Slashdot Mirror
Gabriel and Eno Start Digital Music Artist Union
An anonymous reader writes "We have long heard stories about how the record companies cheat their own artists with audit techniques that would make Enron blush. They are already applying the same techniques to the revenues they draw from digital download sites like Apple iTunes, which is one reason many artists have refused to allow their music be sold through them (those who can control it at least). Looking to take a stand in the digital music arena before these practices become status quo Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno are starting a new union the "Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists" or MUDDA. Gabriel, co-founder of OD2 - an iTunes competitor - has that company as a first source to negotiate terms with the new union."
Well, all the shit moving around music and copyright I think only is leaving a poor image of the artists. I mean, there must be a large bunch of them who like their word, want to earn their living, but are not benefiting of all the DMCA noise around them. Selling by themselves their music in the Internet are good news. The money for those who work, the artists, not for intermediates.
We need something that did what the old mp3.com did, create a direct link between the artists and the public. The record industry as it is today is so totally redundant.
Give me quality music that is digitally available, rated through a balanced criticism system like Slashdot, that I can copy onto my systems and play as I like, and I will subscribe tomorrow.
Anyhow, I always liked Gabriel and Eno. Go, guys!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Do I undertand that the problem is that the record companies are NOT passing the low manufacturing costs on to the musician? Or is it that Apple is doing something bad?
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
All of those "hidden" promoting/distributing/in-my-pocket costs that have long been a part of the music model need to be exposed. It's the only way anyone is going to get a handle on how much money is really being spent and/or given to the artists. Nice in principle but hell to actually implement - existing status quo has too much money (or lawyers) behind it to sit idly by and watch their outdated business model die.
loose != lose: My belt is too loose, thus I'll lose my modesty shortly.
If you are responsible for a product and find out the
people who are selling it for you are crooks, you would find
someone else or do it yourself. The same as if you had
been ripped by a bad accountant or lawyer.
The mafia went straight, maybe there is hope for the RIAA.
And as an aside, I wouldn't pay a dollar for a song with
no physical medium when the artist is only getting a few
pennies of it. No way.
Credibility?
Lets look at OD2 od2. Aside from the well documented "Damn, we ran out of bandwidth again" incidents every time they try to sign up another brand (msn, coke etc.), its survival has been due to selling shares in the company to the labels in order to gain rights. This has enabled the labels to dictate the DRM rules used, so EMI has different rules to BMG, and so some tracks allow burning and portable play, some don't. You have to carefully examine what you're buying. Then there's the cost, which is not much lower than a CD. So much for cheaper distribution.
Lets not forget it's all Windows Media, I've yet to see one of their branded stores allow MP3.
The BBC quotes him as saying (most musicians) "good at making music and not necessarily good at marketing". I'd suggest these days he's marketing and nothing else.
Unions definitely have their costs, but if you think they haven't been good for workers, you don't know what working conditions were like before there were unions. I've talked to my grandfather (who was anti-union) and my mother, his daughter, who was mildly pro-union. And both agreed that unions improved the working conditions and pay for the worker over the long term.
There's a couple of disadvantages to unions:
1) like any center of power, they tend to become controlled by those more interested in power than anything else.
2) maintaining a union isn't a cost-free activity. There is significant overhead.
3) unions get their power by uniting the labor force, so people who don't feel that the union is fairly representing them tend to be abused
OTOH:
1) the center of power that the union represents is generally less than that of the company, so it tends to be less corrupt
2) every action in a system has it's costs. Unions create a focus of power intended to balance against an alternate center of power, but most of the participants aren't interested in balance, they want to win. This creates excess cost above the minimum necessary.
3) the classes of people who are abused by the union were abused more by the company powers before the union existed. (A sour truth to the people the unions doesn't adequately support, but a truth.)
Now my sources are personal, so I can't share them with you. But they are from people who lived through the period that the unions were being formed. And they weren't pro-union groups. My grandfather was an independant contractor, an unsuccessful farmer (he wasn't a good farmer, so he kept earning money as an electrician, returning to his farm, and loosing it, etc.)
If there's a lot of free space, then there are (moderately) good arguments against unions, and against welfare for the non-handicapped. People can homestead and work the land. (You have to grow up with the right skills, but that's part of the environment.) OTOH, when everything is owned by someone else, the only thing you have is power politics, and you are at the low end of the pole. This means you organize legally to ensure a decent life, or you act illegally to do the same thing. You figure the costs, and act on that. Unions are one way of society making it reasonable to choose the legal path.
Actually, there is evidence, though hardly conclusive it's slightly stronger than merely suggestive, that this is well understood by the government. Before the recent decades of "crackdown" on "crime" they took steps to make the slave labor of prisoners profitable to certain manufacturers. (I suppose it's one way to compete against jobs being outsourced overseas.) And in California, at least, the Prison Guards' Union has one of the strongest lobbying groups in the state. Considerably stronger than the Teachers' Union.
Simple pronouncements in this area bespeak ignorance, so I'll avoid one. It sure would be nice to come up with an answer that didn't, by creating a new centralization of power, start the cycle of problems all over again. But merely noticing that there are problems doesn't qualify as a solution. And clearly there isn't a good side, as every group is madly struggling to win on it's own terms. For some it's for survival, for others it's due to greed, but it's the struggle that's most destructive, and to me this appears due to the existence of large centralizations of power. (Lesser centralizations cause lesser problems, and at that point other problems begin to dominate.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This phenomenon strikes at the heart of the issue underlying all of copyright: who controls? Copyright has always been an attempt at striking the balance between artist and consumer. It is artificially constructed because copyrightable works are easily copyable; it is an acknowledgement of the problem that rampant copying will bankrupt the artist.
This MUDDA is an attempt to shift some control back to artists, particularly in the album vs. single arena. I understand the motivation, but I question the implementation. If artists really want that kind of control, let them either produce albums that are good enough induce consumers to purchase and consume them as whole ablums, or let them distribute a whole ablum as a single mp3 file, and let me decide whether or not to purchase it as such.
CDs (and LPs) have track segmentation and track listing to facilitate track-based consumption. A shift away from that consumer empowerment is nothing more than ceding power to artists. I am agnostic on whether this is overall good or bad, as certain albums are much better when consumed as such and not as discrete singles. I am reluctant however, to allow the artist to make that determination ex-ante. I'd rather do it myself.
Hmm, a musicians union - you'd think someone would have though of that before now.
- Allow people to music music and make a buck.
- Don't tie artists into involuntary servititude contracts
In the end it killed Factory and the Hacienda, but at least they made some very good, and important, music before it died.
The fact that on an open you-upload-your-music website there's going to be a lot talentless bands and noise tracks is a serious problem.
It is the reason that the music industry and record business exists as it does in its present form. Primarily as a filter for junk music. As long as it costs real money to put commit music to an unalterable disk format and distribute these disks to the world, the music business will be needed as a junk filter.
For U-upload music websites, allow me to suggest a game of 'musical chairs'. This refers to a children's game in the USA (possibly other places also) where there are a row of chairs and a number of children who walk or run around the chairs while a piece of music is being played. There is one less chair than the number of children. When the music stops unexpectedly, the children try to sit on one of the empty chairs as quickly as possible. One child is left with chair and the contest begins again. The last child (the fastest child or biggest child) is the winner.
A website would accept only 100 recordings a day as a set. Each day ten would be removed from the set until only ten tracks remain. Those remaining tracks would be added to the permanent downloadable tracks of the website. People would vote as to which tracks would be allowed to remain listed. The junk and vanity noise tracks would quickly disappear.
People visiting the site could download an MP3 'sampler' of ten-second segments sampled from the middle of the hundred tracks.
It's an idea to deal with the problem of the vast amounts of junk music that would be uploaded to an open MP3 website.
What I keep seeing here and on other sites is a fundamental lack of understanding of what the RIAA and "record labels" do, why they exist and why they will continue to exist. I keep seeing things about how the RIAA has a flawed business model, that it is tied to distributing physical media and since this is no longer necessary, they will eventually disappear.
Well, there are two important things that need to be considered first. The main point - which addresses MUDDA is the idea of "artist management".
For the most part, in this country we have seen examples over and over again of artists "making it big" and either through their own mismanagement or being taken by others end up with nothing. The artists that can both perform and manage their business effectively are few and far between. I believe there are fundamentally different skills required, so a good business manager may not make a very good singer/songwriter/performer/etc.
The primary thing that the "record label" does isn't so much personal finance management for the artist, but manages the "business" of being a performer. This involves promotion, booking venues, sponsors and so on. One of the main reasons the "label" takes so much is that a lot of this activity is done before the first "big hit". If it never comes, then a lot was spent without anything in return.
Eliminating the "label" is certainly possible - you end up with lots of greedy business managers instead of having them all under one roof. Also, the promotional model changes a bit. Instead of signing on a number of artists with the hope that 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 makes it big, a manager basically says to come back when you have some money to pay. Today, this is how a lot of authors end up. Steven King doesn't have a lot of trouble finding a manager, but if you aren't known you aren't going to get someone to take your book to a publisher. You try yourself and maybe it gets published, maybe not.
Of course, this means that artists that have wads of money to start with can promote their stuff. We have all seen this in other areas, where some rich guy buys a magazine and can publish whatever he wants to. Usually goes bust in a while, but not always. It transforms it into an elitist club that only the wealthy can play at. I'm sure you know of at least one magazine like this.
Now MUDDA could provide promotional services for "their" artists. How does this make them any different from a record label? The big different 50 years ago was the ability to produce and ship records. Now, I am not sure I see the difference at all. Both fulfill the same function.
Then there is the second point. Why do artists need promotion at all? Isn't all this advertising just a waste of time because people will eventually find out about new artists on the Internet?
Yeah. Sure. At some point in the future where the words "digital divide" have passed into history. Important clue - not everybody that buys music is online. More importantly, not everyone is able to be online. For one reason or another, lots of folks don't have a full-time broadband connection at home or office. How do you reach these people? Offline promotion.
A lot of music is bought "on impulse", maybe after hearing it on the radio or playing in a mall. How did that happen? Promotion. Radio stations play what they are paid to play.
So, somebody has to continue to do the promotion of music. If an artist doesn't, their market penetration will be that of Gentoo vs. Windows. Will it be the artist doing that promotion directly? I doubt it very much.
He also talks about artists giving away their product not making any sense and DRM almost in the same breath.
Not a promising start imho.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
One thing to keep in mind before getting too excited about anything replacing the major label system as it stands, is that the labels are capable of providing artists with exposure and press far beyond what any independant union, CDBaby, etc. can do. And it's that marketing and promotion money that the most valuable to an aspiring band, not the money to make the actual music.
If you're talking about being a truly successful act, making the music is the easy part. It's getting people to buy it that's hard. It's great to have alternative methods to get your music out to people, but really, if there are ~54,000 bands on CDBaby, what are your chances of significantly increasing your sales simply by having your music there. It helps, but nothing like signing with a label.
Maybe, with critical mass online distribution will be able to have the exposure and clout the labels currently possess, but be careful, that's just putting the power of king-makers into different hands, that hopefully are more benevolent to the artist, but there is no guarantee they will be.
Check out what Robert Fripp has to say and the DiciplineGlobalMobile label.
Chekc out http://www.disciplineglobalmobile.com/diary/
an excerpt:
Business imposes limitations and restrictions upon music and musicians. This is inevitable. But the mainstream music industry often, even mostly, determines and directs the music which is available to the public. Business may legitimately recognise areas of public interest which are not being addressed, but should not make musical choices for musicians. Neither should business apply pressure to make musicians conform to industry "common practices" and concerns. Industry agencies do this in a number of ways, some of which are honest and some of which involve lying, misrepresentation and threats, even corruption of the musician's better nature. Some are subtle and invidious. Some are blatant. Some are the result of an inexorable and ongoing embrace. They are rarely innocent.
We as a community have many freedoms because we are all willing to fight for them. Love him or not Richard Stallman has done a lot for this community and others like it. Someone needs to champion the music community in the same way
"They say travel broadens the mind, so I went over the falls in a barrel." -Thomas Dolby
AFAIK CDBaby artists have been in the iTunes Music Store for some months now.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Chuck D was angry over the label telling him he could not post his own music and Polygram even threatened to sue if the tracks were not removed. This was before Mp3s and filesharing were in the press much. Here is a quote from Chuck D on the matter:
From News.com article: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-218807.html?legacy=c net
Most unknowns don't make money playing music at all they make music by having another job, sometimes it is in the music industry, but usually it's doing something like tending bar, or writing software. Playing live makes them almost nothing. Most venues will only pay about $100 for an opening band, which rarely covers expenses if they had to travel at all. However if they wrote their own songs they make at least 10 cents a song sold (for a 12 song album, thats a $1.20 an album). Most unknowns also have very good contracts, because; they don't spend that much on production, they generally pay their own production costs, and their label just does distribution. If you want to know more about the costs of playing live see this article about playing Irving Plaza in NYC and Playing All Ages Shows and the econmics of venues by Man or Astroman?.
This is going to be the actual salvation of bands from the RIAA. Eventually, all the tools they need will be place so that they wont need the RIAA's "help".....they will be able to write, produce, distribute, (and this is the only part not yet complete: get PAID ) for everything they do. Shit, you dont even need actual musicians anymore for some types of music.
Think of enabling tech like GarageBand to be the beginning of the open source of music movement. Now, if Apple REALLY wanted to control the entire industry, he would invent a way for the indies to get paid going thru iTMS without the RIAA taxes. I'm sure that's going to get threatened in the next round of negotations between Apple and the RIAA as leverage for giving Apple more of a cut.
Cut off all the new bands all over the world from the RIAA's grip, using tools like iTMS and GarageBand like apps in the future - thats the way to kill a beast. Go, Go, Gadget Apple.
Gabriel said he could not understand big music stars that advocated free music downloads while accepting big cheques from record companies at the same time.
After all, most artists depended on record sales for up to 60% of their income, he said.
On the other hand...
Apart from being a successful musician, running his own record studio and the Real World record label, he is also active in the field of digital downloading.
So Gabriel can't understand other musicians doing the same thing he does? Mmmm-okay. I also don't know where he gets the idea that most artists get 60% of their income from record sales. Maybe a business-savvy few like himself and Madonna have recording contracts that don't eat up their royalties with expenses.
My issue is with this statement:
In the age of digital downloads musicians and the music industry have had to find a way of giving consumers what they want while securing revenue streams.
NO THEY DON'T have to secure their revenue streams. It would be perfectly fine if our culture changed so that musicians treated downloads as free advertising, rather than try to perpetuate the record company business model of getting money for each copy. We don't need the copy police and all the technical and legal restrictions being imposed on us for the benefit of a business model, no matter who is making the money.