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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."
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.
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.
Definitely, that's probably a hell of a lot more than they made off of the industry despised $.99 cassette singles back in the day. If anything, it would seem like this could potentially make them (larger artists) more money. Since most of popular artists still sell millions regardless of totally free P2P and the economy, it would seem as if this would be nothing but gravy on top of what they normally make. Truthfully all than anyone can do on this right now is speculate until the numbers stablize.
Concept albums seem to be pretty rare these days so as many others have said, it's hard to think of this as anything other than "We want you to pay for the bullshit too!"
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
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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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.
On another note : singles have been available for...well, probably for the duration of the recording industry. They just weren't $.99 unless you found them on sale. Now that you can get them on the cheap, big rich rock stars don't like that.
Now, for Linkin Park, these guys have no room to bitch. They got noticed by UPLOADING SONGS IN DIGITAL FORMAT and posting on other bands' web forums asking their fans to try out their music. And now their bitching about the same-style format that got them where they are today. What a whiny bunch of prats.
One last thing for these artists : radio stations. They don't play your whole fucking album once an hour; why should I be forced to buy your whole album just because I hear the one song I like? Guys, keep biting the hand that feeds you because I already reach into my wallet less and less these days to buy music, especially from people who dictate to their customers how they should buy and listen to what they pay for.
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!
Why not just make the songs available in one big non-dividable format?
On one hand, they are ok with radio/videos broadcasting single songs (over and over and over again). On the other hand they want their music heard combined as a single piece of art.
On one hand they will sell cd/tape/tiny 6 inch plastic records of singles. On the other hand they have a problem selling the same song in a electronic format.
On one hand they will mix and match songs from multiple albums when they play in a live concert. On the other hand they act like the album must be heard in one sitting.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
There are definitely some artists (or there used to be) that produce the album as a whole, rather than as a collection of songs. For example, the Beatle's Sgt. Pepper's as well as Pink Floyd made a point of that.
Agreed, but if I, for some reason, only want a copy of the Beatles "Fixing a Hole", and I want to BUY IT LEGALLY, why should I be required to buy the whole album? These artists are shooting themselves in the foot. People WANT TO BUY their material, maybe not all of it, and they are saying "No, you can only buy it the way I WANT you to."
This will only serve to drive fans away from the legal services and back onto Kazaa.
It may be foolish, but it's their music.
Digital distribution has the potential to eliminate most of the middlemen, allowing artists to efficiently distribute thier work directly to the audience.
But there is no reason to believe that doing so will make artists more responsive to the market. It will probably enable them to pursue their own artistic visions more.
Which will predicatably result in more artists:
Eventually artists will realize that the album was never a true cohesive work (with a few exceptions where it had been truly worked on). It was always more of an arbitrary size for delivery.
In this transitional period artists are left with the worst of both worlds. They still have to delay release and/or push out a song that wasn't quite ready in order to have "an album", but suddenly they risk their fans not hearing all the tracks the artist really wanted them to hear.
Well, it's transitional, and the latter problem was already created by radio.
In the meantime, remember that an artists control over their own material is one monopoly that most everyone should be wiling to support. Done right the shift to digital distribution should be about increasing their control, not about ending it.
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...
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Yes, but we're the consumers. Oil companies might want to sell us each a tanker truck of fuel at a time but the consumer is only interested in buying one tank of gas at a time.
It doesn't really matter what the artist wants. If the consumer is in the market for single tracks, single tracks are what are going to be offered.
If an Oil company tries to sell you a tanker truck at a time, you'll cross the street and buy a few gallons from the other oil company.
Oil companies trying to sell you a tanker truck at a time would only be a problem if they colluded, and refused to compete.
There are sufficiently few oil companies that this can be a concern, and historically has been on other issues.
The thought of musicians colluding successfully to deny their music to consumers is just so far fetched as to be laughable. If they were capable of doing so they wouldn't have needed digital distribution to fire the distributors in the first place.
If a writer wants to produce novels, nobody demands that he sells it a chapter at a time. If a musician thinks of an album as a complete work, they should be allowed to sell it that way. The real issue is when the marketing channel determines how works can be presented. For example, it makes it hard for writers to sell short stories.
Marketing forces may indeed make it hard for musicians to sell "opus length" compositions that contain multiple songs. But it's still their decision.
The main thing that's changed from those days is the democratization of the consumer base (you don't have to hire your own chamber orchestra to get good music), and the increased power of the middle-men.
We are the 198 proof..