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Artists Protesting Single-Song Downloads
prostoalex writes "The 99 cent downloads are stirring some discussion in the music community. Linkin Park, Radiohead, Madonna, Jewel and Green Day are protesting music stores' policy of single-song downloads and introduce some stipulations, requiring their work to be sold as albums. "The fear among artists is that the work of art they put together, the album, will become a thing of the past," says attorney Fred Goldring, whose firm represents Will Smith and Alanis Morissette."
These people make me want to PUKE.
Ian
Artists should be protesting this by making albums that don't consist of 85% trash and 15% hit singles.
Hmm. Good idea, isn't it?
Am I the only one who sees this as a "whine whine you suck" story?
If the artist would stop making 19 songs that suck and 1 good one, people wouldn't rip the cds.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Maybe they'll actually have to fill the albums with good songs now, instead of two good ones and a bunch of filler.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
they'll just get them off kazaa. Maybe the artists should focus less on forcing people to buy their entire album and more on producing albums that people want to buy.
The fear among artists is that the means of selling a bundle of crap with one good song, the album, will become a thing of the past.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
They should make their albums available at 99 cents each, oh, but wait, they won't make as much money...
Apple already reported that over half the songs sold so far on the iTMS were in album format. Aside from that, these people are missing the whole point of this service. That is the ability to preview which songs you like on an album and choose which ones to buy. If there is a CD that has one or two good songs and the rest are crap, do you think I'm going to spend $17 for two songs? No! But with the iTMS, the record labels make 1 or 2 dollars. If they go back to album only, they will make $0 from me.
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Remember the good old days when an album wasn't one single + 10 tracks of filler shit? Yeh, that was the 70's. Anyway, a vast majority of albums now contain 1 (maybe 2 if they're really talented, heh) song meant for commercial distribution. The rest of the crap on the album is so you think you are getting your money's worth when you spend $15.99 for that one stupid song you really liked when you heard it on the radio (and will be sick of by next week b/c there is no substance to it whatsoever).
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Sometimes I could agree with that, in which case surely fans would buy that 'art' complete.
But how, in any way, are Madonna's songs more than some stucatto 3 minute pop tunes - do they combine in the album to create art greater than their constituant parts?
Or perhaps some discount could be given for downloadinging the songs seperately if there was a lack of demand. An artist loves the art - so making money from the catchy song and giving away the 'filler' that may complete their albumtastic circle is perfectly acceptable.
The more they argue the more free p2p downloads become entrenched in society, thus leaving them with less money.
to 'such'? what the hell are you talking about? that make no cents!
And these artists are ALREADY making how much?
Piss on them.
*I* am the customer who's money they are trying to get.
Guess what? NO MORE. You know -- I have absolutely never done the Kaza thing or stolen one song.
I suppose I'll have to learn now. Stupid artists...
This system rewards good music and consumer choice. I mean we all know this scenario quite well: You buy a cd and find that maybe three songs are good and the rest suck. Now why should we pay for stuff we don't want. Artists are lazy because they feel as long as they make one or two good songs the rest can be garbage and we still, those that purchase the cds, have to buy everything. As for the artists, they need to realize that they will make more money this way cause they could produce and sell song by song instead of trying to put up a bunch of songs together to make a cd. They also get to know exactly what songs are working and what are not by the amount each is downloaded.
I think in the end they are going to find that while a band might sell 500 thousand albums at $15.00-plus, they might sell 2 million of that one good song for .99 cents...and 1 million of that other song on the album that was pretty good. And then the die hard fans are still going to buy the whole thing, so they will make money off of the rest of the "filler," too.
Go that way really fast, if something gets in your way, turn.
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
let the user download the WHOLE album for 99cents. :D
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
We can't buy the good songs without buying the filler songs that they put on CDs. The only reason I've used p2p networks is because while I'm willing to pay for one or two songs that I like, I'm not willing to pay for the 10 other songs on the CD I don't like.
Lately albums have been looking as a way to get rid of crap not able to stand on itself as singels. Often when i buy a record i only want 2 or three songs out of the whole album. Frankly, they push some very crappy stuff alongside the hits.
Ofcourse some artists are afraid because they will have the pressure to release good stuff and not some b-side crap as landfill in the albums.
HTTP/1.1 400
Some albums I specifically DON'T buy BECAUSE there are only one or two good songs on them.
At least they'd get 1.98$ from me.
I think the last concept album I heard was back in the late eighties/early nineties with Queensryches "Operation Mindcrime".
i've listened to Linkin Parks CD's - but they don't have any sort of "Flow" I can figure out.
I think RIAA might of sent the bands some funky numbers to scare them into talking out.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
{ $artist->{gun}->shoot($artist->{foot}); }
If they don't find a middle ground, they're going to wind up being a sorry group of footless amputees.
Let me get this straight:
You bitch and moan because your work is being pirated via CD burners, napster and P2P networks.
Fans screams for a legitimate way to purchase and download your music online with any crappy restrictions
Someone comes with a solution to both problems and you still bitch? C'mon! You want to sell an album, fine, make an album's worth of material and sell for less than $16.
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Now the artist will only sell one song for a dollar and gain %12 off that, rather than one album at $15 and gain a much more profitable %1, as most people only care about the new hit single- I think I'd rather sell the entire crappy cd too. Its all about green stamps to pay back your major label, and 12cents compared to $3 aint gonna do it. You dont want Johnny Record Label comming after your kneecaps.
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I'd also like to see more artists make albums rather than collections of songs. If everyone gets into the mode of buying single songs, there will be no more Dark Side of the Moons or OK Computers, just greatest hits collections.
Maybe albums could be available for several months before the single downloads, or have a pricing scheme that makes buying the album look enticing.
...buy those singles you can buy from the Apple Music Store, because it's convenient, reliable, good quality.
Those singles you can't get, you get off P2P, because the cost of buying a whole album easily outweighs the cost of getting that one song you want from P2P.
Translation:
The fear among artists is that the songs on their albums that SUCK will no longer be purchased by the consumer, meaning that they will have to write better "music" if they want to sell their music. These people don't put their own albums together, the producer does that. It also opens up the music industry to more competition, seeing as an artist no longer needs a WHOLE ALBUM in order to distribute music.
Only good can come of this, capitalism at its best!
--Dormous
One song purchased downloads together with harder laws against piracy is what's going to save the music industry.
Ciryon
earn your money doing live concert tours. Half of these idiototic, "so called" musicians, like Will Smith do not even play musical instruments. Go to a Will Smith show and watch him run around on stage rapping to pre-recorded music tracks from a cd player behind the stage is not exactly my idea of entertainment.
Would you rather spend $ 40.00 go to watch talented artists like Rush or Dream Theatre, or the talentless Karaoke artists like Eminem or Will Smith ?
Proabably if your old enough to remember what good music is all about.
...on iTunes the artist CAN choose to have their music downloaded as the whole album for a lump sum or else no download at all.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
People just continue to download the whole album for free, or pay for the songs they want to here. That should be a no brainer even to people as feeble minded as the RIAA and the Artists. Just my 2 cents.
Of course they're afraid of single song downloads! These are the same artists who put one good (I use the term good liberally btw) song on a CD and fill the rest of it with fluff. Thus the consumers have to buy the entire album for the one decent song and the artist gets ~$1 per CD. If a user saves money by simply buying the 1 good song on the CD and avoiding the fluff then the artist gets paid less.
Solution - put together a good album as a whole. You know, like they used to do in the good old days? Then people will have reason to buy more than one song. Then again, I'm a dreamer. Call me your stereotypical anti-everything guy, but very few actual artists covered by the mass media will do that any more. More work for the same amount of profit under the "MP3s are bad, CD sales are how music is supposed to be distributed" ideology. Eh, guess I can't complain. It's this BS that made me fall in love with the indy scene in the first place.
Ok I am going to say that artists actually get half decent deals.
First getting 12 cents on the dollar is not bad when you consider the going rate for book authors. Authors traditionally get anywhere 5% to 20% from what the publishers get, which is traditionally 40% to 60% of the retail price. And guess what happens to royalities to foreign countries and book clubs... You guessed it, DOWN THE TUBES.
In other words artists get about 20% to 30% royalities. So if you do not mind, I am going to cry some crodile tears right now!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Put together a "Work of Art" and I'll buy it complete!
Push out 1 hit + 9 filler songs and you don't deserve to argue this line!
For example, you would be a fool to buy singles off these "Works of Art":
Alan Parsons _I Robot_
Van Morrison _Hard Nose to the Highway_
Lucinda Williams _World Without Tears_
Jennifer Warnes - _Famous Blue Raincoat_
If it truly is a work of art, as they suggest, it will stand on it's own merit and be viewed as such.
The artists this has the most chance of hurting is the one-hit wonder, who depends on the purchase of either a $7 single for that one song, or the $22 album (bought via retail.)
On the other hand, that one-hit wonder is currently dependent on the media companies who offer up very strict contracts for unproven artists where that 8% has various cuts taken off the top. As smaller labels gain access to electronic distributers, the artists' share will hopefully rise enough to offset the lower volume (less middlemen, and lower (zero) distribution costs, since the distribution cost is shouldered by the electronic distributer).
If the "artists" can explain, in their own words, why their collection of songs needs to be presented in an album format, then perhaps I (and many others) would care about preserving the album intact. Otherwise, I suggest they stop being pretentious and afford their fans and supporters the same freedom that radio stations and MTV have when they play their (one or two popular) singles.
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
They'll bitch about the radio stations not playing their full albums.
Oh yeah, without commerical interruption too.
If Madonna wants to insist that her music is only available as an album then let her have her way as long as she can't force every artist to do the same thing. If she's truly an artist then million dollar mansions aren't of primary importance to her and the resulting loss of income shouldn't bother her.
If, however she's in it for the money, then she's a business, and as a business she has customers to satisfy. If she can't or won't supply what her customers want they'll move elsewhere.
The only way this could matter is if a few top names are able to control the entire industry with regards to single song downloads. That is, Madonna knows she'll lose customers if she doesn't allow single downloads so, out of spite, she somehow is able to end single downloads altogether.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Redhat, SuSE and Mandrake protest because distros like Debian, Gentoo and Lindows allow the user to only download the rpms they actually need and not have to buy 6 cds of filler RPMs filled with unwanted texteditors, window managers and pdp8 emulators
If they don't want to sell singles - fine. I suggest that they also will get no sales of their over-hyped, filler full album.
If they are true artists they should realise that artists don't make money until they're dead - or in the case of music, not at all.
If they are truely commercial, then why do they give their stuff away for free (for the end listener anyway - it costs them to advertise) on the radio? Why don't they face the commercial realiaty that music just isn't worth anything anymore?
Who devalued the music to next to worthlessness? They did -by their own greedy hands. They devalue it by radio play. They devalue it by "copy protections", by letting the RIAA screw them over so they don't actually get any money from sales, by not playing their own musicical instruments, by not singing their own songs and by not composing their own tunes.
If people don't hear music for free, then they don't buy music. You've got to give it away to charge for it!!!
Let the reality sink in - they're a dead industry.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
I've noticed that all the really good songs from an artist or band eventually wind up on compilation albums (sometimes it takes years, but it does happen). So, why not impose a time limit where before a certain date, only the entire album can be purchased, and after which, individual songs can be obtained. It isn't exactly win-win, but it is a compromise...
[/$0.02]
Obviously selling individual songs for 99cents isn't the optimum position - a three minute pop song really shouldn't be worth the same as a seven minute masterpiece or a track from a two track concept album.
Whilst selling on quality is not possible due to everyone having a different set of standards, it seems easiest method would be to sell by quantity - 10cents/min seems like a good price point for me.
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
"...work of art they put together, the album, will become a thing of the past," says attorney Fred Goldring, whose firm represents Will Smith and Alanis Morissette"
I really would not consider Will Smiths or Alanis Morrisettes albums to be works of art, they are just a collection of songs flung together to fill out the CD. I think they are really worried that people won't bother to buy the albumn because people aren't stupid and wont pay for songs they don't like.
Radiohead on the other hand are a band who may actually employ some kind of quality control and make a proper albumn. In this case they have nothing to worry about because people who appreciate that will still buy their albumn.
In a nutshell it seems to me that 'artists' who sell albumns with 1 hit and 11 filler songs are worried the public won't be forced to buy the 11 crap songs. This seems to me like a good deal for the public.
There is a such thing as a bad song[s]. What we are confronted with when buying an album is typically an album with one or two real good songs with several other recycled or not so good songs (crappy ones). Basically, the artist gets away with selling an album in order for us to buy just those one or two good songs - this isn't fair at all. To summarize, $30 AUD for and album with 1 or 2 songs that we like and N other not so good ones.
OTOH if you buy a single for $5-10 AUD then the 99c + $1 AUD to burn it on cd won't sound fair to them either.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Okay, I have a pretty "off the wall" idea here. Maybe, just maybe, the artists are right for once.
Most of my favourite bands aren't really "single makers". With the likes of Pink Floyd and Radiohead the albums themselves are much more than the sum of their parts. Taking out individual singles doesn't fit in with their style of music making.
I don't agree with the commercial arguments but artistically I think they're right. So shoot me.
Simple soultion... Sell the whole album for 99 cents. What??? They don't want to do that either?
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I find it odd that artists are bringing up the excuse that they don't like people keeping individual songs, out of the context of the complete album. What do they think radio stations do?
The other factor which needs mentioning is that the album format itself is still quite new. Until the mid-60s, all music was sold in single format--and early LPs were simply compilations of older singles. The 70s was the time of the concept album, but this obviously isn't the norm anymore. It's been a while since 'The Lamb lies down on Broadway'.
It would help if artists called a spade a spade and admitted it's about the money. They have a point, as we are cutting into their bread and butter. But then again, any artist with the sort of clout to make this an issue, and who has enough money that they can risk attacking their own fans, will have a hard time generating sympathy.
Ken:> http://keneckert.byus.net
Am I the only one who read the sentence "The 99 cent downloads are stirring some discussion in the music community." and thought that "99 cent" was some new hip-hop artist I hadn't heard of?
> Remember the good old days when an album wasn't one single + 10 tracks
>of filler shit? Yeh, that was the 70's.
>
>
Why do you think 70'S albumns have been on the top selling lists for almost *20 years* now? Those things were really works of art. Is there a modern albumn that can can compare to the stuff put out by the Doors, Led Zepplin, or even MJ's Thriller Albumn?
The answer is no.
As a very serious exercise, try to name albums where every track is good or great. Off the top of my head, I can only name a few from my own collection. I did a quick review of my 120 CDs and only 6 of the CDs fit this description. That's only 5% of the total.
;-)
By the way, what albums of yours fit this description? What are some "perfect" albums that are good from start to finish? I'm always looking for good stuff, especially hard rock and heavy metal!
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I'm excited to see what will happen as music's means of distribution are altered. There's a chance that this can lead to a real revival of the single, as against the album, which would be great. Too many artists treat the 45 (dammit I'm not letting go of vinyl yet) as soundtracks to video promos for their album and tour, where they screw you for the real money. If this makes people make artists produce better, more interesting singles, and allows single tracks to spread through channels that aren't in thrall to (say) ClearChannel, then go! go! the new shape of music sales.
Good pop can do without being burdened with the late 60s notion of an album's importance and integrity, while real album artists (Radiohead et al.) will still be loved for their LPs.
The only album that jumps straight to my mind as a work of art that is not complete unless it's whole is Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Each song flows into the next creating an essentially unbreakable hour-long song. None of these artists do anything remotely close to that and I can't agree that these albums they talk of are a singular work of art. Mostly they are poorly arranged collections of small works of art (such as a private home gallery).
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
If they don't want people buying their songs individually, why do they sell singles?
If the artist make a compeling CD, then they'll sell the whole CD. OK Computer is a good example of such a CD worth buying. Good CDs don't need to be forced on us. We'll buy them. What we don't want and don't like is having a bunch of crap shoveled down our throats when all we want is a few songs.
If the "concept album" argument held any water, we wouldn't hear singles on the radio. It'd all be full CD recordings. Wouldn't radio advertisers like that?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
The album existed because of the medium of the vinyl record. It had two physical sides, and if it wasn't filled up it was a huge waste. The cassette tape was similar in its two sidedness, but you could put a different amount of tape in the cartridge to reduce waste. CDs are a dime a dozen and you can even get little cds if you want. mp3s take up no "physical" space even though they have to be put on some physical storage device.
If you want to sell me an album of a bunch of your new songs, you're going to have to change a few things. First, all the songs better be damn good. None of this 1 hit on the cd business. For years artists have sold albums to people just trying to get the 1 hit, well it wont work anymore. Also, you have to put a lot of songs on that album. None of this 10 song shit. You better damn well have 80 minutes of audio on there. I'll buy the cd if it's worth the money.
What cds are worth the money? Well, pick any great old album, it's cd form is worth money. Like Queen's A Night at the Opera. But new stuff? The White Stripes suprised me a lot by being a new popular band that has music I really like. They just released new Led Zeppelin (best band ever) dvds and cds of live stuff. Andrew WK also put out an awesome album, I even went to see him live it was so good. And of course there are cds from other countries, like Super Eurobeat and such.
So yeah, I'll buy a cd if it's worth the price. The real reason I don't buy much music anymore is lack of quality product. So if you've got one song, and you don't want to sell me that one song for like 50 cents, guess what? If there's a demand and no legal supply, a black market is created.
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First, they artists need to stop their bellyaching. If they actually put out a $15 album that had more than 1/12 of it being good, it wouldn't be such an issue. I wonder if it's really the artists saying this, or if it's the labels speaking for them.
Just think...under normal business rules and methodology, the whole single download thing could be an excellent way to collect data on your audience. So, 50% of our songs sold are Track A, 25% are Track B, 10% Track C, and so on. They can figure out what the people like and tailor their songs accordingly (of course, I am under the opinion that if a musician is creating music as art, they should do what they want. Unfortunately they need to survive so sometimes they need to appeal to the masses). Not only that, they could look at what other bands are selling and react accordingly. It takes a lot of guesswork out of the statistics. No longer do you have to look at album sales and go "Everyone likes Metalica" or the Billboard charts which has singles tainted by the marketing of the labels.
That was the business dork in me. I have quite a few friends in bands and I can't think of anyone that may think single song sales are bad. Any sale is a good sale. I guess I'll have to ask them all and make sure.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I just saw an interview with Hillary Rosen saying how apple had got it right.
Every other industry in this country has had to keep up with change, its about time the ARTISTES learned they are no more special and perhaps much less so than steel or autoworkers.
It's ironic, given that back in the vinyl days, most/all artists came out with many singles (oftentimes before assembling an album, if they ever did assemble an album.) Now we have a way to cut our own singles as we see fit and the artists (who are obviously going after the one-song hits) are angry. I say boo on them.
Seen the CD-singles section of a record store lately? Pretty bare. Likely because most CD singles cost $5-$8 (about as much as the price of the album used) and have been relegated mostly to hardcore collectors buying the single for that one extra track, not music samplers looking to buy the latest hit.
Welp, guess it's back to cherrypicking the best tracks off Kazaa. Which of course maintains the "integrity" of the work (viz: sound quality) infinitely better.
When are these people going to realize the magnitude of the competition they're facing? Hello? Free, easy, fast, ubiquitous--you aren't really in a position to bargain with today's P2P networks...
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
He won't be able to package a piece-of-crap soundtrack with his usual summer blockbuster and expect drones to just consume it because it's for sale. Make good music. People will buy it. That's how most economies should work. Sadly, the music industry feels that their product is beyond this economic principle.
Instead of paying please support your artists that allow the free taping/trading of their music (either via P2P or other methods).
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Amazingly enough The Grateful Dead (The OtherOnes and now The Dead), Phish, and Neil Young/Crazyhorse) allow the free taping/trading of their music and look how popular they are and how long they have been around.
I want to see the day when we are still listening to Alanis 40 years from now while she's on tour.
"The fear among artists is that the work of art they put together, the album, will become a thing of the past,"
Yes indeed, singles rule, crufty albums drool..
Some bands are finally starting to get it - at least a little bit. Instead of fighting the fans some bands are starting to provide reasons to buy the whole album.
Bon Jovi, Metallica, and Weird Al have put things with their CD's that make it worth buying the disk instead of downloading (legally or illegally). I am sure other artists have as well.
The same thing can be done for online music sales. If a band puts together an album with 12 decent songs it will get whole album downloads from iTMS.
It's all about putting together a value package. People have decided that a good song is worth about a buck. That's the standard artists need to use when putting their package together. If their product is priced at more than that they will need to throw other things into the package to up the value (or lower the price).
the album, will become a thing of the past
That was already starting...
Don't these people understand that if they demand songs only be offered in album format, nobody will buy them and people who were going to be legitimate will be forced to go back to kazaa? Surely they realise that something is better than nothing. If people wanted to buy entire albums, well, that's what sanity music and best buy are for. *shakes head in disbelievement* I'll be really pissed off if they ruin iTMS.
I honestly see this as a good thing. It's evolution. It's moving forward. And, ideally, it could benefit everyone involved. Down with the album (unless you're making a real album, and not a simple compilation of singles - read: most 'albums' released today).
Imagine this scenario. Instead of releasing a new 'album' every year, or every couple of years, or whatnot, artists would instead have the option of releasing each song as they record it. They would no longer be pressured to create filler for the album by the demands of the public - "I want a full CD worth of music, because that's what I paying for." - as well as the demands of the label - "We need to appease the public demand for a full album. Therefore, you will fill the album, crap or no crap, I don't care." Instead, they could take the time to craft real songs (I've giving artists benefit of the doubt here and assuming that they would actually like to create meaningful works of art).
Furthermore, if the artist has the one, all-encompassing goal of making money, this model would allow them to tailor each song to the buyers desires based upon the feedback from the previous release. The modern album is somewhat of a gamble in this sense simply because (ignoring test audiences) there is no real knowledge of what the public wants and expects from a particular artist (take Metallica's new album, which sounds *very* different from anything they've released previously, and which was a gamble to release simply because of this unknown reception).
To push the idea a few steps further, and incorporate the whole 'best of' method, the artist would then be able to take 15-18 of these singles that were released over a certain period of time, and release the album with all of those tracks on it. In other words, the public would be able to download lower-than-perfect copies of these singles for $1/ song, and then if they wanted a full quality 'album' (complication disc, really) they'd buy it when the artist released it.
Just an idea. Feel free to pick it apart (for instance, I'm not sure exactly how this is better or more financially sound than the current model - it's just a different way of doing things).
Ack!
Remember when singles ised to get "released?" I guess they still do, nut essentially, when an album came out, only a song or two would be released as a single, and everythinh else was album only.
I think the dair solution is this. No single sales of songs that haven't been released for up to 18 months. If you want to hear the 1 great track from the new album, wait till it's released as a single or buy the album. After 18 months (or whatever), the while thing is fair game. This is essentially a premium pricing policy, which is how many businesses operate. This enables artists to get the high margin sales on the front end, and cash in from the lesser fans later on.
Maybe Apple can give Madonna et. al. a conditional album-only release for the next year or so, but after that, only new albums can be album only. Otherwise, these artists may stay away from iTMS, and that would be a shame. Compromise is needed, and each side gives a little with this proposal.
I can see their point, certainly radiohead have released stuff that didn't work as indivdual songs, only as a whole album. But I don't think its a serious issues for a few reasons;
(1) a regular album with 8+ good tracks will still do well under this system and should encorage people to quit throwing filler songs in.
(2) Experimental albums will always be viewed as such by anyone with a clue about music, these won't be mainstream anyway, they will be publicised by people telling their friends "hey check this out, and make sure you listen to the whole thing"
(3) apple has claimed a large proportion of sales are whole albums. getting individual tracks is a large benifit present digial distribution methods but it will hardly kill off the desire to listen to a set of tracks that were intended to be listened to together.
C'mon... We all know that they're pissed at this for one reason only: When making an album they only need to make two to three good and catchy songs while the rest of them are boring, monotone and pure crap as a way to fill out the album. In other words, they're scared because now they need to write a good song every single time. No more lazy productions!
But you know what? I don't really care. I say let them put their stuff on to the iTunes Music Store with an album download offer only! And if nobody buy the album because they've heard that 8 out of 10 songs suck -- well, then it's their own damn fault!
I hope the day of buying an album and getting disappointed on what was on it because their hit single was really good is in the past. More power to the consumer!
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
well, that's sorta valid. The work as a whole has a value in and of itself as a form of expression, as many albums have themes running across songs and tell a story or project a message or whatever. Even album cover art (which declined greatly in the switch from LPs to CDs) adds to the overall value of the album as a piece of artwork. To sell just an individual song is sort of analogous to going to an art gallery and buying only a small section of a painting.
While a lot of artists seem to have a few good songs and fill the rest of the album with crap, there are a few that have good reason for not wanting their albums to be taken apart.
Alanis Morisette, for example, is a very emotional person, and she puts that emotion into her albums. She doesn't sit down and write a song, and then when she has a bunch of songs, compile them into an album. Instead, she suddenly gets the mood (what hackers call 'the zone'), and writes an album to express how she feels at the time. Taking that apart, disassembling it and sharing the pieces for a dollar each, it just doesn't seem right.
Another example is Prozzak. Their albums tell a whole story - the search for True Love - and you can hear the progression from one song to another. There isn't a coherant and evolving plot, sure, but the songs are all closely interrelated, and if you just buy 'Omobolasire' and say 'hey, it's cool', you'll miss out on what the rest of the album has to offer.
--Dan
Hey, but at least I got a playable Mac and PC version of Warcraft 3 demo on the CD, so the record labels at least didn't let all of the CD go to waste. But when I saw that, my first thought was, ah, any room left for any actual music? Yeah, a whopping 35 minutes worth.
Today's music market has been flooded with a lot of groups that are purely meant to be pop-music fodder for 2-4 years, then burn off for the next crop.
The era of masterpiece albums has been over for quite a while, save for the work of a small minority of today's active artists.
That's not to say that there weren't the ol' 1-2 good songs + 10 tracks of filler crap on albums in earlier years. There's just more of them now.
Before the mainstream-"Joe Sixpack"-Internet era (1996-present), people used to buy the select "good" tracks via vinyl/8-track/cassette/CD singles, and get a few extra remixes and b-sides thrown in for good measure. (It's my theory that B-sides have moved from these "singles" to the main albums these days!)
Bands these days should seriously consider what they put on albums. Artists of the past used to record 30 or more songs, then select a solid set of 13 good ones and tie them together as an album (how do you think they can release "newly-discovered" songs even after they are dead?).
Today's artists also need push their labels to rethink how they do business as digital media files overtake the industry.
Personally, I look forward to when iTunes will become available for non-Macintosh computers. Only then will the RIAA be stuck with warehouses full of blank silver CDs and plastic jewel cases.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
And I agree with the artists. You wouldnâ(TM)t cut just they eyes out of the Mona Lisa and framed them just because thatâ(TM)s all thatâ(TM)s all you liked. A CD is a compilation of their âartâ(TM) even if parts of the art suck.
I would also agree that these should take a back seat to this argument. Letâ(TM)s get this âNew Industryâ(TM) up and rolling to SAVE the music industry. Then you can worry about what you sell on a CD. Hopefully this ânew industryâ(TM) will encourage more artists and better artists â" ones who can make a full 74 minutes worth listening to.
Seth
There have been a number of postings about fillers on CDs here already.
Maybe some artists and their audience have a very different opinion about a mandatory sequence on an album.
I still prefer to mix my own music I can listen to in the car or doing sports.
Somehow I feel Ms. "what the f*** you think you're doing" prefers people not being creative themselves.
It will be interesting to see how this turns out when some of the artists will decline to sell single songs from their albums while others allow it.
Buyers will be able to express in money what they think of the album as work of art. Maybe, they will turn towards artists who care more about their audience than about their wallet.
With the ability to preview songs, maybe it will become easier for newcomers to sell their music. I guess they wouldn't mind me buying a single song I like.
Face it, albums ARE a thing of the past.
You can't seriously tell me that I must pay for all the filler you make up to fill an album? Here's an idea. Put 15 GOOD songs on an album, intead of 3 or 4, and the whole album will be bought in 99 cent downloads.
Which,by the way gets you $15, which is what the CD cost in the store, but with no packaging or distribution costs on your end.
Your greedy record label should have pointed this out to you, but they didn't 'cause they get even less of a cut with this distribution method.
Quit 'yer bitching.
These folks won't accept anything short of selling mediocre albums for $18.99.
In other news, SCO has just signed up Linkin Park, Radiohead, Madonna, Jewel and Green Day as the sole content providers for their new "Buy our albums or we'll sue" online music service.
The consumer (according to Apple ITMS Statistics - 40% are album sales, sorry I don't have the link - it was posted on the internet and then retracted because it was confidential info - this was when INDY labels met Apple a few weeks back) The consumer wants to buy single tracks instead of the entire album.
An artist creates an album of 10 songs. 3 singles are excellent, the other 7 are dead wood. I'm not going to spend CA$20 on 3 songs, I want the opportunity to buy just those 3 songs.
The artists are ignoring consumer requirements. At the end of the day, insisting that consumers should buy the entire is going to hurt the Artist. PPL will just go and download the songs they want for free off the internet. The artist gets no money. At least if the artist offers individual tracks for sale, they get some money for it.
Anyway, at the moment, *legal* digital music distribution is far behind that of normal retail sales.
I know I'm showing my age here, but back when I was a teenager, virtually all pop music was sold as singles - remember the old 45's - the disks with the BIG hole in the middle? At worst you got the song you wanted and the "B" side was filler, usually the "B" side was not a real hit but not bad ! Albums (LPs) were for stuff like classical music.
If you go back even further, they had a form of "Rights Management" that seems to be resurfacing with these self-destructing downloads - the old 78s were very breakable, and if you wanted to keep the song you would sooner or later have to buy a new copy.
I think the current mania for albums started with the switch to cassette - a 45 single was smaller and cheaper than a LP, but a "cassette single" was sort of an artificial creation. Never did seem to make much sense.
My opinion, these albums (at least most of them) are not "works of art", they are nothing but a damn collection of songs! I hope everyone decides to boycott these idiots (not a problem for me, I don't listen to any of the groups listed, in fact I've never even heard of some of them!).
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
Maybe the artists and record companies should consider making a less shitty product instead of whining when their silly attempt to push garbage fails.
If these guys think they haven't already compromised their "art" to appear on the radio, sell millions of albums/singles, and tour with laser light shows, then they are fucken nuts. Of course, they're free to put whatever draconian licensing schemes on their music they want, and I hope they do, because it will eventually drive consumers away from giving money to the RIAA and its bedfellows.
We should get the whole album for 99 cents. :-)
"God is dead!" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead!" - God
"The fear among artists is that the work of art they put together, the album, will become a thing of the past,"
maybe it's time for it to be a "thing of the past"
The gun is good - Zardoz
So now suddenly "the album" is some sacred cow that can't be cut apart?
For those who are honest enough to say, "Hey! We want to make money of our crappy tracks too!" I say good for them. They still are a festering pile of sewer scum but at least they are honest about it.
For those who preach about artistic integrity and the full impact of the album, then I propose that radio stations be required to play the entire album everytime.
Oh, that also means no more single releases either to capitalize on the airplay you are getting through the ClearChannel funnel. Oh, and the Grammys and Billboards? Forget about those awards for Best Song or Best Duet. You will be judged on the merits of your entire album including the stinkers you slip into the middle of the album.
To think, all along we thought it was the RIAA's corporate goons in suits that were the real bad guys when all along it was women it tight pants and cone bras.
Here's a little bit of advice for you artistic losers. You can't put the genie back in the bottle no matter how often you try to get Congress to do your dirty work. Either take your 99 cents from users who want a legitimate option to download your one good song and shut up or force the issue and turn everyone into pirates and collect your dwindling album sales.
Idiots.
Name the last album you listend to that had a theme, thematic or musical, through the whole album...soundtacks don't count!
The music industry has worked hard to kill songs that tell stories...song that make you think. With no songs that tell a story, the songwriting paradign that comes to us from the dawn of time, through the Celtic Bards and Troubadors, and into our time, there is no need for albums...for albums are for stories that are longer than one song.
And with the death of the album, the record companies are maybe hoping to reduce recording costs by just having their "made" artists (N'Sync, Spears, Idol stars, etc.) go in and record a new song whenever their demographics department thinks that a new song by that artist will be successful.
And if you want a really cynical view of ths music industry, hunt down a book called _Little Heros_ by Norman Spinrad, borderline cyberpunk, and some good Erisian in-jokes.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
*Time Passes*
Now the compilation CD containing this song has come out...who's going to buy it? The people who couldn't wait already have it (and have already gotten sick of it) and the people who could wait have probably forgotten about it over the passage of time.
My point is "really good songs" only become so when they are exposed en masse so that people can realize how good this song is. If it's really that good, you've got to have some strength of will to not acquire a copy for many years waiting for the compilation CD. Just think, your music collection would be pretty complete with the latest 70's compilations about now and starting in on the 80's and 90's.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Is 7 minutes of dreck worth more than 2 minutes of the Ramones? nah. The value of music (or any other product) isn't determined by it's cost but rather by what the market will pay for it. Charge more than people will pay then you get lower sales or theft. It really is that simple.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
In the US, there are anti-trust laws that say that you can not (under specific rules) force people to buy one less desireable product in order to get a more "desireable" product. It is called bundling and in some cases it is a violation of anti-trust law.
This is one of the area's that Microsoft was getting in trouble for with bundling the browser with the OS since in order to get the "desireable" product (cough...windows) you HAD to buy (bundled) the Browser.
So, apparently the artists are in favor of Big Money/Anti-competative/Corporate rip-offs...As long as it is in the name of art.
You know, I think strip mining is an important artistic commentary on our world today..I think I will try to bring it back in the name of Art.
At least Madonna and Alanis Morissette will be on my side.
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles
- The Beatles, The Beatles (the white album
- The Final Cut, Pink Floyd
- Pornography, The Cure
I am sure others exist, and I am sure people can bring up lists of their own favorites. My point is more that out of the hundreds and hundreds of CDs and LPs I own, I only consider 4 to be artistically harmed by pulling them apart. That's just sad.Here is something even sadder.
I have ripped all of mine and my wife's CDs onto a server in my house. That is 22 GB of music.
I then went through and rated all of the songs I liked. Of the 22 GB of music, I consider only 7 GB worth listening to in the quirkiest of moods. That is 15 GB I consider complete worthless crap.
Now, it is true you can dismiss some of the crap as "what the hell was I thinking back then" or "what relative thought I listened to this shit" or "why does my wife like heavy metal". That accounts for 2-3 GB.
Under a charitable view of things, this suggests that 12 out of every 19 songs released is considered crap by an artist's own fans! And they want to keep forcing me to pay for this shit?
No more buying albums for me. No thanks. I will preview each new song on the Apple Music Store. If it is any good, I will buy it. If I like the band, I will preview it several times. This will also prevent me from buying crap like REM's Up.
If some artists want their songs sold only as part of an album, let them. If it's a bad idea, they'll be hurting themselves.
<sarcasm>
Oh wait, perhaps I, the consumer, will be "hurt" too, if I am "forced" to purchase an entire album, when all I really want is the one song I "just can't live without."
</sarcasm>
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Some people, even some people on *gasp* major record labels, actually believe themselves to be artists. Taking away the cohesion of an entire album and the art to go with it would really be a shame and definitiely reason enough for the artists to be worried about such a thing. See small section of a painting example from above.
Just because an artist views his or her work of art complete only as a whole, other people may like only a small section of the work. Why should those people be force fed art just because the artist wants it that way?
Given the choice of buying an album to get one song versus not buying the album, I would simply not buy the album. I'd most likely try to find the song through other means. If, on the other hand I was able to buy just the one song for a reasonable price, I'd buy it without a second thought.
stop writing crap tht no one wants to hear. pretend every album is a Greatest Hits album.
This
It's sad, because, unlike Jewel, Madonna used to be excellent. Not the capital-A Art kind of excellence, but she did have plenty of songs with solid songwriting and good production which have aged well.
Illegal Copying is illegal. Larceny - the unlawful and intentional taking of another personâ(TM)s property with the intent to deprive that person of said property permanently - is illegal. They are both bad. They are different offenses though. The RIAA has never charged any of the file sharers with theft. If they did, they would probably get laughed out of the courthouse.
Yes you can make a leap and say that since nobody bought the album that a potential sale, i.e. money, is lost. Unfortunately there is no way to truly quantify a lost sale in this matter since you can not assume that the downloader would have bought the album in the first place therefore you can't assume that any real money was lost. For every 10 downloaded albums there are potentially 10 lost sales but there are potentially 10 non-sales as well.
Also the fact that many people have beem downloading individual songs that haven't been for sale that way until recently has made determining any monetary loss (a very important part of determining the severity of a theft - or copyright infringement for that matter - charge) a very interesting matter. Think about the fact that the RIAA charge those college students the maximum amount - like 150 grand - for each work of art (which is ridiculous because of the fact that the "work of art" could be a 20 second interlude) and you could never get away with that prosecuting the theft of CDs.
But of course you don't get charged with copyright infringement when stealing CD's. You could steal a blank CD with a 15.99 retail price and get hit with the same charge as stealing top 10 "hit" album.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
is always more complicated than that, though.
I live in a world where one in six Americans steal music -- but apparently Apple users alone are willing to pay to download 500,000 tracks a week. I also live in a world where the recording industry routinely degrades the rule of law by successfully prosecuting against file indexing software or advocating legislation of vigilante justice. In this world, artists signed to major labels can sell a million records without making a dime, while artists with their own labels make a nice profit with one tenth the sales.
When you start using a simple definition of right and wrong, it almost seems like you're living somewhere else. I agree with your moral argument, but I'm just not sure it makes sense to apply it this way.
What would make more sense to me is to say, "I see that this consumer is willing to pay for something that they can get for free. I also see that they are not willing to pay for the product I currently offer. Perhaps I should provide the service they want." This abandons the level of morality, and lives pretty much in the practical -- but as far as I'm concerned, morality went out the window long ago.
They're being very stupid on this one. They say they don't want their "art" to be chopped up and hence ruined. So what about shuffle on my CD player you want that taken away too?
These people make me sick, glad I didn't goto that mess of a radiohead show here in NY a few weeks ago.
Can you imagine a painter sitting in a gallery and whenever someone came in and looked at his painting from a different angle than he wanted; he'd come running over crying like a bitch and force you to stand, 85.5degrees from center, clamp open your eyelids so you can't not look at any of it and keep you there for 1:15?
I'm done buying any music from the RIAA sponsored pukes. Before I was iffy, but now I'm certain I can find better, free as in expression, and cheap as in price bands to listen to.
-- taking over the world, we are.
With tracks being sold one-by-one the can no longer do that hidden track gimmick that got old in '83.
Personally, I'm just curious what the the track-by-track pricing scheme would be for an album like "NIN-Broken" where they've got about 90 tracks of silence. Do those go for 99cents too?
The reason they sound so good is that even a mediocre song from the 70's beats the shit out of hits today.
When we're talking about real artists, songs are not created on an album schedule.
What they can't see is that the new single-song distribution method would allow immediate release of a song that was just recorded. It's a good thing when a single song can become an event. And artists should think about it, because this new technology and method can seriously reduce the time to market. Good for cash flow.
I guess we're gonna have to wait a generation to see this new method working out as it's supposed to. Then these guys will realise how supid they were.
They shouldn't fear that albums will become a thing of the past. It _alreary is_ a thing of the past.
At Men's Warehouse I can buy a whole suit that looks great with a coordinating shirt, tie, tie chain, hankercheif, and shoes. But perhaps I simply like the pants -- there's no obligation to buy all the other parts simply because I need new pants.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Apple's iTunes Music Store (for one - don't know about other such services) allows the artist (or whoever it is that has the rights) to sell their tracks via whole albums only. While, browsing the store, I've come across a lot of tracks that I couldn't buy unless I were to buy the entire album. (which is a shame, because, in many instances, they would have at least gotten their share of 99 cents out of me)
cygnuhchur
This can only promote creativity. Ship an album with 2 good tracks and the rest fillers and crap songs and you'll only sell the 2 good tracks. Ship an album with 9 good tracks out of 10 and you'll sell 9 tracks like hotcakes. Oh well, I guess the album is dead anyway. This can only be bad for crappy artists with hits: They put 1 or 2 'hits' on MTV and you like them, you go buy the album and end up dissapointed, because all the other 8 tracks are complete crap.
What puzzles me is why Radiohead is agaist this practice? Most of their songs are good, so they will probably get bought. WTF?!
I have a some full albums from artists that don't force me to skip tracks. Of course some songs are 'better' but that depends on personal taste. As most of their songs are good I'll most likely go ahead and buy the full album.
If I can't sit around the swimming pool getting high and waiting for the royalty check to come why should you ?
If programmers and engineers have to deal with technological change and a changing job market why do you deserve special protection ? If many of us make alot less than we used to, why do you expect us to feel sorry for you and keep on paying $20US for a crappy CD with one or two good songs on it ?
Why don't you guys try making your money the old fashioned way by giving live performances ?
The current monopoly system deserves to die. If that could actually happen alot of "artists" (or stoners with guitars, or thugs or whatever) would be better off too.
Sorry, responded to the wrong post. :-)
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
You artists protesting this also won't be allowed to sell "singles" on CD, how does that sound?
Speaking as an artist who would want my work sold in single format, does anyone know how one gets ones work featured in the iTunes store?
I'm not with a label at the moment or anything, however why should I need to be if my work can be sold online at zero overhead?
Better solution for the consumer: Don't buy music from these artists at all. And I'm not talking about stealing the 'music' either. Skip it.
They call themselves artists, but should be called "factories." Most of the product ("music") is formula, worthless crap intended to fill a CD so that you overpay for 1 or two good songs.
That is not how an artist operates. Bands/Soloists with actual skill have nothing to fear... people will buy many of their songs. Bad groups do have something to fear... the days of hijacking your wallet for a single song are over.
These bad musicians are putting their thumb on the scale when measuring out the flour, ripping you off. They're short-changing their customers, and when we cry foul at their behavior, they turn it around and blame us--as if we are doing something wrong by pointing out that what they're trying to sell is is not what we want.
NOTE TO MUSICIANS: it is your perrogative to create an album that is your own personal expression, etc. Enjoy doing so. It is my perrogative to consider most of your expression to be crap and have only one small part of it worth buying.
Forcing music on yuo is not how a true artist operates. But that's no suprise, since most of the current whiner are not true artists, and music is not art. Beethoven, Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Verdi.... they were true artists, and it shows because their music is still cherished over a hundred years after their deaths. Think people will give a whit about Green Day or Madanna in 100 years? How about 10? It's crap.
Artists? Get real. They're bad musicians that want top payment for crap using an antiquated distribution channel as a means to enforce you pay for product you don't want.
What are some albums that should be listened to as the entire album and not whatever indivdual songs you prefer? The only ones that come to mind are all Pink Floyd (The Wall, DSOTM, actually every Pink Floyd album I can think of).
You don't like your songs sold by apple, then don't authorize this. Your songs will not be sold and will not have exposure. You have a choice... Let the rest of the artists that want to sell it.. well sell it!
What artists seem to be forgetting, is that in the 50's and 60's, the industry was driven by singles, and not album sales.
Most people, in that time period, only bought 45's, it was bands such as the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and the Eagles that drove the album oriented rock movement by filling LP's with GOOD songs.
If artists were releasing entire CD's of good material, most people would want all of it. However, I fail to see their point when they say this is undercutting their bottom line. I say, "So what? That guy who only wanted 'Like a Virgin' or 'Jason Andrew Relva' was going to just download it from Kazaa, but now he's actually paying for it."
YES you are a snivelling snivel of a snivel and I will cup you over my ears and hope that you pass away internally, like an INTERN! yes, like an intern.
Both Will Smith and Alanis have 26 singles listed on Yahoo Shopping. I'm sure their attorney will see to this problem at once. Sigh.
But we shouldn't pick on the other artists for the artistic integrity stuff, because it's only the one attorney for those two musicians who made the claim. If we want to criticize them, it's gonna have to be for wanting more money.
Which is sort of ironic. (Doncha think?) Since one oft-used justification for online music was "the bands don't get enough money! evil labels! more money to bands!" Are we really in a position to criticize bands for trying to make (urk) more money?
If these bands actually put out a FULL LENGTH CD that was worth buying maybe people would buy it.
The bands listed were all crap bands who get one song played on the radio cause 'its the first song of their new album'.
The music industry blames p2p for the downfall of the industry. They should blame themselves. They arent releasing anything good since 1999.
So because they have rabid fans who will buy their music, they're somehow not "big crap artists"? I honestly don't follow your logic. However, since you're an admitted Radiohead fan, I do question your objective assessment of the band. It's like asking CmdrTaco if he thinks Linux is a good operating system.
I think this makes a lot of sense for the "business savvy" or "smart" artist. I noticed the artists listed in the article are also the ones that are alledged to have some (or a lot) of intelligence when it comes to business matters.
From the artistic perspective, I suppose the artist can claim a "mood" or "feeling" that the album as a whole should emit. If they don't want it split up, then they shouldn't release ANY song as a single. If they want to restrict downloads, then only allow released singles to be downloaded if not every song on the album -- point is they should not hurt their fans (or their targetted consumers) by unilaterally saying no to all downloads.
However, the business case for preventing these songs from being downloaded makes a lot of sense. First, I'm not in entertainment or the music business, but you hear a lot of talk about the contracts the musicians work under, where they have to "pay back" to the label the money the label "risked" in promoting and manufacturing (and often money advanced to the artist). Two gotchas -- with an album selling at $12 to $25, a 100,000 album sales will mean 1.2 to 2.5 million dollars, while a 100,000 song sales at $0.99 would mean $99,000 dollars. That's a big difference, and if the contracts state the artist owes the label a flat rate of money, say $400,000, for production, manufacturing, artwork, marketing, and anything else you can think of, then the sale of individual songs that cause fewer complete albums to be sold could significantly affect the artists, since in theory the artist won't start making any significant money until that initial $400,000 is made. And, likely, the labels are able to trump up all kinds of costs that drive that example $400,000 to a higher value.
If the artists would just embrace the digital mentality, they would realize there is a HUGE opportunity to promote new music with drastic cuts in the costs to produce and promote/advertise up front. Also, Music on Demand created CDs could mean producing a CD for someone that orders it at the time an order is placed, rather than the initial creation (and COST) of making thousands of CDs in the hope they will sell, often ending up in bargain bins for pennies on the dollar after they don't sale.
Of course the labels don't want these changes because then the legalized endentured servitude the labels force on artists would no longer be the only way for artists to hit the main stream and it would make it harder for labels to control the artists.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Most modern artists don't seem to understand the concept of a coherent album versus a collection of unrelated songs. Sales of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band were not threatened by sales of 45s (for the youngsters: low-priced, 7", 45RPM records which typically had one song per side and were packaged in a cheap paper sleeve). They were actual albums rather than collections containing two hit songs and a bunch of filler material. Even when an album was not a "concept", everyone involved knew that the it was all about value: If the buyer liked a lot of the music on the album, he/she would buy the album. But if there was only one or two songs on the album that were appealing, the buyer would opt for 45s.
And the record companies don't understand that they need to add value to the albums. What happened to the days when you could buy an album and get a 12" x 12" multi-page color book inside? Where are the free enclosed 24" x 36" posters? Now one is lucky to get the lyrics printed in 5 point fonts in tiny square booklets. Sorry, but when you used CDs as an excuse to double the price while taking away all of the value-added extras, you slit your own throats.
Sounds to me like those artists are just worried because they can't come up with an albums worth of good songs and just count on the pophit single to move the filler track CD.
Linkin Park, Radiohead, and Madonna aren't available through the iTunes Music Store.
It seems because of the past boom of the economy that a lot of companies have forgotten the spirit of competition. Competition is usually a natural progression to any product and service. It seems like people in the Music Industry, Microsoft, and SCO consider competition as something to crush other then a fact of business.
So the Music Industry has faced near competition free business for what seems likes forever (It is very rare that 2 music companies will be issuing the same artiest). So after time they got use to finding new methods to increase the percent of profit. So now the internet came about and offered a new distribution model for music that put in direct competition to their business. So except for doing the right thing when there is competition is to lower their prices or find a way to improve quality, they cry and wine and sue as many people as possible. So after a while an innovated computer company found a good balance between the two. The Industry who is not at least getting part of the pie is still complaining that they are not getting the same profit as before. Well that is competition and what do you expect. Just because their is competition it doesn't mean the end of your business. It is like the American Auto Industry they always have to find way to improve their products and price them in a way that they are competitive with the rest of the world. I think the music industry should stop complaining about it and start finding a way for people to buy more single tracks, such as lower the cost per track, So people would buy more, and actually pay more in the long run.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
On one side of the coin, an album may or may not represent the artists' entire presentation, an album can be a book with songs as chapters, or it can be a cluster of singles (in comparison, a book of short stories)
On the other side of the coin, radio stations don't play entire albums (well, not usually) so isn't the playing of that popular single on the radio (There there) just as much a bastardization of the "art" as the single purchased track?
With that said, an artist can present their art in any way they wish, but it's up to the consumer whether or not to appreciate that art as intended or just a part of it.
In closing, Green Day still exists?
------------ Ben Chroneos
It's simply that time has erased the majority of that shit from our memories.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Why don't they hold a fucking gun to my head and force me to listen to the whole 'work of art' they way they demand.
not every good performer is an aging prog-rock band. There are hip-hop bands that put on good performances (Public Enemy) and mind-blowingly excellent performances (The Roots), and if Moxy Fruvous (not hip-hop) ever comes to your area, see them. I could list many more, but I just wanted to make the point that great live performances are not restricted to "the artists of old."
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Never heard of these people, why would I want thier ablum?
Also, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band - another set of songs conceived as an album, almost perfect.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
I took a vow to never buy music from any RIAA approved site, nor from a band that does not release their mp3's for free. The consumers have the power for ONCE. Let's not be asses and give it back to the companies. There are enough good bands out there that are willing to make a living playing shows, and freely allow people to distribute/share their music. I'm only going to support them from now on.
There is a famous Japanese Folk Tale about Judge Ooka, where he essentially points out that certain things can't be charged for. The basic reality is that people haev the ability now to replicate anything that can be distributed in digital format. Once you make something available in that format, you have lost control of it.
Read Judge Ooka's story. Digital Music is like the scent of fish. Once you put it out into the world where many have access to it, you cannot expect to be able to charge them because they have the ability to replicate it.
I'm not saying people can charge for others work, feature it in a film, etc...but I do think that people can share and distribute freely anything they can create/replicate. Let the market determine what the music is worth.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Many artists' work do have to be taken as a whole when consumed by the audience but some works of art are able to stand alone without the support of the entire collection. Music compilations, especially those of pop artists, do not have to be heard in the context of the rest of the songs in the album to be appreciated. Radio broadcasts of the individual songs instead of the whole collection attest to this. I suggest that the artists who want their albums to be heard intact start with the broadcasters and make them play the whole album instead of just one or two.
Jewel sells singles collected on a CD for $18.00.
St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is an ALBUM and work of art.
Modonna sells remixes of Erotica and a few singles collected on a CD for $18.00.
The Who's Tommy is an ALBUM and work of art.
I'm sick of buying filler. There are very few Albums in the world.
All I can say is this:
The industry offered a solution to the file swapping problem, and the artists rejected it.
I don't feel a bit sorry for them. Not one little bit.
When they become quickly unpopular and start REALLY losing money (no, I'm not talking about this whining they're doing right now), I will not feel in the least bit guilty or sad. They deserve whatever they get at this point.
Art is lead by technology. In the field of recorded music, the album came to the front when the lp (long playing) format was invented. Eight track, cassette, cd and dvd followed. But prior to the lp we had a golden age of singles. Which fit into the jukebox format, a critical element of the past. And throughout all of this radio played single cuts almost exclusively.
Now we are in the download age. Pick a track. Singles by definition.
It will no longer make economic sense to commit to the investment it takes to produce a 10 song album. (they used to be twelve)
Now the smart money producers will take a project in for two or three cuts based on the one song they think is a hit. Just like in the old days. No need for an album because albums are not what is selling.
I think this will produce better stuff to listen to. And more product too. This is good for artists and songwriters. There will be more diversity and opportunity.Because of technology advances recording is itself becoming almost trivial and affordable to the masses. Of course the greedy-scaly hand of the RIAA oligopoly must be released from the throat of our culture for all to truly benefit.
"Don't Follow Leaders." Bob Dylan
Linkin Park, Radiohead, Madonna, Jewel and Green Day - true elite of todays music. But what happened with Metallica? They fight so brave with Evil Napster before! Are they so tired playing Midlife Crisis Metal, that they are unable to fight with Evil Internet today? Metallica - please come back!
They think of the cd as one entity. you wouldn't cut up a painting and sell only pieces of it, you would sell the whole thing. I think this is where they are coming from.
Although I disagree with that idea and it's also naive to think that everyone thinks of music and albums this way.
LOL. I would hardly call anything that Madonna produces a work of art.
But, they feel disenfranchised because they put a lot of work into make a whole album and feel they need just compensation.
It is all about how you, âoeFeelâ and not much of anything else. Money is just a side effect of how you âoefeelâ and how much work you âoefeelâ you have put it and you artistic you âoefeelâ you have.
Sadly, most artists got lumped in with damn dirty hippie when I saw Madonna lecturing people on being materialistic and more to her trade...when I heard her rap.
The only time the artists could get away with this is with bonafide concept albums. The classic examples are Pink Floyd's The Wall and Dark Side of The Moon, both conceptualized to be listened as a whole unit and not sliced into singles. I personally hate every time I hear "Money" in a fake classics radio station (or worse, "Another Brick in the Wall II").
This is of course personal taste. Business wise, if I am an artist I would rather get my cut of a 99-cent download than NOT get my cut of a retail CD or a bundled download.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
The last album I bought was from a local hiphop act named Akrobatik. There's a couple of real hip tracks on here (Balance, Hypocrite, Time), several real decent ones, and a couple I didn't really dig (Woman II, Wreck Dem). I purchased the album the week it came out at Newbury Comics for $10, pretty nice price for a local artist CD with 15 tracks on it (and a bonus track after the silence at the end).
Now what if I had gone online? Would I have listened to each song individually, decided I only like this and this and this and just pulled those out? To some extent, the listener has every right to say "I only like these songs, I only want to pay for these songs," but as an aspiring musician myself, I slightly fear the implications of that.
When you sell an album, you sell the artist. You sell everything the artist does, whether or not every single track is radio-worthy. To some extent, I fear that I could throw a concert, play/sing some of my favorite tracks, and everyone gets up and goes to the bathroom. The ones that stay behind sit around yelling "Play the song I downloaded!" What I fear is that single-downloading turns more artists into one-hit wonders. That we sell the song rather than the artist. It could lower the connection artists have to their fans. With a return to one song selling over a whole album, we could fall even farther into writing songs to formulas trying to land that one big hit that will sell on iTunes. Face it: it's impossible for every song on an album to be on the far right side of the bell curve. Does that mean these songs are bad and don't deserve to be heard? Would you pay a dollar a piece even for the songs that aren't top-dollar?
Someone once said that iTunes is still not offering an alternative because every song costs the same, because low-budget artists should be able to offer their songs at a lower price. What if the title track on an album, the big money maker, sold for $1.50 to download, the two bigger tracks were 99 cents, and then the other tracks were 50 cents, enticing downloaders to sample the whole artist? I dunno. Right now, I still prefer CDs to download. CD's have better quality audio and I just enjoy having the physical thing in my hand. But I wouldn't count CD's out yet. Wouldn't it be great if CD's had to drop in price in order to compete with online sales? Maybe this competition is what will really be the best thing for us all. But then again, I just bought a great local artist's CD for $10, less than a dollar a track, so maybe it isn't so bleak yet after all...
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Ok, artits, guess you'll have to start making 72 minute long singles then. That way, we'll have to buy the whole album in order to listen to your 'work of art'. Electronica musicians do it all the time.
What? Radio doesn't play 72 minute long songs? Bugger.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I hardly see what this has to do with the situation, but first:
...OK, maybe its a bit overzealous to compare the music to the statue of David, but I feel I've made my point. Be kind to my post, this whole "english language" thing is not my strong suit.
East Coast Super Sound Punk of Today - World/Inferno Friendship Society
Instrument Soundtrack - Fugazi
The Bends - Radiohead
Californication - Red Hot Chili Peppers
Surfer Rosa - The Pixies
Pinkerton - Weezer
Last Splash - The Breeders
Down On The Upside - Soundgarden
Tiny Music: Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop - STP
Those are just a few, and many may disagree, but I digress. I think the problem here is people fail to realize how hard it is to make the next White Album(dammit, I forgot to put that up). A lot of music doesn't even make it onto the main album. One only needs to look to all the b-sides Radiohead has for proof of that. A lot of time and effort goes into this and if this were the RIAA or some major conglomerate complaining, that would be one thing. But the artists want to have their medium displayed in a certain manner and maybe instead of complaining so much about paying a few extra dollars for a CD, we should at least try to respect their wishes a bit more. Or you can write your own damn music. Then you can release it any way you want, and appease all of your loyal fans.
Anyway, while I respect the concept of consumers rights, this isn't modding an XBox, this is breaking off the Statue of David's dick and selling it to whoever is wierd enough to just want that.
If albums are such "works of art", there seems to be no reason why it cannot be considered as one piece of work by the artist. Why then do artists are record labels insist upon splitting their indivisible work into tracks? Surely the consistent thing to do would be to use just one track, if it is so important that people listen to the whole thing rather than bits of the album. That way, they could insist that the ITMS charges $10 for that track and prevent people from downloading individual songs.
However, chances are it will just be counter-productive and people just won't purchase the album at all...
If you're looking for great rock music made somewhat recently, with albums that don't have filler, I suggest you check out Quasi, The Hives, or Burning Airlines (who have sadly broken up). For something a little quieter, try Boy Crazy, Slow Reader, Hefner, Stereolab, or Call and Response. For "out there", try Moxy Fruvous or They Might Be Giants. For fast-paced electronic pop, try Enon (currently on tour), Freezepop, The Stereo Total,or El Guapo.
It's been my experience that most of the music of college radio stations (i.e. artists who are independant or from smaller labels) tends to have CDs with a very high percentage of quality songs. Of course, we get our share of 1-hit CDs (interesting observation: track 1 of a CD is seldom the same as the rest of the album), and there are of course plenty of albums that are crap or just average.
For finding out about this stuff (assuming you aren't involved with a college radio station), you can go to http://www.cmj.com , or to the sites of good distributors like Team Clermont, McGathy, etc. (who distribute music for labels too small to do it themselves, and are selective in what they work). Labels like spinART, Touch and Go, Dischord, Fueled by Ramen, and many other I've forgotten always seem to have good stuff coming out. Again, not everything is stellar, but that's life.
Of course, sometimes we get lucky and a really talented artist like Tool, Radiohead, Beck, or Weezer become popular. Though some people are snobs and won't admit to liking them after they "make it big", most college stations still play them because hey, it's still good music. REM and Radiohead, in particular, got their start in college radio (for that matter, we were playing "My Name Is" by Eminem well before commercial radio found it).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
GO FUCK YOURSELF, MORON
fuck you in your fucking fuck, you fuck-fucking fuck-fucker.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
You are a better person that I if you can listen to "The Final Cut" regularly, and not kill yourself...I love Floyd, but listening to that album makes me go searching for razor blades!
But Floyd has a number of wonderful thematic albums, "Animals", "Dark Side of the Moon", "The Wall", etc. ELO did "Time", Rush even did stuff than _spanned_ albums with "Cygnus X-1/Hemispheres". And then there is even Luther Wright and the Wrong's remake of the Wall in a blugrass/country style.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Linkin Park, Radiohead, Madonna, Jewel and Green Day are protesting music listeners policy of single-song listening.
Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead singer for Green Day was quoted as saying: "We made all of those songs on our album and arrainged them in an order. You should listen to them from the first track to the last, that's how we intended them to be listened to. Listening to just one track in the middle is classified a derivative work and we will sue you fools! Now pass the bong Tre."
Checking the Itunes Music Store, I see that Jewel and Green Day both have individual songs available for download. Radiohead's OK Computer was available the first week or so of ITMS but was pulled. I guess now I know why. Madonna also had some songs on ITMS but they're gone now.
I'm not an actor, but I play one on tv.
Better than Skynyrd.
Or at least sells more albums. Did you know David Gates and Jimmy Griffin regularly outsell today's hot artists? "If" is a wedding reception standard. They just won't go away. Hell, the Carpenters womp the shit out of Britney Spaniel or Eminem.
Charge different prices for the songs depending on how good they are. $2 or $3 for the great songs on the album and 50c or 25c for the stuff that radio DJs thankfully never forced anyone else to listen to.
it's all about singles. There's a lot of times I buy 1 record that has one strong track and one not so strong track on it. Sometimes I buy a pack that has 3 records and half or even all are good. But that's kinda a different thing if you're buying it to play it for someone else.
I'm still for the whole band-makes-an-album-thing, but with the popularity of dance/dj stuff, single songs will become more and more in demand. It's what people want. And frankly, most artists are not capable of producing even 20 kick ass tracks over their entire career. Shit, some don't even make that many at all!
This whole experience of buying, finding, and listening to music is and has been changing for a while. The ones (the producers) that won't roll with what the people want to buy, will have their little niche, but (hopefully) not the astronomical profits as of late.
...the case that the labels will start to realise most artists can only put three or four decent tracks on an album and the rest is filler material ? I know I know, there's exceptions to this, but let's face it, 90% of the stuff churned out by today's manufactured bands is crap. I think it's more a case of the artists running scared that instead of signing a mega-bucks 3 album deal, which is gonna be mostly them treading water in the studio, it might set a precendent where they get paid purely by commission on how popular individual songs are. Hey who knows, the Top 40 might have relevance again!
Boo Hoo so sad, are you making music for me or for you? If youâ(TM)re selling it then youâ(TM)re making it for me. For the most part these "artist" produce crap on a scale likened to the sewage output of a medium sized city, I mean really, how many of us have purchased an album in the past only to find 1 or 2 good songs at the most on it?
I for one am tired of the egos and business practices of the industry and have not paid for, nor will I pay for any "popular music" ever again.
I will pay for classical and jazz albums that retain their listenability thru the years unlike the tripe you hear on the top 40.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
After reading all the other comments, it's clear that this is a bad idea and can only hurt these artist's image in the eyes of the fans and customers. That should have been obvious. I think the reason they, the superstars, don't get it is the same reason the RIAA and it's owners don't get it. They are in denial and want to stay in the past when life was easy.
The truth is, the world changed. We don't need them anymore. It's most apparent in terms of distribution, which is why the labels see the problem more than their artists. However, the writing is on the wall. The industry has lost control over the music business. We the people are now free to not only find and have whatever music we like.
However the real impact will be seen soon, new artists will undoubtably use this freedom to create music outside the old commercial system by using the net for both performance and promotion. I believe we will soon see a renaissance in music, as those who were denied an outlet for their creativity use this new channel to develop a fan base. Viva la revolution.
Words to men, as air to birds.
I just wonder if these artists are realizing that their ''package'' sucks and people just want to buy the few songs that are singles that ultimately provides their existence.
assholes.
1. Make an album available for $0.99/track initially.
2. Monitor sales of each track for a few weeks.
After this initial period:
3. 'Popular' tracks (over some threshold # of sales/week) would retain the 99 cent price.
4. Less popular tracks could be downloaded at 25 cents each (or whatever) by any user purchasing one of the more popular tracks.
5. Users choosing to download an entire album would get an additional discount, and free downloads of whatever cover art or text the artists wanted to make available.
Some variant of this system would ensure that the whole-album format would survive. What won't survive are the ridiculously high profit margins.
Bingo. If an artist puts out an album full of quality songs, then they don't have to worry about people only downloading a song or two from their latest release.
That would be predicated on the concept that those that get recording contracts these days actually can make a friggin' album. Most of the time it is Kelly Clarkson, or Jessica Simpson, or someone horrible like Third Eye Blind or Three Doors Down that I see at my front kiosk at BestBuy or wherever. Whoooooo cares?
Considering, with few exceptions, only people like J-Lo and R. Kelly get contracts for major distribution, why are we surprised that the whole world only wants at best one track from these people? The RIAA needs to sell albums? Hire songwriters and musical acts. Putting Ja Rule and J-Lo singing the same lyric back to each other for four minutes in front of a drum machine is an insult to music.
However, R. Kelly's Feeling on Your Booty was a song so musical that I pulled Mozart's Magic Flute out and put him in to make space in my classics collection.
I am hoping this forces the record companies to change the way it's done online. If they can't offer singles, and have to sell albums only, maybe they'll sell albums cheaper(say $7). I'm still don't get why somebody would buy an entire album at $0.99 per track. For the same price, you could get the hardcopy.
As for the big monoplies who CONTROL what we hear on the airwaves, I don't really care what happens to them (Thank the maker for the WWW giving us options, and music stores that let us listen before we buy). But that is probably an attitude that is causing many problems. I hear and see mostly animosity toward the industry from the consumer side. Does anyone know of a "music lovers" group that is voicing the opinions and NEEDS of the consumer to the artists and labels in a welcoming way???
Like many, I think that the future model includes the full length album. The truely creative artists take us on a trip through musical wonderland with albums of music by NOT taking the cookie cutter approach to trying to write "hit songs" on every track. For music lovers, that is a great thing...
But many people have different music tastes where they only like one or two songs on each album. They probably won't pay $12 for the whole album, but would pay the $2 for the two songs they like. I don't buy music this way but I see others that do. Aren't having both options open to consumers going to make more money for the artists and labels?
Axigrav
P.S. My fear: POP music already has little variation from hit song to hit song within each music genre (I know, I know -- with 11 notes and octaves how many possibilities are there...). If they end up thinking that they have to taylor to selling on a single song basis there could be even less variation from song to song and artist to artist. That would be boring!
You mean the Alanis Morissette that's featured in Apples iTunes Music Store promotional video (round 4:35) and who can't praise it high enough? Seems like the spokesperson of the firm are more concerned about it than the artists...
Donate free food here
how many people buy regular albums since napster came about? Now there is an endless stream of p2p, and its not going anywhere.. Although I DO NOT think its likely a $0.99 song service will actually make money, the artists should be happy they get the freaking $0.12 and bug off.. better than nothing , which is what you are getting right now.. isn't it?
GREEDY ARTISTS.. go figure, most of you moronic one hit wonders should be so lucky!
you'd think that she would be happy that she was getting paid for downloaded songs period.
scott king
No single sales of songs that haven't been released for up to 18 months
Out of sight, out of mind. One single is all most artists have, 18 monthts is an eternity and nobody will pay for work after that. Ya gotta sell while you're hot, and if you can get your customers to load up with an album instead of a single, so much the better.
Unsigned artists used to have hits, you know. It's just that they didn't have any way to press singles when their song got airtime. Who ever heard of "Rusty Chevrolet" by the Yoopers? They got hot in Chicago when Larry Lujack liked it, but couldn't get it pressed for two months, by that time it was spring and nobody would buy it.
Nowadays, no station will touch your song unless an independent rep hired by a label will pay you a couple thousand dollars in slotting fees.
The typical album of today, even by a "good" artist like Alanis Morisette (who had one masterpiece "Jagged little pill", and listening to anything she's done since is like TAKING that pill) has AT MOST 3-4 songs (usually less) worth listening to.
If we can just buy the 1, 2, 3, 4, etc songs we actually *WANT* we are blowing off the rest of the album.
Frankly, my response is such:
IF you want to sell your music as an ALBUM, then MAKE A GOOD ALBUM! I'm sick of the 2-3 catchy, radio friendly songs+8-9 songs of CRAP that is on most albums.
Simply put, the artists of today aren't as good as the artists of the last 20-30 years. "Dark Side of the Moon" (Pink Floyd), "Fair Warning" (Van Halen), "Back in Black" (AC/DC), "Power Windows (Rush)", "Led Zeppelin IV", "Rumors" (Fleetwood Mac) just aren't produced anymore...
Even Metallica has sucked since the Black Album, with MAYBE 1-2 good songs per release. I've not heard their new one yet, and with their actions back in `99-2000 against their fans, I'm disinclined to buy it no matter HOW good it may be.
But, back in those days (70's, 80's that I remember), bands had to PRODUCE great albums or ELSE. There wasn't the huge marketing machine that exists today, and bands had to survive on REPUTATION. Especially in rock. The rock of today absolutely SUCKS, maybe because these bands get marketed and sell BEFORE they've played the clubs for years and refined a sound...
I can't RECALL the last non-classic album I ever bought and LOVED EVERY TRACK.
"Jagged Little Pill" was probably the last one. A TRULY killer album.
Corporatism != Free Market
"The fear among artists is that the work of art they put together, the album, will become a thing of the past," says attorney Fred Goldring, whose firm represents Will Smith and Alanis Morissette."
99 percent of all albums suck anyway, I only want the one song.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
You want us to buy full albums? So make an album that doesn't suck, from start to finish. You know, like Outkast's first three albums, Dark Side of the Moon, Jar of Flies, 36 Chambers, or Lateralus. Albums that don't suck for 60% of the time.
If I only want to listen to 40% of your music, much less pay for it, I'm not going to buy the whole album. I'll settle for hearing your shit from time to time when I'm radio surfing in traffic. Make an album that doesn't suck, and I'll buy it. Otherwise, you can take either nothing, or $0.99/~3 minutes that don't suck.
They need a plan for the .99c sales vs album sales. If they're getting a nickle per song sold then they've done something wrong or the RIAA is ripping them off.
Maybe the lack of sales stems from the fact that most songs on a cd are worthless crap and people know it and dont buy as much. The Radio is free and they're usually playing the songs you want to hear not the crappy stuff the artists put in the cd's or the publisher's version of the artist where they make the artist sing X songs for the artists written songs they put there.
And this "Oh my album isnt being sold" well hell after browsing through the leaflet I usually pile it all in a chest in teh closet with the other cd cases. On a list of reasons of buying a CD seeing what the album contains other than the cd is probably right under the last thing on the list.
Great! Now when can we apply this argument to books? I buy only the good chapters, and if the publishing industry forces me to buy the crappy chapters, well I guess they will not get my money.
I can see why some music artists would feel this way. personally I dont know if i like an artist/album unless i listen to it all of the way through because I view albums as one piece of work with a bunch of seperate parts.
People that only listen to the radio for their music might never even hear another song except for the single off of an album and I think that would be hard for me to do. I like listening to albums all the way through from Track 1 to Track End, not on shuffle or repeat.
There are themes among other things that are woven into the songs, and the arrangement of them is picked for a reason (although for some bands it is probably just marketing).
Artists almost always get nickels and dimes, if they get anything at all, from the sale of their music!
The only ones who have ANY benefit from each sale are the HUGE names like Madonna, who have the clout to make contracts that benefit them.
Belief: Record companies love every artist, and pay them a percentage on every CD sale.
Truth: Record companies treat artists like dirt until they've made them many millions! Only then can they even try to collect a percentage of sales.
Don't buy recorded music from big companies! They're as bad as some of the sweat shop companies in the third world.
I'm on board with other recs made in this thread (Boston, Zeppelin, Rush, Floyd), but I did notice one omission, so here it is:
Queensryche. The Warning, Operation Mindcrime, Rage for Order.
In that order. Overall the Warning is a great collection of songs, no real theme though. Mindcrime is a true concept album, ala Floyd, though musically not as tiptop. And Rage for Order is another excellent collection of songs, just not quite as good as Warning. They're still putting stuff out but I've not been terribly interested in their offerings post-Mindcrime.
ehintz
This at least helps me separate the true artists from the greedy jerks. Linkin Park and Green Day are disappointing...I've actually enjoyed some of their music. Madonna and Jewel come as no surprise.
The only groups I'm familiar with that have a leg to stand on in the assertion that their entire album is one piece of work are Enigma and the Trans Siberian Railroad Orchestra. I'm sure there are more, so this is not an entirely unreasonable position IMO. But the artists named in the article are either clueless or under a lot of contractual pressure from the labels.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
If I want to buy one song at a time, then I should be able to do so. The market makes the rules. If this is what your customers want, to deny it to them can spell the death of your career.
Artists should take heed. Hollywood and the RIAA seem to think that they're not replacable. They are.
Later, GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Madonna is such a bitch.
So either accept the $0.99 deal or deal with being pirated because people think your songs suck.
What we really need is a way to just buy parts of songs. Like the chorus or the verse. Hell, I'd just like to buy the first four measures of a couple of songs. That's worth probably $.05 or $.10, right?
So Madonna, are you going to ban the "shuffle" button on my CD player, because it interferes with your "work of art"? ...or is it all about the mon..er, control?
As others have mentioned, it obviously isn't about the money for some of us; I stopped buying albums long ago because they're a *waste* of money. However, that doesn't mean that we're in the majority; I'm sure they get a lot of album sales regardless.
I don't know if outlawing singles would help or hurt sales, but it's just downright spiteful *and* greedy to get rid of singles in the hopes of making more money. Don't think this has anything to do with "art", though, because it doesn't. Unless you're talking about the "art" of accumulating more money.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What will happen to the songs we decide that we like after listening to the cd all the way through 4 times? One thing that we will lose is the desire to look deeper into music and realize what someone was trying to convey in his/her songs unless we keep around some of the songs that we don't like the first time we hear them.
"forever in debt to your priceless advice"
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
Don't give the people what they ask for (the ability to buy the songs they like, without having to buy the whole freaking album), but rather shove a bunch of crap down their throats for $18.99. And copy protect the CD to boot so you can't rip it. So... they're still trying to go back to 1996? My iPod has changed the way I listen to music because I can listen to the songs I like whenever I want to listen to them. I don't have to worry about putting a CD in the player and having the remote nearby to skip the 3 or 4 crappy songs on an album, and then get up after 17 minutes to put in a new CD.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
No, they don't.
The contract may state that, but it also states all the "expenses" that come out of the percentage.
Courtney Love did the math a few years ago, and it hasn't changed.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Apple has started a chain reaction which will ultimately destroy the "music industry" as we know it.
When an artist creates, they need three things to make money from their art. Distribution, Collection, and Advertising. Music artists were dependant on the music industry, because the industry provided these three things. Through this power are able to create new artists, when originally the record companies had to search for artist.
With the internet and digital media, Distribution and Collection can be relatively easy. Apple has provided the structure. Whole sections of the music industry are obsolete, but they still have money. They will continue to fight for existence as long as they have money.
The last link is Advertising. The only way someone get someone hooked on a song is for them to hear it. The record industry owns radio, so that's not how it will come about. Internet radio will eventually click and it will happen when wireless is good enough that I can listen to an internet stream anywhere I would normally hear radio.
"The fear among artists is that the work of art they put together, the album, will become a thing of the past," says attorney Fred Goldring, whose firm represents Will Smith...
Will Smith? "Work of art?" Hahahahahahahahah! Ho, ho, ho! Stop it! You're killing me! Hahahahahaha! Ho...*sniff* *gasp* *blink*
Okay, I'm better now. Damn, that's funny...
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
I'm not sure what my point was...oh yeah: Maybe, just maybe, it's about the integrity of their artwork, and not about the cut they're getting.
-- Who am I? How did I get here? My God, what have I done?!
...so they shouldn't cost the same either. Most CDs have one or 2 good tunes and a lot of stuff that would not have sold much on it's own. So .99/song for all songs is silly. It may not always be apparent ahead of time what will sell the most, but it certainly is known after a few days or weeks. So adjust the price of the more popular up, the less popular down. If there's only one tune on an album that people actually want, this method eventually should eventually hit the point where people who weren't going to spend the (eg) $15 will spend the (eg) $3 and everyone makes out.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
There is a simple formula that a concerned consumer can apply to remove the seat of power that this segment of the industry enjoys. It will require discipline and dedication on the part of the consumer, but it is guaranteed to work. I have provided the tactics and their intended targets (in italics).
Perhaps some of you are thinking "how can I live without my [insert favorite TV program here]..." or other such broadcast. It isn't that difficult, I have cancelled my subscription to cable. I thought I was going to miss the shows, but in actuality I don't miss what I don't know I'm missing! In any case, I have provided some suggestions to help my fellow slashdotters to continue existing.
I can think of many more as I'm sure you can. I encourage you to think of many more. The point isn't really about "sticking it to them", although that is a nice by-product, it is about reclaiming your industry independence. You can break the dependence on entertainment media that the industry has spent so much time, money, thought, and effort into cultivating within the consumer markets. Once you have achieved independence, you can no longer be threatened by the current tactics of the MPAA, RIAA, and other industry groups. It worked in 1776 didn't it?
Helloooooo, "artists".
Guess what? You decide what you sell. You DON'T get to decide what we buy. WE DO.
Get it?
-... ---
...whose albums are to be listened to AS ALBUMS... consider Pink Floyd, Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins (Adore flowed together)... many artists have to butcher songs to release them on the radio because people absolutely need a hit single. It's really sad that that whole radio mentality has to be perpetuated. I'm not saying that some albums aren't full of filler shit, but if you're unsure, go into a damned store and listen to the CD first. If you know that an album is far more as a whole, then don't degrade the artist by downloading the hit single for $2 a pop.
...is that they will have to actually make some creative stuff instead of just filler ...
Excellent examples. And I would add Tull's "A Passion Play" and "Thick As A Brick," the Kinks' "Schoolboys In Disgrace," and some of the Moody Blues' albums, for those of us who remember.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
Painters have formed an industry body the PIAA to protest the practice of people buying individual canvases from a gallery instead of the whole collection.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
You can buy 4 minutes of a movie for 99 cents. Then you can buy just the scenes in the movie you liked and leave all the rest on the table.
The should also do the same with books. You could be able to by each chapter for 99 cents. Then you can buy just the chapters you want. You don't want the chapter about Rivendale, don't by it.
Maybe they could even make it 1 cent per paragraph or sentence so if wanted you could buy just Frodo's little lyrics instead of the whole story.
if i were one of the crappy artist listed (maybe radiohead as the exception) i'd be worried that my other crappeir songs would never get listened to, i think it promotes better individual songs, which is good!
all i see are 1's and 0's
I'm disappointed to see my favorite band, Radiohead, supporting this. But, what can I do? They can't be perfect can they? Can they?
True, most of Radiohead's albums are concept-style albums where the greater whole is more important than one song - say Fitter Happier from OK Computer - that doesn't mean that there isn't significant artistic worth in some individual songs. Treefingers will never be sold alone but Paranoid Android is impressive by itself.
The key difference that selling songs individually allows is something both artistic and commercial interests will appreaciate: audience. By allowing the more independent songs to stand on their own the artists can reach a wider audience. Most of my top 40 listening friends won't touch Radiohead albums at all but they'd add Fake Plastic Trees to their playlists if it were available alone. And doesn't that make it worth it?
My own personal music maybe have the artistic importance of a grain of sand but I'd still much rather touch many people with a few songs than a few people with many songs.
I frequently have been forced to pay $25 and more for CDs that contained only one or two tracks I have any interest in ever listening to. Artists don't like not being able to force me to buy 16 tracks of crap so I can get the one track I want? Too fucking bad. Somehow I suspect that the albums of some artists (Beatles, Pink Floyd, Yes, other groups that mostly don't suck) will continue to be sold as such anyway -- mainly because they're WORTH buying as albums. The one hit wonder bands should be demanding more of the 99 cents.
Here are some of my favorites; Judas Priest - Defenders of the Faith, Deep Purple - Perfect Strangers, Def Leppard - Pyromania and High-n-Dry, all Tool, and just about anything by Van Halen with DLR still as frontman.
On the other hand there are a load of albums where it only makes "artistic sense" to listen to them start to finish; where some songs outright suck when taken out of context, but where the entire album is often really good. For example all the Radiohead stuff, Pink Floyd, Queensryche (Operation Mindcrime), some Alice Cooper (older stuff, "Welcome to My Nightmare" and "From the Inside" come to mind), some Black Sabbath, Nine Inch Nails, TheWho, Tool, some Blue Oyster Cult, Iron Maiden, Sisters of Mercy, Golden Earring (Moon Tan), U2, Billy Thorpe "Children of the Sun" and others. (Tool gets high marks both for individual songs and compilations.)
I think the artists are complaining that they fear the public will lose sight of the entire album concept. They're simply wrong of course, but that's what they are afraid of. (I find the idea they think that type of thing about me sort of insulting. It has never occurred to me ever to listen to less than a full RadioHead album.)
Good songs and good compilations are separable artistic talents. My wife (for example) has odd taste in music that I do not understand, but she can take songs from my collection and her collection and make awesome "mixed CD's" that tells a story or are good for "Driving to St. Louis" or whatever. She even spends time getting the silence between songs just the right length. Some artists (i.e. Pink Floyd) totally depend on the compilation talents to make their stuff work.
Single songs for download is just one of the consumer-enabling steps the Internet and the electronic age have provided us. Worrying about it is silly. The worst that can happen is I never get a sour taste in my mouth again due to getting duped into buying an album with lots of sucky songs on it. I can still buy the single. (Anyone else totally hate Smashmouth after finding out their first single sounded nothing like the rest of the songs? They had the balls to go and bitch about it later, saying their "real" sound was the other songs. Hmm. Nice to know you guys suck so bad, have fun making albums that sit on the shelf guys!)
It's just illegal. Information wants to be free.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
This reminds me of the debate that erupted when they invented phonograph arms that could be manually moved to any point on the record, and again when they added "fast forward" and "rewind" buttons to tape players, and yet again when they gave CD players the ability to skip directly to a track and to shuffle play. The argument was that, since the consumer could now listen to the album in a non-sequential fashion, the artistic integrity of the album was destroyed.
Oh, wait, there were no such debates.
I guess this one must be about something else, then.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
...for musicians that actually use the album as a collection of works that are connected or otherwise have some meaning by being together and in a certain order - not "I want to write 10 songs and put them on a CD". Moody Blues "Days Of Future Passed", Rush's "2112" and "Hemispheres" come to mind here....they are albums and the songs on them are written in such a way that they tell a story when played in the order they are presented - and if you just play one track off the album or play them in a different order, the songs lose their meanings.
We used to buy singles all the time. As kids, who could risk the cost of an unheard album, when you could buy eight or ten 45's for the same amount? Seems to me that these artists who are now complaining have had it too easy for too long. They've grown accustomed to people buying the whole CD based on the airplay of one or two songs, and the people now have a way to buy what they want. You want to sell complete albums? Make them worth buying. The market rewards those who provide something that people want.
Look at all the different versions of movies on DVD. The Fellowship Of The Rings, for example. Four different releases (the theatrical release, in Pan and Scan or Widescreen, the Extended version, and the Gift Set).
The market thrives on more choices, not less.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
I kinda sorta see what you're saying. But I really do have to take issue with some of this prattle.
Right away, I have to disagree, not just because Radiohead is up there, but because there are countless artists who don't give a lick for verse-chorus-verse structure with danceable melodies. some have even gotten very famous. Now this does apply Madonna, Linkin Park, and about 90% of the other "musicians" that flood our ears and eyes every goddamned day of our lives, but witness Frank Zappa, Mr. Bungle, Igor Stravinsky, Sun Ra, Milk Cult, and many many others that create music that both challenges and excites for reasons other than making one want to shake one's booty.
I pulled this quote out because I think if it stands on its own it reveals its own ridiculousness. If i can tell everything about a song from one vibe, one chord, etc., that's not the kind of song I want to waste precious time of my life listening to, examining, possibly remembering.
If that car has a boomin system and you're not already listening to something yourself. Its not about making your audience dance, ok? I mean, sure, maybe you just want people to get up and have a good time, and that's great entertainment, but not all musicians are simply entertainers. a lot of music is meant to recreate moods and feelings, and express in sound emotion and experience in ways unheard of. Example, "Violence ^5" on Mike Patton's "Adult Themes for Voice."
Many times these structured, honed sound waves are parts of a larger composition. Like sections in a Beethoven symphony, each track is a part of a larger whole that is meant to be taken in as that whole. Frank Zappa's Civilization Phase III is a good example of that. Sure, its a "CD" and there are "tracks." But it is an opera, with a storyline and development. It requires the whole album to be taken in the correct context.
Would you like to be able to buy just the action sequences from The Matrix Reloaded and not have to pay for any of the garbage filler that ruined an otherwise great piece of eye candy? I sure as hell would. But we can't. So why should we be allowed to pick apart the aural creation of someone who wishes it to be heard as a whole?
They split albums into tracks to make it easier for us to pick up where we left off, but it should be up to the artist as to how they get distributed. Singles were a different market. That was only one or 2 tracks from an album.
Unless you were Michael Jackson circa "Thriller", then it was your whole album. But that just illustrates another point. Make an album good enough, and EVERY SONG WILL HAVE SINGLE POTENTIAL! You hear that Madonna? No more "Take A Bow."
Ugh. Would you rather have millions of people only know 5 minutes of any one of Bach's compositions? And being "in it" to have millions of people clutch one song and ignore the entire rest of your catalog, especially if you
I discovered my love of music at a fairly young age. I don't know if my family was any more musical than any other typical family of non-musicians living in the Detroit area in the late 60s/early 70s, but many of my earliest memories are of songs we'd hear on the radio while on weekend trips, shopping excursions and camping outings. I have vague memories of being in love with songs like "Tears Of A Clown" and "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" and "Love Will Keep Us Together" and "Silly Love Songs", though at that early date (around 5-7 years old) I couldn't have told you who performed them or even have done much more than hum the chorus for you. I can remember the very first single I ever purchased, though. I liked a song by Joe Tex called I Gotcha, which research shows was a hit in 1972, which means I was about 5 years old, and that sounds about right. I can't remember whether Mom gave me money to buy it or whether she just asked me to pick out a 45 while we were at the store. In any even, I know for sure that it was the first non-"kids record" I ever owned myself. I have vague memories of playing my older sister's records, but nothing really specific from that early on.
My first "real" album purchase didn't happen until years later: Parliament's Mothership Connection. Even after I bought my first albums, though, for years my musical purchases overwhelmingly came in the form of 45 RPM, 7-inch singles. American singles of the time were very distinctive looking. Unlike European singles, which replicated the small center holes of 12-inch albums, U.S. singles sported a large center hole. This meant that you usually needed some sort of adapter to play them on a standard turntable. The little plastic adapters were somewhat fragile and impractical, but they sure are a wonderfully iconic element of a bygone age, aren't they?
The prevalence of singles among my early purchases was largely practical. I got a small allowance, which if I remember started out at 25 cents a week, then escalated through 50 cents a week, a dollar a week, and finally $5 a week by the time I entered middle school. When I first started buying singles regularly, they went for about 99 cents to $1.25 apiece. That got you a (usually edited) single mix and a b-side, some of which were purest filler and some of which were fascinating. It would probably seem alien to a music buyer younger than, oh 25 or so, but up until the mid 1980s or so record stores would stock hundreds or even thousands of 7-inch singles, with the top sellers proudly displayed on the walls. Singles were a huge part of the music business, and a lot of record stores devoted just as much space to singles as they did to albums.
My music buying took off in earnest when I turned 12 and got my first paper route. I discovered many artists via 45s during this period, many of which I would come to love and by many many albums by in subsequent years. Some early 45's I bought were by Kraftwerk, XTC, the Police, the B-52s, Devo, Gary Numan, and Yellow Magic Orchestra. I mention this not to try to buld up any cred points, but to point out that the easy, cheap availability of music by these artists made it possible for me to try new things musically without a lot of risk. Albums were a formidable $5-$7 apiece, and $7 bought a lot of M&Ms and Hot Wheels. A kid with a paper route just didn't have a lot of dosh to blow on any full-length album that wasn't a sure thing. For a while, the record industry was fine with this. They'd made a mint on bands like the Beach Boys in the 1960s, who were practically hit single machines, releasing multimillion selling single after single, which would eventually get compiled onto albums almost as an afterthought. Of course, as bands like the Beatles (and eventually the Beach Boys themselves) gained more artistic control they began to deliver albums that stood as coherent statements, but for a long
Our entire society is suffering from a bad case of collective attention deficit disorder. We see news on television and the broadcaster devotes thirty seconds of time to an issue that the Economist gives four pages of detailed analysis. If you don't know what the Economist is, you're part of the problem :-)
... who produce quality work :-) The sensation of the moment boy bands are going to end up filed next to Abba and the BeeGees, and god willing we'll see no more of them as richer, more meaningful work will be the only thing that makes its way into long term public hearing.
The music artist has for many years crafted records that contain up to a dozen songs and have an ongoing theme. One or two of those songs might become 'hits', while the rest will be appreciated by those who know the artist well enough to purchase the entire recording.
Many of you have heard Jackson Browne's "Running On Empty", but how many of you have ever sat and listened to the entire "Late For The Sky" CD? *All* of this entire album packs the same punch as "Running On Empty" but it is completely unknown.
Our society's view of the world is changing to a sound bite centric, unfocused perspective. The artists can complain, but they're fighting a gigantic force and they won't be sucessful.
What will the landscape for albums look like as time progresses? I'd suggest you look for the recorded material of bands like the Grateful Dead, Widespread Panic, Moe, Phish, etc - these so called 'jam bands' allow fans to tape all their live music and distribute it freely.
I think this move will be freeing for the artists
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
the work of art they put together, the album, will become a thing of the past
In the case of many of these artists, I kind of hope that's the case. Oh, if only boy bands were already "a thing of the past."
Seriously, though, as a visual artist, I can kind of see their point. An artist works to create a body of work, that in some ways is more than any one piece. Think "Monet's water lilies" or "Picasso's blue period". Of course visual artists have no qualms about selling individual pieces out of that body of work.
Similarly, an album is, or was, the musical equivalent of a body of work. A great example is Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". If digital distribution had been in place back then, noone would ever have tried to play it alongside Wizard of Oz, because it may not have existed! Still, it occurs to me there are two viable solutions: 1) Get over it. Artists have always sold individual pieces. Work on developing a good, cohesive body of work, and you won't have any problems. 2) If particular songs in a particular sequence are that important, package them as a single song (Bohemian Rhapsody?), or digitally distribute the entire piece.
When was the last time Madonna or any of these other artists performed one of their whole works of art in a concert? It doesn't happen very often. If the whole album as a work of art concept were true more of these performers would play their albums in their entirety and in order in their concerts. Fans go to hear them perform their hits. If they just performed an album or two in its entirety there would not be time to perform all of their hits and fans would not go to the concerts.
Queensryche is the only pop/rock band I've seen that has performed and entire album (Operation Mindcrime) in their concert.
Doesn't the latest MP3 ID version allow you to store the album cover??
With this I will NEVER buy another CD again....these artists are absolutely RETARDED. Make aWHOLE CD worth of good music and I will buy ALL of those tracks. Make only 2 good songs on the entire CD, and I'm only going to buy those two songs.
You know if I write 3 scripts in my offtime and sell them to my employer, and only one of them is any good, he would never buy all three. If I built four houses but only two off them were built straight, nobody would buy the other two. But "artists" seem to think it's ok to make 3 good songs out of 12 and force me to pay for the crappy ones. Get real....
Until they surgically remove their heads from their asses I won't be buying ANY more CD's and nothing, online or otherwise, from any of the groups mentioned in the article.
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
I am so sick and tired of these "Artists" bitching and moaning. They actually believe their own BS. Most CD's are 1 great song, 2 good songs, and 10 peices of crap. THEN, these "Artists" have the gall to charge $30 a ticket to see their drugged up, drunken asses. They live like freaking pigs on our money then you go to their show and pay to listen to their political beliefs and personal agendas. I don't give a rats ass what they believe, especially since they will readily change their beliefs if what they believe hurts their pocketbook. Sorry, I don't care if these basturds make another dime off the public.... Keep trading those songs..... !! Someday they will get it!!
GOOGLE returns 1270 hits on "full albumz", so obviously there are quite .RAR.
.99 Cents, but the truth is in between!
some places where entire albums are available for download. Also, on
some P2P networks albums are shared as
I expect this trend to become more common also among paying online music
consumers, when downstream bandwidth increases and prices settle to an
acceptable level (today online music is more expensive than physical
media).
I saw the other poster got +5 funny for suggesting to download the entire
album for
Marc
They will not have to produce more than one good song on an entire album of pure crap in order to survive.
To me, this argument is pretty transparent. These artists have each had a "hit" single plastered all over the radio at some point. I don't remember hearing any of them complain about the artistic integrity of the album when that happened. The only difference here is that folks are paying to listen to that single again.
The cases I can think of where album integrity is truly an issue (e.g. some Genesis or Pink Floyd albums) are few and far between. More often than not, these albums still have one or two tracks that make it to the radio as singles. Again, no complaints then.
It's plain that this is all about the (perceived) bottom line. The true "danger" in a service like iTMS is to filler tracks and best-of albums. I just can't seem to feel sad about that.
Read the full text my book Perl for the Web
A lot of hypocrisy and stupidity voiced by technophobe morons. It's not like singles didn't use to completely dominate music, back in the days of records and the singles racks? Come on.
Yesterday I purchased the last CD from Radiohead. Besides the perceived musical involution, I noticed that I *could not* play the CD in my computer ("files needed to be modified first"). I now, this isn't new, but this is the first time for me. I think this is the last time I buy a music CD. Downloaded music is much better; it saves space, it it cheap, I get what I want and I can play the music everywhere.
When they can sell the songs individually on a CD single, and get more than 99c for it...
$0.12 per $1 isn't bad (in fact it's quite good). That said I don't think you really know what you are talking about. First I'm quite sure that just like book publishing, Musicians royalties are based off the price the price which the publisher sells the product, not retail. (And these prices are crazy, some sales channels pay more per unit then others... etc.)
From a book publishing POV (which I have quite a bit of experience), a large percentage of books published *loose money*! Most authors never earn out their advances, and often publishers don't recoup thier editorial and printing expenses. The publisher only makes money off of a very few best sellers. This of course has the effect of the few best selling authors occasionally making a fuss about how they get ripped off by the publishers.
Now the average author, often complains that they didn't make much money for the work involved (which is unfortunately often the case), 9/10 times here the authors still make more money then the publisher (infact they are usually the only one's who make any money). This is how the business works. There's no telling what will sell and for what reason, there are literally millions of great authors and great books that never ever sell. Why? Well if can figure that one out ahead of time then there's a future for you in publishing! If you are Steven King you can get 40% Royalties and Millions of dollars in advances, because a publihser can be pretty sure to make something off of it, everyone else needs to play the game, otherwise nobody *could* play the game.
That aside... there is one really hugh difference traditionally between Books and Music. With book publishing the author usually walks away with all of thier royalties (if they earn them out to begin with) minus a small reserve against returns (which ultimately the author gets back, if they remember to ask for it!). Any book marketing and publicity done by the publisher is paid for by the publisher. Most editorial and printing costs are paid for by the publishier too. In music almost everything is charged back against the royalties, and the marketing dollars that music publishers spend with artists money for "promotion" is crazy high, and in most cases eats up royalties and makes it impossible for the artists to get any.
BTW I don't feel sorry Artists, they should know what they are getting in to before the do it. They get to live doing what they love, and while they might all live like superstars the quality musicians get bye. Most of the big complainers are lucky to be where they are (Cortney Love, please!)
Of course the issue above isn't about any of that, it's about the musicians wanting to have a say in how thier art is conveyed. I think they should, the money thing aside, at the end of the day they created something, and they should have some say in how it's used. If they feel thier music should only be played as an album... well, whatever, they have that right (of course then turning around and releasing a bunch of singles and videos doesn't do much for there "artistic credibility", but oh well, hypocrisy or ignorance isn't a crime (though maybe it should be))
--- Nothing To See Here ---
1. Produce a high quality album with no filler and I have no problem paying $20CDN for it. 2. Produce an album with one or two good tracks and the rest filler. I have no problem downloading and paying for those two songs but I won't buy the album. 3. Allow only albums to be sold. I have no problem pirating the two good songs. Artists get nothing. If Madonna insists on albums only. Guess what? Instead of getting 24Â from me, she gets 0Â. What is better? 24Â x 250,000 or 0?
Listen to Will Smith or Alanis' albums. Do those stinking piles of shit have anything remotely resembling a full collection rather then a hobgobble of singles? I think not.
The joke ass bands that are Green Day and Stinkin Farce (Linkin Park) wouldn't know an album if it bit them in the face. Those idiots write 3 or 4 singles, all to be released in three month intervals to maximize fan stupidity, and then fill the rest of their albums with noise so they can pretend they're musicians.
I'm sorry, but the lead 'singers' of linkin park should be dragged into the street and shot if they ever try to sing again. I've never heard such drivel. Tell me how there lyrics aren't pandering to the white suburban nerd, who thinks he has such a terrible life. Poor kids get three meals a day, a warm bed, school, AND they have the privilige to listen to this crap.
And since that's the case, wouldn't a 'pay per song' model be more effecient? These tools won't have to fill in the rest of the album anymore. They can just put a new song out every three months. Jeez, if they were smart they'd do that and insist on a 'modest' increase of price to $1.98.
I bet it's easier to sell twenty idiots one 'cheap' song, then sell one idiot a 20 dollar album.
Such whining makes me want to throw up. And I think I'm going to.
Someone tell Mr. Goldring that the folks who appreciate the art that is the record album will continue to buy 'em.
The rest of us just want the tunes, one at a time, please.
Is this the same Jewel who has content on iTunes Music Store, and does exclusive songs..?
- reid
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Shelly
Not much to say, except that I basically agree with you...
I write as well and finally I found a publisher I like....
I was annoyed by the musicians whining constantly about this, that or the other thing. They should live the life of a writer sometime and see how it is! Poor mostly!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
All of this is lost in the CD versions of LPs that most of you are used to listening to now: the CD just plays straight through what was originally the gap between side A and B, and then after the original finale of the LP, there are a bunch of typically very minor "bonus" tracks tacked on that spoil the effect.
And as for music newly being released on CD, the problem is no longer "which piece should I choose to put on this album", but "how am I going to fill up so much space?". It's rare for a CD to be padded with actively bad tracks -- not unless you're buying a really light weight artist -- but it *is* really common to have a CD that seems a little samey, that gets a little boring before the end. More often than not, I toss five CDs in the carousel and play them on "shuffle": sorry about your great work of art there, gang, but I would've fallen asleep before the end anyway.
People do not want entire CD's by most artists, because most of the CD is fluff, and not worth the a hundredth of the money spent on it.
Most people like 1 or 2 songs on an album, and couldn't care less for the rest. Artists can't deal with that, then they need to make better albums. Otherwise, tough shit. The market sets the rules.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The artists really should be seeing single song sales as free bonus money. Most of the people only buying one song off of an album likely wouldn't have bought the album in the first place, thus making any money received from that person money they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
As long as there are people like me (I can't be the only one) who appreciate good albums as a complete work of art, artists like Radiohead, Tool, and Hybrid have absolutely nothing to worry about. The one thing I'd hate most would be to see the music industry go even more so into hit-single manufacturing business.
But really, it hasn't really happened yet, and prolly won't anytime real soon, but something tells me the money is gonna start spreading itself out a bit more as people use the internet and come across smaller bands who actually are artists. I know the internet has totally changed the way I listen to music and make my buying decisions. The internet is how I found lots of bigger but not huge artists I might not have found otherwise, like DJ Shadow, Plaid, and Cursive, but also bands like Plink, who can get their music out through word of mouth and a website are getting more of my money (my order's goin out tomorrow!). I forgot the guy's username that casually mentioned his band Plink in a comment here, but now he and his friends are gettin my $10, because the three _free, full-length_ songs on their website were amazing. And no, I don't know these people, they're just really that talented and I think they deserve the push.
So before I go too far off-topic, I'll end with "Support the artists who still view their music as art, not a paycheck."
Not quite. According to the artists, they regard the complete album as the product, not individual tracks.
According to Microsoft, marketing regards the complete distribution as the product, not individual OS components such as the kernel, shell, or web browser.
If you accept that point of view
As you admit, that's a big "if".
Will I retire or break 10K?
Given the fact that the average pop music act has an average life expectancy in the limelight of a year or two at best, I think they should be looking at this kind of information seriously. And currently, I think the best source of that information is going to be single-file download services where the user can preview the entire album before picking the wheat from the chaff.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
All I want is the peanut in the turd and not the SHIT incasing it.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
"The fear among artists is that the work of art they put together, the album, will become a thing of the past"
Well....so what?
The 'album' or even recorded music at all has only existed for as long as there's been recording technology. Why is THIS techology - that allows so-called artists to put their music on some immutable form factor - so precious and worthy of preservation?
Perhaps this is just the end of an era - it used to be that musical artists only got paid for their PERFORMANCES. For a while, there has been the chance for them to record a song and effectively reap the rewards of millions of simultaneous performances. But now let's move on.
-Styopa
If you buy Pink Floyd, Yes, Dream Theater or Spock's Beard single by single, you're wasting your money.
Now I'm all for choice and less "filler" tracks, but if the trend of selling individual singles stops artists from creating conceptual albums, it will be a great loss for those of use who like their music rich and complex.
We worked with Madonna's group personally to sell here American Life single here:
r osrecords/
http://www.madonna.com/downloadsingle
It debuted higher than any digital single on billboard. It was 3rd behind Kid Rock and someone else's in store sales. The artist's camp could not have been happier with the process and results. Though we do have it priced at $1.49, in unprotected mp3 format!
We also sell for several other artists mentioned in the article:
http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/warnerb
Me thinks this article doth protest too much...
I'm sorry, I love radiohead as much as the next guy, but I remixed my own Kid A and Amnesiac album. I found KID A to be laden with fluff.
Once you combine the best of one with the best of the other, you get the album that I would want to buy. If they can't understand that, then I can't be bothered spending money on "Hail to the theif"- due to "artistic difference between me and the band."
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Not true, big artists like RadioHead probably get much more then 12% of an album sale. It all depends on who you sign with, what you sign, how much your distributors sell you album for, and how much retailers sell your album for.
Fort example... sometimes big artists own their own label and pull in most of the profits; sometimes artist are big enough to get fairly lucrative deals from an existing label; sometimes artist get screwed and only make money after their label has been comp'ed for production and marketing (ie. We take the first million... you get a percentage of what's left); sometimes albums are expensive at wholesale, causing stores to make little money off of them if they make them down to an entising price; etc etc
There is no standard way of dealing with this stuff.
But regardless, I think these artist are tripping. First of, labels/artist don't have to pay for printing and distributing these albums. They're digital and always there once they have been ripped.
Secondly, individual tracks are usually more expensive from Apple. (ie. Buying a 15 track album is $10, yet buying 15 individual songs is $15). The vast majority of sales from Apple have been from selling complete albums. Complete albums are cheeper if you intend to buy a lot of tracks from an artist at the Apple store. Moreover, mixed-CDs of random songs get very very old after a while.
And, hey, don't these artists realize that this is what their fans want? People want to have the freedom to download individual songs whenever they want. It's easy to snag b-sides, you can shop for music in the buff at 3am, and you can build you're own "greatest hits" album if you wish.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
In certain genres. Mainly in Reggae and all its sub genre's like dancehall.
All the *good* tunes are released as 7" and 85% of the album releases are allways collection of 1month-3 year old singles. This is the case atleast from the top artists.
Why this happens ? Because there is so enourmous competition and there are literally hundreds of few songs each month (Basicly because of the "riddim" re-use eg. many artists record their own version to the same track)
IT doesnt take a visionary to see that this will eventually happen in mainstream also.
yush
The artists need to look at demand and sales and realize one thing. It's not a question of divvying up the sales of a $18 album vs. a $1 single. It's a question of divvying up the sales of lots and lots of $1 singles vs. trying to divvy up zero sales of albums. Fans are tired of having to pay that much money to get only a couple of songs they really like, and they're not willing to do it anymore. Artists who refuse to give fans what they want... won't have too many fans.
i can't say i disagree with this entirely... i actually like finding full albums that are really good. i think if the song has been released as a single and is played on the radio by itself, you should be able to buy it by itself.
same deal with classical music -- as a music student, it is infinetly helpful for me to be able to download one movement or a set of movements for study purposes. i bet per-song classical downloads would even raise the amount of classical music sold online!
granted, there are a lot of records where the album sucks but 1 or 2 songs are good. i just try to stay away from those albums. if i accidentally buy one, it gets put into the "sell back to the record store" pile.
incidentally -- records that are good as a whole (in addition to a lot of great ones posted here already):
Gillian Welch - Time (The Revelator) and Soul Journey
The Bad Plus - These are the Vistas
Joe Jackson Band - Volume IV
Alejandro Escovedo - A Man Under the Influence
Del Amitri - Change Everything, Twisted
This album is the only one I own that would suffer terribly from breaking it apart. It tells a story through the songs from beginning to end and each part really doesn't stand very well on its own. I have to say this is the only album I own that has to be listened to as an album.
But, I should also add, that I tend to only buy albums from artists I'm very familiar with and I end up liking almost every song on every album I buy. And, a lot of the time, I buy an album without hearing any songs from it. I just have very specifics tastes and I have a pretty high level of confidence that my favorites won't disappoint. There are about 5 groups on okayplayer whose albums I will buy without hearing a single song before hand (their singles usually don't get much airplay). Any given album usually doesn't have more than 1 song I don't like, but then again, these aren't your typical pop groups either. If any of you like hip-hop and don't know about the artists on okayplayer.com I highly recommend you give it a visit. The artists even post to the message boards there.
I agree, "Operation Mindcrime" is probably the last good concept album, I've heard as well. Though, I will admit that there have been just some amazingly good albums in the last 10years. I do believe some artist work really hard to make their albums good, which for me means that the album has more than five good songs, and maybe only one or two songs that will ever make a radio single. Albums by Radiohead and Tori Amos tend to have amazing songs, and are often best purchased as an album.
That said, I'm now a strong believer the album as a collection of tracks, is more important than the album as laid out on your standard CD. My iPod and the shuffle function, has had me rediscover albums that I use to think were merely adequate or slightly good, but I had purchased for two or three songs. For example, the new Annie Lennox album Bare, my first listen was in artist compilation mode (straight from the CD order), and while, I was impressed by a few songs, my response to the overall album was, "It's okay". I then relisten to it in shuffle mode, and now I've listen to the damn thing over 20 times, and I have to say, it's a very good album.
I think artist get to caught up in I want to start here and end here. I'm not saying that that method won't be successful, just that even of the artist fans, only a % will be super responsive to the album in that format. Digital downoads and the digital format, allow those who weren't so impressed by the order the artist selected to rediscover the album, to mix it up, to discover secrets and talents of the artist that they missed the first listen.
I've had Absolute Torch & Twang in heavy rotation this last week, because iPod shuffle mode. I purchased it through ITMS so I wouldn't have to go through the trouble of converting it from cassettee to mp3. I had then placed my recent purchase list in shuffle mode, and low in behold intermixed with songs from Annie Lennox, Hall & Oates, Missy Elliot, Tori Amos, and Live, came "Wallflower Waltz." "Wallflower Waltz" was a song I was somewhat dismissive of on the album, but tossed into this 50 minute mix of songs, it grabbed my attention and wouldn't let me go.
I then just went back to the entire Absolutely Torch and Twang album, and listen, and listen, and am still listening. The variations offered by shuffle mode, just keep making the album more attractive, and allow me to see different songs as cornerstone to the album. Now I have an album that has 12 really good songs, when it use to be an album of 3 great songs, and 2 additional good songs, that I hadn't listen to in years. So it doesn't take a concept album to make an album a work of art, but it takes more than the artist desire as well.
That said, I find the single is often enticement to the album. I find if I've purchased more than two singles of the same album, I reconsider purchasing the album. The road to discover of a great album starts with a single song. Some people will purchase a single, and never return. Others will purchase a single, then another, than return for the album, and of course there will always be those who purchase the album outright, because the recognize the artist and the artist capability to deliver good songs and albums worthy of being purchased. But a single song can and does often act as the foundation for building an artist to someone who is worthy of full album purchases.
Dist. Costs are much lower under this model. It should allow more profit snce no physical medium has to be manufactured and sold.
As someone else pointed out there is also a greater potential for artists to sell directly to the customers. This would eliminate the record company, distribution company, and retail outlet from the supply chain and should entitle the artists to a much greater percentage of the profit.
As for an album being an artform... I'm not convinced. I think that people have always wanted to purchase individual songs but were forced to buy the whole album to get the one song by the record company. The dest way to handle this for an internet dist. model would be to offer a discount if you buy the whole album. So tracks would be 99 cents and all 12 tracks would be 9.99.
Sounds pretty cool to me.
McLuhan, I believe, said that art is whatever you can get away with. Technology will end up keeping them honest.
Back in the late 18th century. Concert band music, with a mix of 'classical' and modern music, were pretty well the hight of popular entertainment. It was nothing like it was today, productions were huge and expensive, and made music accessible to people. The bands and symphonies played selections of music, Susa, Beethoven, generally selections from, the popular movements people enjoyed the most. Then, in a move to make music the art it was in Europe, they stoped doing the huge productions, ended the large selections of music in favor of single symphonies.
This was pretty well the end of the symphony. People stoped coming to performances, bands and orchestras dried up, and became the continuously poor, and only supported by philanthropy organizations they are today, fighting every year just to keep from going bankrupt.
I have no problem with music as an art, I think it's great. I'm a big fan of classical, but was it really the best choice to make it an all our nothing change? Where would the city orchestras be today if going to the symphony was still at the least still part of habit at the beginning of the 20th century?
I think there is no reason why artists, people who create works to make people think, should be ashamed of also creating crafts to entertain people. It pays the bills, and keeps your art from falling into obscurity. Sometimes people latch onto things that were not your 'vision' as an artiest, but this is just part of the public eye. Rather then forcing your public to meet with your views, why not just keep yourself connected with people well enough so that they will understand it to begin with?
Thank you for taking the time to write this excellent message. I have been following this path (more or less) for about five years now.
My current excellent new book is "1421: The Year that China Discovered America" by Gavin Menzies.
One item that I would add to your list is to put time and money resources into converting your interests and hobbies into income-generating career possibilities. I am currently trying to develop a fascination with little microcontroller chips into an Embedded Systems Designer career. Having a genuine and focused interest in a field will help you get through those periods of depression caused by 'media-withdrawal symptom' and also when it seems that you're taking two steps backwards for every three forwards.
Best. Album. Ever.
Also, even if I could get it in digital form, and *cough* I can, I'll still buy a nice gold CD re-release with neat cover art, etc.
I guess if this is a successful its going to undermine the whole concept (or at least one of the major ones) of online distribution, download the songs you want and forget the rest. Now these artist want to remove that. Looks like some people are going to moving back to free P2P programs to get the songs they want.
Well, you can't always get what you want. Consumers pay the bills, and consumers will dictate the way products will appear in the future.
Half the songs are too fscked up for radio play, but when I listen to the whole disc (in an altered state, if possible), I appreciate the whole far more than the sum of its parts.
Why are these artists afraid that single-song downloads will undercut album sales? Could it be because they realize that they put out a lot of crap?
And don't give us this 'artistic integrity' bullshit. If your album is a work of art unto itself; if your album truly must be heard as a whole , then why can it not stand on it's own merits? Why do we have to hear from your lawyers?
Music is art. The 'music industry' is not.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
The point that you either missed or ignored was that copying might be illegal, but it's not theft.
Surely, most classical music handed down to us is High Art, but you don't appear to have read much about the lives of classical composers... Mozart and Vivaldi, for example, spent their lives composing for other people, and their livelihoods (as with many others) hinged on their music's popularity. As great as they may have been, they ended up buried in the same poor people's cemetery in Austria, without even a marked grave, because the tides of popular appreciation ahd turned, and noone would subsidize their genius anymore (maybe that's what we need nowadays --- more mecenes?).
The market for music hasn't changes, it's just grown to more layers of the population.
Oh and lastly, as a music-lover myself, I rather resent your objectification of music : I find it of striking obviousness that were we to dictate our "customers'" first-degree wishes to artists, we would get bad music - which is what happens when music executives tailor a joke performer to the market (hello, ricky and britney.)
No "customer" would have asked for "Dark Side of the Moon". And it is the best sold (concept) album of our time, but more importantly a work of genius.
I was annoyed by the musicians whining constantly about this, that or the other thing. They should live the life of a writer sometime and see how it is! Poor mostly!
:)
Don't compare apples and oranges.
The average musician (or band) is just as poor as the average writer. Perhaps even poorer, as many owe their record label money for promoting albums which didn't sell (How much money do you owe your publisher?) On the other hand, when you hear about artists complaining, they tend to be the successful musicians. The simple reason for this is that nobody would listen to unsuccessful ones. Only the complaints of the successful ones get published.
In other words, you're comparing successful musicians to the average author. The average unsigned musician/band is still playing clubs for $100 a night plus what they get from merchandising. The average musician with a contract probably owes their record company quite a bit of money. These should be the basis for your comparison.
Now if they want more than .99 for the album, then we will see that their motivations have nothing to do with artistic integrity and everything to do with greed. The ball is in their court...
Artists understandably complain about their music being bootlegged on the Internet, but now that people are downloading music legitimately and are actually making a profit from it, they're still complaining?? Sounds like they've been brainwashed by the RIAA. They must face reality: things change! People no longer want to spend $18 on CDs, since it's such a ripoff. Unless CD prices drop drastically, downloading songs individually at a cheap price is the way to go.
The artists will learn to stop whining. Linkin Park will learn that charging full price for a HALF-FILLED CD(Less than 40 minutes on Meteora) is not a way to call it a work of art.
There ARE cds that need to be sold as albums. Collections of sound effects, and CD MegaMixes, as one example. But I haven't seen artists complaining about the NOW! compilations, radio plays, singles selling(Well, those stopped, thankfully), commercial use or ANY OTHER MEDIUM WHERE PEOPLE WANT TO LISTEN TO 3 MINUTES OF MUSIC AT A TIME AT THE MOST.
The comics in newspapers have changed from full page spreads to cheap throwaway black&white joke strips. Those that BUSTED the limit were Mutts and Calvin & Hobbes. Those that DESERVED to perserve their format WILL. Those that WHINE will just get mocked.
With "and are actually making a profit from it", I'm refering to the artists.
The latest Blur CD, Think Tank is, like many techno CD's, seamless. All the songs are meant to flow into each other with no breaks.
..except.. the damn player inserts 1 second pauses between tracks. Since the album is supposed to be seamless, these pauses are jarring to say the least.
That is.. until you put the thing into your computer. Whereupon the Digital Restrictions Management loads it's little mickey mouse player (mickey mouse both for its power and the DRM associations) to play the CD for you..
So what I want to know is, how come we don't hear about Madonna, Linkin Park, etc., bitching about how DRM players are "killing the art" of the album?
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Popular songs are usually between 2 and 6 minutes, partly because of techological limitations of the 78 and the 45 RPM disk, but also because that duration fits nicely with human attention span and has become part of the culture. Albums are typically a bit under an hour long, because of the limitations of the 33 RPM LP record, and the design of the audio CD which specifically was intended to replicate the LP. There is no fundamental artistic reason for that length at all, and the cultural influences for that duration are not strong. For myself, I usually find an hour listening to any artist a bit too long, even if the work is consistently interesting.
Nothing prevents anyone from creating tracks and albums of any other length using digital technology. This offers more, not less, room for artistic exprssion and integrity.
The fact that economies of scale allow very efficient distribution of 6 minute tunes (3 cheers for iTunes!!!) doesn't prevent you from using similar mechanisms to sell your 6 hour magnum opus. Of course, it doesn't force me to seek, pay for or listen to such a thing, but it certainly gives the artist the freedom to offer it. If artists think there is demand for these things, and the standard download sites don't support them, it will cost next to nothing to set up alternative distribution mechanisms.
I wonder if there isn't a more mercenary interest than artistic integrity behind these "artists" gripes. Obviously a lot of albums are mostly tedious filler. "Artists" who line up behind this complaint are apparently declaring themselves to be profiting from such filler. I would avoid any album by anyone supporting this argument on that basis alone.
iTunes does sell whole albums, by the way. I haven't bought any, though. I find the ability to buy individual songs vastly more appealing, and my music purchasing has rebounded from nearly zero as a result of the easy sample/easy download/easy pay features of iTunes.
mt
If you listen to a live performance by a *good* band, you'll notice it's practically a new album in itself : because of the mix of musicians/instruments, the state of mind of the artist at the moment they perform, all their songs will, live, cease being part of a particular album and become part of that performance. So your last dichotomy is a false one - if you consider an artist who would make albums so that they would be meant as *one* work. A concert set is *not* a mix tape.
Ny Girlfriend is a best selling author for a major publishing house. Sells out the first print run. It takes her about one YEAR to write a book. She makes less than 20K a year.
No one gets paid worse than writers. Especially not when you break it down by the hours invested. All musicians who are willing to play clubs make more, hell even a halfway decent 'Fan Artist' at cons makes more money.
Never heard of it.
Hands up any of these meat puppets who chose not to sell all rights to the work that the labels wrote and produced for them to those labels. Any one? Any one at all?
I'll start caring when actual artists rather than sock puppets start whining.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
sweet fucking jesus i'm OS/2 warp
"you are plagued by feelings of abandonment and disgust for your backstabbing step brother..."
they had lots of missing answers though, the bset SW movie is Return of the Jedi, if i were going ot be late fo rwork i owuldn't shower OR shave OR brush my teeth i would be in the fucking car..
nonetheless you seem like an insanely busy motherfucker judging from your website, when did you find time to write a book
Why break songs into different tracks at all?
I should be required to pay for all the crappy songs you write so I can get the one or two *decent* songs on an album? They must be crazier than the RIAA!
I really want a digitized version of Surrealist Max Ernst' Garden Aeroplane Trap, only I don't want the whole series of paintings. I just want the first and the last. I don't care about Ernst' artistic vision.
These musicians have a reasonable concern. It's not about greed - at least not for most artists. Artists must protect their artistic vision and the integrity of their works, which are products of sometimes years of toil. Def Leppard took 4 years to make Hysteria. Pink Floyd took longer than that for Momentary Lapse of Reason. Artists like Britney Spears or Linkin Park are also alone in trying to protect their creativity. The record biz execs aren't interested in things like artistic vision. The execs don't really even care about Britney that much. There's always another *younger* Britney waiting for instant stardom. For Christ sake, there's not a lot of difference between Menudo, New Kids on the Block, NSYNC, or Backstreet Boys.
I think it's about independent music stores and the commoditization of music. Even before music sharing was done online, the record biz and the corporate music stores have been turning artists' music into commodity items that can be bought, sold, and even traded. Corporate music stores tell you what is cool and what you will buy, using inventory and marketing as their weapons.
Single downloads of music can be great for pop stars who release singles that have been carefully engineered to be hits, but what about musicians who create albums as a single cohesive music experience. These albums don't have to be concept albums. I didn't think Radiohead's OK Computer was a concept album in the ilk of Pink Floyd'sThe Wall or Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime; yet the songs in OK Computer were meant to be enjoyed together.
These fears might amount to nothing though. There's no reason why I might not buy an entire album (however unlikely). If this new crop of online music stores can make independent music as accessible to consumers as is big label music, then great. But this is only possible if I see just as many popups/banners for Clinic as I'd see for Justin Timberlake.
I think a lot of artists are quite aware that they would be making more money percentage wise per sale. But that won't make up the difference caused by people only buying the tracks they like. If I were them, I'd be nervous too. Even if people spend more money on music, the current top artists are likely to make less as consumers hunt for better music to spend their money on.
How they are naive, is that they think they can stop this. They are apparently buying the RIAA line that the only reason CD sales are declining is piracy. Let them try to stop single track sales, I beleive the market will quickly demonstrate exactly how much people value a CD with one or two good tracks on it.
Heck, I've already started buying for the best bang/buck, asides from Nine Inch Nails (Who could sell me every last track at $0.99/each) I buy mostly movie sound tracks these days.
----
If they would put out albums that have all good, legitimate songs in the first place, single song downloads would probably be less in demand. Very few artists know how to put out an album that has a plethora of music that will hold interest. I'd say they should take their 99 cents and be happy, since obviously those songs are the only ones that the mass public finds worthwhile to listen to. Some songs are good, but don't get any radio play, and I think the online forum could possibly enhance the public's ability to make a proper judgement on an album to see if they like all of the tracks before they buy it. Before, an artist could release an album with one or two good singles and the rest being filler or some crap that's completely off from their genre, so it was a great case of Caveat Emptor (let the buyer beware). Most of their fears, I believe, is that they might actually have to WORK to sell their albums. Pardon me while I feel sorry for them...(0.0001 milliseconds later) OK, done.
Although it is true that in general artists get much better cuts from online single sales than from albums, they may still have legitimate fears about it. Perhaps they fear that music may turn into a sort of single-serving per artist thing. Perhaps they don't want people talking about a cool song they heard, instead of a cool band they heard. Getting a single song from a band hardly builds the kind of fanaticism and hard-core fandom that albums sales build. If everyone just buys artist's singles then they will never get a true real following they will just be monthly fads that fade.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
Who really cares? They're all covetous Jews anyway.
Heil Hitler!
From a book publishing POV (which I have quite a bit of experience), a large percentage of books published *loose money*!
It's unfortunate that you don't have an equivalent amount of experience with good spelling.
Why can't someone who creates something choose how it is going to be sold? Seems like a basic right to me. Whether or not the way they've chosen to package it is appealing to their customers will all be sorted out by the market.
If people don't like the way it's packaged, or the price, they don't buy it. For crying out loud, it's like Mr Burns blocking out the sun and raising the price of electricity. I'm pretty sure everyone could survive without listening to the latest Linkin Park song.
I also find it interesting that people here seem to know what is written in to those bands contracts with the record companies. And that 12% is much more than they are making otherwise. It may be or it may not be - you really don't know until you've read all the contracts involved. And perhaps it has nothing to do with money. Maybe they want to package the entire album as a single 'work'.
Selling the music should be the labels' job... and not the priority
[/utopia]
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
I used to be able to buy an album and find I liked at least half the songs on it. Not any more. What I find today is maybe two good songs and 10 'fillers'. Fillers is a term coined from the days of the 45 when you had the hit on one side and the other side was known as the "B" side. The B cut was the filler. Bands like the Beatles would not release album cuts on 45 because they felt it cheapened the value of their albums. They wanted their fans to have the best value possible. The CD eliminated the 45 and that's too bad, because it killed the "One hit wonder"; meaning those bands that had one or two songs that were hits before they faded into obscurity. Problem is, those bands are still around, but now they record 12 songs, only one or two of which is usually any good! I find it amusing that bands these days are bitching and moaning over what's basically a rebirth of the 45! Could this be because it will show them up for the mediocre musicians they are? Or is it because the entry bar has been lowered to once again allow "one hit wonders' to flourish? Or is it (SFX of cash register "ka ching" in the background) over the almighty buck? I think we all know the answer, don't we?
You walk in to a doughnut shop and ask to buy a single doughnut.
They tell you "No, we only sell them in a box"
So you order a box, pay for it and take it home.
You get home and open it up.
You find one doughnut and 14 lumps of SHIT.
You take it back to the doughnut shop and demand a refund,
"Hey, I don't like what was in the box, I thought I was going to get a box full of doughnuts
but I got a box full of SHIT with one doughnut in it. I want my money back!"
"Sorry, that's the only way we sell doughnuts."
If the artists and execs are so worried about the single-song download, then they should at least give the iTMS a fair shot by offering to buy whole albums.
This is a non-issue. The artists determine what actions are legal regarding their music by the contracts they sign with their labels and other distributors. So artists: shut up, stop protesting, stop rallying, and if you don't want people downloading singles, then don't release the rights to your own creation such that this evil corruption of your pristine work is realized.
And don't tell me "well the artists can't get distribution unless they sign up with a label, and the contracts are so unfair, and ClearChannel blah blah blah." That may be true, but it's another problem entirely, and its solution has nothing to do with whether I can buy a single, an album, or am forced to buy an 8-CD box set of every musician I'm interested in.
It grinds on me when I buy a record/tape/CD for one particular song and the rest of the songs are crap. Some artists won't put anything on an album that they don't think will be a top 10, but in reality 80% (educated guess) of the songs on today's releases never see any air play.
If I bought just the songs I want at 99 cents each instead of buying an album of 12 songs for $15.99 (or whatever the price is) the artists & music companies will get a LOT more money out of me than they do right now. I usually don't pay the retail price for CDs because it's just too high. I buy 99% of my music used at yard sales as a protest of sorts against the high prices.
Yeah, it might be a little lame, but it's my protest and I can do it any way I want... :)
Have you hugged your penguin today?
As we and they know, most albums have one or two good songs, the rest is filler. If people can buy the good songs, a lot of people who might not buy a $20 album will buy the 99 cent single they really want.
In any case, the people on the site will be using the streaming audio to review songs on records for possible purchase with Apple paying for bandwidth. Perhaps instead of buying via iTunes, they'll go to their record stores instead... kaching!
When they listen to it over and over enough to want better quality than improved 128K MP3, in many cases, the users will buy the physical CDs.
While Madonna, Jewel and Green Day are products of the old pre-Internet promo scene and have excuses (inertia and stupidity) for not knowing this, Linkin Park, Radiohead used the Net to build their careers. They never hesitated in the past to release MP3 singles in the past to promote on the listener's dime, maybe they think they're so big they don't need promo other than radio airplay anymore.
Maybe they finally decided that they're big enough to take advice from the conventional-minded fuckwits who advise the major labels and who are running them and their labels straight into the ground.
The indie musician I'm working with and I want to get our music onto iTunes and hoping the CDBaby deal works out to make this possible.
We are hoping this works out both in direct profits and helping us sell physical CDs, which will continue to have better sound than is possible from 128K compression in lossy formats like MP3 and the somewhat improved Apple format iTunes uses for distribution.
We're starting small and can't afford to be clueless fuckwits.
BTW, IMHO, the real reason for physical CD sales (let's face it, in most cases, you can download every track of a popular album via Kazaaa) is simply that... they sound better. While the average listener won't notice it consciously, there's a small, but significant difference between straignt digital recording and lossy compression using psychoacountic masking to hide compression artifacts to keep filesizes down to reasonable downloads... and that difference might not be noticeable on the first play... but the 20th or 30th, you'll decide it's time to "support the artist" and haul ass to your record store and buy the CD, which will take full advantage of your sound system.
Tech Public Policy stuff
the music industry is heading for a change a ugly change.
.
... they want to build there collection to their exact specs ...
...
.
... it would be simple to create a web site with full album downloads and singel downloads along with content to cater to fans ...
... but would restrict the user from mass sharing especially in bad faith and or selling of said music ...
... and the bands to lazy to self promote them selves ...
...
and we are all going to be hurt in the process
the consumers are demanding more control of their music
the music indusrty wants to controll the consumers listening habits they want to maximize exposure of whats hot
and wants to make sure whats not stays a definate not.
they know giving the consumers the choice to pick and choose what they like will massively change marketing strategies..
the unfortuneate side of this is that it is still the music industry who is in controll of releasing this music
and its almost a sure bet that they will conjure up some form of marketing that maximizes the the sales of singels at the cost of the artist
and blame it on the consumers
if the artist were smart they would say screw the industry send them a big fat finger and a swift kick in the pants and go market their music on their own.
sure it would cost them more money at first but i would bet it would tripple there exposure and profits in the long run
they would have to produce their own material and work to have have it introduced into new record stores then both the band and the record store would profit from the sale of their music
also the record store would profit from having a huge repostory of songs from other bands that they could sell...
each song would have a license that garauntees
fair use amoung the owners personal items that includes all media players software and hardware based
but it would be easy to buy a redistrubtion licensing and allow others to sell music to others at what ever profit the band requires
who is loosing out on this kind of set up ???
the music industry
this would return music to the scene and the true fans
but it will never happen because the music industry has to have controll of the content they must controll what you hear and there fore find a way to control what you buy
Music the Paint dancefloor the canvas your body the brush
Stupid simple solution. Don't want and album chopped apart for single song sales, just record it as one very long track.
Problem solved.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
And what, you think musicians live lavish lifestyles with women and booze and drugs? Think again, man. You might want to play the role of poor starving artist, but you need to know that 99% of the musicians you speak of are dirt poor. Only a very, VERY small percentage are able to avoid day jobs. Most of them are so damn poor that they work in photomats and coffee shops to make rent. I have yet to meet a real musician that didn't have to sacrifice nearly everything to pursue that dream.
And you know, even some of your favorite radio bands are dead broke. I would argue that *most* of the artists that move you are, in fact, pretty damn broke.
I'm not giving you a hard time here... but to imply that musicians have it better than any other struggling artist is both narrow minded and ludicrous.
And yeah, I know the life of a writer is difficult. I also know a little bit about the life of a musician. The only difference I can find between that and living as a musician? Well, let's see. Musician's have more shit to haul around and it's generally a lot heavier. That's about it.
Anyway, I think you guys are missing the point. This isn't necessarily a financial issue. Taking a single song out of an album will remove a piece of the story from its context. At least that could be said for some artists. Would you be so keen to chop your books into chapters to be sold invididually? Of course not! That idea is just plain silly. Why should it be okay for music? Just because you may not see the story in the song list doesn't mean it isn't there.
On a side note: it's a strange day indeed when you meet a writer that doesn't have much to say.
Anyway, that's my Sunday ramble..
--
mcp.kaaos
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Well, the Apple Music Store does also sell the entire CD for less than $10, so what's the problem? Trent Reznor has said the same thing, and since I listne to NIN and not Radiohead I can say that I know that he writes his music with the whole CD in mind. So in the case of NIN I'd be happy to buy an entire original Halo online, but on the other hand I may or may not want to buy the Closer CD with a dozen renditions of the same song when I only like 2 or 3 tracks. People mention "the customer is always right." Well, maybe I think all of the tracks (or enough that it would be cheaper to buy the whole CD) on a Britney CD are great (this is only a hypothetical), but I only want three songs off of Linkin Park's Meteora (to refer to one of the groups bitching) because I think that totality be damned, the rest of the tracks sucks (this is only a hypothetical). Thta should be my decision based on my preferences, dammit, and not theirs based on some sort of pretentious bullshit.
Radiohead Tells Press That Hail May Be Their Last Album
I'd rather be parsing. --Jive5
Singles use to be the dominate format for distributing music. In the early days of Rock & Roll about all you could get were 45's. It wasn't until later the album format really took off (late 60's - 70's ??) then you started seeing things like concept albums (Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall etc. etc.) who puts out concept albums anymore? Nobody. Personally I'd rather buy singles and not waste my money on a cd that has only one or two songs on it I like.
Then make the ENTIRE album good, not one ot two songs worthy of listening to and the rest crappy worthless filler. That's the real problem.
If your album sucks ass, except for a couple of songs, no way am I going to buy the whole thing. I'll just pick up what I like and avoid the rest.
this is my sig
These jackasses produce crap, pure crap. I stopped buying popular music (and I suspect 90% of fileswappers out there have the same reasoning I do) because the $14.99 sticker price for an album containing 7 to 15 titles, of which an average of 3 were listenable, was simply not an economically viable idea. Thanks to iTunes, I have spend more on music in one month then in the three years prior.
Moreover, you can't convince me that these crap albums by people like Linkin Park are complete Song Cycles, so this concept of an album as a work is bunk.
And then there's the fact that there are a lot of KMFDMs out there...bands that couldn't put more than 2 listenable songs on an album if their lives depended on it, whether the songs go together or not.
If musicians have a problem, take it up with the distributors. I am not going to pay for shit I don't want to get what I do want.
Not that it matters, after that Jesse Jordan thing, I'm not buying ANY music from the RIAA companies. Fuck em.
...make a really long song, divided into 15 chapters, and charge more for it. No big deal. Frankly I think the "art" is an excuse to sell a 16 song CD with only one or two decent tracks on it.
Well, the question then is whether you consider music to be art, or a marketing exercise.
Apparently Radiohead consider it to be art, rather than marketing--which should be no surprise to anyone who's a fan of their work.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Maybe if artists made more than one good track per album, people would buy the whole thing instead of the one good song. I mean really, who wants to pay $15 for a CD with one good track and a bunch of crap? Granted, I'm sitting here listening to Pink Floyd atm, so you can probably tell I'm not all that big on modern pop music to begin with. But really, this has been a growing trend over the last few decades (getting really problematic in the late 90s and early 00s), where a band is signed, makes one song, the record company makes bank off selling that one song to everyone, then away they go into the dustbin of history. Make good music and people will buy whole CDs of it. Make crap and people will 'pirate' it or buy just the single good tracks, it seems pretty straight forward to me.
"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong" - Dennis Miller
I thought this was ScoDot! What's this happy horseshit about musicians whining? OF COURSE they're whining, they're musicians.
What *I* find troubling is that my generated front page hasn't got a single mention of SCO. Has SCO stopped making incredibly stupid statements? Put a hold on frivolous lawsuits? Damnit, I need my fix!
These "artists" are suddenly running up against the reality that their egos are much larger than their fan base. Most major label artists, the groups/singers/performers/whatevers that are known worldwide and heard endlessly on Top 40 stations, are not artists in the sense we might consider perhaps classical composers or even modern trailblazers like Elvis, Bob Dylan or Grandmaster Flash. They are simply hit machines. The music they make is not particularly unique or revolutionary. Rather, it's just noise for people to dance to at clubs, blast out of their 8000 watt car stereos or hear in the background at the gym or office. Their music will not be remembered on anything other than "Now that's what I call one-hit-wonders vol. LXVII"-type compilations.
As such, people don't want their albums. They buy them when there's no other way to get the hits they hear on the radio. Nobody will identify that sixth track on Shakira's latest album, but they will remember the one in the Pepsi commercials (if she's so lucky). The only substantitive difference between the two is the fact that the song is widely identifiable; the quality is not particularly great in either case. People don't want the albums, they want the hits. This is the reason for the massive appeal of the apple music store and P2P mp3 sharing beyond a few geeks looking to find some obscure Front 242 or Cure B-side.
And this runs straight up against the millionaire "artists" who conceive themselves as visionaries and look to their worldwide appeal as proof that they are, indeed, somehow different than their peers. As if the rise of Linkin Park from the engorged field of "rap-rock" crossovers had something to do intrinsically with their band's music, attitude or aptitude rather than the pure dumb luck of having caught the eye of a major label with the presence of mind to hype the hell out of them.
The artists in question are having to deal with the unpleasant fact that their visions of themselves as pioneers, saviors or rebels do not quite gel with the views of their customers, who see them merely as soundtracks -- soundtracks that get old and need to be changed, like everything else.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
International Superhits by Greenday
The Immaculate Collection by Madonna
The Best of Motorhead[Metal-Is] by Motorhead
(unfortunately, I was unable to find "Best Of" albums by Linkin Park (most likely either haven't been around long enough or don't have enough decent material to make a "Best Of" album)or Jewel (Personal opinion, but I NEVER, EVER want to hear what one would consider to be the "Best Of" Jewel).
The point remains that virtually every artist I've ever seen has been perfectly willing to put out a "Best Of" album when enough dollars/euros/insert your favorite local currency here are waved under their nose. I've heard one band say no because "Best Of" albums always seem to be the last gasp of a group/artist that has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.
You don't want your work broken into singles, fine. Just be honest with yourself (and your listeners) and admit that the reason has absolutely noting to do with art.
Karma: Chameleon - mostly influenced by bad '80s New Wave music
"the album" ... it's merely a way to deliver multiple songs, and few of them are a coherent musical concept. If they would put out an album stuffed with good songs instead of taking one or two songs they hope is Billboard chart-topper material and padding it out to fill an overpriced CD ... they wouldn't have to worry, would they. But the usual CD by the usual mega-hit artiste is the musical equivalent of that WunderFluf white bread. Nothing but air.
Before LP albums became the accepted way to release music, artists and recording companies were doing well with 45 singles. They would produce the album only AFTER there was enough commercially popular to make it worthwhile.
The main problem I see here is that we have let people define themselves as artists. That's not for them to define. If enough people listen, look, and appreciate what they do, then and only then can they be defined as artists.
It's really gotten out of hand with people who paint on canvas. It's to the point where some fool can clean his brushes on his canvas and declare it "ART" and he and his friends expect the world to "appreciate" it. Nope, that's right backwards of the way it's supposed to be. We, the unwashed public, know what we like and don't like. It's not for a self-proclaimed "artist" to tell us.
It looks like musicians are taking the same path. Don't tell me I'm "unsophisticated" just because I don't "get" your "art". I'll take that decision. If I like one song, I'll buy it. I don't have to buy the whole "work of art".
i spent 14 years of my life paying for filler album after filler album.
not no more.
---- oh no - it's the RIAA and their $100000000 fine. I'm gonna take that so seriously...
I bet that "artists" who have trouble selling their works are mostly in *favour* of the single song downloads because they understand that if you feel like eating a slice of pie, you shouldn't have to buy the whole frickin' pie. Plus I'm sure they appreciate the exposure and a little bit of revenue...very hard for amateur musicians to make *any* money whatsoever....infact, many I know look at it as a hobby and will actually spend more on equipment and getting themselves to gigs than the gigs pay.
-psy
You're onto something here, and I'm not sure what it is exactly, but noting that the offended artists are all established and rely heavily on the existing royalty model, would have to infer that they just wouldn't get as much scratch from singles as they currently get from the album model. So, I'm guessing it's all about money.
I agree with you on the best of and/or remake concept. But, I also think a singles model is fine as well. We should be arguing less about choices today since we have so many of them and start concerning ourselves more with content since we have much more access to it than we used to (even before the "rock" phenomena of the 50's occurred).
I'm not a signed artist and have spent about $5,000 on my current CD, Wasted Tears and understand the business of producing music. It's painful and expensive, but it's done because of the joy you get when you finish a song and that song is a part of a collection of other songs to such extent that you put them together on a CD. Some of these tunes are no more related to the other songs on this CD than Linkin' Park's "In the End" is related to Burt Bacharach's "Close to You," but they happen to be on the same CD because it makes more sense in the modern context to put more than one song into the finished product. I actually could care less if someone took "Ostracising the Ostrich" as a single rather than abstain from buying the Wasted Tears CD because it was too expensive given they just wanted that one song. But, then I haven't gone platinum or made millions from my "art" so I don't know what it's like to lose out to the lesser over the greater revenue I'd be realizing if I had sold hundreds of thousands of CDs.
In the end, I'm guessing that ultimately the consumer will decide what they want to buy and my hope is that if they buy one of my singles for $.99 they'll wonder what the other songs on that production sound like and buy the whole CD. Either way, I'd be grateful that I got anything out of it and that someone else enjoyed what I'd produced. That's really what being an artist is all about. If people buy your produced work; that's just a bonus. I'd have more respect for Jewel if she were to spin that message rather than the nickle and diming one...
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
Sure, they're "artistically opposed" to selling singles for 99 cents.. but they have no problem selling singles for $12.99.
Linkin Park
Radiohead
Madonna
Jewel
Green Day
I'm artistically opposed to purchasing anything by these bands.
Let me put this very uneloquently....
Go F&*^K OFF!
you can't make 'em buy it.
i hate multi disc CD players and multi album mp3 players that have a "random" mode that doesn't have the ability to treat it as "random album" rather than switching albums all of the time. many albums are best listened to in order.
however that doesn't mean good singles don't exist and stand on their own.
why aren't they protesting the fact that clearchannel only plays a single song from an album at once if they ever actually play more than one from an album at all?
Yeah, Temple Of Low Men does rock. I'd say it's Crowded House's best album (just edging out Together Alone). It's such a shame a truly phenomenal songwriter like Neil Finn isn't more well known and appreciated in America.
"Dave, I stand still--the conclusions jump to me!" - Bill McNeal, NewsRadio
...I don't think I had to. It's pretty obvious these so-called "artists" are only interested in one thing, money.
I've seen big-ticket artists' albums go for up to $35 in stores, for a measly 15-song CD and I think these rich-ass bastards like it that way. Someone must have told them that if only 5 of the songs on the release are any good, they stand to lose that $30 worth of "filler" tracks they recorded as an after-thought over a weekend to get the album released on time.
I mean, Radiohead is one of my favorite bands, but they release 3 albums a year!
Why?
What happened anyways? 50 Years ago being a musician wasn't the height of society, and now they get more respect, privelage, and money than any other profession!
I seriously think this whole digital music revolution is nothing more than the long overdue wake-up call for everyone in the music industry who thought this was going to last forever.
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden
...There probably is no way to pull this off, but I wonder if Artists would be upset if music was downloaded and then money directly sent directly to the artists.
...but this model would piss off the record companies, so it will never work.
Let's say I download an album and loved it, then sent the artist $10-15 directly for the album. Would that make the artist happy? It then would be a FULL cut and the FULL artist vision would have been purchased (even if through download).
This eliminates the middleman (the record labels) and gives artist an 100% cut. The industry will never work correctly until the artists take back the radio stations and start selling their own music, without the labels.
Oh well, wishful thinking I guess.
BTW, I physically OWN over 1000 CDs (which roughly translates into about 237 good songs. It really is a shame that I had to pay for 763 artistic visions of CRAP too.)
What you do is no harder and deserves no more compensation than any other profession. You do not deserve 1 million dollars a year. You are not special. While I am sure being a rock star is hard work, it has benefits greater than any other job besides being the president. Stop your complaining. Stop your whining. You are not in a position to complain. You are not in a position to be unhappy.
"Mini-albums"? I believe they call those "EP's." Step out of Tower Records for a while and notice that most local/independent artists release nothing but singles and EP's until they have the clout to release full-length albums. Do you mean to say you'd rather national artists release EP's on a regular basis instead of full length albums? There is certainly a bit of a stigma that once you reach popularity level X you cannot release singles and EP's anymore; you can only release full-lengths. Maybe the variation of length would help out a little. It certainly couldn't hurt.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Linkin Park recently pulled its music as a singles offering from digital services.... Other acts with similar stipulations about their work include Radiohead, Madonna, Jewel and Green Day
In other words, artists who have millions of CD sales already under their belt are complaining about people downloading the one or three songs they like instead of the entire album for $10-$15, because they're the ones who can afford to complain. But they certainly don't speak for the entire music industry, and I scarcely think they have a right to.
A singles-oriented model only has the possibility of hurting the bottom line of acts who already have a worldwide following in the millions of dollars. The idea is to sell songs by artists who may not be able to sell entire CDs as easily. As Neophytus said, 12 cents is certainly a step up from the status quo for any band who can't afford to renegotiate their own contracts from a position of strength.
Why not give it to them the way they want?
Because that's the same argument MTV uses. "We don't control people's tastes! We just give them what they want!" Selling people "what they want" usually means manipulation of such, and I fear that the big labels will now push artists to write one or two good songs apiece, give them their time in the limelight (or Limewire), and them throw them over for another single. And by another single, I mean another artist. ...Oh wait, that happens now, doesn't it?
That's a pretty Blade Runner view of the future of iTunes, and I admit that that first post was a bit strewed, but personally, I don't think I could ever sell singles alone if I were to make music. It would be selling a gimmick rather than a product. (Although I would have nothing against EP's.) I think that this should be a choice that comes down to the artist. As someone said in an earlier post, if Madonna wants to only sell albums and not whole singles, let her. And let anyone else who wants to as well. It's understandable that hearing Linkin Park and Madonna speak out against singles is much less convincing than hearing it from someone who needs the money, but ultimately, the length of material to release together should be the artists' decision rather than the corporations'.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
you asked: "Would you be so keen to chop your books into chapters to be sold invididually?"
.... usually breaks down to something like 1 or 2% profit. their major bank is touring.
yes, if i wrote a good book i dont see where the pain/problem is ? people buy chapter one read it , and if they like it they buy the rest. simple. its no damn different than a borders or barnes and noble setup. except i can do it at home butt naked with a bowl of lime jello.
No, if i wrote a piece of crap. or some fluff novel. Because people would buy chapter one and not buy anything else cause my book sucks.
now on to a previous point, the average musician clocks 3-6% of the retail price of a CD, then they payback the label for studio time advertising etc
i dont know crap about book publishing except the "elite" of that genre of art are not hurting. J.K. rawling and steven king make just as much (if not more) than radiohead and madonna. i also assume that authors make alot of money when their books are licensed for movies, toys etc. so this is different how ?
the reason the afformentioned pop-artists are whining is because they can no longer drive album sales (2% of $20 is $.40) from one catchy single which generate more money per sale (as opposed to the $.12 they are making per downloaded song.).
nary an album in the past decade has been a "story" or a work of art. its usually a collection of songs written by different people that vaugely sound the same. and thats only because its the same group of half-asses making the "music".
excuse me for my speeling in advance.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
If you need help in working out how much each of you need to pay i'm sure a post to /. will get you an answer.
As a last resort look around to find one of those rare record shops that have have listening posts where you can probably listen to the whole cd or at least a sample of the tracks.
I could name maybe 10 that I heard that were like that. And oddly enough you would probably disagree with me about them as well.
And lets not even mention the 60's.
As if they have a say so... They should be happy they're getting anything at all for their music! What a bunch of rich crybabies!
r4lv3k
Real artists do not produce mainstream music. The real artists produce music that is excellent according to their own vision. And only a small percentage of people will appreciate a given artist's music.
Unfortunately, under today's "record label" system, the real artists can't make a living, because they can't reach the people who could appreciate their music. Likewise, the people who might appreciate that artist's music are frustrated, because they can never find the music they like.
Under today's system, the record companies ignore artists who only appeal to a small percentage of listeners, and focus solely on performers who fit the current popular mold. Thus, all we hear on the radio is mass-appeal performers like Britney Spears, Madonna, Justin Timberlake, and Eminem.
But the Internet promises to change all that, by allowing artists and listeners to find each other directly. Most people consider this to be a good thing, as it will allow non-mainstream artists to earn a living, and non-mainstream listeners to find music they enjoy.
I can say from experience that it is working. Though I have yet to try downloading, I have, over the last year, gotten into Internet radio. In place of a few dozen local radio stations, all of which play the same hits, the Internet has given me a choice of thousands.
Thus, for the first time in decades (literally), I have been able to find the music that I like. In just one year, I have bought over 100 albums, mostly from groups that I had never heard of before. By way of contrast, over many years prior to that, I had bought maybe a dozen albums in total.
But there are problems to overcome.
The biggest problem is that the Powers-That-Be are threatened by the new system. The record labels want to continue to control a limited number of distribution channels, in order to block competition, and ensure success without effort. Many pop stars, aware that their "success" is based purely on record label hype, rightly believe that their income will be threatened by a system where merit plays a larger role. And the record manufacturers and distributors know that they are bound to go the way of buggy whip makers, because they can't compete with the greater efficiency of Internet-based distribution.
The second problem is that Internet-based music distribution must become more popular. Until that happens, artists still won't be able to earn a living from it, and will have no reason to defend to new system. This depends largely on the next point.
The third problem is that a set of open Internet protocols must be established, and gain popular support. This is partly happening already, but there are also some very powerful forces -- especially Microsoft and Disney -- working hard to ensure that it does _not_ happen. Those forces would prefer to have proprietary protocols under their control, such that they can become the new monopoly hitmakers, and charge a premium for access -- access that would be much less expensive, or free, without their extortionary intervention.
And the last problem is the need to establish new methods for licensing and payment. In the past, the license, and proof of payment, came with being in possession of an official, physical copy of the album. But with the ability to easily download, copy, and transmit music, we probably need a system where an individual can buy the license separately, regardless of how the music is obtained. Also, in order to convince most people to take the high road, and legally pay for their music, people will need to be assured that their money is going to the artist and his or her voluntarily-chosen agents (publicity, legal), instead of being taxed to keep now-obsolete, monopolist labels and manufacturers in business.
Lastly, let me say that, when it comes to licensing and payments, DRM is NOT the solution. DRM is the Soviet Union approach to stopping crime, to wit, if you remove people's freedom, then they won't be able to commit a crime.
He needs to do more acting. I love his movies, and for 99 cents, I'll go see one. (Just kidding, I know that is only for the smallest candy bar or drink in the MoviePlex)
I agree. When I buy an album based on what I hear on the radio, and I discover that the rest of the tracks are filler, I feel cheated.
There is one case where my reaction is different. When I buy an album, and there are filler tracks, I am disappointed, but I can't say I'm surprised. But when I buy a Greatest Hits album, and I discover that the artist has only had two good songs in his entire career, then it is too pathetic for me to get angry. Such was the case when I bought Don Mclean's Greatest Hits.
an ad for the album back in the day, but lets face it if there is 2 'good' singles on an album you are lucky. If there are 4 other tracks which 'aren't annoying' then you are now dealing with the an atypical album. It is just a means to push the music that WOULD NOT SELL otherwise. Then again Hasbeeninca protest music sales ?, whoda thunk it
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Albums are the music industry`s way of shovelling out the crap, they use one or two good songs to sell the album, and then give you 10 tracks of pure shit, the tracks that they couldnt sell as singles.. and you can guarantee that if they could make money on their own, thats how they would be sold.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The fear among artists is that the work of art they put together, the album, will become a thing of the past," says attorney Fred Goldring, whose firm represents Will Smith and Alanis Morissette.
I didn't realize that Will Smith's albums were even a thing of the present.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
The only thing the online trend is going to threaten is greatest hits discs. There will be less reason for them to exist.
In 1990, Mike Oldfield was very upset with his contract with Virgin Records and made Amarok, a 60 minute long instrumental album with only one track and many sudden theme changes so they couldn't make a single.
I recommend it. It's a GREAT piece of music.
There is something fundamentally wrong about Madona and Linkin Park calling their albums as a whole a work of art when no-one can name more than a single song per album.
I do security
AHAHAHAHAHAHA, so let me see if I get this: It's legal to pay for A song. It supports artists and shows them buying trends. Now I suppose they think they'll fare much better by making people download their 'music' in the original set. What about compliations? or Soundtracks? I'm sure Rage Agaist The machine would be amused if they had to go tell their old bandmates: Hey you know the songs that sunk? We get to do it ALL again!
Anyway you definatly do not go into music to make cash. If your stuff doesn't sell, it doesn't sell regardless of how good you think it is.
Musician's have more shit to haul around and it's generally a lot heavier. That's about it.
Don't forget that many fewer people read for pleasure than listen to music, so the audience is smaller.
Some day they'll realize that $1>$0. I won't buy a full album to get a single song. And for most artists besides my favorites I'm only interested in a single song. If they were my favorite, I would gladly buy the full albums, but for everyone else all they can hope for is single sales, or no sales.
If artists don't like their songs being played one at a time beaucse of artistic reasons or whatever, then lets start with radio.
That's right, No more Madonna singles - you now have to listen to the whole CD.
Two ways these "artists" can solve the problems they face with single son downloads:
1. Stop making 1 or 2 creative songs and then stuffing the rest of the album with filler noise.
2. Try their hand at "rock operas": Each song on the album is part of a story and theme centric. Getting just one song wouldn't make alot of sense since it is just one part of the album.
Of course, this will be effective in weeding out the real talent from the zero talent and that would send alot of "stars" back to flipping burgers...
#vancouver-free on undernet
That the public's buying anything at all. These days, the consumer decides what constitutes an "album." For instance, I love my version of "Devil's Night" by D12. The only skits I've left in are the first and last ("Public Service Announcement" and "Steve Berman"). I bet there is a lot of albums these days that have filler like that; stuff that can be elided easily and actually enhance the experience.
Musicians and the record companies will just have to get with the program and give people what they want. That's just good business.
Ok, so this is a bit off-topic, but the idea of selling a book by chapter is great! I've never thought of it that way, but I would love to buy just the first chapter or two, and If I liked it, buy the rest. Too often I read the back cover of a book, and decide it looks interesting, only to go home and find out the book is not that interesting at all. However, I just spent good money on this book, and I feel obligated to read it now. Why has no one thought of this idea of selling books by the chapter? It's a great Idea!
To keep these people's comments in perspective, keep in mind that Madonna, Linkin Park et al don't represent "the music community" any more than Rush Limbaugh represents "the broadcast community." Major label musicians are an extremely tiny minority, and those who actually make money directly from CD sales are an even smaller minority.
The vast majority of the musician community has everything to gain and nothing to lose from the increased exposure downloads give. Whether it's one song or a whole album, more exposure generates more and better gigs, and nearly all professional musicians make a living from gigs, not from sales of copies of recordings.
Umm, 78s in fact. I have a few 78 "albums" myself.
Back in the days of the 78s, the really good ones only had one side with music on it. The other side had a trademark covering it.
This is basically the same way the music industry works. They sign lots of 6 figure deals with bands. They pay out big advances. Artists get rich.
Of course, what really happens is their "advance" is really more like a line-of-credit, and has to be paid back. Only a small percentage of those bands actually make their advance back, and an even smaller percentage make a big profit for the record company.
Courtney Love wrote a really good article about this a while back. As much as I don't like the way the record industry works, there's not many other ways to get $1,000,000 to produce an album, record a video, and live off of for a year, espessially since the stats say that well over half of the bands will flop. And a bank certainly wouldn't be writing off that $1,000,000 loan because you "didn't make it"..
Speak before you think
After all of the belly-aching about filesharing, now this?
Yet another argument in favor of having DVD ripping and user controlled playback controls discussed in a current /. article.
It's my DVD. I paid for it. And I'll d@mn well play it back any way I want to!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Here is where they're coming from.
A very good example.
You're going to buy chicken from the butcher. You just want the breast. He wants to get rid of the whole chicken. It's up to him if he wants to sell you just the best part or the whole thing. Now if he wants to cut that best part out and sell it for a bit more than it's percentage in weight... if I were the butcher I would do it. But, it depends on the butcher.
Some people just wanna get rid of that whole chicken. The smart ones might sell that breast for a premium. You as the consumer decide if that breast is tender enough to buy the entire package.
Wow. Does this make any sense?
this is not about the stopping sale of albums at all, as much as it's about artists wanting us to buy the bullshit when we don't really want to. there are certain albums that need to be heard together to be truly appreciated...there are others where the extra songs are just fluff. However, If i believe it's to my benefit to get the whole album as a unit or not should be my decision, not the artist's. It's not as if i can't get the whole album if i want to (From the apple music store it's considerably cheaper than buying it a track at a time). however, if i know the album and think most of it is fluff, i'll just buy the songs i like.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
make the shuffle button illegal, it screws up the order of songs on an album, depriving our cashcows^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hesteemed customers of the full experience of the album.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
To these artists, I say - it is your industry. Deal with it. You created, or were a part of, the pop culture mentality. You taught us to listen to one song until we want to puke, and we are so violently sick of it that whatever the next "hit" song is, we will listen to it just to get the bad taste out of our ears. It isn't the fans you need to check, it is the record companies. They have created this sound-bite culture in your name, and you haven't said a damn word until now.
Reap what you sow, motherfuckers.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Who knows maybe car makers will stop selling parts of their works of art. So if you need a head gasket or windshield, OH WELL......
this will make the 'artists' actually know that tracks 3,5,8,9,10,11,12,13 suck and that the $15 cd price should be $7 since 50% of the tracks are never downloaded.
I see that the 'artists' are afraid that some obscure b side equivalent song (I'm down) will be lost from our culture and that the culture will collapse without their 'valuable' contribution.
Do the smart thing, don't support RIAA members, listen to free music.
So do radio stations have to play the entire CD to show the "work of art"?
As an artist, I keep reaching the same conclusion about this issue of making money from my music: Being a musician is a blue collar job, one that if I'm lucky I can eek out a decent living: Own a modest house, pay the bills, drive a decent sedan, blah blah blah.
I can understand how current "superstars" are concerned: The era of high-dollar "superstars" is over, or at least coming to an end. Artists don't need the middleman anymore, which allows them to get their proper compensation for the art they create. The compromise is that they can only succeed on their own merits of their material, and their own personal salesmanship.
Didn't Charles Dickens do something like this by publishing a novel in monthly installments?
:).
I remember Stephen King did the same thing with his Green Mile series of books and it was quite a success.
Maybe some of these artists could learn a thing or two from them
Would you be so keen to chop your books into chapters to be sold invididually?
IIRC, Charles Dickens first works were distributed in the installment fashion in newspapers in the 19th century.
Back then, readers anxiously awaited the next chapter just as much as readers today await the release of the next Harry Potter book.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
However... It's not the artists who put out the "greatest hits" but the record company. Many recording contracts bind the artist to a "best of" release whether they want one or not. Labels like it because they get to sell the songs one more time without having to pay the artist an advance or have the record count towards the artists' delivery requirements ( ie. how many albums they owe the company before they get "released" from their contact).
I think this single downloaded forces the artists to make albums with 12 good tracks instead of 1-3 with 9-11 fillers...if they do that then we will BUY the whole CD....
I think St. Anger is really good too, but have you noticed there's no lead solos in the entire album? At ALL? The crunchy thrash is back in top form, and I welcome it, but where are those soaring, majestic solos that helped make their earlier work so legendary and unforgettable? Is Kirk all tapped out, needed a break, or just wanted a change?
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
In the past five years, I bought maybe four CDs. My wife bought maybe fifteen. Then, in December, my wife decided that she wanted one of those flat-panel iMacs. She immediately fell in love with iTunes and started burning her own mixes. Since then, we've bought maybe twenty-five or thirty CDs, maybe sixty tracks on the iTunes store (twenty of which were in an album), a Panasonic CD/MP3 player, an iRock FM transmitter gadget, God only knows how many CD-Rs, and a Sony five-disk CD changer for the stereo. Not only that, but my parents are constantly emailing me to request that I download tracks for them, which they are thrilled to get for a buck a pop.
Now my wife has told me to start researching DSL.
All this because we bought an iMac. If anything, Steve Jobs should get a commission.
Beethoven Sonatas played by Claudio Arrau.
Beethoven Symphonies conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.
Oh sorry, I included real artists here.
My bad.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Perhaps recording artists could spend time putting out a quality album, as opposed to putting out a rather bland album of "okay" songs with one or two possible hits. This trend of of only topping off the album with a couple good songs in my opinion is what started off buyers not wanting to spend their hard earned money on a whole album only to get a few enjoyable songs. Artists: make an album an album, not an EP with some extra crappy tracks thrown in so you can have the illusion that your album is actually worth more than the few songs the buyer wants to own... would you buy a car if it cost 40 thousand dollars extra, and you had no choice but to take the extra options imposed by the manufacturer that you didn't like or want?? Would you go to a restaurant that charged you 300 dollars for a meal, and you only like a few of the courses served, but disliked the rest? I say let the consumer dictate the product and let the supplier conform to the industry demands. Allowing the spoiled brat musicians and the greedy RIAA to continue charging the amount of money that they do for a CD, and not allowing the public buyers interests to be served only kills an already sickly industry more. Some artists can, and DO produce amazing albums of high quality (Pearl Jam's "Ten" comes to mind, or many a Nirvana album... all worth the full price!). Too bad that greed is spoiling our music industry. (This is all purely opinion)
"GO FUCK YOURSELF, MORON
fuck you in your fucking fuck, you fuck-fucking fuck-fucker. "
Wow, you're amazing. You know that?
"Derp de derp."
Put together a decent album and i might buy it. Are they gonna put some code on the cd to force me to listen to the entire album as well?
"At first, we thought it was just another snake cult."