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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.
"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
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
... 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.
This 40 year old "moron" uses P2P frequently and I always sample before I buy.
Defecation occurs.
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.
MORTAR COMBAT!
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
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
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?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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
Remember Amalek.
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.
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)
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?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.