Re:Janis is missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

We started from Janis Ian and Ani DiFranco, from which you jumped to Chopin, so I don't think I'm moving goalposts so much as trying to get you back on the right playing field. Ani is a very clear example of an independent musician with her own label building critical and commercial success. Genesis, Floyd and REM are not. IRS, for example, was distributed by A&M from its inception.

Re:Famous songwriter and artist?

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

case in point:

went to see movie "Rock Star". heard song "Colorful" by "The Verve Pipe". went home, powered up my favorite P2P App. downloaded "Colorful". listened to it, liked it. went to OLGA and downloaded the tab and learned it. liked it. went back to said P2P App and downloaded a few more "The Verve Pipe" songs. liked them. went to "Barnes and Nobles" and bought "Underneath", latest "The Verve Pipe" album. listened to it a couple times. liked it. went to "The Verve Pipe" web page and checked out their tour schedule, made plans.

have I ever heard "Colorful" on the radio? no. will I ever? probably not. did being able to get "Colorful" for free keep me from buying the CD? far from it, being able to get the song for free is the SOLE reason I eventually bought the CD. and I had a CD burner and all the MP3s for the album already.

Al Sharpton

[Anonymous Coward]

Reverend Al Sharpton, say what you will about him, is extremely sensitive over racial issues that impact blacks.

He came out in this as angry about anything, defending those Jackson attacked.

The problem for MJ is that his music is bad, and people also shy away from it since he has a reputation for raping children.

I suggest a letter writing campaign...

[Dark Nexus]

No, not to the RIAA.

No, not to Congress/Parliment/whatever your country has either.

That's been done, and frankly, won't do any better now than it did then.

Boycotts won't work well either. They'll just blame it on piracy anyway.

No, I suggest letter writing to the ARTISTS.

If you decided to buy a CD or go to a live show by [insert artist here] after sampling some of their music, but wouldn't have before, let them know! Most bands have websites, with ways to send email to them. Send one letting them know that they got MORE of your money thanks to your being exposed to them through free downloads.

Maybe, just maybe, if enough people do that, then more artists will step up to argue against the RIAA claims that piracy is hurting artists.

Consumerism will kill US Tech Economy

[skcalanderson]

This rampant need to turn all computers into "delivery systems" is going to kill the US tech. Eventually most of the world will stomp all over this country. No more innovation, no sir. You might steal some music or 'gasp!' a movie. That cannot be allowed to happen. So they will kill anything that threatens the big corporations that own the government. You nasty little hackers, lurking in the playground shadows!

Re:Consumerism will kill US Tech Economy

[stalker88]

"Eventually most of the world will stomp all over this country."

good. screw this country. i'm physically leaving a nation quickly turning into a fascist third world country. ashcroft, the RIAA, and the unelected bush administration with a cabinet of millionaires is making it more blatant what has happening for half a century - that living within borders of a nation has nothing to do with quality of life anymore. the net is changing all that. locate p2p networks offshore, and let the RIAA do their thing. they can't take the whole world to court.

Leftwing myths

[Anonymous Coward]

"So they will kill anything that threatens the big corporations that own the government."

You have been listening to Ralph Nader too much.

Here's one big reason I P2P

[derekb]

'cause I'm an idiot!

Before P2P I must have bought Joshua Tree about 4 times on CD and now I lost it again!

But I have backups - mind you only at 128k. I can build it without having to re-buy the CD I lost.

Not something to be proud of, I suppose

Janis Ian is Project Gutenberg's 3001 entry

[pjones]

http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext02/sochi-REA DME.txt

Janis Ian's "Society's Child" is Project Gutenberg's etext
#3001 (the lyrics) and #3002 (sound files).

The lyrics are short (shorter than the Project Gutenberg header,
unfortunately), and are in sochi10.txt or sochi10.zip

The sound is in 4 different formats, made from the same digital
audio source tape:

sochi-high.mp3 MP3 file, no degradation
sochi-med.mp3 MP3 file, slightly reduced sound quality
sochi22.wav WAV file at 22kHz
sochi11.wav WAV file at 11kHz

** These are copyrighted files, including the sounds and the lyrics!
** Please read the header in sochi10.txt or sochi10.zip before
** redistributing them.

The lyrics are Copyright (c) 1966 Taosongs Two (BMI) Admin. by Bug
The musical performance is Copyright (c) 2000 by Janis Ian

Thanks to Jason Moore and IBiblio (formerly Metalab) for creating
the digital files. Thanks to Janis Ian for donating these files for
distribution by Project Gutenberg.

The machine and software used to create the MP3 and WAV files was:
- Power Mac G4 running at 500Mhz
- Yamaha DSP Factory DS2416 sound
- Bias Peak and Media Cleaner Pro software

Re:Famous songwriter and artist?

[Anonymous Coward]

Piss on you!
I grew up listening to punk rock and 80's new wave and I even know who Janis Ian is! I guess that since she doesn't write hate rap or pop-ish dance beats you don't care, eh?
...fucking loser

Janis Ian

[Anonymous Coward]

I found out about her through Napster. I was going through a song list (on one of the TV music sites), downloading random songs, found "At Seventeen," copied it, and liked it. Before that I had never heard of Janis. Doubt I'll ever buy a CD, but I may go to a concert at some point.

Frank Zappa

[SerpicoWasTaken]

I recently picked up Frank Zappa's autobiography (The Real Frank Zappa Book) and he had a chapter on failure where he listed all the ideas he had that never took off. One of those ideas (and this was back in the 80s) was to have record companies sell albums using using modems connected directly to home recording decks. His theory was they lose the overhead of packaging and shelf space and would be able open up the industry to new artists (who no longer had to compete for shelf space with more well known people). In addition, there was no concept of out-of-print, and people could get better sound fidelity rather than recording of your buddy's crappy LP. While this probably has little to do with the article, I found it fascinating that this guy was thinking about delivering music directly to people well before Napster and all its clones. Further proof that the man was a genius

Re:Frank Zappa

[gowen]

Good point. As I remember, he also said that traditional record sales wouldn't be as badly affected as some suggest because people liked the "fetish and fondlement" value of the original packaging, a point repeated by Janis Ian.

Also he wrote :

"I never ate shit on stage. The closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in North Carolina"

I miss him.

You are way off base dinotrac

[maynard]

I don't know "sirslud", but if you take at face value what he wrote in his comment your reply reads simply as flamebait. By painting him as a "20-to whatever moron..." instead of dealing with the content of his post you only damage the credibility of your argument.

He's a musician. I know many professional musicians eking out a meager living off of live performances who will say much the same thing the previous poster wrote, as well as what's in Janis Ian's essay. This music industry is destroying the incentives to "innovate" just as Microsoft -- through their anti-competitive tactics -- has destroyed the very market they feed from. Piss in the communal soup pot and you get the soup all to yourself; of course may taste like piss but it's all yours!

It may seem counterintuitive, but to an undiscovered musician giving out product for free makes the best marketing sense possible. It's a loss leader for the profitable live performance market. That few musicians -- even those signed on label contracts -- make money from CD sales is further proof of a disincentive for musicians to follow the RIAA's lead and break free. Ani DiFranco is a great example of how a talented musician is better off producing and distributing their own music because of onerous and exclusionary recording contracts, ridiculous accounting methods, and blatant payola on radio. It's more profitable for the individual artist to give away selected tracks. This is a real financial incentive from the bottom up, which may be bad for the monopoly positions of the major record labels, but is very much to the benefit of individual artists.

Cheers,
--Maynard

Re:You are way off base dinotrac

[dinotrac]

"20-to whatever moron..." instead of dealing with the content of his post

The moron comment was completely fair in response to his "40 year old morons" I don't like being called names any more than you or he does (even though I'm actually closer to a 50 year old moron).

As to responding to the post, I did.

My response was simple:

Reviling the recording industry doesn't pay artists. If you read my post, you saw that I have no conceptual issue(maybe a few legal and moral issues) with piling the entire record industry on a bonfire and soaking it with lighter fluid.

Artists should have the right to sign deals with folks who will handle distribution, publicity, etc, if that's what they want to do. However, the music industry isn't taking artists on as clients, with an obligation to serve their interests and abide by their wishes. It steals from them and treats them as chattel. This is more than wrong, it's criminal. Musicians continue to be bonded in much the way athletes were held before the Curt Flood case opened the floodgates. Musicians need their own Curt Flood, that's for sure.

I agree that artists would do well by giving away some music. Teasers are a great way to attract buyers. I just think that the decision of whether to give something away, when, what and how should be at the musician's discretion.

I don't see how musicians are helped by a world where anybody can take as they please without regard for those who created it. Who's ripping you off matters less than the fact that you are being ripped off.

As I said, positive suggestions for taking care of musicians are a desirable thing. Mere statements that "record companies suck, so I'll take what I want" don't help a soul.

Re:You are way off base dinotrac

[SirSlud]

I am in fact a 24 yr old moron. :) As stated in one of my other plies, I just wanted to incite, because I wanted to know peoples age, and their opinion. Sorry about that.

> I just think that the decision of whether to give something away, when, what and how should be at the musician's discretion.

I dont, and I'm a musician. I never want to have that control. If I ever fight for it (maybe some record exec will buy my ethics with $$ some day), do whats best for you, I, our neighbours, and fight me from getting it. I dont like this whole 'author should be allowed to be a control freak' thing. Art, culture has *never* benifited from additional control placed on the artist, and almost the opposite - the freer we are in taking, interpreting, borrowing, etc art, the more rich our culture and art becomes.

Now how to artists get paid? Easy. People want to pay them. If the artist is good enough, enough people will want to pay the artist. It's quite simple. We dont believe it, because nobody wants to volounteer their money to McDonalds or Nike. Well, they are comapnies, and they dont touch people's lives in the same way artists do. If you listen to yourself, you're advocating that no gallery charging a cover would ever use glass front windows - cause you and I could just view the art from outside! Suckers!

Seriously, its pathetic - nearly everyone I talk to talks about how they volounteer their dollars to the artists that deserve it; well wake up, people, lets get some self confidence going. The ethical folks far outweigh any serious damage the cheaters could incurr on my viability to make a living. It's the industry, as you pointed out, that needs to be taken out back and shot.

All this control stuff simply arises because technologies allow artsits and distributors to use that technology to tip the scales in terms of selling or pushing this or that. Stop pushing, let people pull, and you'll discover that while we might have less rich Celine Dions, we'll have hundreds more local musicians able to make a living from music.

As countless others have said, social solutions, not technological ones. We might feel the world is packed with cheats, but this is mostly thanks to the commercial success of anti-establishement acts (basically, the subversion of counter-culture by companies) .. much of the message that sells is "Fuck this, fuck that, steal this ... get whatever you can so long as you dont get caught." It's the message that sells, but it doesn't change the fact that it simply does not gel with the human condition, or we would have cheated each other out of existance centuries ago.

To sum it up: the artist does not, has never, nor ever will/should have technological control over his work. To give the artist this control might *sound* like a good short term solution for a troubled industry (and get the consumers onside with this argument, hook, line and sinker), but it is simply not good for the state of culture and economics. Scientists also need to balance control over their reasearch with an indeptedness to share it. If we let scientists have the sort of control the RIAA is seeking over music, sure, a few scientists would get richer in the short term, but the scenitific progress of the last century would grind to a halt (although the nostradamus in me says that this is exactly what will happen.)

Re:You are way off base dinotrac

[dinotrac]

>As countless others have said, social solutions, not technological ones.

People doing what's right is better than technological solutions and better than legal solutions. The Hollings/Disney/whomever crap that folks are stirring up is an abomination.

Of course, if people always did what's right, we wouldn't need courts, police or armies.

I believe that artists have a moral claim on their own creations: but for their energy and vision, the creation would not exist.

Understand, however, that this moral claim does not prevent an artist from saying "Hey, I don't want the burden of this. Take it, it's yours." IE: putting their work directly into the public domain. In a way, you can have the best of both worlds. Don't agree that musicians need some control over their work? Give yours away and prove your point.

The more I think about it, the more I like my bonfire idea. I have a feeling that a lot of interesting things might happen if we could get those folks out of the picture.

Who knows? Someone might even prove (not conjecture, not philosphize) me completely wrong. I don't like to be wrong, but this is one of those places where being wrong means the world's a little better place than I give it credit for. As a father with three kids, that's the kind of wrong I would love to be.

Re:You are way off base dinotrac

[SirSlud]

>Don't agree that musicians need some control over their work? Give yours away and prove your point.

I do:

here

Guess what; I've made money from my music. Even though you can get it for free! I must know some awfully hippy people, huh?! Oh no wait, I forgot, they're humans, and they like to pay people. Not all, but I dont care. Why should I? We all scam the system where we judge it to be okay - the fact that these systems could not exist if we all, one day, scammed the same part of the system is what proves that it can never happen. Doubly so when it comes to culture, which humans will never be without. Demand for culture is intrinsic and eternal.

>I believe that artists have a moral claim on their own creations: but for their energy and vision, the creation would not exist.

Aha, but for not the music art and culture that artist injested (and no artist could *ever* afford all the art and culture they need to be exposed to to gain a sifnificant and useful context from which to create and extend the state of the art), neither would they be an artist. If you think any given musician could afford to pay every single musician for every single piece of music s/he listened to or had on personal media, you are very very very much mistaken.

Take Beethoven. He used to 'steal' (we'd call it that today) 2, 3 straight _bars_, _right_ from other composers songs. Verbatim. He was a genius. He got paid. The composers he 'stole' from got paid. Everyone lived, everyone went home happy-ish. Disney wouldn't have had their masterpieces were it not for public domain works. I've said it a million times: the information should be free. Culture, art, etc experiences absolutely amazing results during the time of the least control mechanisms over published works, and the insurgence of participation in the market that results from this allows the 'semivoluntary' purchasers to support the artists. Again, everyone goes home happy, unless you're a greey jerk who mistakenly claims its his right to make money off every single little incidence in which one's work is used/viewed/listened to/re-interpreted.

Re:You are way off base dinotrac

[Pig Hogger]

Musicians need their own Curt Flood, that's for sure.

To lose the case? No thanks! What they need is more Rick Bouchers!!!!

Re:You are way off base dinotrac

[Lemmy Caution]

It seems a little me-too-ish to chime in "I wish I had mod points now," but - I wish I had mod points. Your insight into the fluidity and shared nature of creative inspiration - and the resultant constipation of culture that springs from denying it - is absolutely right on and completely overlooked by the Intellectual Property Uber Alles crowd. There are, in fact, very few original ideas. Most creativity comes from reframing and recombining that which came before.

Open artistic cultures are better then closed ones. You've stated it well. Bravo.

Re:You are way off base dinotrac

[Anonymous Coward]

> Who's ripping you off matters less than the fact that you are being ripped off.

WRONG! That is SO wrong. I can't even think about how wrong that is. That's like saying frivolous lawsuits are OK, or that it's OK for the IRS to overtax everyone because hey they didn't write the tax laws, congress did! The "who" is VERY much important because it implies the legal rights or abilities of the victims to protect themselves (who the *real* victim is is yet another matter).

For instance, the best example is probably Napster. Did they really condone or promote piracy? NO, absolutely not! They provided a service that let user X communicate and transfer stuff (files, PICS, MP3s, whatever) to user Y. It is the USER who ultimately is responsible for the *content* of that transaction and who has the intent to defraud. If the user used PGP encryption or similar how could Napster even remotely possibly have knowledge of any wrongdoing?

If I burn an illegal copy of my favorite CD and send it UPS to a friend in another state does anyone think that UPS going to be held accountable for the content of that package? They were paid money to be the "mule" to transport that illegal item so surely they must at the least be an accessory, right? Not! It would be entirely my responsibility for commiting the crime, and possibly the recipient of the package for receiving the "goods". The same example proves true for the Unabomber. Was the USPS or whomever he used to ship his letter bombs held responsible? No, even though they were directly involved in the deaths of several people (if the packages had not been delivered, the people would not have opened them...yadayada).

So if the user is the criminal then why didn't the RIAA go after the true culprits? D'uh, how many millions of file swapping users are there??? How expensive would the legal fees be and how time consuming? It made more financial sense for them to use Napster as the scapegoat. And they wouldn't want to alienate millions of potential customers now would they? This is one example of the RIAA picking the right "who" to screw.

I think Napster set the WRONG example, it may end up killing off a good technology, and it doesn't in any way address the issue of paying artists for their work that the RIAA hides behind like a spoiled child behind mommy's skirt. The only thing that was addressed was the intent of the recording industry to protect their distribution channel, and thereby defend their cash cow from perceived looters (e.g. *us*, the consumer, because heaven forbid our attention should be distracted by the economy or being able to preview new stuff for free instead of just writing them a check).

The true victim being ripped off was Napster and all of the employees that now collect unemployement because of the inability of the little guy to defend himself from the raving lunatic giant. (And hey, as a working stiff aren't I paying someone's unemployment? So now I've been ripped off by the RIAA too!) I'm absolutely sure that if instead of the RIAA some other private company without congress in their pockets and without a bottomless coffer had tried to file the same legal suit it would have had a much different outcome.

It's the same as the frivolous lawsuits I mentioned at the start...it doesn't matter right or wrong, if someone big enough has a grudge you may as well save the headache and surrender before they litigate you to death. So yes, sorry for the long winded example, but the "who" is very much important because it's not always a level playing field (and I don't mean the band -- grin!).

Personally I think both artists AND consumers have been the victims of the recording industry for decades. Not only do they make every effort to own the artist's soul, but have CD prices budged? Ever??? I was dismayed to say the least in the handling of the price fixing and price gouging investigations into the recording industry. Considering the cost of goods is less than $1, and the artists are lucky to see more than a nickel per CD, what the hell do they have to complain about? (And there in lies the rub, since distribution is almost all gravy!) And Columbia House tries to make it sound like they are doing you a favor by waving the shipping on a $17 CD??? But that's the subject of another tirade altogether! ;-)

Cheers,
TC

Re:You are way off base dinotrac

[dinotrac]

I have to sadmit that your response totally confuses me.

I don't remember coming out in favor of frivolous lawsuits and I've certainly never defended the record industry, Fritz Hollings, Jack Valenti or any of those other prize toads.

I merely said that, if you are being ripped off, the fact that you are being ripped off is more important than the identity of the people ripping you off.

I have trouble seeing how that is a controversial statement. And I really have trouble seeing the connection with your post.

Can you enlighten me as to what it is I'm missing?

Common, but false, belief...

[Anonymous Coward]

"That nothing will change though. There is simply TOO much money at stake here--but its the same old problem with the RIAA and friends..."

Well, I think actually, correct me if I am wrong, that people are basically suggesting a new type of business model, and the RIAA is saying, 'How about we keep the old one?"

I don't think either you or I can say for sure that this new business model will make LESS money for the industry. And, well, according to the article, cross-marketing opportunities are HUGE. So I think it is probably that the new way will be MORE profitable for the industry as a whole.

But, perhaps, the "too much money at stake" is really directed at cutting 2 million dollar salaries to $200,000, and giving the other 1.8 million back to consumers and artists.

The ratio between volume and profit is what really matters.

KPH

Ozzy!

[ShavenYak]

I don't know, but I have this great mental image of Ozzy biting off Hilary Rosen's head.

Re:Ozzy!

[questionlp]

It looks like User Friendly has a series of strips, starting here that you may like. Forward a couple days more... the worst thing that could happen to man-kind... mini-clones of h.r053n.

Re:Ozzy!

[ShavenYak]

That's $#*&! hilarious! I had never seen that cartoon before making my comment - it was just an obvious thing to say given the mention of Ozzy and the topic at hand.

Re:Ozzy!

[questionlp]

Maybe we can also line up Jack Valenti and Hollings right after h.r053n... I would definitely pay to see that... so long as none of it goes back to the MPAA or the RIAA monopolies.

So how are sales of the Beatles ...

[Anonymous Coward]

...back catalogue doing for him anyway?

My heart bleeds. Not.

This seems DIFFERNT from Courtney Loves speech....

[jsimon12]

Janis Ian seems to embrace giving away free music on Napster and such. Stating that it sold more records when some of her songs were downloaded off Napster. On the other hand Courtney Love seems to say that since the record companies are screwing the artists out of money that the artists should sue Napster and Gnutella. Whoever wrote the post for /. didn't seem to read past page 1 of Courtney Love's speech.

The truth is....

[Psx29]

The music/movie industry executives actually believe that a lot of money is being lost, Bill Gates continues to seek more control over everything and aspect of your life. All it's about is greed and control. I think we are really looking at a major problem in society that has never been fully realised as it should be. Greed and the lust for Absolute Power are still very real things.

Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

It's a cover up!

[rberton]

The primary reason for the RIAA's position is not the hurting of record sales. After all, when Napster was up record sales were up significantly, as well.

The real reason is that record companies spend a lot of money on generating one hit song and a persona to go with it. If you delve beneath the surface of the album (listen to any other song) you will realize it's a piece of shit and the jig is up. The record companies survive on the top 40 radio songs that convince people to buy the album because the song is so catchy, knowing full well that the rest of the album is crap.

Like any sales practice (including software), it's about vaporware. Any movement to shed some light on the "product" would be squashed by any company.

Can you imagine Microsoft or Oracle allowing people to sample snippets of source code before they buy the product? That'll be the day.

Re:It's a cover up!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Can you imagine Microsoft or Oracle allowing people to sample snippets of source code before they buy the product?"

Apples and oranges. A better comparison to letting people see the source code would be the record companies let you listen to the raw MIDI tracks used at some point in the mixing process.

Yeah but Mike was being a dickhead

[Anonymous Coward]

Michael Jackson has been firing shots at Sony for months now because his last CD sucked rocks and he can't accept that he's done. Sony pumped money into it and no one (relative to his former glory) wanted the record. What can you do about that?

Last thing I heard he was playing the race card and the most interesting part about it was that he actually did so against a guy who is apparently friends with Al Sharpton. When Reverend Al thinks you are out of line playing the race card then you've gone too far.

Al's the King when using race to your advantage is concerned and he thought Mike was way over the edge.

I'm so tired of this debate....

[Eric Damron]

There are basically three sides to this issue:

1. The music industry's that want to control music so that they can maintain their high profits. They don't care about the artists or the fair use rights of individuals.

2. The internet takers who want no controls over music so that they can get what they want without paying for it. They also don't care about the artists or about the law in regards to the rights of the copyright holders.

3. The people in the middle who believe in fair use rights but also know that for good or bad, sharing copyrighted material without the copyright holders permission is just plain stealing.

I fall in the third group. The fact is that if an artist decides to disseminate his music to which he has not already signed the rights away, over the internet for free he has every right to do this and it is perfectly legal to so. However, it is also a fact that the copyright holder has the legal right to decide how his work will be disseminated. It is also important to realize that the artist isn't always the one who controls the copyright. If he has sold the copyright to the recording industry then he has further say in the matter.

The fact that the recording industry is an evil empire is irrelevant to the issue of music stealing.

So, the bottom line is be responsible. Share only the music that you have been given permission from the copyright holder to share.

Re:I'm so tired of this debate....

[Anonymous Coward]

Limitations on how those copyrights can be signed away from the artist (sign here or no one will ever hear you) need to be limited by legislation. No open-ended contracts, no arbitrary regections of albums, minimum royalty percentages, etc. Until the publishers start dealing fairly with the artists I don't see why the copyright holders (publishers) should expect respect from the consumers. They won't play fair until they are hit right in the wallet.

Re:I'm so tired of this debate....

[Eric Damron]

'Until the publishers start dealing fairly with the artists I don't see why the copyright holders (publishers) should expect respect from the consumers. They won't play fair until they are hit right in the wallet.'

They don't deserver our respect and they won't change unless they are forced to do so. So if you want to hit them in their wallet then don't buy their products.

However, we are a nation of Law. It is a corner stone of our way of life that the Law is above any individual. Breaking the Law is never a legitimate way of protest.

I know some people will say "But the many laws were created by lawmakers who were bought by corporations to serve their own purposes." They are right in this assertion.

However, we still must work through the system to effect change. We can vote out the bastards that enact laws that only serve the corporations.

All it takes is a lot of public interest.

Re:I'm so tired of this debate....

[tryfan]

> 3. The people in the middle who believe in fair use rights but also know that for good or
> bad, sharing copyrighted material without the copyright holders permission is just plain
> stealing.

This is simply not true. Although I've seen quite a few posts like this on /., I've yet to meet a real person with such a view.

The people I know (VERY regular, VERY law-abiding people, VERY in the middle - not like me) don't think of it as anything else than a commodity. They dl a lot of music, and they also buy a lot of records.
Actually, they dl everything they can find that's free, but they also buy loads of stuff. If anything, they're amoral - morality just don't come into it.

Re:I'm so tired of this debate....

[Eric Damron]

Of course there are exceptions to every rule. But I believe the people you are talking about are in the number 2 category. They'll download everything they can get for free and buy only what they can't download.

As far as morality goes, I never mentioned it.

How about a SlashDot P2P Survey ?

[tomatobasil]

Maybe we need a new \. survey ? Something like "Do you use P2P services :" a> to steal, b> to shop, c> because I'm broke, d> for porn videos only, e> I don't, f> to spread warez .. etc .. Or update the old one if this has been done.

RIAA protects the Whales

[e2d2]

From the article: "Who gets hurt by free downloads? Save a handful of super-successes like Celine Dion, none of us. We only get helped. "

I think this is exactly why the RIAA doesn't care about the tiny musician that consistently makes and sells music, but never hitting the astronomical numbers that Super stars like Celine Dion hit. Just like a casino can stay open because of the money it brings in from entertaining rich players that spend millions in a weekend (aka whales), the music industry looks for musicians that appeal to the broadest possible market, selling such high numbers that all others are ignored.

I could be wrong but I would like to see any person's perspective that views the music industry as anything other than greedy slicksters trying to milk talent for all it's worth. Their self serving image precedes them and predates this entire argument.

Exactly what they are afraid of....

[sbillard]

From the atricle... Free exposure is practically a thing of the past for entertainers. Getting your record played at radio costs more money than most of us dream of ever earning. Free downloading gives a chance to every do-it-yourselfer out there. Every act that can't get signed to a major, for whatever reason, can reach literally millions of new listeners, enticing them to buy the CD and come to the concerts. Where else can a new act, or one that doesn't have a label deal, get that kind of exposure?

The RIAA (et al) needs to limit consumer choice for thier own protection. It can't accomodate (read "control") the number of artists that gain popularity via internet. Not only that, but has anyone noticed the 101 "college bands" out there with a very similar sound. It feels (and sounds) very structured and manufactured. NOT the way rock-n-roll was meant to be. I can't stand the radio anymore. Its the same 15 songs over and over all damn day. Over half of those song have the same 3rd eye barenaked goo goo creed sound. Man...Funk that. That was a very good, very lucid article. The internet has excelled at cutting out the middle man in many cases. May the RIAA be the next to fall - for the greater good of artists and music fans alike. Although with thier lobbying power, the only thing that can beat "big money" is "bigger money".

Re:Famous songwriter and artist?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said!

Another religious debate

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate this topic, since it turns into a religious debate every single time, with people on both sides very selectively citing facts and figures and drawing their own conclusions.

Honestly, how many people here have bought music after first hearing it or something else by the same artist via an mp3? I bet a lot. And how many people here continue to listen to some illegal mp3's without buying a CD to get legal and support the artists? I bet a lot. And how much overlap is there between these two groups? You get one guess...

In other words, this is about as gray as gray areas get. Trying to cast is as either "file sharing is pure evil that will destroy the music industry" or "filesharing is free advertising so shut up and enjoy it" is just plain inaccurate, not to mention intellectually lazy.

You forgot one...

[burris]

Again, from personal experience: in 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money. So I make the bulk of my living from live touring, playing for 80-1500 people a night, doing my own show.

We hear this again and again. The vast majority of artists never see a dime from their "royalties." Artists say they don't want to be reduced to playing on the street because they can't sell albums from the comfort of their homes, but that is pretty much the way it is and has always been.

burris
"I wanted a profession that didn't require my physical presence." - Kinky Friedman, commenting on his decision to become a novelist.

Re:Famous songwriter and artist?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit on you! Have you ever listened to her songs? I mean "listen", not hear, you prick head!
Have you even seen her perform? Give some air to your teeny music world...

It's good for clear skin smiles...

[rholland356]

Janis Ian? What's she recorded lately? Is it worth downloading?

The internet is a last-gasp haven for faded stars. How else would these ppl have a voice that anyone would listen to, if it weren't for clever fan sites and file sharing?

RH

Re:It's good for clear skin smiles...

[WebMasterJoe]

The internet is a last-gasp haven for faded stars. How else would these ppl have a voice that anyone would listen to...

Um... do you realize the irony of what you just wrote?

Re:It's good for clear skin smiles...

[Anonymous Coward]

"...Last gasp haven for faded stars..." That's the sort of idiocy I expect from someone who thinks that dominant pop culture is all that matters. If an artist had one or two popular hits years or decades ago, what's wrong with them using the net for connecting to their old fans and making new ones? You sound like a kid who thinks old people don't (and shouldn't) have sex.

... both honest enough to not steal, yet smart ...

[dpilot]

There's an old adage about, "trustworthy people trust others, and untrustworthy people don't." I suspect it may apply in this case. They *know* they're taking both consumers and musicians to the cleaners, and expect no less than the same treatment from both, given the option.

They're trying to remove the option.

Re:You are missing two points

[schon]

1. She wouldn't have a career at all if it weren't for the exposure she got

But her point is that NOBODY needs the record companies any more. Or are you suggesting that because the record companies made someone famous (and made 100x the money their 'stars' did), that they should be immune from the laws of economics?

2. The major labels are being facile if they ever pretend to care what happens to the Janis Ians of the world. Those are the artists they're losing money on.

You missed the biggest point of the article: the record companies are not losing money on her or any other artist. The recording contracts are set up so that the only way a record company will lose money on someone, is if the artist stops recording, declares bankruptcy (or dies), and nobody every buys any of their material.

In any other case, the record company can't lose money, because the artist's contract says that they must pay back every expense the record company incurs.

Re:This seems DIFFERNT from Courtney Loves speech.

[gelfling]

What Ms. Love was saying is that the distribtion medium doesn't change the way the artists are NOT compensated anyway. Even if CD's were a buck or even free it wouldn't change the rigged game that is engineered to pay artists nothing and record companies everything. Her point was that legally speaking, if you CAN sue anyone it should be Napster because your rights are already tied up in the record companies.

15% -- damn good results for direct marketing

[Reziac]

From Janis Ian's excellent article:

"When Napster was running full-tilt, we received about 100 hits a month from people who'd downloaded Society's Child or At Seventeen for free, then decided they wanted more information. Of those 100 people (and these are only the ones who let us know how they'd found the site), 15 bought CDs."

Anyone else notice this is a 15% successful direct sales rate? ANY marketer would be thrilled to have a 2% contact rate, and delerious with joy if only 5% of those contacts made a purchase. 15% is a solid testament to the power of "free samples" as a sales technique. Try the MP3, buy the CD.

BTW I had no idea she was such a good writer. There are lots of well-considered articles on her site, on all manner of topics. Gotta spend a day there sometime soon!

Re:15% -- damn good results for direct marketing

[darkonc]

BTW I had no idea she was such a good writer. There are lots of well-considered articles on her site, on all manner of topics. Gotta spend a day there sometime soon!

From the information of an earlier poster: Her father was able to repeatedly get teaching jobs despite being branded a 'communist' by the FBI and having his employers harrassed by them on an ongoing basis.

This indicates that he was

• a free thinker
• a good teacher
• as likely to pass these abilities on to his daughter as his students.

Re:15% -- damn good results for direct marketing

[Reziac]

Good points. And obviously his daughter was a good student!

No mirrors yet?

[WebMasterJoe]

I have posted a mirror of the article at http://www.birdlandmedia.com/archives/000021.html. The article can be freely distributed, provided that you link back to her site. I'm keeping a copy of it for reference - and since I design web sites for musicians, I can direct them to the article if they are wondering about whether or not they should provide free music downloads.

The benefits of online music...

[Hyped01]

While the RIAA may not be happy with online music, the truth is many artists (due to the idiocy in the record industry) are turning to the 'net to get their albums out.

Here many musicians are doing it and meeting with increasing success without selling their souls. For instance, Greg Thompkins has a great Jazz Quartet that has 5 of their songs online and an album for sale. Their site has just recently went up, and it's already gaining them exposure they hadnt had before.

The record companies will spout off a dozen different reasons why online music should not be, but quite simply, the biggest reason is, as with Greg, Sony and gang don't receive a penny from them. They lose control as well. No profits, no control, no nothing. Thus, they aren't happy, and it's that simple (and something they will keep fighting till someone finally forces them to stop).

Who can force them to stop taking this "witch hunt" to the levels they want? I dont know - but I do hope it is soon - before music on the 'net becomes illegal.

- Rob

Re:The benefits of online music...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's great that there are musicians like Greg Thompkins using the internet to thier advantage, but this needs to be done on a record company level if it's to become the norm. It ultimately has to be cheaper and more convenient than buying a CD if it's to become a major distribution model and not just a marketing afterthought. People who have never heard of Greg Thompkins aren't going to wind up at his site unless they stumble across it while browsing related artists at Sony that they're already familiar with. Besides, depending on how the contract is written up, Sony or (insert major label here) may get the same cut from an internet download as they do any other means of distribution, even though there's less overhead on the part of the record company.

More opinions, information, links for those interested:

http://www.niki9.com/save

Re:The benefits of online music...

[Hyped01]

Hi!

Do you work for Sony? I hate to say it but your post is the biggest piece of bull I have seen - no disrespect intended.

I host dozens of sites, and do you know how the people out there find artists like Greg? Well, if it were for an artist like Greg, you'd search for "jazz" or "sax" or something similar. No Sony involved.

Greg's site wont be indexed in all the search engines for another 2 weeks, yet he's already getting an increase in hits via search engines, and people picking up simple 1/2 cent flyers left out at various venues.

Also, if the record companies take over/push Internet distribution as Sony is trying (already has their own initiative for it online, part of why the Napster suit took a turn for the better last spring), then music would still be all pay for, and the artists (as is still the case with Sony's new initiative) still get nothing or close enough to it that it doesnt matter.

Soon, our company will have music kiosks in numerous local music stores (not big chain stores, but small ones, that seem to do far better in our area), a couple dozen musician sites and an online database of musician resources that will be growing daily once it's online. Betcha Sony wont be happy... I'd also bet you that when our efforts and/or that of others like WebMasterJoe get overly noticed, Sony will find a way to insinuate that what we do is illegal as well or damaging or some other nonsense... much like MS trying to make Open Source Software illegal and pointing out all the "damages" open source causes.

Re:The benefits of online music...

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, no, I don't work for Sony, or any other label for that matter. And my intent was not to imply that the *only* way for musicians like Greg to get any attention is to rely solely on a major label. Believe me, I'm all for artists taking more direct control, but the fact of the matter is that companies like Sony have the advantage of already having the attention of millions and millions of people who might like to hear Greg's music. For each of us who proactively search for new music we might like, there are thousands more who take a more passive role and find new artists when they see an ad or hear a song on the radio. Both labels and artists could stand to benefit from working with people like you and WebMasterJoe rather than against them.

The issue of who gets paid how much would of course stand in the way of that, as artists are usually severely undercompensated by major labels, but that's another rant entirely. To stay on the subject of artist popularity and exposure: it depends on the artists' priority. If they want to make their music available to people who take the time to look for it, no, they don't need Sony at all, and more power to them. But if they want to put themselves in front of as many eyes and ears as possible, it's still companies like Sony that have the means to do it.

Re:You are missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

A record company can easily lose money on an artist. That's the way the system is set up: the record company fronts the money for making and promoting the album, and gets paid back out of the proceeds. If the proceeds never equal the costs, the record company has lost money. Just because the incremental revenue from a CD sale goes 100% to the record company doesn't mean it's profit. If the accounting is done fairly and correctly (and I'm not saying it is), then if an artist isn't getting royalties it's because their record never did make back its costs. Major-label artists may be getting ripped off, but they're also getting to make albums in real studios with real producers and go on real tours they never could have afforded or arranged on their own.

The Bottom Line

[smartfart]

It's not about the artists, and it's never been about the artists. It's only about the record companies and how much money they can make.

It's not about the fans, either. Ok, so this may be flamebait, but so what. I'm pushing 40 and I've got an opinion, just like everybody else.

Fans are stupid. How much does a Britney CD cost? Around $17 these days? It's stupid to pay 17 bucks for $artist's CD. The record companies make sure that there is a steady crop of new artists and new songs by both new and old artists on the radio (and as stated earler, the radio stations and Clear Channel, etc. have their own finger in the pie), and everybody rushes out to purchase the newest CD by $artist. It's rigged, and few people understand that. Everyone is out for your money. I guess I could make the same argument about movies, too.

I'm not advocating "stealing" via napster, etc., I'm simply saying that fans are being fleeced. If the fans said "enough", the industry would up and die inside 12 months. It'll never happen, though. However, the insatiable desire for entertainment was one of the things that brought down the Roman Empire.

Think about it.

non-top-40 format

[MrFredBloggs]

"You can't hear new music on radio these days; I live in Nashville, "Music City USA", and we have exactly one station willing to play a non-top-40 format"

I know how she feels. I went into my local shopping centre the other day, trying to locate some blank betamax tapes - nothing. I also tried to get a commodore 64 so I could check out some prehistoric games - zilch. And could I find an 8-track machine to play the tapes I got cheap in a jumble sale? Could I fuck!

So much for the so-called free-market. They`re quite clearly just trying to make a profit by selling what most people want to buy. Its a bloody outrage!

Re:non-top-40 format

[adewolf]

How could you know what everybody wants when the RIAA et al are telling us what we want.

Alex DeWolf

Re:non-top-40 format

[MrFredBloggs]

"How could you know what everybody wants when the RIAA et al are telling us what we want"

They`re not telling you what you want, they`re selling you what you buy. I`m a big music lover - listen to it all the time. I must listen to a music-playing radio station for about 5 hours a year. Bugger all on that I like. (This is in the UK). Same with films (movies) - the stuff I like isnt on at the cinema (theater), I have to get it on video.

Janis Ian is a musician, so of course they arent going to play stuff she finds interesting on the radio, as professional musicians must make up 0.00001% of the market in wherever shes talking about. Just like there are no tv/radio programs about the sort of stuff that gets discussed here.

Re:non-top-40 format

[deanc]

I know how she feels. I went into my local shopping centre the other day, trying to locate some blank betamax tapes

You could, however, buy a top selling CD, like the soundtrack to Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? which boosted bluegrass music to the top of the charts. You won't find the "Bluegrass" station on the radio, however.

Furthermore, the entire point of the public radio airwaves is not so radio conglomerates can put out their most profitable "product," but rather to provide a wide range of options and choices to the local audience. That's why the radio situation stinks.

Re:non-top-40 format

[WNight]

It's not a free market in any fashion. There are a limited number of radio stations you can fit into the frequency allocated. They're all been assigned and are usually owned by the same few companies in all areas.

These companies are paid to play music by the record companies. Their entire program is basically a paid advertisement. The top 40 is simply a list of the 40 most-played songs; most played on the stations that get paid to play this music.

Some customer-feedback is used in determining the ratings. They aren't going to play a commercial that customer react badly to, but they also aren't going to play a commercial for a product they don't own. They manipulate the ratings to ensure that customers only hear their music, knowing that customers tend to buy only music they have heard samples of.

This is a monopoly. The airwaves are essentially controlled by the record companies, as are the distribution outlets and concert venues. The companies that control these resources make price-dumping type decisions, losing some money in the short term, to hurt potential competitors and/or force them to sign up for an exploitive deal.

This is the exact opposite of an open market, where all products are displayed and judged by a knowledgable consumer.

Re:non-top-40 format

[MrFredBloggs]

"You could, however, buy a top selling CD, like the soundtrack to Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? which boosted bluegrass music to the top of the charts. You won't find the "Bluegrass" station on the radio, however."

Thats because people dont want to hear bluegrass, they want to hear the soundtrack to "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou". If the soundtrack had been cajun music, the same people would probably have bought that.

Yes it is...

[Xebikr]

Isn't it illegal to use a technology that circumvents a copyright protection technology. It's part of the DCMA.

Slashdot interview

[Giggles Of Doom]

I wonder if it would be possible to get some questions submitted to a high ranking RIAA official from the Slashdot crowd. I for one would like to see some hard numbers on all the support they claim to be doing for the artists, amung many other questions I'm sure we can come up with. A nice direct line from the populace to the propagator free of flame mail, wild accusations, etc.

I hope her next concert will be slashdotted

[~roman]

I've never heard anything from her, but i am going to download something...

Ozzy?

[avoisin]

Perhaps it's just me, but I don't think having Ozzy Osbourne as a "spokesperson" for the anti-RIAA cause would be such a good idea ...

How does that make sense?

[jsimon12]

What will they gain by sueing Napster? Bankrupt a free route for advertising? All the sane information I have read says that Napster and things like it increase peoples awareness of music, introducing them to things they might have never listened to before and hence increasing albumn sales. "Ms. Love" is sueing the wrong party, sueing Napster won't get her more money, if anything it will get her less. What I am saying is sueing Napster because she can't sue the record companies for her lack of forthought in getting crappy record deal isn't going to fix her original problem.

Re:How does that make sense?

[gelfling]

no no her point was narrow. It was, if there is anyone at all you are legally permitted TO sue, it's not the record companies since recording artists have already whored away all their rights in a recording contract guaranteed to leave them broke. If you sign a contract that says "You can never sue me for any reason - you no rights no redress" well that pretty much says it all. It doens't make any sense to sue Napster because a) they have no money b) probably provide a benefit to the artist. But Hey - Craptallica sued their own fans, right?

Wierd Al?

[GuyMannDude]

A study compiled by the Yankelovich Partners surveyed...

Holy shit! You mean Wierd Al is doing music industry studies in addition to making music? Now that's diversification!

GMD

An Artist's Life

[Prof_Dagoski]

While I think your comment hits very close, it doesn't quite get the bulls eye. Say gold ring. Anyway, you have to remember that the dream of every artist in any media is to be able to devote themselve to their creativity. In a perfect world, an artist would simply create. People would buy art out of a sense of asthetic duty, the state would support them or what have you. Sadly, the world ain't perfect, and artists like everyone else have to make comprimises. A musican may have to think they have to make faustian deals with record companies. A writer may support their works of love through writing crappy genre fiction. And a graphic artist may have to make some easily consumable pieces of art. It's either that, and a whole lot of luck, or they have to have a day job. I know exactly one artist who leads an pure uncomprimised life. She scrapes by on shows, music festivals, and whatever part time job she needs to get. She lives on something like $12-15K a year. She won't ever be big. She knows that, but she gets just enough attention to get by. I admire her for leading that life, but I can't do it. Neither can the other artists(meaning here musicans, writers, and so on) I know. The rest of the bunch have day jobs to support themselves while they find that big break. The downside is that you lead a very sleep deprived, exhausted life that way. It's really hard for me, especially now that I'm married, to sit down and write for four or so hours every night after work, but I do it. I look forward to the big break I know is out there, and I'm heart broken everytime something fails to come through. That heartbreak alone is enough to lead an artist to cut corners and make deals that comprimise them.

Re:An Artist's Life

[Anonymous Coward]

not many REAL artists dream of a world where they are supported by people who are reminded of their esthetic duty at gunpoint by the State.

Bush was elected

[Anonymous Coward]

Bush was elected through the constitutional election process. The exact same process that elected Clinton and FDR (and Harding as well). He won the election fair and square. Get over it. Wishing it were otherwise does not make it so.

(In case you bring up the Supreme Court shutting down Gore's attempt to tamper with the ballots: the recounts afterwards, including the one Gore wanted, showed Bush won as well.

Free albums?

[esnible]

My wife and many of her friends work in the music industry. I don't know anyone who works in the industry who doesn't get free "promo" albums, often more than they can listen to, every month from friends, collegues, and their own employer.

Those records cost the artist money. Labels bill the artist for them -- and not the $1 it costs the label.

It's irritating to see people who get free music in a way that costs artists money complain about people who get free music in a way that doesn't cost artists money. Then those same industry people gouge the artists again by getting on the guest list for concerts then standing in the back of the club gossiping over the music I paid $20 to hear.

Re:You are missing two points

[Todd Knarr]

Not quite. The label doesn't get paid back out of the proceeds, they get paid back out of the artist's share of the proceeds. Say the artist is getting a 5% royalty, was fronted $20,000 to make the album and each copy sells for $15. Assume a 25% retail mark-up, ie. the label gets $11.25 per copy. Break-even is just short of 1800 copies. But the artist won't start getting a royalty at the 1800-copy point. They won't start getting a royalty until 26,667 copies have been sold, at which point their 5% has paid off the $20K advance. In between those sales points, the label is making a profit but the artist doesn't see a penny from it. The only way the label loses money is if the album doesn't even sell the 1800 copies needed to break even.

Any signed musicians out there, feel free to plug in actual advances and royalty rates. Yes, I've omitted any promotional costs the label might incur, but those come out of the artist's royalties too as I understand it.

History lessons

[starX]

I remember one of my history profs saying something about how in Elizabethan England (that's Shakespeare's time for those who want a frame of refference) the audience would pay for the shows after they were leaving, and if they thought it was worth the money. Now I say, what exactly is the problem here? There are plenty of good artists out there who churn out an excellent album once every few years, and for those, I am willing to pay. Then there are the okay musicians who churn out a good song or two once every few years, and for those songs, I am wiling to pay. Then there are the crappy artists who churn out a good song once in their lifetime, and I am willing to pay for that song. Since you can't usually listen to the entire CD before you buy it, I just go to P2P when I'm interested and check out the merchandise.

Why is the RIAA scared of this? Simple, it forces them to be more selective. So far, the marketing trends place quantity over quality, that way you can sell more records. P2P allows me to make sure I want to buy the album in the first place, and if I don't, I keep the songs I like, and will pay for them when there is a sane and stable system in lpace for doing so. Here, I excercise my ultimate power as a consumer, the ability to refuse to pay $20 for 3 or 4 minutes of audio, and P2P allows me to be able to make that informed choice. RIAA is corporate, so they naturally want the consumer to have as little freedom as possible. If these recording industry types just made sure that they were churning out a quality product each time, there would be no need for P2P, as far as I'm concerned.

Then again, if wishes were horses and all that.

Re:History lessons

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a sane, though I don't know how stable, way to pay for the MP3s you keep without having to fork over 20 bucks...

MusicLink: http://www.musiclink.com
They have a system in place where you can make "donations" to artists that are registered with them, and there seem to be a lot of different artists in thier database, and it's easy to do.

Save The Bands: http://www.niki9.com
They're trying to set up a similar system, only with more of an agenda. They do it specifically to voluntarily compensate artists for music that's downloaded via the internet or burned from a borrowed CD. Come August they'll provide the contact info where you can send an artist a check, and right now they're asking for feedback about which bands you want them to list and and suggestions for other initiatives they can start to help out bands that get screwed by record companies.

Everyone shoud...

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to her site, download MP3's *AND* buy her CD's from there. If enough folks from Slashdot and the rest of the net do both, the stats will be there that those who buy CDs and those who download music aren't mutually exclusive groups of people.

It's been a while since I heard "Seventeen" and I think I might be in the mood for it anyway now.

Music Publicly funded?

[adewolf]

Maybe an answer is to make music publicly funded?

Alex

No it isn't.

[shepd]

>It's part of the DCMA.

Well, unless you're talking about the Defense Contract Management Agency, its DMCA. :-) And that stands for (drumroll):

Digital Millenium Copyright Act

The DMCA only covers Digital media. NTSC/PAL/SECAM signals (which are the only ones that Macrovision is licensed for, IIRC) are all analog and therefore any devices designed to circumvent protection on them are 100% legal (unless its a scrambled cable signal -- but that is a different territory with a different act).

Not to mention that a Time Base Corrector will remove all Macrovision and serves an important purpose to broadcast studios (and it isn't Macrovision removal).

This is why it is 100% legal for Philips et al. to produce CD-to-CD Audio Recorders that can copy a disc more than once. After the first copy, further generations are sent through an incredibly accurate ADC-DAC stage thereby removing the copyright protection in the analog domain while still keeping a rather original sounding signal (that even an audiophile could enjoy). They did the same thing with dubbing DAT tapes, IIRC.

HTH.

Here's why dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

Because having generational copies of your data is important. Having copies that can't be erased unless the media is destroyed is important.

Maybe not to a little college puke like you, but to people who do real work yes.

And with the price of blanks at under a penny each, why would you not?

Re:You are missing two points

[glenn mcdonald]

The label gets paid out of the proceeds. The artist's debt gets discharged out of the artist's share of the proceeds. The mechanics of this depend very much on the exact details of the contract, but usually the record company will have more expenses than the $20,000 they gave the artist, and even in Albini's classic breakdown, the label only gets $4 for each CD sold, not $11, putting the label's breakeven point, in your simple example, at somewhere over 5000 copies. A lot of albums don't ever sell 5000 copies. (So who pays for them? Britney.)

Also, I certainly don't want to imply that the structure of the standard record contract, today, isn't insane. Why any rational person ever signs one, I do not know.

Government-controlled music

[Anonymous Coward]

We already have government-controlled (publicly funded) music. You'll find your favorite chamber music and operas on your public radio station.

Re:Famous songwriter and artist?

[chrisspurgeon]

Yeah, cocksucker, I've done all of that. Suffered through her one hit back in the day. Have "listened" to several of her albums. Saw her a few months back as a matter of fact, at a place called The Point in Bryn Mawr, PA. Completely fucking forgetable. Deal with it.

Wrong, wrong, wrong ...

[pyramid termite]

A company that doesn't have customers, or doesn't have enough customers to make it profitable, is dead. The corporate graveyards are full of companies that ignored this simple fact and went out of business. The shareholders or owners who insist upon being served before the company's customers often end up holding worthless pieces of paper, or selling at a loss.

Speaking of DRM...

[lunenburg]

The Technology Administration of the US Dept. of Commerce will be holding a public workshop on DRM on Wednesday, July 17, 2002. There are no details as to time, location, etc. on their site, but there is a public comment form.

So even if you can't do anything on the 17th, feel free to send the government your thoughts on DRM and its place in technology.

There's an essay on Books...

[JabberWokky]

She also has, on her site, an interesting essay on how the Baen Free Library has increased sales of SF novels. That fact is referenced in her essay, and linked below it. http://www.janisian.com/article-eric_flint-free_li brary.html Good reading. In the past 24 hours, I've read five really interesting, solid essays linked from Slashdot (some in the comments, and the one above secondarily linked). Now I have to stop reading for awhile, as I have to get work done. ;)

--
Evan

Funny Accounting

[wtoconnor]

Face it, letting people download your songs or books is another form of promotion. The real threat record companies are feeling is pressure on their control of distribution.

Downloading provides a realatively cheap means for independent artist to promote their own work without giving a cut to a middleman.

If you look at the lost sales as a promotional expense rather than theft while cutting out the middlemen, expensive promotional campaigns and packaging it might be that the artist just comes out ahead.

--American's in Support of RIAA

Who is the typical musician?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think part of the problem we have with discussing what is good for musicians is that we have such a bizarre view of who the "typical" musician is. The RIAA seems to equate "artists" with "celebrities", or at least with young wanna-be celebrities. But how about all the others?

• The lesser-known touring musician whose living depends on word-of-mouth and a worldwide network of fans and fellow musicians.
• The talented local player who pieces together a living playing weddings and teaching at the local community college.
• The pianist who plays at church Sundays and teaches kids during week.
• The computer programmer who moonlights playing in a blues band at the local bar on wednesday nights.
• The recent retiree fullfilling his childhood ambition by going back to school and learning to conduct.

To my mind, the local musicians, the teachers, the amateurs, are all more important parts of our musical culture than those few stars the record industry wants us to think about. What's best for them?

Re:..to look like Janet

[lugonn]

If you ask me, he wants to look like Janet. She has a little button nose and lighter skin tone. Jacko changed his nose and skin tone to match hers. It is so obvious.

Never heard of a skin disease that can turn your skin blotchy like that after adolesence. The only thing I've ever seen that can leave huge light blots on black skin is healed 3rd degree burns. But I'm also a high school dropout...so what do I know.

And is it just me or does Donatella Versace look like a bad sex change op.

Janis Ian's who you want to listen to, yes

[ianscot]

It's amazing how many times in this thread people have whined about Janis Ian being "obscure" or words to that effect. You'd maybe think a group of Web Geeks would be able to try a search or two, to start with.

This is a woman with something like nine grammy nominations in at least three different decades, from what I can dig up in a few seconds' searching. She's been a big star, first for a sort of social-issues breakthrough song about interracial love in the sixties and then with a more mainstream hit, "At Seventeen." She's become a "back list" artist, and then a decidedly niche artist. (She released an album more-or-less about coming out as a lesbian.) She's released albums in different styles -- country, pop, folk -- with different labels. Tons of her songs have been recorded by other artists. Basically we're talking about the classic singer songwriter, and one with more than the usual longevity, versatility, class, and eloquence.

Sounds like someone you'd maybe make an effort to listen to rather than trumpeting your own studied ignorance as if it renders her views meaningless. You think?

My hat is off to you, sir!

[Anonymous Coward]

" the western world's addiction to flash over substance appears to be ever increasing "

That was beautiful. In one phrase, a mere 13 words, you have encapsulated what has driven our superficial popular "culture" (i.e., popular: music, movies, television, books, advertising, Microsoft operating systems and applications, fashion, most internet content, fast food, the stock market's ills, and western politics) to it's current pathetic state.

I hope that you won't mind if I collaborate with you as follows:

"Always remember: the western world's addiction to flash over substance appears to be ever increasing. Live to feed and nurture that addiction in those who are or may become so addicted, for they are weak and cannot discriminate between benevolence and exploitation. Be as self-interested, greedy, unscrupulous, uncaring and ruthless as possible. Follow these guidelines and you will become fabulously wealthy."

We now have the essence of an entire MBA degree course, and the credo of big record companies, in a four sentence Buddhist-like admonition.

Much agreement

[maynard]

• Musicians need their own Curt Flood
• I just think that the decision of whether to give something away, when, what and how should be at the musician's discretion.
• I don't see how musicians are helped by a world where anybody can take as they please without regard for those who created it.

Agreed on all these counts. The issue is not whether IP owners have rights over the work they create (or own in this case) -- clearly the consitutional framers were right to include protections for inventors and publishers (which have morphed into our current copyright and patent systems). I don't suggest we should remove the traditional IP legal framework in place for the last hundred years or so kids can download free music.

However, the question is really: does the situation WRT personal copying warrant the kinds of changes suggested by Hollings, Disney, Sony et all in order to protect their market share? I'm all for prosecutions against commercial duplicators in violation of copyright laws, but the CDPTPA/SSSCA encryption schemes currently on the board will have (I think) a twofold outcome of both reducing music consumption (in much the same way taxation thresholds can reduce total government income either by increasing taxes beyond what is economically sustainable, or reducing taxes below what the economy can support) and decrease "innovation" by destroying incentives for artists to create. They will have created in law a mechanism to exclude competitors, thus having a government sanctioned monopoly on distribution. This can't be a good outcome for the music marketplace, or music consumers.

So, which is better for society all around? A few kids filesharing music (with the outcome of free marketing for individual artists), or a total corporate/government stranglehold on copying through autocratic and onerous new laws and technologies targeted against citizens? Why don't we just enforce the laws as they exist? And how different is this from what the Bush administration is saying about new regulation in the financial markets? If these businesses don't need the regulation, why is it necessary to regulate individual commerce?

Cheers,
--Maynard

A Simple Plan

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not saying this will change anything overnight, but if each time an article like this was published we sent a link to it with a paragraph stating our opinion to each and every member of congress, the idealist in me says that things will change for the better.

fear of photos or flashes?

[jcsehak]

I wonder how much of the camera nazi stuff was caused by being pricks about having their photo taken and how much was from getting sick of goddam flashes popping in their faces every 10 seconds.

Re:fear of photos or flashes?

[Anonymous Coward]

pretty much all of it, as they had signs that said (taking photos in the concert venue is STEALING)

now isnt that the largest crock of lies and bullcrap you have ever heard.

Next they'll claim that you're stealing their soul or singing abilities..

Re:fear of photos or flashes?

[jcsehak]

Next they'll claim that you're stealing their soul or singing abilities

I had that idea yesterday. You've stolen it from me and published it without my permission. You'll be hearing from my lawyer.

Re:fear of photos or flashes?

[thoughtcrime]

Have you ever done a gig up on an honest-to-bob stage with spotlights in your face? Trust me, you don't notice photo flashes at all. You can't even see (or can barely see) the people you're making the music for. The first time I did a gig on a real stage it really creeped me out; I was used to feeding off how people reacted to the sound. But with enough floodlights, you actually find yourself understanding what 'showmanship' is all about because you feel alone, even though there might be a couple hundred people watching you.

Ye. Freaking. Gods.

[Chris Johnson]

At my URL above, I have some rather uncommercial music. It's mostly just downloadable. I put a lot of effort into making CDs, though- they're 12$, which gets me a couple bucks over and above the cost of making it (I chose a pretty slick packaging, which is more costly).

I've sold one, for two bucks in 'royalties'.

That's two bucks more in royalties than Janis Ian has ever been paid for her entire major label career, by her own account. "In 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money." I'm not even 37 years OLD, myself...

As if that's not enough, I can get CDs made pretty cheaply if I made 1000 or so, and can get them one at a time back from Ampcast for 7-10 bucks- and even at that, it's a better deal than BMG artists can get on their own CDs, should they wish to sell 'em at shows: "BMG has a strict policy for artists buying their own CDs to sell at concerts - $11 per CD."

This article is even more damning than the Courtney Love article. My jaw is just dropping, and I was far from uninformed to start with... and I never knew how well off I was as a starving indie with no sales. Funny how I'm owed more royalties than a multiple Grammy winner...

Re:Ye. Freaking. Gods.

[Chris Johnson]

....erm, nominee ;)

Re:Ye. Freaking. Gods.

[mvdwege]

I can witness to this, as I just bought two of Chris' CDs after downloading one entire, and one song of the other. I had to wait three months between the download and actually buying the stuff, since I am dependent on friends ordering for me (no CC), but I was very happy with this.

As a result, I am now plugging Chris to friends and acquaintances of whom I know they would like his stuff.

BTW Chris, nice piece of mixing on 'Koala'. I could hear the percussion effects literally floating in front of my eyes. Keep up the good work!

Mart

Re:Ye. Freaking. Gods.

[Chris Johnson]

No way- it's true! Big thanks. Now I have sold 3 CDs instead of 1. This is the right direction to be going in! Hope you like them. Whatcha think of the 'Wounded Skies' inner gatefold? (ah, if only I could release vinyl 12" records with full size covers)

Some of that percussion clarity on 'Koala' is from Open Source (GPL) digital audio mastering software :D

Re:Ye. Freaking. Gods.

[mvdwege]

Heh. Don't tell me you've only sold three CDs? With your constant advertising for ampcast and the user demographic of Slashdot I'd expected you to do better. My remark was mostly meant to underscore that a generous preview policy is good for sales. Now don't you go robbing me of my good faith in humanity ;-)

As for the inner gatefold of 'Wounded Skies', I like it a lot. It looks a lot like the more rural parts of my home country (the Netherlands), where I like to take a bicycle when I need some peace and quiet.

Anyway thanks for the good music, and I'll be watching your work for more good stuff. I mostly like rock in all guises, so I'll skip the electronic stuff if you don't mind.

Mart

Most 'artists'

[Steveftoth]

most people in the music business are not artists, they are just people looking to make money. I'm not talking about the record people, I'm talking about the people on the stage making the music. Many musicians are there because it's the only thing they are really good at and it pays better then other jobs. Very few are in the job because they love the art, and the few that are I would bet have a hard time staying in that mode of work.

Art is hard work, and the few that can do it I admire, just like I admire anyone whom truely loves their work and would do the same if the incentives (money,fame) were removed. Bands like metallica would not exist were it not for the lure of rock stardom and fat sacks of cash.

Don't forget that before the productization of ART in the early 1900's that the only people who bought art were the rich. The artists of yore were the luxuries of the wealthy and not expressive of the comonfolk, of the common ways of life. Just go to any art museum and you'll easily be able to tell, as the older paintings, statues, etc. are all portraits of the rich, or of religious nature.

Subsidy! Why don't you all get this?

[droopus]

Jeez, you could get a headache.

Ok, listen carefully. 85% of all released CDs fail to earn back the money it cost to make them. 85%. Got that?

If Boeing had a similar success rate, none of us would ever fly. If Cambell's Soup had a similar tainted can rate, we wouldn't eat much soup.

That's more than 8 out of 10 CDs that LOSE money. But, the labels have such beautiful headquarters, and A&R (new act signing) is expensive. Promotion is even more expensive. So, the big acts have to pay for all the failed acts' costs, plus A&R, promotion, RIAA/NARAS fees, etc, etc.

This isn't new, this is the way the music business has worked for thirty years. The hits pay for the failures: Mariah's platinum paid for hundreds of failed Sony Music acts. This is the way it's been for a long, long time.

But now, the labels are fucked. Their most valuable asset is now their most vulnerable. The result?

Biggest CD of 1982- Thriller - 45 million , Biggest CD of 1986 - True Blue - 18 million

Biggest CD of 2001 -Hybridtheory - 4 million

Starting to see the problem now? It isn't "morals" or Hilary's rants..it's simple business. No big sales, no subsidy for the failing 85%. The labels are STUCK in a business model that will not let them give away music, or try any of the other weird ideas (how about making money off tshirts!) that are thrown around so casually.

So, with this in mind, it becomes a little harder to come up with the "simple answers" so many ACs spew about.

Anyone have a rational one?

You mean the MJ that outbid McCartney?

[mmuskratt]

Who owns the rights to the Beatles' music?

Easy solution

[mmuskratt]

Across-the-board boycott of purchasing new albums...just do it for a week. Nobody buys the CD's as a protest...see if that gets their attention. Probably won't, or they'll claim it is more proof, but hey, I would love to deny the RIAA any of my money. CD's cost more than LP's ever did, and they're cheaper to make...

She is obscure

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't get around it, she is obscure. It sort of drives home the fact that you tell others that they have to do a web search to find out who she is.

She amounts to a one-hit wonder who is hundreds down on the list of "Well known artists", and a large percentage of those who know the name have to think a bit to distinguish her from the other Janis.

Sure, she's done a lot and has an impressive resume. This is no different from a large number of other artists who are also obscure.

Not that there is anything wrong with that; I'm a fan of artists who are even more obscure. But at least I know that they are obscure.

Best Quote from the article

[stephandahl]

Again, from personal experience: in 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money.

Those artists must really love their work!

Re:Best Quote from the article

[VB]

Payola for simulated songs doesn't cost the artist as much as for the real ones...

Commerce, Art and Entertainment

[stixnpics]

It's the intersection of Commerce, Art and Entertainment... Pick one:

Commerce success is measured in $'s
Artistic success is measured in historic legacy
Entertainment success is measured by the
connection between performer and audience

All artists need to sustain themselves
so they have to find a suitable
balance between the need for $'s,
legacy and connection.

Through the ages all artists have confronted
these issues of patronage, freedon to create and
acceptance.

It's also worth noting that Janis' became an
outspoken Lesbian (she values honesty)
and she was then rejected by the
commercial musical establishment
despite her obvious artistic
credentials. Too expense to "sell"
against mass-market bias...

They prefer to leverage
sex is another manner. "Jailbait" is hot this
year...

Left with few options she developed her own
commericial business base with her own
recording production and distribution
projects... she lives off these and her
performing revenue streams and does so
for the priviledge of being able to share
art with an audience. A small
(by commericial standards) but loyal following. It's worth
noting that most arts have an audience...
The trick is getting their commercial support
to sustain the making of the art... (buy the
products or tickets).

FYI... Her article about attending a Science
Fiction Convention (where she was the awestruck
fan is a great read too). She writes and thinks
well. http://www.janisian.com

Stix n pics

I'll see your Bullshit and raise you a cow fart

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I agree that it's stealing but I don't believe that this is an issue that can so easily be broken down into black and white.

To begin with all of your facts are completely in order and in a perfect world I would agree with you 100%. The artist should be the one who has the final say in the matter within the limits of copyright as it was originally intended to be used. There can't really be any argument about that.

In many cases though the music being "stolen" by me (and believe me, I've "stolen" plenty of it and to use your term, I'm cool with that)was already stolen by a record company from the original artist. They might have done it "legally" but as artist after artist has come forward to say it's still stolen from them fair and square. These companies have been raping the shit out of artists from the dawn of their inception and that's what their entire house is built on. It's their MO, it's WHAT THEY DO. They do it within the (flawed) lines of the law and they pay these artists a token amount for endless ownership of what the artists have made. They pay the lawmakers to keep those lines flawed so their business in screwing people is safe. It's a scam and it's a ripoff and the performers who no longer need the record companies all, or at least mostly seem to agree that it's true. At the same time they gouge the artists audience for access to that material. They are reprehensible.

Now you are dealing with a thief stealing from thieves. The "victims" this time around are the ones who made their fortunes on the backs of musicians who frequently have brief careers and often end up little better off than when they started. Can anyone dig up any real empathy for the recording companies at this point?

It's still illegal but I see some grey forming around the edges.

Re:I'll see your Bullshit and raise you a cow fart

[nomad_monad]

Here are some more grey edges...

Granted, if you download a song off a filesharing service that the artist doesn't want shared, and then burn it onto a CD and listen to it (or play it on your computer) fairly regularly, enjoy the experience, like it, yet never go out and actually buy the product in it's commercial form... yes, that definitely seems like stealing to me.

However, let's say you download a song, and you don't like it. Frankly, you think a series of farts you let out after eating a can of beans is more musical than the crap that this artist put out, and if you had actually paid for it, you would've felt ripped off. You never listen to the song again (or delete it from your computer), or only listen to it when you want to demonstrate to someone just how much this particular artist lacks in talent (in your estimation). Did you steal? Some people may still say yes, but I don't think so. You never use it, you don't listen to this song. Perhaps it physically exists on your hard drive or on some other media like a CD. But even then, the word physically is a bit of a misnomer, since music is pretty intangible -- the only physicality we speak of here is the recording format. It's not like taking someone's car and then never using it (which would still qualify as stealing since the original owner no longer has access to it, and has lost actual value). It's more like eavesdropping on someone explaining a new idea, but never using it. How have you stolen it?

You might say that you've reduced the artist's potential profit by not accidentally buying something that you would've never bought if you had heard it beforehand, and thus have stolen from the artist. Personally, I think as soon as you begin to vocalize that argument you realize how silly it is.

This is even more relevant when you consider one of the arguments in the original article -- filesharing is a boon because it gives immediate, unfettered, and near-universal access to *preview* songs and artistic material. If you preview something, decide you like it, keep it, but don't buy it, you're stealing. Anything less than that, I'd have to disagree.

I still buy

[edstromp]

Every time I hear something like this, I boot up BearShare, and share my 15GB of music with the world for a few days.

But seriously, I burn CD's all the time. Some of music I own, and some not. I would say that 75% of all the music I've bought in the last year (~20 CD's) was because I was able to listen first to the mp3's to decide.

Treat us like criminals, and we'll act like them. Treat us honestly, and we will act honestly.

Badly run companies

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ok, listen carefully. 85% of all released CDs fail to earn back the money it cost to make them. 85%. Got that?"

That must be surely due to business (wasting money, etc) mistakes by the labels.

Know why? There are plenty of small CD labels that never have anything near a fraction of a big hit, yet they can get by.

"So, with this in mind, it becomes a little harder to come up with the "simple answers" so many ACs spew about."

Maybe if the big labels took business lessons from the small ones? Perhaps then they can do better than only make 15% of the product profitably.

What about music they refuse to sell us?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the music the recording industry refuses to sell us? We can dangle money in their faces, but they won't take it and won't give us product.... so we have to rely in Napster clones in order to get it.

This includes out of print albums and concert material that was never released. A good example is an "Alan Parsons Project" album that was hardly printed at all, and is now being sold by Russian bootleggers. I'd rather buy the official version, but they won't sell it to me.

Their business model is totally hosed if they refuse to sell material that people want to pay for.

(This was what I relied on Napster for the most. I'd already bought all the related material I was interested in on CD. Napster was a great place to get the material they were too lazy to sell us.

Re:You are missing two points

[Bassman59]

Not quite. The label doesn't get paid back out of the proceeds, they get paid back out of the artist's share of the proceeds. Say the artist is getting a 5% royalty, was fronted $20,000 to make the album and each copy sells for $15. Assume a 25% retail mark-up, ie. the label gets $11.25 per copy. Break-even is just short of 1800 copies. But the artist won't start getting a royalty at the 1800-copy point. They won't start getting a royalty until 26,667 copies have been sold, at which point their 5% has paid off the $20K advance. In between those sales points, the label is making a profit but the artist doesn't see a penny from it. The only way the label loses money is if the album doesn't even sell the 1800 copies needed to break even. Any signed musicians out there, feel free to plug in actual advances and royalty rates. Yes, I've omitted any promotional costs the label might incur, but those come out of the artist's royalties too as I understand it. Some other points: 1) It's quite common for major-label releases to cost upwards of $250K to record. Why, in these days of technology enabling good- (not great-) sounding home recordings? Because the major labels want the records to "sound like hits." The bands don't get the choice. The labels will choose a top-shelf producer. The label may decide that the record needs a different person to MIX each song. Then, of course, the record has to be mastered by one of the big guys. Oh, yeah, many producers and mixers (not Albini!) take "points," which mean that they get a certain percentage of the gross -- and that's paid BEFORE the artist gets a royalty. 2) All promotion is recoupable. Every little tchotchkie or promo item or in-store appearance or anything costs the band money. 3) Tour support is recoupable. If a band wants that tour bus and the hotels, they get it -- and it's deducted from their royalties. (Obviously, it behooves the band to continue touring in their old van, but if you're a baby band on tour supporting a major act that flies between gigs, trying to keep up is not possible without the bus.)

Re:..to look like Janet

[Anonymous Coward]

Never heard of a skin disease that can turn your skin blotchy like that after adolesence. The only thing I've ever seen that can leave huge light blots on black skin is healed 3rd degree burns. But I'm also a high school dropout...so what do I know.

Look up vitiligo on Google: I got it (though I'm a paleskin). It started a couple of years go. Now my right hand up to the wrist has no skin pigment, and contrasts heavily with the suntanned arm. It's a damn nuisance: burns but never tans so I have to slop sunblock on when I go out cycling. Looks cool though: like I had a transplant of an evil hand!

Flaw in Book Example?

[harlows_monkeys]

The example where one book was made available for free download and that caused sales of the other books of that author to go up is not necessarily relevant.

The important question is what would have happened if all the books from that author had been available for free download.

Another possible problem with the comparison is that books on computer are usually much less convenient than regular books. With music, MP3 format is often as convenient as CD format, and it is easy to burn CDs from MP3s.

Re:You are missing two points

[Bassman59]

Not quite. The label doesn't get paid back out of the proceeds, they get paid back out of the artist's share of the proceeds. Say the artist is getting a 5% royalty, was fronted $20,000 to make the album and each copy sells for $15. Assume a 25% retail mark-up, ie. the label gets $11.25 per copy. Break-even is just short of 1800 copies. But the artist won't start getting a royalty at the 1800-copy point. They won't start getting a royalty until 26,667 copies have been sold, at which point their 5% has paid off the $20K advance. In between those sales points, the label is making a profit but the artist doesn't see a penny from it. The only way the label loses money is if the album doesn't even sell the 1800 copies needed to break even.

Any signed musicians out there, feel free to plug in actual advances and royalty rates. Yes, I've omitted any promotional costs the label might incur, but those come out of the artist's royalties too as I understand it.

Some other points:

1) It's quite common for major-label releases to cost upwards of $250K to record. Why, in these days of technology enabling good- (not great-) sounding home recordings? Because the major labels want the records to "sound like hits." The bands don't get the choice. The labels will choose a top-shelf producer. The label may decide that the record needs a different person to MIX each song. Then, of course, the record has to be mastered by one of the big guys.

Oh, yeah, many producers and mixers (not Albini!) take "points," which mean that they get a certain percentage of the gross -- and that's paid BEFORE the artist gets a royalty.

2) All promotion is recoupable. Every little tchotchkie or promo item or in-store appearance or anything costs the band money.

3) Tour support is recoupable. If a band wants that tour bus and the hotels, they get it -- and it's deducted from their royalties. (Obviously, it behooves the band to continue touring in their old van, but if you're a baby band on tour supporting a major act that flies between gigs, trying to keep up is not possible without the bus.)

Did you know that bands signed to a major label are not able to participate in their label's health-care insurance plan? That's right!

I know many indie bands who've made the jump to the majors. I don't think any of them made any huge money. The ones who were most successful ("success" defined as "don't have to have a day job when we get back from tour") were the ones who did things the same way they did them when they were on the indie labels -- staying in the Motel 6 (or the "couch network"), driving the same old van, hiring only one roadie (a soundman; one of the band members was also tour manager), selling merch themselves (deals made w/out the involvement of the label to keep costs down), and general penny-pinching.

[Aside: Any of you bozos who think that bands make tons of money touring have clearly never been on tour.]

I think about the best thing a "buzz band" can do is to sign for as big an advance as possible, understanding full well that they'll never ever recoup. Essentially, it's a roll of the dice, knowing full well that the move may be a career ender.

Oops

[Xebikr]

Damn! My first post on /. and I screw it up. Thanks for the correction. So bypassing Macrovision is legal on VHS, but not on DVD, is that correct?

Re:Oops

[shepd]

>So bypassing Macrovision is legal on VHS, but not on DVD, is that correct?

Yes and no.

Yes for sure on VHS.

With DVD, it is illegal if you bypass it _inside_ the DVD player (usually by reprogramming the BIOS so that it refuses to turn on the Macrovision chip). But, if you buy a Time Base Corrector ($$$ unfortunately) and place it on the Composite or S-Video outputs of the DVD player that is legal because at that point the signal is in the analog domain.

So, basically this is legal (and sold in the US), however, this is not legal and is only sold outside the US. [Fortunately, I live in Canuckville so I can link to that. If you're American and click on that you can probably go to jail for it. ;-) ]

I know, its stupid. Welcome to the world of crappy stupid laws. Canada just got their own making it illegal for me to associate myself with American TV. Too bad our charter of rights isn't worth the paper its printed on...

cdreward@riaa.com

[Anonymous Coward]

sign up all spam and newletters to this address. let 'em deal with a few hundred thousand junk emails a day. let's see how quickly their mail server gets overloaded.

More Lee Atwaters

[Anonymous Coward]

But can Rick Boucher play blues guitar as good as Lee Atwater?

WRONG!!!

[alizard]

Boycott the recording industry.

No. Buy CDs ONLY from artists who are selling their own music, either at gigs or via the Web AT THEIR OWN WEBSITES. Not ones created by major labels for them, ones made by the artists themselves. (or usually, by Web authors paid by the artists) Figuring out which is which isn't rocket science.

That is one of the best ways to make sure that the artist gets compensated, not the drug dealers who sell to the suits at major record labels.

Re:WRONG!!!

[uncoveror]

If you could compile a list of those, It would be a great service, or if they would email comments@dontbuycds.org a list of artists unafilliated with the big 5 and RIAA couls be listed as exempt from the boycott.

Re:WRONG!!!

[alizard]

I was going to suggest creating a cool logo which can be displayed as a banner by artists who are not with RIAA... but unless your people have the resources to trademark it, major labels will grab it immediately to stick on lesser known artist sites.

I'm working with an independent artist NOW, but I don't want our site slashdotted unless her CDs (we're doing CD-on-demand via third party vendor)are ready to go... that's weeks from now.

I don't know the music scene well enough to give you such a list of independent artists... but I agree one is necessary. In the meantime, I suggest that you put somewhere prominent on your site a contact address for artists who aren't RIAA.

Wrong all on counts: it is not stealing

[Anonymous Coward]

You listed a few things saying "it is stealing". However, the definition of theft or stealing applied to none of them.

It may be wrong, it may be bad, it may be illegal, but it is not theft.

Re:Wrong all on counts: it is not stealing

[nomad_monad]

I'm not sure if you're responding to my post or an earlier one, but if it's my post, then I'd be interested in what your definition of theft or stealing is, since your entire argument/objection depends on what that is.

Re:Wrong all on counts: it is not stealing

[darkonc]

Downloading (or uploading) a copyright song without the permission of the author (or copyright holder, which may not be the same thing as the author/artist) is a violation of copyright. This is an entirely different thing than stealing. Taking the CD from the store would be theft.

Violating copyright on a sharing network may, or may not increase sales for the artist or decrease such sales (music sales during the life cycle of napster seem to indicate that they increase sales). Taking a CD without permission physically denies the store use of the CD as a sale product and can easily be proven to cost them money (replacement costs and/or one sale now impossible).

It's ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

It's ironic that the RIAA and their toadies like holings are talking about rampant theft, when their crooked accounting is stealing so much from the artists.

They're playing the same game as the insurance companies, trying to get two groups of victims to fight each other so that they won't join forces and fight their real enemies.

the point people keep missing

[alizard]

Shutting down P2P and Internet Radio isn't about protecting artist royalties or even record label royalties.

It is about control. The RIAA record labels want to close down any venue that is easily accessible to the public where the independent (as in unsigned by major record label) artist can upload her own music without having to go through a gatekeeper under record label control.

The ability of RIAA record label suits to make a living depends on their being able to say "You can't make a living without us."

With easily available CD on demand and band merchandise on demand, all a musician needs if his/her material is any good is exposure... a musician no longer needs record labels and record stores to sell CDs and T-shirts.

The last choke point that allows RIAA labels a chance to make money off artists and the public is exposure to masses of people. Internet Radio and P2P allowed an easy way for the independent artist to get to the people.

When people say "I bought CDs from bands I never heard of thanks to Napster, etc.", this doesn't make the RIAA want to keep P2P / Internet Radio open, their business is to make sure you only buy from RIAA artists... to find RIAA artists, turn on any Clear Channel radio station. Where an independent without a major promotion budget isn't going to be heard.

You missed this point

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not about control as you describe. Look at your statement: "The RIAA record labels want to close down any venue that is easily accessible to the public where the independent (as in unsigned by major record label) artist can upload her own music without having to go through a gatekeeper under record label control."

In fact, the services that deal in this music get left alone by the RIAA. The reason is that they don't have anything to do with p2p, trade, ftp, etc of music that is covered by copyrights of RIAA-represented artists and companies.

The RIAA has left alone the places where the independent/unsigned artists can go directly to the fans. Even if they wanted to (they probably do), they don't have a legal leg to stand on.

Re:You missed this point

[darkonc]

P2P sharing has a grey area where the RIIA can throw millions of dollars worth of legal fees into the fray to beat someone into submission. They are also nice big juicy and (most importantly) popular sites that provide a real alternative to RIIA marketing.

Janis Ian's site would never have been seen by most of us had it not been for the posting of this article... Similarly for CDs put out by my friends. Most people don't know where to go to find such things.

P2P networks, on the other hand, are a well-known venue for access to artist's music that do not have any connection to the RIAA. If a budding artists have a choice for the distribution of their music, they might not agree to recording deals that give the record companies effective ownership of all the artist's output for years or decades. That is why the RIIA has been beating these P2P networks into submission despite the fact that they clearly appear to be increasing music sales. ..

They threaten the RIAA's monopoly on the market, and give artists some choice.

Theft

[Anonymous Coward]

A necessary part of the definition of stealing is taking something (look up at dictionary.com, for example). When something is copied or downloaded, it is left sitting there, never taken.

Ok, say your car is sitting in the driveway. I'm going to go by, stop in the street, make a complete duplicate of your car, and drive away in the duplicate.

Or, I'm going to go into your driveway, get into your car, and drive it away.

The first is not theft, the second is.

Re:Theft

[nomad_monad]

Well, the resolution of this matter really doesn't depend on the definition of "theft" then. It depends on the definitions of "taking", and the identification of the object being taken. Your application of the definition of theft is so decontextualized from the social usage of music that it doesn't accurately depict the issue here.

Music as product is afforded profit value not because of the media it is represented on, but because of the experience it provides, and repeatable nature of it. Your defense of any act of duplication as non-theft assumes a conflation of music and the medium that it's stored on. Simply because the media is left where it is after duplication doesn't imply a lack of theft. To get at the root of what's being "taken", you have to ask the question what quantifiable value is being taken? The experience is not quantifiable, but the potential profit from *selling* the music is. Hence, what's being taken *away* from the artist is the potential profit of the consumer buying the music instead of not buying it. The question of whether or not it was downloaded, burned from a copy, or shoplifted out of a store is actually not even relevant here. The litmus test is simply this: if there wasn't the opportunity to have it for free WITHOUT PERMISSION, would you still pay for it? If the answer is yes, you're stealing, because the artist has lost potential profit.

Your car analogy is a false analogy because it doesn't completely mirror the situation. It would be a correct analogy (but with a different outcome) if it was phrased and qualified like this:

Ok, say your car is sitting in the driveway. *You make profits from selling rides in this car that you made, and I would normally pay for these rides.* Instead, now I'm going to go by, stop in the street, make a complete duplicate of your car, and drive away in the duplicate. Now I don't have to pay you for those rides, and you've lost all potential profit from me.

Notice: the object being taken is not the media, but what the media provides. What matters is not what's physically taken, but instead what *value* has been taken.

A great article

[Anonymous Coward]

I read this article in "Performing Songwriter" and I'm glad to see it online. I guess I should have been shocked to read that Janis had never recieved a royalty check from a major label, but I'm already pretty familiar with the fact that the majors have been expertly screwing artists for years. It's great that more artists are speaking out about that fact, and that people like Janis are able to see beyond the RIAA-generated FUD about file sharing.

That issue of "Performing Songwriter" is actuallly all about indie artists, and also has interviews with Aimee Mann and her business partner.

Rich

Michael Jackson does not want to be black

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if you accept the "Vitaligo" by Michael Jackson, that does not explain him getting rid of the nose he was born with, and burning his hair into to be straight (anything but an afro).

Re:Michael Jackson does not want to be black

[archmedes5]

I'm not justifying Michael Jackson's physical alterations, but rather, imparting a bit of information of the skin condition. To be honest, once set off, the effects of vitiligo vary, from very rapid to very slow, depending probably on the strength of the autoimmune response, adolesence probably triggered the response in his case. For some, the condition fades by the time their mid twenties, for others, (again using myself as an example) the splotches remain quite prominent. (Well not too prominent for an already pasty white computer nerd, but oh well)

Ever hear of MP3.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The RIAA record labels want to close down any venue that is easily accessible"

Ever hear of MP3.com? Many many independent artists out there, direct downloads to fans.

The RIAA leaves it alone. Yes, the RIAA did sue it, but that was when and because MP3.com offered regular big-label CD content for download.

Re:Ever hear of MP3.com ?

[krisguy]

I don't know about you, but I could never download big 5 music without the artist or labels permission. What you were referring to was the concept of the "virtual CD changer", the actual MP3.com term escapes me right now. MP3.com used a program to read a valid CD and then opened up streaming access to that song, or opened it up as soon as you gave a credit card number to buy a copy of that CD. The RIAA was scared because at that time, they were sure that this would all go away, but it didn't. The RIAA decided that they would shake down the site and the consumer for more money, (Smells like a RICO violation, in theory) and get a court to basically say that fair use of the CD I owned was illegal. Fair use is in danger, and you better be careful.

record companies making money off copying already

[mindKMST]

I wonder why the record companies know how many CD-Rs were sold in the US? Could it be because they make royalties off of every CD-R sold? No, of course not.

I think I just had a sarcasm.

Thank you Al Gore

[Anonymous Coward]

Al Gore invented the web, not berners lee. Gore invented it in 1992.

Wow, that's almost too grey for me

[JudgeFurious]

Ok, I get that. I don't think it's the same thing here in that we are talking about (at least to some extent) the "value" in dollars and cents that the artist (or in this case the evil butt monkeys from mars at the record companies) might have/could have/should have made from the creation of the music.

I see it like this.

1. If I download the song and it's crap IMO then I am glad I didn't buy it and it appears to me that the artist lost nothing in my hearing the song and disliking it.

2. If I do the same thing and enjoy it, keep playing it, and don't buy the CD then the artist lost their tiny share and the record companies lost a few bucks. It's then stealing (again IMO).

However if you look at it like the record companies and some artists do then in the first example where I downloaded the song and hated it, was sorry my consciousness was ever touched by it's terrible sound, and didn't buy the record then I have still stolen it because they missed a chance to stick me with a lousy CD at a premium price and niether one gives a damn that I got the shitty end of the stick in the deal.

I've been on the wrong end of a number of bad CD's in my time and I refuse to give up the right to check out what I am getting in advance of purchasing the material. I further insist on the right to do it in my house on my time and think this is non-negotiable.

It's only a matter of time before record labels go the way of that old dinosaur and we find ourselves in a completely changed musical landscape. I don't imagine my children will have a clue what it was like to get a CD with one good single and 11 songs that sound like monkeys fucking grizzly bears in the rain. Lucky them.

Re:Wow, that's almost too grey for me

[nomad_monad]

However if you look at it like the record companies and some artists do then in the first example where I downloaded the song and hated it, was sorry my consciousness was ever touched by it's terrible sound, and didn't buy the record then I have still stolen it because they missed a chance to stick me with a lousy CD at a premium price and niether one gives a damn that I got the shitty end of the stick in the deal.
Yes, and I think that this definition of stealing is ludicrous. Which is why I said the following in my initial post: You might say that you've reduced the artist's potential profit by not accidentally buying something that you would've never bought if you had heard it beforehand, and thus have stolen from the artist. Personally, I think as soon as you begin to vocalize that argument you realize how silly it is.

Re:Wow, that's almost too grey for me

[JudgeFurious]

Just in case you come back to see if I replied I got to leave a quick "Yep you said, nail on the head"

I completely overlooked the fact that you had already covered that. It happens. Excellent point.

The one good thing the RIAA has done.

[Mr. Pibb]

Virtually all modern records are recorded to the RIAA standard and require RIAA equalization. But older records, and not just 78's, were recorded to different characteristics. Pre '60's LPs were recorded to the now redundant Decca/London FFRR, HMV/EMI, Columbia (British), Columbia (American) or NAB "standards". From 1955 most record companies changed over to the RIAA (new orthophonic) standard, but some companies kept their old "standards" well into the '60's because they considered them close enough to RIAA when listened to with record players of the era. (from here

They developed the equalization curve that was used on records (yes, vinyl) in the 60s, giving a little better low end to recordigns (from the way I understand it). See this for a chart.
I know this'll probably be never modded up so that anyone will see it, but I think it's interesting.

Ozzy Osbourne - not a role model

[aftk2]

I don't think Ozzy Osbourne would be the best advocate for the rights of the music consumer, since his new CDs feature Key2Audio copy protection., a decision that he himself reportedly approved.

heh heh

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can't play you anymore baaabie Can't play you anymore"

A thought or two

[pjt48108]

While I have spent my fair share of time getting my knickers in a twist over all this copy protection BS, I confess I don't fear for the future, for a few reasons.

First, technology is reducing the stranglehold that record companies have over production and distribution, and not due to Napster. If I were an artist contracted to one of the big companies, I'd cool my heels collecting $$ from them until my contract expired, then spend the $$ on my own means of production and distribution (home studio and website). Once enough artists realize they have this power, it will begin to crack the RIAA's foundation. In fact, due to technology, artists will have much greater flexibility in how their works are distributed, and won't be beholden to CD-pressing facories.

Second, too many companies are making too much money on MP3 players, and this is a wildfire that no amount of industry money can put out.

Third, the combination of the two create a self-defeating cycle for RIAA. The more they try to control the artists and distribution, the less inclined current artists will be to play along, and new artists will be to join in. The tighter their self-imposed restrictions, the smaller their paying audience will be. So, eventually, you will see more independent artists, both big names retreating from the RIAA debacle, and new ones, recording in garages and distributing from home via DSL, cable, and wireless without need of burning a single CD. New independence from corporate control will foster a new and invigorated creative environment, and the removal of the corporate firewall between artist and audience will allow for far better feedback between the two, thus driving creative expression further. Hell, artists will be able to host concerts from home, even getting around the mammoth performance hall nightmare, yet still reaching as many, or more, people.

I see it as roughly analogous to highly-distributed computing, in that a centralized server (RIAA and the Big Record Companies) is less important because of the extensive use of distributed systems (garage bands newly-energized by the freeing influence of technology). Eventually, the only ones playing the RIAA game will be those who just don't get it.

RIAA has taken up a new strategy apparently...

[mtec]

Peer-to-Peer Pioneer Dies in Accident

Gene Kan, a developer of music-swap site Gnutella, is dead at the age of 25.

oh dear...

[Max the Merciless]

Too much economic theory, not enough reality.

You need to make a choice:

Do human beings serve the economy?

Does the economy serve human beings?

As far as I'm concerned if the system is serving money, not people, then the system should be changed!

Besides even if you spend a life time buying shares you will NEVER have ANY POWER over the corporations. "Managed Fund" managers have all the shares and all the power. There is a elite class who control, the managed funds, the corporate boards, the CEO chairs and the political seats. See how easily they slide between the board chair and the ceo chair and the congressional chair.

What we are witnessing is the almost complete domination of politics by Capital. George Bush is nothing other than a figure head to major corporations. Unfortunetly it is tin-pot theories like the one you are espousing which pulls the wool over the public's eyes... but I not even the thickest wool, grown in the best economic faculties can cover the massive corruption and hypocracy forever...

Re:oh dear...

[TWR]

OK, fine. Describe a better system.

-jon

Janis Ian is articulate and right on the mark!

[Newer Guy]

This article says it all....precicely. No ranting or raving...just the facts...

So did Illiad...

[Svartalf]

He ran that line of thought recently in User Friendly.

Grateful Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

" I meant a current musician, one who has prospered completely outside the major-label system during the period of history in which the major-label system has existed."

Are the Grateful Dead worth some sort of mention? They were (until Garcia's death a few years ago) one of the top money-making acts. Sure, they had a major label, but I don't think it had much to do with their money-making.

Re:This seems DIFFERNT from Courtney Loves speech.

[darkonc]

Courtney Love was pretty much neutral on the effect of Napster on the artist. Her real point was that it didn't care. The RIAA was claiming to be defending the rights of the poor artists, but it's the RIAA who was butt-fscking them with a sliver-filled baseball bat. Most artists never get the money that comes from their albums, even if they sell a million units.

+ or - 10% in sales because of the difference that napster makes doesn't matter to the artist because they don't get any of that money anyways. The RIAA was simply using artists as a shield in their fight for more control of the artists..

"Patriotism is the last refuge of the despot".

Anarchy

[Max the Merciless]

Abolish both Private property (bar personal possessions) and government. Industrial democracy. Rotating "leadership".

Delegates, NOT representatives...

To quote Monty Python:

DENNIS:
I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week,...
ARTHUR:Yes.
DENNIS: ...but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting...
ARTHUR: Yes, I see.
DENNIS: ...by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,...
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: ...but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major--
ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
WOMAN: Order, eh? Who does he think he is? Heh.
ARTHUR: I am your king!
WOMAN: Well, I didn't vote for you.
ARTHUR: You don't vote for kings.
WOMAN: Well, how did you become King, then?
GEORGE W BUSH: a whole lot of corporate money and some crooked judges.

Re:Anarchy

[TWR]

You want to ban private property? Great! Let's start with you. Please post your real name and address.

You don't want government? Fine! The guy with the biggest gun will be in charge, and don't expect him to allow you to appeal to a judge.

I believe the warlord areas of Afghanistan and Somalia have exactly what you are looking for. Why don't you ask those residents how well your system works?

-jon

Re:Anarchy

[Max the Merciless]

"You want to ban private property? Great! Let's start with you. Please post your real name and address."

- I own nothing but personal possessions - you'll note that I excempted them.

"The guy with the biggest gun will be in charge, and don't expect him to allow you to appeal to a judge."

-Hrmmm isn't the guy with the biggest gun (USA) already in charge? Didn't the USA just refuse to join the International Criminal Court?

Destroying the institution of Private Property is vital to the restoration of humanity. It might not seem like that, but if you think deeply enough, that's exactly what needs doing.

Re:Anarchy

[TWR]

Well, I'm an anarchist, too, and I don't believe in your personal property. Or, more accurately, I believe that your personal property is my personal property. Give me you address so I can go exercise my anarchist rights to all of your stuff. Since you don't believe in government, I take it that you won't ask the government to protect you.

-jon

Re:Anarchy

[Max the Merciless]

If you don't believe in personal property then how can you make mine yours? It is non-sensical. Unless you are discriminating against me as an individual and giving yourself different rights...- but then you wouldn't be an anarchist would you! keep trying though ;)

"... freedom without Socialism is privilege and
injustice... Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality". -Mikhail Bakunin

Re:Anarchy

[TWR]

I want, I take.

The core creed of anarchists. I'm just going to apply it to your stuff. I decided that I want it. So, where's the name and address, oh he who wants to share with the world?

And who are you to decide what makes me an anarchist?

Since you're very dense, why don't we try an existence proof. Please tell me why areas which live under anarchy (Somalia, Afghanistan) aren't paridises, with millions flocking to them? Why is it that absent the rule of law, people have LESS freedom, not more? If you can't answer these questions, then your stupid economic theory is pretty much shot, eh?

I'm guessing that you're a spoiled white kid who lives in a rather rich part of the US and who has never actually had to earn anything that he owns. Mommy and Daddy have give you everything, except a sense of value.

Now, isn't there a McDonald's that you should be looting near your bedroom in Mommy's house?

-jon

Re:Anarchy

[Max the Merciless]

Actually I live in Sydney, Australia, and WORK 9 - 5 for a living.

You obviously don't know anything about Anarchism.

Somalia is not Anarchism, it is CHAOS. They are not the same thing. Somalia has private property and a hell of a lot of outside influences. If you knew anything about the country other than your BLACK HAWK DOWN history, you'd know that the the Ethiopian State as well as other States are backing and supplying various factions and keeping the country unstable.

I'm not saying that under Anarchism there will be a Utopian Peace. What I am saying is that the institutional violence in the world today dwarfs any other violence. Perhaps not in your cushy part of the United States, but in the rest of the world...

But I suggest you rent BLACK HAWK DOWN again and pretend things are 'Black and White'(literally) and that the USA state is a good guy fighting for freedom and democracy! *cough*

Brainwashed Slashdotters.

[grubert]

It really amazes me how many Slashdotters have been brainwashed into thinking that sharing files of copywritten material is a kind of theft.

Sharing copies.

I guess that knowing something about computors and math doesn't make you immune to muddy thinking.

Re:Brainwashed Slashdotters.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever store-brand crack you're smoking doesn't render you immune to muddy thinking, either.

"Computor". "Copywritten".

Hahahahah!

What a 'tard.