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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."
He's done a lot of work for charity, and lots of his songs point out inequality/bigotry/social issues. I have a lot of respect for a bloke who can make good music with such activism inherent in the whole thing. It'll take a guy with this level of credibility to really hit the music industry where it hurts. ... cos basically we want to reform it, so we can start actually buying CD's and so on again, right ? Or download (and pay for) them from the internet... Oh happy day...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
This sounds all well and good from what's in the article. But what are it's chances for success??
I'm not bashing it at all, I'd really love to see it succeed.
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
"MUDA" is a portuguese word to mean "DUMB".
<smallprint>
female form. double "d"'s do not change the pronounce
</smallprint>
-><- no
So where are Prince and Bowie? The four of them are the big names that are getting into this in a very constructive way and I think that they would be a powerhouse of influence.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
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.
No offense to Eno (whose music I like) and Gabriel (whose music I'm indifferent to) fans, but in order for something like this to be a success, for better or for worse, you need loud participation from musicians who haven't plateaued caereer-wise and are bigger-name "pop" musicians.
The former provides more financial clout and the latter more name recognition and clout. Of course it stands to reason that wildly popular pop musicians are likely to think that the current system works since they're benefitting from it (despite the longer-term consequences) or lack the business savvy or "political" interest to do so.
But I don't think a poorly named initiative by two musicians whose careers, however successful, are largely over and done, is going to do much, since these artists aren't as much of a PR or business influence on the industry. But I do applaud the idea behind it, and think that they'd probably be better off funding a PR campaign hilighting the RIAAs bullshit accounting and police-state tacticts towards old ladies with iMacs.
When performers no longer need the distribution and advertising services they provide, RIAA and the big labels will go away, or at least shrink to manageable size. Until that time, they will continue to prosper and pursue their agenda. As long as they effectively control distribution the situation will continue more or less as it is, a stalemate between producers and consumers of media. Who better to hasten their demise than the artists themselves?
...at camp Grenada.
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.
With the major labels for instance, the artist might get something like ten cents per song sold. On the other end of the spectrum, an artist selling their music through CDBaby gets something around 60 cents per song sold.
The Practices they use and their Business model will be their own demise. We are starting to see fewer and fewer new "Hit" Artists evey year.. How long will it be before these arists come togther when thier Recording Contracts Expire and Form their own Internet Related Distribution system That doesn't bend them over and Comepletely Circrumvent the RIAA... The RIAA is shouting at the top of their lungs Its not about the music.. Its about money... Which for the most part alot of artists do not see it that way.. Money is secondary to the music.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Good to see that Peter Gabriel isn't just lying down like some lamb on Broadway. He's not just saying "Excuse me" and waiting for the big one. Early on he saw the potential of digital downloading to change the industry and said "here comes the flood." Rather than getting humdrum or doing a slowburn over others controlling the medium, he got some perspective and decided to DIY and get on the air himself. Now he's having a wonderful day in what was a one way world sending out music through the wire. I don't remember any musical artist getting such a start on changing the industry. I'm sure record companies will consider him an intruder, say "you're not one of us" and claim he has no self control. I'm sure they'd prefer he remain a wallflower instead of saying "I have the touch" and bestowing the kiss of life to independent artists. This will shock the monkeys at the RIAA, who have gone gaga over downloading, and would much rather draw the curtains and see artists remain quiet and alone, or under their lock and key. But Gabriel was disturbed, troubled and in doubt about where the industry was going, and with an open mind and a passion for music, he decided to march to a different drum. Now he's telling artists "Don't give up, you can make it big time. Come talk to me," and initiating them into the secret world of rights contracts and digital licensing agreements. He saw that this was the time of the turning, and he's giving artists a sense of home and putting them on the map. He refused to believe there was no way out of the dilemma. He drew back the darkness, cut through the signal to noise ratio, said "there has to be more than this," saw it was high time for artists to start growing up about the business and technical sides of the industry, and then lead the way. So, thanks to his passion, things are on the way up for all of us!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
If the artist so requests, CDBaby will also shop the CD to download services like Rhapsody, BuyMusic, Emusic, the new Napster, AOL's MusicNet, and MusicMatch (no iTunes yet). The cool part is that CDBaby only takes 5% of what the download services pay them, passing on the rest, which is about 60 cents per track, to the artist, and when they do that they forward the detailed accounting report to the artist.
This is great, CDBaby has an impeccable track record of honesty and fair dealing with the artists, and 60 cents is more per track than what the vast majority of signed artists get per entire CD. But the potential for accounting shenanigans perpetrated by the download services themselves is high. They could simply lie, or fail to correct some error in their accounting software, and the artist would be none the wiser. CDBaby already helps independant artists by harnessing the collective bargaining power of all its members, but the additional pressure and oversight of a union like Mudda could help keep the pressure on.
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
For a CD sale the label pays the artist about 13% of wholesale, minus various charges like packaging deductions, to recoup against all advances. In a licensing scenario where, for example, a recording is synchronized in a movie or TV show, the labels pays 50% of revenue without any deductions.
The labels licensed some of their catalogs to Apple but want to treat that revenue like a CD sale at 13% and not as licensing revenue at 50%. That is why in large part some of the more popular artists with more leverage have been holding back on granting permission. It is also probably the major obstacle to record labels licensing for P2P sharing.
The whole thing will come to a head later this year when the record labels must issue royalty statements to the artists showing how they treated the iTunes revenue. Gabriel and Eno are organizing artists for that battle.
Music fans should be organzing too .
One man's trash is another man's treasure.
Any filtering based on simple voting will be subject to the problem known as the tyranny of the majority. In fact, we are suffering that exact problem under the RIAA system today where $1 == 1 vote. All the mtv-brainwashed masses have a lot more dollars put together than the rest, which is why the market is dominated by pretty-boy-bands and tits-with-mouths soloists.
The marginal cost of disk space is so small as to make it effectively free. Bandwidth is almost as cheap as disk. So trying to use physical constraints (aka economics of scarcity) as a way to deal with the complexity of the content isn't a very good approach.
First, although you didn't directly comment on funding, let me get that out of the way: Charge the customers an "infrastructure fee" that covers maintaining the company, the basic facility. Then charge a per song fee that accurate reflects the marginal cost of disk space and bandwidth (i.e. really tiny) and then tack on top direct revenue to the band again per song as decided by the band itself. That should cover your costs and scale as large as could ever be needed.
Filtering or how to seperate the wheat from the chaff without throwing the baby out with the bathwater: The solution is collaborative or community filtering. Through player plugins or worst case, manual registration, you can set up a feedback system that makes recommendations by comparing each person's likes and dislikes with all other customers. Kind of like a way more sophisticated version of what Amazon does when you look at product X and at the bottom of the page it says, "People who bought X also looked at or bought A, B and C." There would be a couple of knobs to tweak about how tightly or loosely you want to track other people with similar listening preferences to avoid getting too insular. The more people contributing their playing habits back to the system, the wider ranging and more accurate it will get.
There is already one such system in existence today, for free. I did a quick search of feshmeat and couldn't find it, but if anyone else knows the links to projects like this, please follow-up with them.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.