Slashdot Mirror
Time to Face the Music
Mortimer.CA writes "The Toronto Star has an article up about the ailing recording industry with some possible scenarios for solving the problem(s). Choice quotation: 'We must ask ourselves what Elvis would do to stop the theft of music via the Internet, now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters.'"
Record companies should start flooding the Internet with bogus MP3 files that look like songs, but that explode on contact inside the hard drives of Internet thieves. Anyone who illegally downloads an MP3 file via KaZaA or any of the myriad peer-to-peer (i.e. thief-to-thief) services would at best get a corrupted file, and at worst a ruined hard drive.
The companies should band together and enlist a dark force of special-ops hackers to make this happen. Once Net users discover that all they're downloading is a World Wide Web of pain, only the most determined and technologically savvy of them will continue to steal music.
Explode on contact? Hey great, while we're at it why don't we get those 1337o hackers make loads of nasty pixies flood out of the downloader's coffee cup holder... er I mean CD ROM drive (you know, that nasty thing used for ripping CD's)
So this is the sort of utter crap that Slashdot is linking to these days? Word to the editors: This is still in Mysterious Future, I'd recommend you dump it posthaste ;) (Yes I'm a subscription whore. $5 or so is fair game for an extended post history. Morbid curiosity)
kick the RIAA in the arse with his blue suede shoes, of course.
Were simply making copies of the original items and leaving them intact, I think I'd be fine with it.
Elvis would just order another burger and shoot the TV?!
"We must ask ourselves what [sic] to do to stop the theft of music via the Internet, now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters."
File Chapter 7 (liquidation) bankruptcy on Monday, and by Friday, all your troubles will be over; I promise you.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Give me a service which has nearly all the songs p2p networks has (ie the big 4 labels and all the smaller ones) for betwen £5 and £10 per month for nonDRM's downloads (ie in mp3 or ogg format) either in unlimited ammount of downloads or limited - 50 songs per month??? and i will pay now
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
"Are you John Doe?"
(Hands Over Envelope)
"You've just been sued for 97 Billion Dollars. Have a nice day."
Okay, so according to the write up swapping some songs on the internet is better than breaking into a Baghdad museum and making off with priceless historical artifacts. Hrm...next you'll be telling me that murderers are getting lighter sentences than those violating the DMCA.
I think Elvis would like p2p and give away his songs for free.
He was all about self-promotion. If the people love you and your music, they'll buy Elvis-brand lunchboxes, furniture, ground beef, forks, etc. They'll also go to your concerts, and many fans will STILL buy full CD's because they are fans. I doubt Elvis would be too concerned.
I read this in the paper today. The first guy's a complete idiot. The other 4 aren't so bad but it's nothing new. As far as I remember, one guy was saying that record companies SHOULD go down, another person wrote that it's all about the radio stations and that's where the fault lies, and what the other two guys said was more or less repeating what the other two said.
Nothing in the article is new that 95% the rest of us already know about.
What you need to do is make the consumer want to purchase this hunk of plastic. So package the hunk of plastic with some jerk off material like T.A.T.U.'s CD with wet-tshit pics.
It's not the RECORDING industry that's ailing -- it's the MEDIA DISTRIBUTION industry. Artists will always need good studios, producers, technicians, and equipment. The RIAA is misnamed. Their weakening stranglehold on the distibution of the final product (bits) is the only reason they get a piece of the pie, and not a flat fee (like the tour bus driver).
All your troubles will be solved. I'm not just saying that to troll or anything, but then the people who boycott the RIAA won't boycott you(unless they hold a grudge on you), you don't have to follow the RIAA(Your not going to be forced to price fix). I hope that these companies can figure out that they are public enemy #1 on the minds of most technical people(they did help write the DMCA or the RIAA did for them). Sure you want to protect your copywrites well why do you think P2P exsisted because of the RIAA. They created it with their high prices and people got sick of it.
Hrmmmm. Perhaps Apple Computer could show the new way by making it cheaper for artists to record and distribute their music?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
"... look like trick or treaters..."
Hmmm... let me see. 5000 years of civilization relics or some Britney Spears songs. I think the analogy should go the other way.
If goatse.cx allowed Google to spider it, I bet it would have a pretty big PageRank (maybe PR8 or PR9) with all the links to it on the net. You know how much some people would pay for that domain? Or even just for a link from it? It's a friggin gold mine.
KaZaA's online file-sharing service leapt by a staggering 1,500 per cent between the summers of '01 and '02
Wasnt that around the time napster was shutdown and everyone was looking for an alternative??
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
It's Colonel Tom Parker. He would do everything and anything for a buck. I'm sure he'd be breaking laws all over the place (or getting new laws made) in order to collect every last penny of royalties he could.
The RIAA ain't Elvis...
What the HELL are they talking about...they are looking just fine to me. They are making money, tons of it even. And they seem to have plenty of money to spend on lawyers to prosecute college students.
-the record companies will stop promoting anything that might be experimental and push the brittanies and N'sync's in their quest for dollars.
/end cristal ball
-by not signing new bands to restrictive and costly (to the bands) contracts, more players in the indie scene will appear, more artists will take control of their own destiny
-CD's and mp3's will become promotional material available on artists' websites (already happening now) for the real money making venture - touring! (which is definately the place to hear your favourite bands)
Clear Channel and Ticket Master will be the corporate pimps in this new business model
So the problem is still there. Just include the pics with the music files for download.
One would almost think market economies would tend to lower the price of items as distribution costs fall. Last time I looked, the cost of CDs were rising. (That was a while ago...because I never even bother looking at CDs any more.)
The pirating is just a side show. The real problem is that distribution and production costs have fallen through the floor and the industry has not responded to the market dynamics. Instead they cling to copyright laws and monopolistic tactics to maintain artificially inflated costs of their goods.
If you really asked the musicians...most would love the idea of a dollar CD. A dime a song.
The CRIA's complaint is that someone is robbing the plunder house.
BTW What's this noise about antiquities? Try pumping an antiquity in your Surburban and see where it gets you.
p2p wasn't and isn't the real problem. The way the recording industry is dealing with it is. Now that word has spread and everyone knows the record companies are acting like a bunch of assholes they don't want to support them. People don't mind buying the music to support an artist, but they do mind buying the music to support a greedy corporation they hate and which they feel makes too much money and rips people off (25 bucks for a CD!!!).
Perhaps this article (and many similar ones written this week) should be read first before taking the first article with a grain of "downloading is bad" salt.
h tm l
http://www.antimusic.com/news/03/april/item19.s
The way the indie promotion business works is record labels pay the indie promoters to work directly with radio stations to get songs on the air. It is estimated that this system can cost over a $1 million to land a song on Top 40 radio.
A million dollars a song? No, there's no way you can lose money doing THAT with homogenized bland "sounds like" radio, is there?
An open note to record companies: Downloading is not hurting you as much as you're hurting yourself (and your audience indirectly) with the payola and other fat inside the company.
Want to make money again? Stop paying for radio to sound homogenic. Stop paying everyone and their grandmother bribes to tell people that the music you paid too much to record (michael jackson's invincible is a good one) doesn't suck and it's worth getting 40 spins a day on the top 100 stations in the US. Make programming directors at radio stations do their job and discover new music again, and break the stuff that needs to be broken, and let the copycat mainstream music stay on MTV, where they're content to just use what they're paid to play.
Give Radio back to the people, and you'll see that people want your music again, and it won't always be just the stuff you force feed them. If the same 25 songs weren't put on a loop with commercials on most radio stations, you'd see more than the same 25 albums being sold, and you'd likely not need to pay a million bucks a song (and with the typical 5 single album, that's 5 mil in useless waste, multiplied by perhaps 100 albums a year, that's half a billion dollars in useless waste, isn't it?).
Amazing where you can find profits these days, isn't it?
it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters Because we all know that music piracy doesn't just support terrorism, but it's also worse than war!
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
"now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters.'"
The most of the looters are are expressing their new found freedom after 30 years of suppression and thievery from the regime. I'm pretty sure thats why Iraqi's are doing it too.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
It's that simple. The music industry is pricing itself out of business. Why do I have to pay $15 for a CD with an hour of music when I can spend only a little more to get a DVD... 2 hour movie, often 2 or 3 hours of bonus material, feature commentaries (another 2 hours each). Start selling CDs at reasonable prices and sales will go up, piracy will go down.
LordBodak's journal.
Free Joe
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
Jeez, get a sense of proportion. The lawlessness in Baghdad is causing human suffering, death, and may yet lead to a real war. The lawlessness in the IP market is leading to lower revenues -- maybe. Only someone who's at the center of their own moral universe would try to compare the two!
We pay $16 for a CD that costs almost nothing to make. Most artists do not get a cent from CD sales.
The artist have to pay "expenses" first. These include a breakage fee to cover the cost of broken shellack 78 RPM disks!
Music would be better if the big 5 recording companies all went tits up.
We would have a better selection of Music. More artists would actually get paid.
The technology now exists for decentralised music distribution.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
"...Such high-priced stars as Mariah Carey are getting dumped..." And here the article implies that its the "pirates" who are at fault? oh, surely it couldnt be because of her declining sales because of the fact people dont like her music anymore, and therefore wasnt making enough millions for the record company? oh comeon, these are the sort of BS articles that joe public reads, and beleives that the RIAA and their ilk are only fair and just in removing peoples free rights? itl only be one day when joe sixpack wakes up and realises that he/she doesnt have any free rights left, and that it impacts nearly every facet of their daily life, that they will realise what they have let corporate interests rule their lives and wallets. i think itl only get worse before it gets better...something has to be done here....
'We must ask ourselves what Elvis would do to stop the theft of music via the Internet, now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters.'"
Considering Elvis was the "bad-ass" of his time, he would probably be trading music with the rest of us. I don't know about you, but not all the Baghdad looters are bad, mostly the ones stealing from the hospitals and muesums that are bad, but even then you can't say trading music is worse than stealing needed medical equipment that would have been used to save lives. The only thing I'm depriving someone by stealing music is buying that brand new porsche to add to the collection, fucking Hillary Rosen.
One day history books are going to record how the american music industry burried itself by treating its clientel like criminals. Let me ask this though, why bother saving the music industry? The meat of the music industry isn't the companies distributing the recordings, its the artists performing the music. If the Internet enables people to get the music directly from the artist, and low cost recording equipment and instruments allow the artists to mix and record their own music, what the hell is wrong with that?
The RIAA is an obsolete business, thank god we didn't have the United States postal service going after the Internet because Email was causing them to lose postage stamp sales (they almost did). Someone came up with a better way, and you can't fight that. No matter what you do, the RIAA is going to be obsolete in probably 10 years.. The question is how much damage are they going to cause on the way down. Companies like the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, Sony, that think they can control the consumers make me want to change my profession from an engineer to a lawyer so I go after these damn corporations myself..
Ugh, infuriating..
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Make better music? Stop hating your customers? I can't tell you how good it made me feel, for example, to hear a few days after purchasing a Nora Jones CD that her producer attributes her success to an "older audience" that doesn't know enough about computers to download music. They even believe their own propaganda these days!
The truth is that despite knowing full well what a computer is and how to use it, I've purchased more CDs in the last year than I ever have. They're almost all from independents, though. There's very little worth buying that comes from the major labels these days. Getting RIAA propaganda as part of the package makes what they're pushing even less attractive.
You can argue that its morally and legally wrong, but that doesn't make it theft, anymore than arson is theft because it is morally and legally wrong. The quote about Bagdad looters is rich, and incredibly stupid as it makes my point perfectly. These people are theives; all these thousands of year old artifacts might be gone forever. But if the looters were copying all the anchient scrolls as opposed to running off with them, they'd still be in the museum.
Any reasonably intelligent person should be able differentiate between infringment and theft, but even here on Slashdot there are numerous people who just can't seem to wrap their minds around it. Try imagining someone who insists that apples are oranges because they both come from trees and start out as flowers, thats what these guys are like.
To those people, before you respond, read these two things over and over until they sink in, and try not to let your minds be thrown into an infinite loop:
If those two eat pussy, I'll eat my cat.
Oh man, I really hope they're lesbians. I'd love to see you eat your cat. (well, and if they were lesbians, that'd just be fucking cool).
;)
neurostarElvis was as shameless as anyone in the recording industry today. There's nothing that man wouldn't do for a buck.
Why is there so much discussion over this so-called "theft" we're experiencing on a massive scale? Regardless of what you think, sales aren't declining because "music sucks" or because the RIAA is recieving some karmic death-blow.
The music industry is starting to have problems because their method of distribution is outdated. The problem: digital music has become a huge online phenomenon, people want "formless" content that they can transfer to any media they see fit (hard drive, cd, memory stick) and the RIAA has so far been unable to provide consumers with that product.
The solution: consumers take matters into their own hands, downloading mp3's and then burning, ripping, copying, etc. The reason this has become such a huge deal is that the RIAA as a sort of oligopoly is having trouble coming to grips with the notion that the public will dictate the distribution methods and prices on its own terms. Like the "black market" writeup on K5 a month or two ago, we're seeing a system completely devoid of that which the public wants - on-line distribution at a signifigantly cheaper price than that of a CD (keep in mind blank media already benefits the RIAA).
Until the RIAA stops thrashing about in this all-out effort to dictate to the public exactly how, when, and for how much (no matter how inflated the price) they can get content, they're going to continue to have problems.
No morality, no ethics, just the facts. 'Nuff said.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
That doesn't solve the record companies' problem of controlling their intellectual property. It also doesn't prevent digital sharing beyond the subscriber base, which would have the same effect on digital sales as on CD sales.
A subscription system I think is practical would involve a special sound card with an RSA-type decryption and DSP on one chip. Your RSA public key would be your subscription ID; just present it to the server to get music that you and only you can listen to. The private key would be protected on the chip, and since the DSP takes place on board, the unencrypted digital music would be very difficult to access. Like cell phones, the card could be handed out for free, and maybe for a few bucks you could get an extra card or two to install in other computers in your house. To be extra nice, the record companies could distribute degraded music files, which you could freely share, but if you want the real version you have to pay to get the special version for your sound card (e.g., the right channel could be free but the left channel is encrypted, so to hear it in stereo you would have to pay).
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I cancelled my subscription to the star years ago. They have turned into a very bitter, ultra-left wing rant page. Just read some of the other articles up there now. Lots of articles blaming people for SARS, Critisizing the government for causing a double load of students entering university, an article saying how abusive the government is for having enforced quarantines.
The breaking point for me was when they had an article pretending to be a list of all the great stuff you can do at the CNE that turned out to be a very rude insult saying the CNE can't do anything right so they should abolish it (the CNE was great that year).
Jason
ProfQuotes
Now you too when faced with excruciating moral dilemas may look at your wrist and ask aloud:
What Would Elvis Do?
Parents, don't let your teen son or daughter leave home without one!
Available in 5 trendy colors for the teen on the go!
Look out, Elvis would reach for .357 TV remote and shoot the RIAA.
I myself have a rule that I live by when it comes to mp3 downloading: If I find that I keep returning to downloading material from the same group I go out and purchase they're CD. Especially if the songs I am downloading seem to all be contained on a single album.
On the other hand maybe lowering CD prices could do something....
copying is not theft.
The recording industry has never made as much as the figures they are citing for "stolen" music.
Imagine Torvalds charging $100/license for the Linux kernel. Would he be filthy rich, or would we all migrate to *BSD?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
50 cent had "highest-selling first album on a major label since Nielsen SoundScan began tabulating record sales in 1991, selling nearly 900,000 copies in the week following its February release" and basically he did 3 things.
1. Get famous first (create buzz with mixtapes or giving it out free on net)
2. Put a performance DVD in the package(just some handicam stuff, fan's dont care its "free")
3. Put out the CD before the bootleg (he actually released it early for this reason
CD prices seem to have gone down some, but it didn't happen too long ago, like starting early fall 2002 or so. The prices I've seen at Best Buy didn't seem too bad. Heck, Far Side of the Moon on a hybrid CD/SACD costs $14 at Best Buy. A lot more CDs seem to be available at $10 and $12 prices there.
...so what are you going to do about it? Here's their contact page: http://www.thestar.ca/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?page name=thestar/Render&cid=972304684203
Tell them what you think about this piece. Every bit of corrospondance keeps journalism a little bit more honest.
Bored with karma, be a fan/freak
Elvis agrees with Janis Ian. I ran into him the other night at the 7/11 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, while he was refilling the propane tanks outside.
What the hell does Mp3 networks like kazaa have to do with the downfall of Sony's classical division? There's hardly any classic music to be found, and the little that is to be found are mostly incomplete pieces (like the first part of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or a handful of ouvertures by Wagner). Also, it is impossible to find the recordings you are after (conductors, recordings, orchestras etc are very seldomly hinted by the filenames). Do most people that doesn't listen to classical music even know these things matter?
If anything, only being able to download what is essentially small snippets of classical music. When it's easy to find and download a complete recording of Bach's Mattheus Passion with the conductor of the downloaders choice and also in good quality, then MAYBE mp3 will start hurting the classic recording industry. Most probably, it will only spurn people to buy more music.
The truth is that Sony saw that their profits were down and just axed one of the least profitable departments. Kazaa had nothing to do with this.
I would like to mod that Toronto Star article -1, flamebait.
-Lars
elvis is DEAD . .. so who gives a shit what some ass supposes he would think?
-fester
-'fester
Elvis probably would have sided with the RIAA once Hilary and Jack convinced him (in a barbituate-induced mental stupor) that by fighting mp3s he was fighting communism. But for him to be invoked as a fighter against "piracy" is ludicrous, since he built his career on the open theft of black music. His work is a perfect case study in how copyright law benefits the real pirates over the real artists. I won't say Elvis wasn't great - he was an incredible performer and artistically he made many of the songs his own - but his greatness was built on the kind of theft and piracy that copyright law should be designed to prevent, yet instead was used to encourage.
maybe they should just realize you can't sell something that isn't a real object.
http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
I really like the comment on the radio part. My local radio station claims to be playing hit after hit. Which is true, to bad they play the same hit over and over again. If you don't like the music which has been defined as hits this week, well to bad, you're going to hate what their playing on the radio then. I would agree with what they claim in the article, the radios doesn't play enough different music.
Another problem which they don't cover is the fact that the music industry doesn't give its customers what they want. If they don't know what we want, it's because they don't listen. We keep telling them what we want and they keep ignoring us. We want cheap downloadable music. The music should be available in the formats we like, not some weirdo proprietary file format. It must be available in high quality, 128kbps is not nearly enough. Most importantly, the selection needs to be huge, just like we see on the p2p networks. Also the website where we buy the music should remember what we bought, just in case we lose the file and needs to re-download it. No other industry can survive ingoring the wishes of their customer, I don't see what make the music indutry so unique.
Why don't they try to make music something you buy on impulse, just like chewing gum in the supermarket. If I hear a song in the radio or on tv, my only shoot at getting this song, while I remember it, is via some p2p network. Why the music indutry doesn't see profit in this is beyond me.
That's what it says on the big poster in my room:
"What would Elvis do?"
The bad news is that sales of CDs are in a freefall, representing a $250 million loss over the last two years.
OK, so we agree sales are falling. Is it any wonder? Having heard the fifth cover version of "Spirit in the Sky" earlier and myriads of other "artists" releasing other people's work, I begin to wonder if the media have woken up to exactly who is the thief here.
Wake up call: There is a global recession, or something that very much looks like one. The music industry is being hit by a downturn in spending in general, just like everyone else. Not only that but they are exacerbating the problem by the broadside by turning out crap, stuff we've heard time and time again, manufactured groups and cover versions that shame the originals. Why are they making less money? Doesn't take a rocket scientist, does it?
Why wasn't there all this hue and cry when twin tape decks appeared on the market? Because they weren't as visible as the publicly accessible Internet. Album and song sharing is not a new, 'net age problem. It happened all the time pre-Internet. Anyone who says they haven't copied a tape or recorded from the chart show on the radio is either very young or a liar. The only reason this is gaining public airtime is simply because the 'net, being free speech epitomised, is an easy target for any group of totalitarians, the RIAA included.
Yes, BTW, I buy my music, when there's anything worth buying. I always have done. The problem is, the interval between my purchases has increased. This is not influenced by finances or that I can download from the 'net. Simply put, the amount of quality music available has declined. Not only that but the implication that I am a criminal simply because I am tech savvy and trying to blame me and worse, imposing a tax on me due to their own faliures and shortcomings doesn't exactly endear the music industry to me, making me think a little more carefully about what I purchase since my purchases may support this idiocy.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
(See Digital Jihad!!1)
Without enacting a lot of laws, police actions, whining, and their other garbage, all the RIAA has to do is lower their prices. If they can price CDs marginally above their cost, the piracy would be crippled. There are other ways to make money- a lot of bands I'd like to see play maybe 12 dates across the country each year, and not always in my neighborhood. If they toured more frequently, yes, I would pay $20-$30 for a show and probably buy food and a t-shirt, too. They just need to change their business model. Make CDs cheap and affordable (the way 45s used to be) and make up the rest with promotions. This used to work, and there's no reason why it won't again.
IAAL
I don't think it's clicked into their heads yet that a large portion of these mp3 thieves only download them because CDs are just to damn expensive.
I have to pay $15-20 CAN for a CD these days. If they dropped that price by $5-7, I would be much more likely to purchase the CD instead of just looking on the back of it to memorize the song lists to download.
I don't know why the retarded record companies can't look out the window and see as plain as day what they have to do.
If the major record labels and a few minor ones would just get together and offer a reasonably priced (I'm talking $5 - $10 per month) subscription-based Napster-like service, they would make more money.
I prefer downloading music. I don't have to drive to the store, I don't have to buy 12 lame songs to get the one that I like, and I can mix my own CDs for my driving pleasure.
This would be good for artists as well. They wouldn't have to work so hard to release an "album". They could just release one or two songs and everybody would be happy. Or, instead of waiting until they have cobbled together a list of 12 - 15 songs (most of which will be lame anyway), they could release 3 - 4 good songs and forget all the crap songs (of course they'd have to come up with a bunch of crap songs if they wanted to go on tour I guess).
Anyway, online subscription-based services are the answer, not paying extra money for stupid encryption schemes that will be broken within minutes of being released.
You've obviously never read anything ultra-left wing. The Star doesn't even come close.
Hands in my pocket
Well, indie guys like me are booming! I sell CDs for 5 bucks a pop (my latest was a compilation album of my first 3 albums plus new stuff, 19 tracks), and tell EVERYBODY to rip their favorite tracks to their HD for P2P users. And that is how I get known with minimal cost.
The whole article is composed of one sentence paragraphs. I think they did that to make it harder to copy. ha ha ha !!!
The record companies are used to having a near monopoly like existance. You want Metallica? Well there is little competition, but to go through Metallica's distributor.
Now, competition exists. The record companies aren't stupid. They realize that if they lowered their prices, revenues would probably rise. They will introduce online services, but they want to charge a buck or two a song, when in reality, the price that will bring in profits is more in the neighborhood of 10-20 cents a song.
If they lower prices and follow the laws of economics, they will see revenues rise (in addition to sales).
-Sean
What the hell kind of bullshit statement is that? What, a lesban duo has no chance of ever making a hit record or what? Kind of a backwords hick attitude you have there. We live in the 21st century here bub. It is common knowledge that they're a couple. Stop spewing shit and check your facts.
The worse news is that the slump has hit Canada first and hardest, because of our higher-than-average use of the Internet, compared to other countries, and the tendency of Internet downloading to cripple traditional record sales. FUD! Has there ever been any proof that people downloading music makes for less sales? If so, can anyone give me some links?
As music downloading continues to soar -- KaZaA's online file-sharing service leapt by a staggering 1,500 per cent between the summers of '01 and '02 -- layoffs are widespread across the recording industry. Entire divisions -- such as Sony's classical division in Canada -- are being pared back. Because as we all know, those nasty youngsters just love to download hours upon hours of Bach's organmusic...
"They're their own victims," says one senior executive, known for years as an unabashed booster of the recording business. "And the problem has been the CD -- the CD and its plastic jewel case. It looks like crap." Uhm.. that actually makes sence you know... if you're going to fork over a fistfull of hard earned money, you would like to get a quality product back.
We must ask ourselves what Elvis would do to stop the theft of music via the Internet, now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters. Some 17-year-olds I know have vast music collections but have yet to purchase their first CD. And their apparant taste for classical music (se above) must be the downfall of the one hit wonderbands the musicindustry is pushing these days.
Elvis, are you with the Jukebox Jihad? Firstly, Elvis is assumed dead, so he can't be with anything. Secondly, as far as I'm told by my mother, Elvis actually cared for his fans. If downloading a 'taster' of your favorite musicians newest release nukes your harddisk, chances are you're going to be pretty pissed off with the recordindustry... thus not giving them your money (besides, you need that cash to buy a new harddisk).
Many of them are musicians, but just as many are managers, booking agents, producers, publishers, promoters, publicists, A&R reps, distributors, indie-label entrepreneurs and the like And you wondered why a CD costs so much? Here is your answer; the organised music industy of today are full of leechers. The best CD I bought last year was from a band I've never heard of before, on a concert I went to only because a friend recomended it. While the quality of the coversleeve was less than the ones in the shop, the music and recording was way better, and the price was about ¾ of what I would have paid in a shop. BTW, the band was Fuzzfish, and I think they are worth listening to.
Independent labels, meanwhile, survive on a fraction of the bureaucracy and lavish expense-account living enjoyed by the majors, and generally treat their artists more generously. Cant argue there - actually, if the 'big brands' learned this lesson we might see an actuall decrese of P2P-sharing of music.
Why is radio so appallingly tedious, homogeneous, unadventurous and predictable? Lowest common denominator. They play partly whats least naseauting to the most listeners, partly what they recive money to give airtime.
And they do this in the most predictable ways. You like Norah Jones? Let's get more where she came from. Of course, if Norah Jones is for real, then there aren't any more where she came from. But we'll witness a parade of lesser facsimiles before another instant trend comes along. Ah, send in the clones - the me-too's and the other one hit wonderbands. Then sit back and wonder why they arn't as popular as the original. Looking back a few years, we had a reasonable successfull group called Aqua that came from Scandinavia. The next thing we knew, we had at least a dozen wannabees (Toy Box and Daze were the most successfull ones, and thats not saying much) who copied the musical style from Aqua, the visuals o
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Elvis Aaron Presley was a homo-sapien.
Why is radio so appallingly tedious, homogeneous, unadventurous and predictable?
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
back in the day it was soo badass. I could get on IRC and download music, then send those songs to the computer i built for my car and cruise with that.
for once the 'crusin' crowd thought i had something sweet, but no. then napster came out and everyone's dog is downloading music.
damn. I want to be a badass again...
Extremely sad...
-- Would it be acceptable to just put my name on my sig?
It seems to me that the RIAA should hire the Iraqi Information Minister on to their PR department. I think he'd fit in great there.
"The music-pirating infadels shall fall to their knees at the hands of our lawyers! Our profits shall be restored once more!"
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
So if, online file traders are like the looters in Baghdad, then I'd liken the RIAA, and the recording industry at large, to Saddam Hussein. They oppress their artists and their consumers, and their latest legal tactics to "kill" companies like Napster are their own private version of WMD.
-buf
What Would Elvis Do?
/. before, why even be tempted to pay a bloated price for only two songs and the rest being audio vomit.
First, I think he would encourage more albums being filled with songs that just as or nearly as good as the few that really catch a person's ear. As stated on
Next, Elvis would eat some deep fried steak with a side of fried chicken and some deep fried twinkies.
Second, I think Elvis would advise a better attempt at karma revival and PR for the recording industry. They have given themsevles a hell of a black eye going from their group benefit songs and perfomances to having their greedy lapdogs try to nail college students for several million.
Lastly, after a snack of pork rinds and deep fried pork chops covered with gravy and dressed with twice fried fries the King would offer one last line of advice: Return to the music and leave the show crap to strip bars, and the circus freak show...people listen to music that endears and sing it long past when they wedge you in a triple wide coffin and mention you in tabloids at least once an issue, where a big flash is soon forgotten when it can't be seen anymore and the light trickles away to nothing.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
Indeed -- What Would Elvis Do? That strange sound you just heard was my karma flying away... :^)
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
We all know how Elvis would act... but...
WHAT WOULD GOATSE.CX GUY DO?!?!?!?!
I sample songs via p2p.. I buy what I like, what I don't like I don't buy. I have a limited
budget for audio. I don't want to waste what I do have on bad product that I cant return,
unlike most any other industry except software..
Its simple as that.. its this easy to figure out: No free sample, no purchase..
If they don't stop trying to persecute and prosecute me, they will loose another customer.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
(pretend the following is in italics)
Some 17-year-olds I know have vast music collections but have yet to purchase their first CD.
(okay, you can stop pretending now)
Fair enough, but I know of a 42-year-old who has bought hundreds of pieces of music over his lifetime, but only has about 20 in his possession right now.
Lets see... there were 120+ albums that became nostalgia pieces when CD's hit the mainstream. Various CD's that got scratched or broken. Cassettes that met a sad demise in a hot car in the Texas sun. 8-Tracks... hell, we won't even talk about them.
Point being, the music industry keeps insisting that I'm not buying the actual music, just a limited license to listen to said music. Fine, but in that case I'm going to insist that I own that license forever, regardless of whether or not I still own the physical medium the music was recorded on. As long as I didn't give it away or resell it, it's still mine.
Until the music industry offers to replace all this stuff for free when it breaks or wears out, I'm going to keep hitting the P2P networks to get copies of the stuff I've already paid for.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
As many people have pointed out, it's the big labels who are in pain: smaller labels aren't dying. When I lived in France, my favourite record shop was a boutique of a label called Harmonia Mundi. It wasn't cheap, but every CD I got there was impeccable. It didn't stock any of the major big labels.
Here's an article by Bernard Coutaz, founder of Harmonia Mundi, where he essentially calls for the death of the big companies who in his eyes are killing classical music:
Does the recording industry actually have concrete proof of a direct correlation between apparent loses and music piracy? It seems to me like there is also the possibility that the quality and effort put into new music is going down as well. I do agree that music piracy is undoubtedly reducing the overall revenue. However, another possibility is that the lost revenue is simply the CD's that people stopped buying because people were actually able to try out CD's before they bought them.
Promote artsists that are actually talented and interesting, and maybe I will buy something again. As it is now, I am not ripping your garbage from Kazaa because it is not even worth the search and the download. How is that for you? Your crap is not even worth stealing. I go to shows, I buy from artists web sites or at their shows, and I listen to interesting radio. You can keep your platinum sellers, I am bored with them.
Music will never stop...... Record Labels may fail, but you can bet you last buck that new means of music distribution will emerge.
-Cnik
The secret about all Canadian newspapers (or at least all the major ones, plus somewhere around 150 local dailys) is that they are owned by one family. Make no mistake, they have a political agenda. Their friends in the record industy can no longer afford their private jets (well, they can afford one, but not more than that). Also note the people in private jets aren't the artists (who take buses) they are the fat-cats who have as much combined talent as my silverware and little retarded Billy's bottle-cap collection.
At any rate, their buddies in the recording industry cry, and these jerks make up news about the "hardships" in the industry.
They are not a valid source of news any more than reading the vandalism in the toilet stall at work will give you the truth about your fellow school students.
The real shame about this rag is it is not absorbent enough for a good wipe, and it leaves black marks on your butt when you are done.
Informed Canadians read the CBC (or BBC) websites for their news!
But that doesnt mean that your not stealing from them. People can go on and on about the Nsyncs of the world, but your still stealing. Do all these excuses make you sleep better at night?
Note, I have a ton of mp3's, and I'm not ashamed, but I don't make excuses either.
Considering Elvis was the "bad-ass" of his time
An interesting comparison: The bad-ass of the early 2000s is Marshall Mathers aka Eminem. Though he speaks out publicly against piracy of his songs, his lyrics encourage listeners to "download the audio on MP3 / And show the whole world" ("The Real Slim Shady", The Marshall Mathers L.P.).
Will I retire or break 10K?
A subscription system I think is practical would involve a special sound card...
And then when you buy a new computer, you call the RIAA and ask for another soundcard with your personal key on it? And make you have drivers for it and it fits your system?
I would suggest that a USB dongle or something would work much better (works with laptops, iMacs, non-tech savvy users, etc and is more portable), but that the point is ultimately moot (for me anyway)
The reason is simple: I will never buy music or any other media if I think it might stop working someday. When I'm 60, will I still have a computer where I can use my special RIAA soundcard/dongle? I can forward-migrate CD's or any other non-DRM media, but once it's encrypted, it becomes locked into the original format.
I suppose that suits the RIAA just fine, but not me.
2. Popular music is getting tired. 3. Lack of range.
Darn right. According to studies by Forrester Research and George Zieman, the 10 percent drop in RIAA labels' revenue from 1999 to 2001 is more likely to come from a slow economy and from publishing 30 percent fewer new titles than from peer-to-peer copyright infringement.
Will I retire or break 10K?
'We must ask ourselves what Elvis would do to stop the theft of music via the Internet
Elvis would not do a damn thing if he got according to the terms in his contract. It's the non-musicians that are losing money. What would Elvis think? "Hmmm....I got paid... and now this internet thingy is spreading my music all over the world...increasing my fan base AND my popularity...."
I would agree with your argument (time consuming) if not for the fact that most people I know would buy a CD's worth of music on-line for $1 if they could (even on dialup).
The issue here is that a CD may only take 30 minutes to buy (assuming travel time, etc.) while the same on-line may take several hours to download via 28.8 dialup, but I don't think that's as big of a factor as one might argue.
Consider the fact that you save more time in the long run because you only have to work for 5 minutes for the cost of a CD rather than an hour or two (if you're flipping burgers). Moreover, while I don't have figures, I'll wager that the ones with broadband are the ones buying a larger percentage of CD's on the whole.
Regardless, the argument is moot. I don't think the RIAA is going to change (insert obligatory buggy/whip manufacturer reference), and we're about to see a huge paradigm shift in music creation and distribution in the next decade.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
No, let's also pause to enjoy any torment that befalls Clear Channel, the greedy narrowminded suits who own and have culturally cleansed nearly all of the U.S. radio market. Break a leg, fellas -- break it in multiple places, you Nazis!
It's a great time to love indy, outsider, ethnic and lo-fi music -- these fields have never been more teeming nor the work more passionate and lovely. And here, of course, when you look beneath the excuses of file trading, can be found the explanation for the collapse of the top-heavy giants. Fragmentation of taste. The rise of alternatives. Before Napster taught the suits to say "mp3," they were already going around in the early 90s bemoaning their long-term prospects in light of the disintegration of consensus music.
Let these dinosaurs sink up to their necks in the tarpits. As they descend, their last angry gurgles will be no more memorable than the formula records they're so shocked that fewer and fewer people want to buy.
Explode on contact?
Indeed!
And this article talks about how Canadian radio is lame. Why is it lame?
Canadian radio is lame because the Canadian government has protectionist policies which force Canadian radio and TV stations to air 40% Canadian content. This is, of course, because we don't want to lose Canadian music because of all those evil American musicians brainwashing our kids...
Unless I'm blind and missed it, the article didn't even mention Canadian content laws.
The problem is that there simply aren't enough musicians in Canada who are capable of going head to head with the products of a very similar culture, 10x the size, next door.
The net effect is that, to achieve their Canadian content requirements, Canadian broadcasters have to play the same songs over and over and over. And then there are the marginal acts which really aren't good enough for the prime time but are being played anyway... The Tragically Hip are a good example.
If any American wonders what radio sounds like when you start letting pseudo-socialists control your airwaves, hit Kazaa and grab the Tragically Hip's Bobcaygeon. I'm a classic rock fan. The classic rock station in Toronto, Q107, wants to play Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. And that's what I want to listen to. But they're forced to play Bobcaygeon because of draconian laws which try to make me like bad music.
Canadian artists can sink or swim on their own. Alanis Morrissette, Burton Cummings and the Guess Who, Celine Dion, Shania Twain have all made it big in the US. Why? Because of Canadian government protectionism? No... because they're talented.
Beyond that and without protectionism (not to mention record company pressure, but we'll leave that for another time), radio stations should be playing what the broadest cross-sections of their audiences like. Of course that will result in more listeners and therefore more ad revenues. It's in the stations' interests.
The Tragically Hip should be working at the Wendys on Division Street in Kingston. The fact that my government has cost broadcasters their audiences weakens the music industry on a whole, disgusted consumers, and wasted billions of tax dollars rescuing struggling "artists" from the hell of working day-jobs in fast food while honing their skills playing bars at night.
"Paying your dues" is apparently too inhumane for the Canadian government to allow. Paying my taxes makes me want to see my government overthrown.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Having heard the fifth cover version of "Spirit in the Sky" earlier and myriads of other "artists" releasing other people's work
It's inevitable. There are only about 50,000 possible four-note melodies in the Western scale.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm sure the horse market went under when Ford had his neat idea, and the shackles and whips market probably took a hit with the Civil War.
ObElvis: Of course, you could just ask Elvis himself, if you know where he's living now. He probably posts on slashdot.
He was being ironic! Geeeze some people!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
for the Beatles ONE release, same with best of CCR, at WalMart. Or 9.98.
Shopko, and less often, Target downmark CDs. Got a couple of Faith Hill for $11 at Target.
CD prices are pretty soft. I've seen $20 CDs at Tower, SamGoody, even Pamida(Shopko owned), but who's buying at that price?
The reason the industry is having such a damn fit isn't because we've all lost our morals and now think theivery is ok - it is because they see the writing on the wall and know they have no reason for existence. There was a whole industry based on there being one way to get music to people who will buy it - now that middleman isn't needed and they know it.
IMHO this is capatalism at work. Another, more efficient, system of distribution has evolved and will eventually kill off the less efficient one. The parts that are necessary will be preserved because they have worth - those that aren't will be discarded.
Interesting fact about TATU: Once the younger one (don't know their names) became 18, they applied to be in an issue of PLAYBOY together. They were told to buzz off.
Since when did this website turn into RIAAdot? Outside of duplicate submissions getting accepted, the only other stories these days seem to be RIAA-related.
Like the latest boy-band, can we get over this fad and back to Stuff that matters?
Dossy's Blog
So is The Star making it up as it goes along, or does it know something google doesn't?
Interesting fact about TATU: Once the younger one (don't know their names) became 18, they applied to be in an issue of PLAYBOY together. They were told to buzz off.
boycott playboy... 'nuff said.
Except that Radio in the US sucks as much as it does in Canada. Clear Channel, for instance has all the same problems as Canadian stations. Canadian stations have the same formula radio as the US does, except for the requirement for 35% of Canadian content on the radio means a slightly higher emphasis on Canadian music. The fact of the matter is, the music and radio industry have dug their own graves, and it's up to them to demonstrate they shouldn't be laid to rest in them.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
To compare looters who have lived in terror for their lives, their families' lives, torture, rape, etc., with spoiled college kids who are alternately downloading mp3's and porn while the roommate is gone home for the weekend. I am going to be sick.
Have some class and respect the tremendous difference between war-time civil unrest and fairyland music theft (if you even want to call it theft).
I suggest you read Slashdot
...because most of us don't have much IP worth protecting. Short of posing as if it is your work (which would be fraud, not theft), I'm not going to start a witch-hunt if you start pirating my school papers, or that programming exercise I did.
Most laws work because we feel a need to protect ourselves. We don't want to get killed, raped, mugged or have our property stolen. But copying a song? The general public won't care. The problem here is that you have a third-party victim. In a conventional crime, you have the offender and the victim. Here, you and me swap songs, and some third-party far far away that we have never met is now a victim?
I do agree artists should be compensated for their work. But I really don't think it's a serious crime. I mean that artist would probably be more hurt if I punched him or her in the face than if I copied an album I'd probably never buy anyway. The punishment should reflect that.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
THe Iraqi people, when given the freedom, looted from their former oppressors. Record Companies have been raping us for years now. WE are sick and tired of it. No amout of law or penalties/hacks will stop it. The more these fat kats try to stop it the worse it will be. Wala, we are in a new era... deal with it Elvis you whore!!!
There is one main problem to subscription based models. The record companies complain the loudest about losing money on the pop-scene. As the article suggests, jazz, classical and non-mainstream genres are doing okay and the imply (rightly so?) because they are aimed at a more affluent, older crowd.
So they want kids, to buy the mainstream pop stuff right? However, all the subscription services require, you guessed it, a credit card. How about this for an idea. You sell the equivalent of prepaid phone cards at b&m locations (7-11, grocery stores etc) and that buys you X amount of songs.
If you price that at about 50 cents a song or so, you probably can get kids to buy the cards. This is especially true, if I could get high quality, fast access, etc.
I must add to the conditions, no copy protection.
People will pay! You could even encourage people to buy cds online (or offline) using these cards. You could include the cards in CDs for promotional value.
One last thing, before P2P, I used to buy around 6 cds a year (this was at my cd buying height) so far this year I have purchased 4. I am pretty sure I will be adding one more on July 8th with Big Bad Voodoo Daddy's latest effort.
I pretty much have maintained the same purchase rate CDs.
Online downloading is more about convenience than anything else.
--Joey
And try to be nice for once instead of just flaming. Face it, this guy is just a journalist reguritating stuff he heard, and even then, he said a lot of stuff that most of us can agree with:
Radio is boring and homogenized, and it is hurting CD sales.
Labels should be more artist friendly
Michael Green's 2002 Grammy speech was annoying and pointless. (Even Janis Ian ripped on it.)
Decent recording can be done with reasonable studio costs (He even mentioned the new White Stripes album only costing $10,000 :-) )
Indie labels treat artists better than majors
Labels are a) greedy and b) want control of listeners
This guy is already halfway in our camp. Don't flame him, just educate him a little. In response to his claim that "sales of CDs are in a freefall", point to the recent Christian Science Monitor article we all read that said many indie labels have profits increasing 50-100% a year. Show him that the CDBaby sales figures keep getting better while the RIAA whiles that sales are disappearing.
He talked about musicians
Give him the names of acts you know about that get no radio play but who still can make money selling music and touring without a contract.In short, instead of yelling at him, give Peter Goddard a few more data points to use in his next article. This guy's views are not that different from most of the people here.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
I downloaded the world wide web of pain once. It took forever!
p.s. Either "The Rock" from WWE or the Iraqi information minister must have written this article.
"... only the most determined and technologically savvy of them will continue to steal music."
Hmm, I remember people saying this when mp3 technology first came out.
ôó
I mean common, the suggestions were clearly chosen by a bunch of people who had to make sure nothing radical or anti-CRIA was proposed and instead fell back on completely unrealistic(if not idiotic-fill the net with hacked mp3s that destroy your computer? what are we hunting replicants here?)proposals. This last chance to save an industry that isn't dying but does need to change to fit the times. I mean look at China, they don't even think about major cd releases there. Whatever, in 10 years this won't matter at all, either the mus industry changes itself, or it changes the laws. Either way I'm sure they'll still be around.
The big issue is that the RIAA is running the record industry like a price-fixing cartel, with that cartel determining the price of an album-length CD.
At US$18 per disc, that is just too expensive for many consumers. Anyone who's taken a basic course in microeconomics know that a cartel has too many incentives to undercut that cartel--Napster and KaZaa were born because consumers were balking at paying the high album prices.
Now, if album-length CD's were sold at US$11 per disc, then things will be WAY better, since there is much lower financial incentive to pirate music.
Look at the DVD market in the USA. Because new-release DVD movie discs go for around US$20, there is very little financial incentive to pirate the movie. Between the high cost of DVD recorder drives, the high cost of DVD recordable media, and the fact DiVX files of a movie takes about 350 MB disc space per hour of movie (a daunting thing to download even with broadband connections), I don't expect DVD piracy to be a serious problem in the USA.
The only thing that I think of in this whole fiasco is how music has become such a material possesion.
Music is an art, and surely should be "sold" as such. We don't get bothered when a jpeg of the Mona Lisa is viewed on a website, yet an MP3 is seen as such an item to be stolen.
The music industries, the whole word industry is such a joke in this commodity, it is taking everything the wrong way. Art is how it should be, give it to the people.
If everything industrially and business wise is destroyed in terms of music we won't see the destruction in music, at least I think that's what we're being told.
Maybe we'll actually see musical artists as artists one day, not Britney Spears, with big boobs, and big bucks.
I would like to distance myself from Toronto. One think many Americans don't understand is that the only Canadians that really like Toronto are the Torontonians (because they think they're the center of the universe). That being said the whole Elvis thing with exploding hard drives was part of one of 5 strategies that they suggested the industry might take though the main article itself was still decidedly conforming to the line the RIAA has been toting (all the internets fault).
But either way as a Canadian, especially a western Canadian please don't blame us for Toronto!
ps. If you could lay off our lumber industry it would be greatly appreciated.
I stole this Sig
I hear the argument that the way that musicians earn their living is mainly through touring. But what of studio-only musicians who don't tour (and there are some)? And there's certainly cases where a band takes a year off from touring in between studio albums (Spock's Beard, for example). Are we now saying that artists MUST tour in order to make money? What if they choose not to? Should they still not be able to make a living based on the work that they produced? It's sort of like if authors were forced to give speaking tours in support of their freely-given-away books.
I guess it's starting to look like artists and bands are going to be FORCED to tour to earn a living, and I think that the public may miss out on some great music that will never be made because of artists who only produce work and do not tour.
Record companies should start flooding the Internet with bogus MP3 files that look like songs, but that explode on contact inside the hard drives of Internet thieves. Anyone who illegally downloads an MP3 file via KaZaA or any of the myriad peer-to-peer (i.e. thief-to-thief) services would at best get a corrupted file, and at worst a ruined hard drive.
:p
Somehow I thought this tactic was laid dead somewhere around the Crusades. "Convert to Christianity or die." I'm sure that'll convert all the nasty pirates, the method has had successes without end. Not.
I'm pretty sure a large part of the CD buying community is listening to mp3s (but not necesserily the other way around). Alienate your current customers, to strike those that already don't want to be your customers.
Of course, they'll attribute an increase in sales to "effective copyprotection measures" and a decrease to "pirates". They're doing a wonderful job of blaming everyone but themselves and their product. Now if only you'd get people to buy a real pr0n vids instead of the RIAA pr0n-wannabes, their marked would finally collapse
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You forgot "Rush", rockin since 1971. ;) They also recieved the "Star of Canada" which I believe is the highest civilian honor one can get in Canada. (Thats what I heard anyways)
sri
I wouldn't mind if radio stations played 35% more Rush. maybe I should move to Canada. :P
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Let' start with the nonsense. First, they say sales have fallen $250 million in the past two years, from 1.2 billion to 950 million. That is a 20 percent drop, and is significant. As has been repeatedly stated, it is unclear how much of this is piracy and how much is caused by the fact that people simply have no disposable liquid funds. For instance, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down about 20% over the past year. In Canada 2002 starting with an 8% unemployment rate, and is still above 7%. I find the suggestion that unemployed people should continue to buy CDs, instead of say food, ridiculous.
Worldwide, the entire music business is still worth a whopping $66.6 billion (all figures Canadian) but only if you factor in cash-cow ventures such as sponsorship deals and tour profits that together account for some 40 per cent of all profits.
All I will say about this is that is same book cooking that the major athletic organizations use. The teams are losing money and putting the owners in poorhouse, but only because concessions and other promotions are listed as separate enterprises.
But the real tragedy of this article are the solutions. In the introduction text it is admitted that CDs are crap and are not making money. It is admitted that the money is to made in concerts. In the solutions it is admitted that radio sucks and the long term progress is to let people download songs. And yet the solutions listed are all about stopping download and repackaging CD. It is silly. If selling music isn't making money and concert are, then grow the concert business. If CDs aren't selling, simple economics says to drop the price. I am not going to pay 20 dollars for a CD when for $25 I can see an excellent local artist and purchase a one of the CDs.
The dropping of CD prices is critical. I see a kid buying a CD then selling copies for $5 with cover art(his cost about $2). If CDs were sold for $8-$15 dollars it would not only make them more attractive to a cash strapped population, but also cut into the underground market.
As has been said before this is not about saving musicians and artist, it is about saving a inefficient and antiquated bureaucracy. It is sad jobs will be lost, but jobs are being lost everywhere. Perhaps the guy who stuffs cocaine and cash into envelopes for the industry big wigs can be retrained to stuff envelopes at home. I get Spam offering me big buck for such work all the time.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The Toronto Star is a really crummy newspaper. It's not really fit for educated people, and since most /.ers are relatively well educated, I really don't know why we're bothering to look at it.
These idiots call for a jukebox jihad.
They are too stupid to realize the jihad against the recording/distribution industry in the first place. The music being downloaded is that jihad. Figure it out you idiots and learn how to give the music jihadies what they want. Trying to counter a jihad with another jihad will end with the music industry getting nuked due to their own stupidity.
Not to egg the stupids on Peter.
Add to that list: Avril Lavigne and Nickelback.
If his main appeal is to 12-16 year old suburban white girls?
I mean, "50 cent" is badass, but he is so 1995. In fact all of rap is so 1995.
How come these articles fail to mention the government's seizure and theft of the electo-magnetic spectrum? It is no coincidence that the internet is their big "threat". They grew accustom to restricted access channels.
"it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters"
If you download music you are a terrorist!!!
I don't disagree with anything other then the breakage fee. I worked in a store that sold music and we returned about 5% of the CD recieved because those cheap jowel case the are stored in would break during shipping. No one wants to buy a CD were the jewel case is broken before it even leaves the store. Now I thing there numbers are for 18% (I think I read that somewhere) is out of whack but CD do break and get returned.
You said exactly what I would have said to this nutcase. American radio sucks because it is mass marketed drivel from clear channel. The real solution to this would be to break up all the big radio/music players until they are small enough to not be able to control the market. Then we would get more equitable treatment of artists as well as more selection.
The RIAA sells little plastic bits for their member through record stores. Those record stores are based on a model from the 1950's where there were a very limited number of new product and inventory issues were easy. I figure there are about 1333 new CD's per year per million people. In the english speaking world, that nearly 1/2 million new albums per year. There is no way a traditional record store could deal with that many different albums and the RIAA fixes that problem.
"If you could lay off our lumber industry it would be greatly appreciated."
Only if you lay off our president. He appears a bit retarded, but probably isn't.
Radio in general sucks. And I think everybody can agree with that. Even in U.S. the same song is played over and over again (at least the last time I listened to the radio).
It is true the record industry needs to change... but just how it will change is still very unknown. But they can't fight technology, especially this way.
For example, once there is a web of trust for mp3's this would make it impossible for the RIAA to use DOS attacks on peer-to-peer networks.
Perhaps better pricing, and the ability to download the songs and play them the way we want would help. But I know that is asking for too much.
Be ready for changes in the next several years.
Look. Most 17-year-olds are still in high school and don't have jobs, and therefore don't have any money with which to buy CDs. Your losses due to their downloads are minimal, because they have no money to spend on CDs (or anything else, for that matter) anyway. Had downloading not been an option, they would have simply had to go without music.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
OK, so I'm an old fuddy-duddy who remembers the days of vinyl. When I was a kid I got an old tube-type pre-amp that had an unusual dial on it. It selected the record de-emphasis to use for each particular label, and it had 19 positions. That's right, each record cutting company had its own ideas as to what the "best" pre-emphasis curve to use to reduce SNR without overcutting the record. (Yes, this was in the days of 78-rpm records, although even the early 33-1/3-rpm records were cut using proprietary filters.)
One of the reasons the Recording Industry Association of America, a.k.a the hated RIAA, was formed was to reign in the madness and develop some sensible standards for recordings. The work of the RIAA was to reduce the cost of both recording and playing back recordings in a number of formats: vinyl, magnetic tape, and at one point magnetic wire. By reducing the Babel, makers of cartridge pre-ampliers would need to put in less circuitry, makers of record-cutting lathes could provide the "standard" circuits for each speed/format, and the listening public didn't have to mess with that 19-position knob anymore when changing records.
The RIAA did such a good job that it put itself out of its original business, setting standards. Much of the standards work is now done by the developers of media: Phillips for cassettes, and I don't recall who brought us the digital compact disc. The DVD is pretty much out of RIAA's hands, too.
Interesting that the RIAA and many computer engineers have something in common -- a lack of need for what they do...
evenprime, you bring up a good point, though I my driving motivation for my previous post was that this writer should NOT be writing anything on a topic for which he possesses no real enlightenment regarding.
And try to be nice for once instead of just flaming. Face it, this guy is just a journalist reguritating stuff he heard, and even then, he said a lot of stuff that most of us can agree with:
(Yes, even is right, any corrospondance readers send really should be as polite as far any respect is due. Flaming doesn't compel your mark to adopt your views.)
Bored with karma, be a fan/freak
Its time we put the recording and movie industries in their place....just because they MILDLY entertain people does NOT mean they deserve BILLIONS of dollars.Don't agree?Well fuck you too.
"To wrongfully obtain or exert unauthorized control over the property or services of another or the value thereof, with intent to deprive him of such property or services."
Learn to think. Fuckwit.
Is it just me, or is anyone else kinda pissed off that they're making a comparison to benign computer geeks swapping music over the internet to looters, theieves and murderers in Baghdad?
This is just my 2 cents on the whole song swapping thing, but I have about 5,000 songs on mp3, most of which are from albums I don't own. Although I'm far from saying the whole thing is ethical (a different bag of worms entirely), I think it's far from illegal.
Although I do have an extensive collection of mp3s, all of varying genres, I also have quite a CD collection. Most of the songs that I download as mp3s are of songs from albums that I would have never purchased. Although I like these artists and their music, I don't necessarily like them well enough to actually purchase their products.
With all that said, I would like to know then how I am stealing from the RIAA? If mpeg layer 3 audio had never been developed, and I had never downloaded those 5,000 some odd songs that I currently have, the record industry would not have seen any more money from my pocket. In fact, if anything they would have seen less. Mpeg layer 3 audio has actually introduced me to a number of artists to which I would have never otherwise listened, if I hadn't downloaded their songs first. That led me to purchase their album!
So, could someone please explain to me how I'm looting and pillaging?
Well, at least I don't own an SUV.
sorry, it was just so obvious.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
My dad's been taking hormones for the last six months or so. His breasts are saggy, but bigger than my moms.
The two are, of course, divorced.
Anyway, he says he's glad you enjoyed it and that your girlfriend fakes it!
HAND!
The author seems to think the death of the record industry "as we know it" would be a disaster.
Funny, most of the five authors who wrote the seperate articles in the link don't feel that way at all.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Homosexual acts are relatively common even in conservative countries like Egypt, so I don't think the numbers would be as high as you claim.
US Radio sucks ass as well. Clear Channel controls a huge percentage of the radio market and they play the same so called music ad-nauseum. I say let the recording industries die! Put the power back into the hands of the musicians. People will continue to make music whether or not they get paid millions to do so. If the recording industry gets out of the way, we may be able to sling all this over hyped corporate shit into the can. Avril, Shania, and Celine are exactly who I'm talking about here. If I have to hear any more of their stuff I'm going to jam pencils into my ears until I'm deaf.
An IT professional's world has been turned upside down by easy corproate access to $2/hr PhD's working from the likes of India.
Music is just too easy to copy to charge more than a few cents per song. Teenagers are by necessity cheapskates and really really don't want to pay $12.99 for an album in which 2/3 of the songs are stinky fillers.
That is life. The geanie is out of the bottle and we can't put it back. (Although it would help a bit if all H-1B's went home.)
Table-ized A.I.
That said, I am amused that so many do not see that regardless of the ethical or even legal issues of music thieves, there still exists the more important issue of reality. There really is no way to police this so they should really try to take advantage of it if they are smart and want to make money. Eventually I think the Internet will indeed provide an easier and cheaper way to legally distribute music. By cutting out the corrupt and manipulative recording industry middlemen then it will also become easier to get a hold of GOOD music. It will be easier for newbies to get going and less stress will be on established bands to pump out crap with one or two good songs on board. Novelists understand this frustration and often will set aside a notebook of "crap filler" ideas for the times when they must fill some unrealistic obligation by their publisher. Thus less time or energy is devoted to the crap and more devoted to the good works. Taken another way it is the idea of not spreading yourself too thin. Now if only the electronic entertainment could do this and not pump out endless cookie cutter crap
Download a whole album worth of songs from your favourite P2P network. When you're done, send a money order (it should be anonymous.. are money orders anonymous?) of, say, $2 US to the artist/band that created said album. They end up getting around 2x-4x as much money as they would've gotten if you'd bought the CD, and you save yourself from spending $15.
Everybody wins! Oh, except the greedy record company.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
There are some reality assumptions expressed by the article that are not really supported with evidence.
The first is, "record companies are ailing."
But almost every mainstream record that is distributed today, ultimately traces its product lifecycle to either Sony, Time Warner, EMI, Polygram, Vivendi/Universal, or Disney. If they are "ailing", that assessment should not be made independently of the trends of the markets among which they are treade.
The second assumption is "internet file sharing is responsible" for the first.
The only thing the article provides in the way of evidence, "the music industry is worth $66.6 Billion Canadian" does not support the premises.
So the writers stoop to an appeal to Elvis. The writer presumes to know what Elvis would do. That's insulting to me and to Elvis.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
that was really weak + unfunny.
lemme guess -- next you're going to reply with "YHBT!"
However, that lame Canadian content law did cause the creation of one of the funnies comedy routines known to man: Bob and Doug McKenzie. They (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) created it because SCTV didn't have enough Canadian content. (For those that don't know, the bit was about two dumbass Canadians that drank beer and ate back bacon.) The ironic thing is, it was the funniest part of SCTV!! I guess the law worked!! (Just kidding...)
No, not any more. Or if so, not without checking for a CDDA label.
Over here in Germany, almost everthing on CD-like media is not CDDA any more. It does not play in what I have as playing devices and I am simply tired of unpacking, trying, failing and then arguing with the shop upon return.
I used to spend 1200 or so per year on new records, and getting new music always has been great fun. But for the past 15 months, it has been zero CDs for me. I just don't feel like it any more.
Kristian
Want to find more music that matches your taste? Install Audioscrobbler and start listening. Audioscrobbler will find people listening to similar bands and will tell you what else they like.
Kristian
Maybe some of these band s should get off their asses and tour more than 10 shows a year for there main source of income. Think about it The Grateful Dead toured almost non stop and allowed taped to freely tape every performance, they were not a top 10 billboard band. However they made their money on the road which also led to practice and HEY better music (amazing).
~~Some people never go crazy what truly horrible lives they must lead.~~ Charles Bukowski
I think laws like this shouldn't be too much of a restriction. There is no lack of talent in Canada. Local artists in Kitchener/Waterloo alone could fill up the regular play lists, if their discs were actually played! The trouble is that most people only want to listen to the mindless stuff they're used to hearing on the radio, and not listen to the wealth of talent that exists in a diverse range of other styles. I think that was, in part, the spirit of that regulation, to encourage a more diverse playlist. Unfortunately, it just means we hear more of the same mindless stuff more often instead of being exposed to some really innovative new artists. Blame the stations, not the regulations. And I suppose ultimately, we have to blame ourselves - if we REALLY wanted to expand our horizons, we would do it.. Most people just never want to take the effort to do so.
that doesn't take into account that movies also cost a lot more to make in the first place, and that most studios figure on making almost half their money from video sales and rentals. A movie that "only" costs 30 million to make is on the cheap side these days. I'm sure record lables spend similar amounts on "promotion", but only for a few bands.
The dot-coms are gone. Airlines are going into bankruptcy. Major telecoms are in bankruptcy. The energy-trading industry blacked out California by market manipulation, took major utilities into bankruptcy, and then went bankrupt itself. The music industry isn't up there on the national priority list.
The music industry is panicking because their sales are down 9%. NINE PERCENT. Car sales are down more than that. Hell, all retail is down more than that.
The music industry needs to shut up and soldier. They have a retail sales problem - let them solve it. Work on the product mix, find some new products that sell, come up with an online distribution system that's usable, cut costs and retail prices. None of that has happened. That's an indication of top-management incompetence.
Celine.Dion.-.One.Heart.(.full.album.+.cover).-320 kbps(ClintEastwood).rar
"You can argue that its morally and legally wrong, but that doesn't make it theft, anymore than arson is theft because it is morally and legally wrong."
Did you not read that part of the origional post, or are you bent on rationalizing how apples really are oranges?
The problem is that there simply aren't enough musicians in Canada who are capable of going head to head with the products of a very similar culture, 10x the size, next door.
Or maybe the problem is the crap that Canada chooses to export. Avril Lavigne? Nickelback? Sum41? You want to compete with Hendrix and The Doors and you've got is Rush? I don't think it's a size issue. It's an issue of talent and taste.
When I see some of the album cost production figures today, I shake my head. I was reading (don't ask why) an interview with Queen Latifah in a magazine called "Sister to Sister" and she was talking about $2 million to record and produce one album.
I doubt that Berry Gordy (Motown founder/producer) spent that much on studio time and production for all the Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, Smokey Robinson, and Marvin Gaye albums he produced added together.
Has all the expensive "modern" digital studio retracking and remixing made the music we get any better? I don't think so. Maybe record companies should start cutting costs on the production end at the same time they try to figure what to do with the distribution side of the business.
- Robin
I think it's all a symptom of broadcasting with only a few stations available in any place. Specialty channels, whether by internet or satellite, have some hope, in that they should realize that they need to treat their audience right, or that audience will move on.
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.
I wouldn't mind if radio stations played 35% more Rush... - Quick ! What's 1.35 times zero ? And DON'T tell me it's zero !
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
...is to country music what Britney is to pop. Luscious to look at, and utterly devoid of musical talent.
She should stick to the calendars and forget about the music.
The Dixie Chicks and a few others are all that is left of real country music, as opposed to the watered-down crap sold to damn-Yankees.
(Oh, and yes, the L stands for Lee and the J for Jackson.)
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
I hate to deflate the pseudo Elvis here, but this whole music thing is coming to a head. I've got the answer and I get to speak at the DMCA. http://www.azoz.com/news/law.html
Musicians distribute their tunes freely on the Internet. In return they get exposure, which gets them paying gigs, and they live off the income from the gigs like they do now. The record business dries up and blows away, leaving musicians and everybody else to get along Just Fine.
To repeat what has been said over and over by musicians who are speaking out: musicians do not make money from recording contracts. Standard recording contracts are written so that all production, distribution and advertising costs come out of the musician's share, draining it down to zero. Musicians make money from the gigs that they get through the exposure they get by having their songs widely distributed. Give musicians an alternate distribution method which works just as well will rob them of nothing.
"makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters."
Yeah, those mp3's you downloaded are more valuable than the priceless treasures and ancient artifacts from the dawn of human civilization. Someone needs to cut the RIAA down in half.
Whoa, whoa whoa, there, Jim Anchower, a hard-rockin oldies fan like you isn't supposed to like The Hip! (Oops, did I say oldies? I meant, of course, erm "classic rock"... by which of course I mean the slightly-less-old-oldies type of music...)
Anyways, I'm getting off topic here. In addition to Led Zep and Hendrix you're also supposed to like Jethro Tull, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Blue Öyster Cult, REO Speedwagon and Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
PS: You're also not supposed to mind smoking joints that smell like sea-otter piss.
[Sorry, right-wing classic rock fans with names like "BigBlockMopar" are just too damn easy...]
The Tragically Hip is an excellent band. They probably would have made it on their own anyways. It's too bad Canadians stations are prevented from playing 100% crap.
If you want to listen to oldies, you probably have the CDs anyways.
Canadian artists can sink or swim on their own. Alanis Morrissette, Burton Cummings and the Guess Who, Celine Dion, Shania Twain have all made it big in the US. Why? Because of Canadian government protectionism? No... because they're talented.
I would say that it's both. Without Can-Con, there wouldn't be an industry for the Canadian artists to start with. Anyone with any talent at all would just move to the States. I think the most damnable thing about Can-Con is that it worked. Kind of like the war in Iraq: Pacifists profess that war doesn't solve anything, but Iraq is now a free country (well, maybe a little too free...). Or how some Americans profess that no degree of Socialism can be tolerated, even though Canadians have a higher standard of living and a higher quality of life.
Talent doesn't grow in a vacuum. Similar things are happening now in the Canadian film industry. With heavy government meddling, it's starting to take shape. And the Americans are all huffing and puffing about it.
The Tragically Hip should be working at the Wendys on Division Street in Kingston.
Some people would argue that The Tragically Hip are actually pretty good. (I'm not personally a big fan, though.)
"Paying your dues" is apparently too inhumane for the Canadian government to allow. Paying my taxes makes me want to see my government overthrown.
Then why don't you just move to the U.S.? Maybe you'll cross some Americans at the border who are heading to Canada because "The land of the free" ain't quite so 'free' anymore.
No need, see WinAmp's 'malicious MP3' vuln.
You forgot "Rush", rockin since 1971. ;) They also recieved the "Star of Canada"
I think you mean the "Order of Canada". The star really isn't a symbol for Canada.
Man, can you believe "exploding MP3" guy? Maybe if you bribed the Winamp people to leave some really absurd buffer overflow in the software
No need, see WinAmp's 'malicious MP3' vuln.
I think I would come in my pants with joy if this entire, monstrous cultural shit-mountain would be washed away for ever.
We must ask ourselves what Elvis would do to stop the theft of music via the Internet, now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters.
While it's cute to prop up the corpse of a cultural icon to support your position, surely you're aware that What Elvis Would Do is chase down a handful of quaaludes with a fried banana-and-peanutbutter sandwich and go into a 48-hour sugar coma.
Record companies should start flooding the Internet with bogus MP3 files that look like songs, but that explode on contact inside the hard drives of Internet thieves. Anyone who illegally downloads an MP3 file via KaZaA or any of the myriad peer-to-peer (i.e. thief-to-thief) services would at best get a corrupted file, and at worst a ruined hard drive.
Riiiiight, that's what we should do. This is so fucking retarded it doesn't deserve a response, so I'll just let it stand there, grinning in its piss-stained pants, all by itself.
That's why I think the Jukebox Jihad would work. And while the industry is using this big stick, it should also offer a carrot to soothe the angry hordes. It should lower the price of CDs, at least for a few months, and have instant-win contests where you could win $1,000 or more on the spot. Make record-buying fun again.
Unfortunately, you're probably right. The vast idiotic middle would probably line up like fucking sheep at a feeding trough, jump up and down and clap and make gurgling noises as "recoord-buying" becomes "fun" again. You're so right I'm on the verge of throwing up in my own mouth right now.
In truth, I'm not personally given to intense "smash the music industry" sentiment because I have dozens of friends and acquaintances who owe their livelihoods to it.
In other words, you're a piece of corn stuck in the side of shit-mountain. Your credibility is even greater now.
Between the CD price-fixing settlements, the career-crippling recording contracts and the constant onslaught of vacuous, disposable music geared to short-term profits rather than the exposure of deserving performers, it's often hard to feel sorry for a multimillion-dollar business moaning about a few less bucks in its pockets lost to file-sharing and CD-burning.
Duh.
The industry must nevertheless also content itself with conducting business on a more modest scale, painful though the process might be. No one needs to spend in excess of $40 million on a record, as Sony did with Michael Jackson's 2001 flop, Invincible, for instance, when the White Stripes can muster a hit record for $10,000.
Duh.
The major-label side of things is, arguably, more bloated and extravagant than it needs to be
Gee, do you think so? Vast empires built on the backs of a bunch of deluded guitar-plinkers and thinly-veiled teenage cock-teasers and the record-buying morons who gobble it all up? Nah.
Why is radio so appallingly tedious, homogeneous, unadventurous and predictable? Blame advertising. It's naïve to think otherwise, but commercial radio's sole purpose is to sell ads -- it's not about spreading the word about undiscovered artists. And selling things, I'm told, is about repetition. And sticking to "safe" formulas.
This is the single most significant thing you've said in your article. There's a huge body of material under this statement rich for exploration. If our hyper-commercial consumer "culture" is the concentration camp, advertising is the Sonderkommando.
The real problem is fear. The industry actually fears its audience, all those downloading slacker scum who won't buy hugely overpriced CDs. In some cases, this fear has morphed into something else: hate.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
". If someone's income is derived from the right to sell copies of original content, and you give away for free, you are taking money out of their pocket."
Of course it is not theft, and you are not taking money out of anyone's pocket unless you would have bought it in the first place.
The extremely singleminded music industry is targeting their pop music at kids in their lower teens.
Here are the facts that follows from this:
FACT 1: Kids dont have money to buy music
FACT 2: Kids must have the latest music to stay popular
Following from this are three alternatives:
ALT 1: Download ("pirate") music from the Internet
ALT 2: Steal music by shoplifting CDs
ALT 3: Rich parents buy it for them
Now, except ALT 3, this results are that kids do get their music anyway and the music industry does not get a single penny. This is well known.
BUT -- and think about this -- it does not matter since they would not have paid anyway!
One may argue about the ethics in this (ie getting stuff for free), but in practice it does not matter since the industry would not have received any money anyway.
Granted, shoplifting is expensive since kids steal physical things and that is a loss for the industry. But the Internet-download-thing will just continue to happen because kids dont have money.
How to solve this?
Use the silver bullet of course: Target a different audience, for instance adults which have jobs and can pay for things they want.
The problem is not the 40% rule. There is a lot off excellent Canadian artists. The problem only is as posted later in the article that they are not "mainstream" enough or that the record labels don't push them enough.
It's about the money.
Of all the countries I have lived in I have never been in a place where music seems to be such an integral part than in Canada (okay, Ontario, to be precise I have lived in Toronto and Waterloo, but I have visited other cities and there it seems to be the same way).
Nope you're wrong, it's (this time) not the content law but simply the law of the almighty (advertising) dollar.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
I can't think of any other industry that so hates it's support base. To actually attempt to damage equipment when listening to music?
I think what we need to look at here is how WE as consumers should respond to the record industry. How about boycotting music for a year? Purchase no CDs or tickets - shut them out completely. And it's not nearly as hostile a move as those that the record industry is looking at.
I've suggested such a boycott before. The trick is that it must be organized, announced, and understood that we the consumer are CHOOSING not to support these monopolists/terrorists who have overesteemed themselves. They may have congress in their pocket, but we have the money, and therefore the power to JUST SAY NO!
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
Usually YHBT comes before HAND.
YHBT.
YHL.
HAND.
leans so far to the left that if it were human it wouldn't be able to stand.
That would be OK if it didn't infect every word printed on its page with an obvious and irrational bias. To add to the intellectual insult, the staff pretend they're terribly impartial and unbiased. At least Toronto's less left-wing (and even most of the MORE left-wing) papers admit their bias.
Anyway, the point is I didn't even have to read the article to know it has a 99.99% chance of being crap. Save yourself the time and don't bother reading it.
I studied music composition and performance in college, and over the years I have ended up simply retreating into my own world of my own music. In academic circles new seriously composed "music" has gotten so strange that no one even pretends there is any kind of market for it. The music "industry" seems to value visual imagery over musical prowess, and the radio is an absolute insult. Why even waste your time? I'd rather listen to sports talk radio, and I am not interested in sports!
/embittered rant
Furthermore, why should I bother putting my music out into such a zoo of a culture. What would have happened to Bach or Beethoven in this day and age, REAL musical geniuses? I am convinced that we indeed HAVE real musical geniuses, who sadly hang up their efforts and move on. They move on to arenas where their genius is actually appreciated, like in programming.
I want to hear counterpoint, form, architecture, genius. I hear complete drivel 99% of the time, why try to save it? When I share music with people that has counterpoint and form and real work and thought behind it, I find people don't catch it and don't care.
In my opinion, who cares if this crap is getting stolen? Or these charlatans are losing their jobs? This society needs a general reboot anyway, as far as music goes. I sincerely hope it all crumbles and everyone's favorite "band" gets jobs as janitors where they belong. Maybe real musicians can start getting a chance to shine.
What's wrong with the music industry? The tastes and standards of the listening public AND the "artists" have gone so far down the tubes that the music itself barely seems to matter anymore.
musicians do? They were performers. They were minstrels and troubadours. Now all of a sudden technology advances and a new profession is created. Recording Artist.
Where then, does this sense of entitlement come from? Why should we be sad that CD sales are dropping? Music existed long before CDs and will exist long afterwards. Yes artists deserve compensation, but the CD is just one model for providing that compensation.
I don't buy CDs anymore. When a good artist comes through town I drop the $20-40 and go support them and have a good time. If an artist doesn't dome to my town, then tough luck for them. CDs should be considered advertisments for performances.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
A number of people joined forces on this. Each has offered his or her solution to the dilema. Unfortunatly, not everyone can be right.
Solution 1 by Peter Howell promotes flooding the file sharing networks with tainted MP3's. While this may be effective to start, it will be circumvented, as it any other measure designed to impeed. Doing this will not force a change in the recording industry, it will not force them to adopt new technology and to abandon the old ways of doing things, the ways that have gotten them into the bind they are in now. To even suggest that the record companies hire a band of spec-op hackers to accomplish the task of making MP3s dangerous is ludicrous.
Lower the price of CDs for a few months and give out cash prizes? How short sighted. The cost of creating CDs has dropped significantly since they were introduced, yet the price to the consumer has stayed level, though it hasn't increased much. I will give the industry that. Why? Because of fat contracts, short sighted talent scouts and over population on the shelves.
Solution 2, Get a Makeover by Ben Rayner touches on some very enlightened points. The recording industry's reputation currently stinks. They are the typical corporate fat cats treating customers like chum. They believe that the consumer has no choice but to buy their product so why give the consumer any respect.
Both consumers and artists have mixed feelings about the current state of the industry. On one hand, they feel cheated by price-fixing, and on the other they do want to do the right thing. The industry isn't helping them, as it is hard to feel sorry for a multi-billion dollar company. Lectures from millionaire execs and artists on the wrongs of piracy hurt their cause even more. It is tough to feel sorry for them, indeed.
The industry must nevertheless also content itself with conducting business on a more modest scale, painful though the process might be. No one needs to spend in excess of $40 million on a record, as Sony did with Michael Jackson's 2001 flop, Invincible, for instance, when the White Stripes can muster a hit record for $10,000. I couldn't have said it better myself.
Solution 3 by Betsy Powell touches on the overall suckiness of the radio today and how it's influence on the consumer is at an all time low. While this may be a contributory factor, I think radio will be far more difficult to change on one hand, on the other it may be easier, depending on how you look at it. Radio has typically driven consumers, but perhaps it is time for consumers to drive radio. Fixing radio, however, is not going to fix the recording industy.
Solution 4, Lose the Lottery by Vit Wagner preaches that the industry needs to stop trolling the music scene for quick hits and one hit wonders and concentrate more on long-term productivity. True indeed. If the industry followed this tact, fewer lousy CDs from one hit wonders would be produced, thereby reducing the over-population on store shelves, and increasing the quality of what is there already. Better product equals more value for consumers equals happy consumers equals less piracy. Being an artist is a full time job, and then some. Treat them as employees and don't give them false promises.
Solution 5, Know Your Audience by Peter Goddard states that the industry is sorely out of touch with it's customers.
Technology has long been the enemy of the recording industry. First it was radio, currently the internet. They adapted to radio and now use it as a tool, as well they should. They will adapt to the internet and use it as such as well, or they will be left behind to those who do.
Peter speaks of the virtual drop off in releases targetted at jazz and classical listeners, groups likely to be better educated and with more money to spend, in favour of quick hits and one hit wonders. It is this mentallity that has cost labels their loyal customer base.
Many of these solutions are viable, but none are a total solution. A total solution will require record companies to come to grips with technology, sit down and get to know their customers and tighten their belts like every other industry these past few years.
tinfoilmedia
My bad. Thanks for the correction.
sri
I have their first US video release "ALL the things she said" right here on DVD. It was purchased at the Virgin megastore in Hollywood, and guess how much it cost?
three bucks.
The CD is still twenty bucks, but I don't really care since I already had it on MP3 and, if I'm not gonna pay Neil Young, I'm SURE not gonna pay these two.
I was going to point out Rush, too. Maybe they were left out because to mention them in the same sentence as Alanis Morrissette and Celine Dion would be too insulting. Or maybe it's because if Celine Dion has talent, Rush has divine inspiration, and the post was only about talent. Rush has been successful for thirty years without tons of radio exposure, mind you. So far everyone's forgotten to mention Glenn Gould, the greatest pianist of the 20th Century, also from Canada.
...guys like this AC who keep insisting that the world is flat despite all reason and evidence to the contratry.
Copyright infringement reduces demand and thereby lowers the value of the copyright holder's inventory. Smells a lot like theft to me.
If I burn down his warehouse, thats depleted the value of his inventory as well. Is that theft? No, its arson. Like I said: "You can argue that its morally and legally wrong, but that doesn't make it theft, anymore than arson is theft because it is morally and legally wrong."
If you want to split hairs, fine, but what's the point?
How is calling something exactly what it is, as opposed to something its not splitting hairs? I would call the inability to differentiate between two completely different actions monumental stupidity, but maybe thats just me.
Oh wait, I guess steal is a proper term, even if theft isn't:
to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully
If you're copying, you aren't taking, ie removing something. Here, I'll spell it out in nice big letters so maybe you'll get it the second time: copyright infringment is COPYING something of yours (you still have it) and theft is REMOVING it from your possession (you don't have it, I do).
With the exception of the Guess Who, every artist mentioned is quite awful, completely lacking in innovation and relatively un-Canadian, in that they're just playing the same drivel as the US popstars. Avril Lavigne and Nickelback being two of the worst affronts to music in general ever to be spawned from the depths of music-industry hell (for those who don't know, Avril was an unknown country singer before her handlers decided she needed a new image). There is good Canadian music. Vancouver's late-80s, early-90s electronic/industrial scene, for example, had a worldwide impact, but you never heard any of the stuff on the radio. Radio tends to be shit, whether it's US shit or Canadian shit doesn't seem to matter. The groundbreaking stuff (like Venetian Snares) won't make it onto the radio any time soon, whether there are Can-con laws or not. I still think Canada's content laws need to be reworked (and that Sheila Copps should be pecked to death by pigeons), but I don't think life would be any better if I had to listen to Creed all day long on the radio instead of Nickelback.
Btw, YOUR FAVOURITE BAND SUCKS!!! (I said that just to make the point.)
Also, another point I'm trying to make is that fame and fortune and high 'top ten' ratings are not outside the domain of artists frmm .ca.
" (and that Sheila Copps should be pecked to death by pigeons)"
I am 100% in agreement with you on that one.
I listened to a few Venetian Snares samples off Amazon.com, and I have to say, they suck. If I made a bunch of random sucky noise and samples, would you call me groundbreaking as well? Nothing against noise, I like some of that stuff myself, the real shit, like, say, oh, Soldnergeist or Aube (or even Dead Voices on Air if you want something more approachable), not the mickey mouse imitation wanna-be stuff like you mentioned. So yeah, your music sucks, and if I heard it on the radio I'd turn it off.
There's quite a bit of good stuff coming out of Canada, even today, above and beyond the early electro ventures, unfortunatelly when they have to produce in Germany, and the cheapest place to mail order from is from the UK, they're kinda limiting their best market, the guys next door.
Why would we add someone no one has ever heard of to a list of talented musicians? What, is that your local band or something?
This is waaay off topic, but I thought I should speak up to defend The Hip.
They are probably one of my favourite all time bands. They are played on the radio because they are a GOOD BAND.
If they weren't how is it they are able to sell out almost every concert they play?
And how is it possible, if this band is only 2nd rate, that 80,000 people turned out for their concert at the forks in winnipeg a few years ago, a city with only 650,000 people or so?
I do agree that the content laws are stupid, but I think using the Tragically Hip was a bad example.
Isn't it possible that they are only popular in Canada because they play on the differences between Canadian and American culture?
Unix is mysterious, and ancient, and strong. It's made of cast iron and the bones of heroic programmers of old -
Ahh, but Elvis never "stole" black music, he just covered it in a way more palatable to whites. All of the writers of those songs he covered got paid, therefore Elvis was not a thief.
The article you linked is false in two ways. First of all, Big Mama Thornton was not the author of Hound Dog, she was merely the first singer of that song. It was in fact written by Lieber and Stoller, two white guys from NYC. Second, Rock and Roll is not a genre entirely created by blacks. Rock and Roll is more properly thought of as a merger of two genres: Rockabilly (white) and Blues (black). So in fact, injecting percieved racsism into early Rock and Roll is cheating it of its truly integrated history.
It's sad that many black performers weren't as popular as Elvis. But to say that Elvis was a thief is unfair.
Back in the days when it was popular to make pirate copies of 8 track tapes, Elvis was traveling with his manager and stopped at a gas station in the Tennessee mountains. The tape display was full of pirate tapes, including some Elvis tapes. Elvis got the fire hatchet and busted up the display. When the owner whined, "What am I going to tell the guy when he comes for his money?" Elvis, said, "Tell him 'Killer' was here."