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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.
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?
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?
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
What's your username on Kazaa?
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?
I'm a big advocate of the prosperity of music artists, especially small-time ones. I go to a lot of concerts. I like to buy indie music direct from the band. I generally try to avoid buying music from big-name production houses because I'm sick of all the gratuitous and pervasive advertisements and endorsements that come along with it.
That being said, my question is (and I hope you can even answer this): when I lay down my $15 for a CD, where does that money go? How much goes directly to the artist? The producers? Publicists and people in your position? Record company CEOs? Charities? Etc etc.
Basically I'm concerned that if I fork over $15 because I really like the music, I think that a big portion of that should go directly to the artists themselves, but in reality $14.95 is ending up making CEOs wallets fatter.
--j
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?
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?
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 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"?
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.
1- Why is the music industry focusing prosecution efforts on poor individual college students who are (a) difficult to track down and (b) not making any money on their endeavors when there are large organizations which are (a) centralized, so stopping them might do some good, and (b) profiting from their activities?
2- If free file swapping is so damaging to music CD sales, then why aren't mafia types trying to stop this phenomenon as well, given they have so much to lose?
The CB App. What's your 20?
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!
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?