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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.
What do you see as the most promising means of maintaining the commercial tie between artist and audience, but in different form than today's "stone tablet", whereby a song or album is burned onto a CD with copy protection? What about enhancing other revenue streams, like fan clubs, for example?
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Have you or anyone you know done any studies of the marketing effect of free music sharing? That is, how much has the free marketing that is a result of filesharing offsetting the potential lost sales?
percent does the recording company take from sales profits?
do you think there's a future in online self-publishing?
"Naturally, since he makes his living in the music business, Bill is not 100% in favor of unrestricted filesharing."
Is it really the case that making a living in the music business rules out unrestricted filesharing? Might not there exist alternate business models that are fair to the artist and the consumer? What about producing music makes it necessary that selling the music needs to be the primary money-maker?
smd4985
Have you ever/do you often use a P2P file sharing client, and what do you think of it?
Where do you think we might have been now had the music labels come up with legal online song swapping? Do you think we would have ever heard of Napster?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The concept of copyright was concieved of way back in "ye olden days" to restrict who could and could not print books; it also conveniently allowed an author to control who profits from their works. We adapted the second cause here in the USA, and have since extended copyright to just about any form of creative expression.
But, copyright is still a control of making a copy, which is getting to be almost farcical in a world where most creative output can be easily and near-freely copied.
Do you think that it would be a good idea to alter copyright so that, instead of selling pubslihers a right to copy works, artists sell consumers the right to have a copy of a work, however that they want to get it and however many redundant copies they want?
(Let's just ignore the privacy and feasability problems for the moment; statistics and security can probably fix them to be "good enough.")
Do you think anything productive can emerge from the RIAA suing its user base? Do you think it will actually result in people listening to more music legally?
The RIAA continue to claim that file sharing is impacting CD sales. They do this by showing the decline of CD sales in recent years. I found some interesting quotes from an article recently:
According to the RIAA, CD sales dropped by 10% in 2001 and a further 6.8% last year, largely because of file sharing.
The IFPI's Commercial Music Piracy 2003 report, produced in early July, reveals pirate CD sales rose 14% in 2002 and exceeded one billion units for the first time.
My maths therefore concludes that if you deducted the 14% piracy, then CD sales have actually RISEN by around 7% over the last year! Do the RIAA actually know why their figures are falling (pirate cds/crap music...) - or do they choose to blame it all on peer to peer networks?
Do you feel threatened by a technology that would allow artists to sell their music directly to consumers and potentially make your job and many other such jobs obsolete, saving said consumers quite a bit of $$$ as well as paying said artists quite a bit of extra $$$ and allowing these artists to retain full rights to their own creations?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
If there was a mechanism to subscribe to music for a flat monthly rate, how do you think this would work along the lines of:
1) Who would you subscribe to? Would you have to subscribe to EMI/BMG/Sony one-by-one, or would there be a number (or one?) blanket subscription for varying genres or labels?
2) How would money be disitributed? By the number of times tracks have been listened to/downloaded?
So many people outside the RIAA have a negative opinion of the RIAA, primarily because of its stance against file sharing and certainly as a result of its tactics to discourage filesharing. As someone on the inside of the music industry, what is your opinion of the RIAA? Is it a necessary evil that really does help artists? What do you think of its tactics with regards to filesharing?
With album sales reaching an all time high (at least here in the UK -- I assume the US is similar), why does the RIAA keep insisting that online music is killing the industry? I personally download music from the net as a taster to see which CDs I should buy. I appreciate that there are some who do it purely to avoid having to spend the money, but the evidence seems to show that it's not a big enough problem to be hurting the industry. Do you think that this situation will continue, or will the balance swing towards more people avoiding buying music that they can download for free?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
People tend to complain a lot about the profit margins in the music industry, and use this as an argument to not buy CD's but download them. Furthermore, a lot of people complain that copying their collection is just fair use, and they feel restricted in their rights by the recent developments in DRM. Without the music industry however we wouldn't have CDs to rip, or DRM protected tracks to download ;)
We (consumer and industry) obviously need each other.
So my question is:
Can you think of (a) profitable business model(s) that would *not* use DRM?
Does the music industry need some type of reform, especially in the area of contracts and artist rights?
Online distribution undermines this model and forces the record companies to spend more marketing dollars as a percentage of revenue. The success of iTunes seems to support this. While it is successful in terms of the # of songs sold, no handful of artists dominates its sales as with traditional channels.
So my question comes in a couple of parts. First, is all of this stuttering towards an online distribution system really more about control? If so, given that the iTunes experiment seems to bear out the thesis that online distribution costs them in control, how will we ever get to online music distribution that is equitable for everyone involved instead of one weighted towards big record companies or towards music pirates?
Why does the entertainment industry seemingly ignore large scale pirates who are making money off of selling copies and obviously detracting from sales, and instead target hoards of college kids who have no money to pay the court costs/settlement, and are not profiting at your industries expense? Don't such actions largely result in a bitter taste in your consumers mouth, leaving them less inclined to either halt actions which the industry deems inappropriate, or less apt to embrace alternative solutions put forth by the industry?
My maths therefore concludes that if you deducted the 14% piracy, then CD sales have actually RISEN by around 7% over the last year! Do the RIAA actually know why their figures are falling (pirate cds/crap music...) - or do they choose to blame it all on peer to peer networks?
Of course pirate CDs increase the total *volume* of music around - do you really think people could afford the kazillions of dollars of "free" mp3s (or at a fraction of the cost at a pirate shop) at retail price? Their argument is that pirate sales (which earn neither them nor the artist anything) are replacing normal CD sales, thus lowering their profits.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
How does the music industry intend on ultimately dealing with music theft? Are you relying on the prolonged use of litigation against individual thieves to spread fear through the general populace, or do you intend on lobbying for legislation that will aid you in your fight against the thieves?
Considering the consolidations in the radio industry, and the hostility against webradio, People such as myself find no place other than P2P to turn to for new music. In your mind, what is the best potential copyright-friendly solution to the problem of a lack of venues for new (and classic) music exploration?
Do services such as the iTunes Music Store, Buy Music really represent the future of music like Steve Jobs and Scott Blum would like us to believe, or are they just another way to deliver music along with CD's, cassetes, and the radio?
In your opinion, what do you feel has caused the greatest financial impact to the music industry? If the answer is not "file sharing," then what is the industry doing to combat the problem?
Goo goo g'joob.
I doubt you agree with those who find Copyright basically amoral, but how do you feel about developing new business models instead of bullheadedly sticking to the old ones(as the music industry seems to be doing). Once the movie industry angrily fought the video recorder (the US supreme court almost outlawed it), then someone woke up and started selling prerecorded tapes and the industry made a bundle. Now we can see, in Europe at least, the the music industry is making a fortune selling ringtones to mobile phones (in Europe you pay to call someone, not to recieve a call so just about everybody from 7 to 90 has one) - Spock believes there are always possiblities - do you agree?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I joined the Apple Music Store. I presently possess about a hundred or so .MP3 files downloaded from Napster/AudioGalaxy/Kazaa/Limewire.
I decided to see how many of these files were available legally from the Apple store, out of at least two motives: curiosity about the effectiveness of corporate-driven, rather than fan-driven music distribution, and a genuine intention of replacing my unpaid-for files with paid-for versions.
It turns out that almost none of the files I'd downloaded were available through the Music Store.
The reason is simple. I am interested in all sorts of old stuff (20's, 30's, 40's, 50's) and weird stuff (novelty records, things like Bernard Cribbins 'Ole in the Ground, etc.)
When fans share files, it makes available almost the entire history of recorded music.
When music companies sell files, the range of what's available is much, much smaller. For example, when it comes to popular music of the fifties, most of what's available on the Apple site comes from one companies single series of CD's entitled "so-and-so's 16 most requested songs."
How do you set up a fair system that pays artists but still allows for the continued preservation and availability of items that are so old or unpopular that their commercial value is very, very small?
How can you avoid the "dog-in-the-manger" phenomenon of companies that will neither make material available nor give permission to others to make them available?
The iTunes Music Store has what's generally considered the most sensible approach to DRM: share with no more than three computers on the same subnet, burn to no more than 10 CDs without changing your playlist, and make this apply to every downloadable song. In contrast, BuyMusic.com has much more restrictive DRM and they change with every song. In your opinion, do either of these stores have DRM "done right"?
I have a friend who also has his own music studio and has worked with some pretty amazing talent. In talking about the current state of the music industry, he has two interesting observations:
1. The music industry is impacted negatively by file sharing, at least at some level.
2. That his studio is most certainly not harmed by filesharing, but in fact is seeing a rather large increase in business as more bands try to get a decent polish on their work so they can get their MP3s out there.
Do you think this is just annecdotal, or true for most music studios?
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Here in the UK that CD album sales are at an all time high with a 12% rise in sales this year.
Would you like to comment on that, given that
i) there are no similar RIAA anti-piracy actions being taken here,
ii) average prices have fallen to below the psychologically important 10 barrier?
--
This sig is inoffensive.
Right now, it's commonplace that a person or entity can own the rights to a song, even though they took no part in its creation (Michael Jackson owning the Beatles songs, Columbia owning Robert Johnson's tracks, etc.). Is there a good reason why the music community stands for this, because I can't think of one.
Wouldn't it be better for all music creators if an artist got 100% of the song rights, and split the recording rights with the label, 50/50; and this was mandated by law, and couldn't be signed away? Am I missing something? I would think that artists would be banding together in droves for this cause.
c-hack.com |
What of the possibility of music downloads based on quality? I offer as a suggestion that if someone wants to purchase, for instance, a FLAC copy of a song, in lossless compression, at say, 80 cents per song [ making most average albums at around 8-10 dollars, a price point that has worked well to stimulate demand in the past ]... but someone else might only want an OGG or MP3 in a lesser quality [ lossy compression = lower quality! ], at perhaps say, 192 bitrate, for approximately 40 cents a track. If we're only getting a percentage of the bits, why are consumers asked to pay roughly the same as for professionally mastered audio data? A typical MP3 or OGG is roughly 1/4 to 1/10 the size of the original audio file, meaning 75-90% of the data has been discarded, yet the price for downloads on for-pay systems is such that consumers pay for the full price of the full quality file. We're in effect paying for bits we didn't receive and cannot reproduce with accuracy! I would advocate a system in which the price per track was directly related to the quality of the track downloaded. This would encourage more try before you buy, and even give a bone to the RIAA's member firms in terms of SOME compensation for their tracks? Why haven't we heard any type of investigation or interest by the RIAA firms in this type of system? Thanks for your time!
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."-Tennyson
...AND...
I am currently in the process of removing my music from buymusic.com, who acquired it and is selling it illegally. What resources do independent artists have when fighting against the very industry that professes to protect musicians? Is copyright infrigement a one way street leading straight to the bank for large companies?
As a publicist, do you see distribution via p2p as a growing trend for your more/less established artists? I notice that the link to Neil's site only provides small samples of music. Do you encourage making entire songs available at low bitrate samples? Does p2p make this a moot point?
Alternatives to file sharing such as the subscription based Rhapsody and non subscription based I-Tunes are offering quality music for an almost reasonable fee and artists receive royalties. Why is it that some of the biggest names in music who, by definition are hit the hardest by file sharing, won't allow their music to be available via these new distribution methods?
Many musicians don't even know how to check their email, much less run Pro Tools. Also, as a producer, his job can't be replaced by a computer. To get a good sound, you still have to use a good studio and hire trained engineers.
Then, after the CD is finished, you can try to use technology to bypass traditional marketing, but right now, it's a joke. Selling your music directly isn't a problem for anyone. Marketing your music, that's the rub. Fancy as the internet is, the most effective way to sell music is to force-feed it to the people directly, through radio and MTV. That's not gonna change for a long time.
c-hack.com |
What exactly are our rights when we purchase a CD? Can I make unlimited backup copies of the media for personal use? Are the copies really allowed to be digital, or only analog? Am I allowed to be using the original and the backup at the same time?
This hypothetical situation has always bugged me: Say I purchase a CD, rip it to my hard drive, and then put it on my MP3 player. I take the MP3 player with me and listen to that music in the car, while (unbeknownst to me) my brother listens to the copy of the music on the computer. Are we breaking the law?
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With all the attention DVD's have been getting lately (for instance)and the main cause of their sales boom being pricing (20$ and under) - don't you think that the CD industry could save itself simply by lowering the cost of CD's to say - 5-7$ like vinyl used to be?
Go read some bible: nubible.com
I think that this disproves the allegation that swapping is killing music and that the real culprit is a CD price that has stayed high while production costs have gone through the floor. Do you agree? If not, why not?
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
It seems like the major role of a record company is to find artists, promote their music, and produce and distribute albums. Advances in home studio technology and the increasing popularity and bandwidth of the Internet mean that it is possible for an artist to self produce and promote their music.
Do you think that it is likely that we will see a major artist go this route in the near future? And if this became a viable model what could record companies do to continue to add value to music?
The RIAA has pushed for legislation to grant them tariffs/taxes on sales of certain digital and recordable media sold to consumers, to defer some of the costs of piracy. They also have raised prices of materials such as CDs to help pay for losses they claim occur in the industry because of file sharing.
My question is that why does the RIAA need more legislation to go after filesharers or pirates to stop losses that no independent auditing company has been able to find, and with all the income they're getting from DAT and CD-R Music blanks, and lawsuits against filesharers, pirates and bootleggers, how much of this goes back to the artists, producers, engineers, etc? instead of simply in the RIAA and its labels' pockets?
And on a side note, why should the US or any other country continue listening to the RIAA talk about its losses, when no independent label or artist or distribution channel are getting any of these taxes or tariffs? Shouldn't we also be giving money to these labels, or should we start repealing these one-sided decisions?
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
When a radio station plays a song, it pays one of the agencies like ASCAP (forgive me if I've got it wrong; it's been a while since I was a musician), and at least in theory the writer of the song (usually the musician) gets a small royalty assuming they've set up a publishing company to collect those royalties. From what I've heard, this can end up being a significant part of a musician's income. As I understand it, there are problems with tracking radio play -- you can't listen to everything at once, so you depend on random sampling and reports from radio stations -- but the idea is good.
So how about treating filesharing the same way? Track which files go where; every time a Metallica song, say, is copied, Metallica gets a nickel. It might not be as practical now that there's not One Big Place (Napster) where everyone goes, but there are still lots of centralized file-trading services (I think Kazaa and the like apply...I haven't been into this for a long time) where copying could be tracked. The services get charged based on volume, presumably like radio stations are, and they can pass those charges on to subscribers or advertisers. Musicians get paid, people get music, and a new millenium of peace and happiness dawns upon the earth. :-)
Is this a good idea, or have I taken some massive, secret dose of crack somewhere along the way?
Carousel is a lie!
Why don't we have some type of Radio-On-Demand service yet, where music could be "performed" rather than downloaded, preferrably without the same legal and monetary overhead that comes with permanant downloads? This type of thing seems to work fine on much more technically-intense "On Demand" cable movies. It seems like something that BMI and ASCAP would embrace.... Instead, all we get are classic-radio-stlye streams (which the licensing agencies easily cover). Wouldn't micropayments (as currently defined) easily cover the cost of transimssion and performance, as well as provide an industry alternative for all the R&D money that's getting wasted allowing permanant copies of DRM-protected media?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Assuming the worst, that RIAA sucessfully shuts down free filesharing networks and everything is pay to play, how would they provide hard to find or out of print selections? I am curious how they envision their library to work.
Many of the items I have downloaded are old or obscure and do not fit in their libraries. There are many like me. Will they try to force us to only select the items they control, or have they addressed the issue of out of print/free stuff another way. A beer band in Cleveland may be the best thing going, but if they silence this band's offerings because they are not "signed with the label" they really are only forcing their control over what the listener can hear. They are offering a less robust product but charging more for it.
Will there be any free venues available if RIAA wins?
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
Do you see a reason why the record industry has not created such a system for older recordings from which they are no longer making money? Are there legal hurdles you are aware of, or is it simply that the record industry has not realized this potential is there?
What is going to happen to all this money that the RIAA is trying to get from the file sharers? Are the artists going to see any of it or will it all get lost in the corporate nightmare that the music industry is?
What are your artists/musicians/clients are saying about online file-trading? Love it? Hate it? 50-50?
Do you find that indie artists are more likely to embrace file trading for marketing/name-recognition purposes than well-known artists?
About 15 to 20 years ago, long before Napster, Kazaa, and the horde of P2P clients came about, most new artists encouraged their fans to come to their shows, tape them, and copy these tapes and mail them out. While this was technically a pyramid scheme, it was never really bothered with because no money ever changed hands, and was simply fans getting the word out to people they new about new talent that was local to whereever they were. A few of the bands that endorsed this, ie Metallica, have now started to request that individuals trading files be prosecuted as it takes away from sales. Now while I do agree that CD sales have dropped considerably, I have also noticed that the number of back catalog CDs being released have dropped, and according to the figures I have seen, these back catlog releases were accounting for a large percentage of CD sales. Is it possible that the sales of CDs is not due to file trading, or even pirated CDs, but that the market sector with the most money to spend, the 25 and over group that was buying up all the CD copies of the LPs and tapes they used to own drying up? Also why is it that filetrading is seen so negatively, when even today a great deal of musicians still allow fans to tape their shows?
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
As a software developer I have always wondered if the individuals and companies that are comlaining about music file swapping would submit to a software audit of their respective computers. If this were done, do you think the majority of anti-file swapping contingent would or would not have unpaid for copyrighted software installed on their computers?
What is your take on this situation? Should people be forced to buy a full album just to get one song (or ocasionally two) they like, or should they be buying the album with the theory that they liked the single, they'll like the rest?
Has "the album" been ruined by the filler that so many of the top40 one-hit-wonder bands put on their albums? What needs to be done to make people willing to try entire albums (ratings, reccomendations, better music..)?
Speak before you think
Suppose the government declared that it would no longer protect copyrights on music. People begin using the internet to share music on a massive scale, all done legally.
What you think are the negative consequences of this scenario? What would happen and what are all the ways in which it would be harmful?
share and enjoy
I have not purchased one single CD in over two years. Why? Because I am tired of spending $18 on a CD with only one good song and the rest disposable rubbish. I am tired of reading that the cost of CDs has fallen below $0.50 in the last twenty years while the retail price has not. I am not happy that the industry has been convicted of price-fixing by the federal government. I see no reason to support RIAA labels until the retail price of a CD is more realistic.
I also do not participate in filesharing. Why? Because I am a working musician who believes that artists should be reimbursed for their hard work. My ethics don't agree with filesharing and they don't agree with the heavy handed tactics that the RIAA is raining down on filesharers.
Do I have your attention? That means I do not fit the argument that the RIAA has attributed fallen CD sales to piracy. I am the exception and I am not alone.
As a working musician, here is the root of the problem as I see it: musicians are being exploited and are being cheated out of their earnings through endentured slavery and corrupt accounting methods.
As a business man, the other root of the problem is that the RIAA wants to perpetuate a business model that doomed to oblivion and refuses to embrace the internet as a distribution channel.
Why? Bill, the major labels OWN the brick-and-mortar distribution channels, but they CAN'T own the internet distribution channel. It's not possible. They want a mafia-style death grip on their distribution and they would rather litigate and legislate away the "illegal" distribution channels on the internet.
My question is: when are the members of the RIAA going to drop their self-defeating barratry and focus on offering quality product?
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
What are the major differences between radio and file sharing?
If musical artists dream of getting played on the radio (because of the wonderful effects exposure has on an artist), why would an artist not also dream of having his/her songs being shared by millions of people around the world? Isn't the Internet just a vastly improved distribution and exposure mechanism?
Would the same concerns arise if radio was able to achieve the same quality as MP3?
To many of us, file sharing is more ethical than many traditional aspects of the music industry.
It is a bad idea to pay $1 for a song I can only download once, have limited ability to use and burn to CD, and can never download again without paying $1 again. I will pay for convenience, service and quality products, I won't pay to be restricted or have top 40 crap shoved down my throat. Why doesn't the recording industry give me a licsence to use that song for my personal use forever, give me the ability to 'sell' it, store it on a conveniently formatted and indexed server, so I can carry my 'virtual' CD collection anywhere I can access the internet?
I'm over 40, have purchase during my lifetime a pile of music. My wife and daughter have extensive collections. I've got disposable income that you want.
But I can't seem to buy what I want. I want to spend 15-20 bucks on something I'll enjoy for a while. Last time I did, there was two songs that were worth listening to a couple of times, the rest was junk. I tried to purchase an older album I knew I would enjoy, but couldn't find it at the retailer.
I listen to music at my computer and in my truck. I now have to check whether the cd will work in those places. If I have to return a cd, I'll never buy again. I don't have time to screw around.
I download music rarely. I'm not in P2P networks. But it's easier for me to find what I want, sample it, and burn to cd if I like it than try to purchase through the sales channel.
Aren't you in the music distribution industry? Why aren't you distributing music so I can buy it and enjoy it?
I don't care what some lawyer says. If I don't get what I want, you won't get my money. It's very simple. Come on. Sell me.
Derek
What about the innocent people? Do you feel it is acceptable for the RIAA to spam the internet with tonnes of DMCA complaints, knowing full well a significant amount of these are false and may lead to the loss of internet access and business of innocent people?
Their bots cast a wide net. Any file which has a word containing the same word as a RIAA member's song or artist name has a significant risk of getting a DMCA complaint. How is this fair? How can this be considered acceptable? You don't see retail store owners walking around to apartment complexes and telling the landlord "I think the people in apartment X shoplifted in my store, kick them out" and by law the landlord would have comply. That would be nonsense, yet the RIAA is doing the exact same sort of thing on the internet.
What about free speech? What about costs and profit loss of these innocent victims of the DMCA? What about those people who are now stalked by whackos because the DMCA force their ISP to give out their home address? Sending a false legal complaint is just as bad, if not worse, than infringing copyright.
Concerts were once the primary source of revenue for musicians and going further back in the past, public performances (or patrons) were the ONLY source of revenue for musicians. The thing which changed that was the existence of an infrastructure which allowed for music from any given place to be marketed simultaneously worldwide.
That being the case, here is my question:
"Do you think that there is any creedence to the argument that today's multi-billion dollar entertainment industry is an un-natural and perhaps un-maintainable state for the world of art? It seems that the "theft" and "piracy" everyone keeps talking about is only diverting potential revenue away from entertainers who get paid orders of magnitude more than what their skills could reasonably be said to be worth to society and away from those who make their living packaging and selling these over-paid individuals. Is it not possible that what filesharing and internet media is bringing about is not "theft", but rather the natural and expected deflation and re-distribution of an unnaturally inflated and concentrated industry?"
lysergically yours
I had the interesting experience a few months ago of trying to license performing rights for a song, and made the discovery that in general, artists aren't expected to do this -- just the venues where they will perform. It's my understanding that most publishers pay out performance royalties based on statistical sampling; if this is the case, isn't this just another part of the system where the lesser known artists are getting shafted? For example, Chris Ledoux apparently used to play a song by Corri Connors, an acquaintance of mine, which for the most part she received no performance royalties for, because it fell underneath the radar of a statistical sample. Is there a better way?
This is relevant to recorded music as well; we know, for example, that we're already paying blank media taxes, whose proceeds are distributed in this way, and I think it's likely that schemes will be proposed for online distribution and peer-to-peer apps that mirror it.
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