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Ask a Music Producer/Publicist About Filesharing and the RIAA
Bill Evans is one of those people in the music business who doesn't get a lot of public exposure, but keeps the wheels cranking behind the scenes. He's not just a musician and techie, but a publicist whose clients include Numavox Records artists Kerry Livgren and Michael Gleason as well as progressive rocker Neal Morse; he's produced (among many others) songs for the Burning Annie soundtrack and the Kansas Tribute Project. Naturally, since he makes his living in the music business, Bill is not 100% in favor of unrestricted filesharing. But what might work? And what might not? Let's find out what this music biz insider thinks -- one question per post, of course. Answers to the "Top 10" questions will be published soon after he gets them back to us.
Just in case this one doesn't get answered, here's one answer.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
My maths therefore concludes that if you deducted the 14% piracy, then CD sales have actually RISEN by around 7% over the last year!
Your maths are wrong (unless you're basing it on more numbers than you're presenting here.) You're trying to equate [percentage of CD sales] with [percentage of pirate CD sales], two values which aren't equivalent. Trying to add/subtract them like you're doing just leads to nonsense statistics (in this case, the "actually risen by 7% number.")
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
MP3's have been around for several years now, and yet, for the most part, you still can't purchase them anywhere. MP3 is the current defacto standard. To me, it doesn't make sense that we can easily buy a CD and rip it (unless it's a copy-proof CD) and make MP3's, and yet the music industry seems afraid to produce MP3's.
Again, MP3 technology is not that new. I can recall using it at least as far back as 1997. 6 years have gone by. The consumers and the CD/DVD-players all want to have MP3's, and yet there is (for all intent and purpose) no way to buy them.
As John Dvorak said in his PC Magazine column, around 1997, no one would want to buy 10 rock-a-billy CD's for $100, but there might be a market for one MP3 CD with 12 hours of rock-a-billy hits for $10-$20. Why hasn't this happened?