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Musicians on Internet & Filesharing
reverseengineer writes "A Pew Internet & American Life survey asked (large PDF) 809 artists and 2,755 musicians, songwriters, and publishers about how they use the Internet, and whether it has been beneficial or detrimental to their success. Results (larger PDF) are quite interesting, with near 50-50 splits on a variety of questions involving fair use and filesharing. A quote from Pew's summary: 'Across the board, artists and musicians
are more likely to say that the internet has made it possible for them to make more
money from their art than they are to say it has made it harder to protect their work
from piracy or unlawful use.' Here is the NY Times summary [ Free registration blah blah ] of the survey."
I think this really underscores the issue and shows how the RIAA is not representative of the musicians thoughts and concerns.
Most musicians, especially struggling musicians, enjoy using the Internet and File Sharing programs to share their music (See pdf) . However, most feel that their work should be protected and they should get some sort of compensation from it (a perfectly justifable argument. Can't make much music if you're starving) (See pdf).
How are the above to concerns and attitudes towards file sharing in line with the RIAA's past, recent and future actions.
Also, this was an anonymous survey so it'd be interesting to really see who fell where (pop stars vs local bands).
-Teiresias
Why do musicians go for recording contracts anymore? It is obvious that the vast majority of them recieve no significant ongoing income from record sales. Most small bands seem to make more money touring. For them to have succesful tours, people need to hear their music, record labels don't help with this. Sure there are people who have made vast sums of money from the record industry, but most make very little or worse end up in debt. Its an expected value problem.
"brxref
of course they are making it difficult for them. why? well if the RIAA was taken out of the picture, how would they get there money?
there are several faces to this whole problem, the riaa wants to keep their monopoly on the music industry, the best way to do that: hamper arts doing it on there own, the only way to "make it big" is through them.
(initial comment: many thanks for flagging the large PDF documents clearly as such!)
We get to hear quite a lot from the "industry" side of the music business; it's nice to get a little balance from those "other" people who are also involved in some way with the music business, the actual creators.
I'm not surprised they're split over the issue, personally -- the future of music distribution is not at all a clearcut thing, and even the artists need someone, somewhere to be paying them for their work. Naturally, there are many more solutions that will work for the artists than there are solutions that will work for the industry that has developed purely to advertise and distribute their work through very limited, specific channels...
Even though most of the "news" is not properly fact checked, and is blindly accepted as true, I have issue with the article that says:
Indeed, big-ticket acts like Metallica and Don Henley have famously denounced illegal file sharing. And the Recording Industry Association of America, which has filed thousands of lawsuits against individual file-sharers, often invokes musicians as prime movers in its crusade.
Metallica, yes, Don Henley, dunno.
Metallica can continue to charge $75+ for half full concert venues (vs $35 and sold out, no pun intended).
Don Henley on the other hand is no sympathizer for the RIAA.
The Eagles have their own recording company and they are not RIAA members.
Also, this url, http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0217-01.htm, has more info straigh from Don Henley's mouth (pen, keyboard, whatever).
On the subjec (partly at least) this is definitely an interesting read for a point of view the public seldom gets to hear: Courtney Love does the math, By Courtney Love
Here, "use the internet" can mean anything from communicate with agents or people who book gigs or recording engineers or fellow musicians, to communicate with fans, to put up web sites with band info, sample tracks, etc. Most people wouldn't think of "having all my work traded on file sharing systems without my permission" as "how I use the internet." So a conclusion like "across the board, the internet helps artists make more money" is disingenuous. Note that I'm not saying that the net is good or bad for musicians, just that such a broad conclusion is dopey.
Really due to the nature of bittorrent, there's no difficulty in non RIAA record-labels or artists making their albums freely available. krecs.com could post the bittorrents on their webpage if they wanted. They don't - I can only presume they'd rather sell the albums than give them away.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
I'm getting tired of all this "hurting the business" stuff. I live in Iceland where we have a national statistics institute run by the government that monitors record sales, movie attendance, rentals, sales etc.
File sharing is huge in Iceland, about 10% of the nation use the largest P2P network every month, and there are several other domestic networks and the plethora of foreign networks. P2P started to hit it big 4 years ago.
Record sales have been up 11% each year, we hold the world record in movie attendance, movie sales up 26% since last year and so on. You should also note that the average movie ticket costs $14, rentals are $8, CD's and DVD's are $30-45.
This is not a strange coincidence to have this burst along with the growing of P2P networks. And don't give be crap about being an island in the north-Atlantic - movies are usually screened here before the "previews" in the US. Hell Sigurrós the world renowned Icelandic band even have their own P2P network!
As many people are learning these days, getting a recording contract is basically the same as getting a loan. But -- Courtney Love's ramblings notwithstanding -- a lot of musicians (like me and the others in my band) are willing to enter these deals because:
1) The "loan" buys you recording time, publicity, transportation, expenses, per diems, etc. Things that a starving band can rarely afford.
2) The "loan" is repaid from CD sales. And that's the fair trade because we realize that chances are slim to none we're going to sell enough CDs to cover our costs. But this isn't a bank we're talking about. Nobody's going seize your home or car because your CD sold 100 copies.
3) You typically get to keep merchandise revenue. And that's the silver lining: even though you never see money from your CD sales, you get to earn money on the road.
So, given that a band's goals are usually to afford to keep playing, recording and performing, a record deal sounds ideal. If you end up being the 1 in a million who "makes it" then you're obviously set. If you don't, then at least you got to "live the dream" for a lot longer than you could have you if you had to foot the bill. Along the way, you make some decent press, build up a fan base and basically have a great time.
Win-win I say.
(footnote: since we were dropped by our admittedly shitty label we've made decent money selling CDs and songs online at places like iTunes -- but still nowhere near the amount we received from our "free" loan which paid for our last CD's production and then some).
I remember a time when there was an internet radio station called "Soma FM" available for free on the internet.
(Slashdot even had some stories when they were forced to close down)
They played a lot of _very_ interesting music I never heard before -
and that you wouldn't get on your typical commercial radio station either for that matter.
That was the time that I actually bought the highest number of CDs I ever did in my Life!!
I remember more often than not, that I heard some _really_ amazing stuff there - and simply opened another tab on my browser, went to amazon and just ordered a bunch of CDs.
- It's been some time now that I bought any CD at all - not because I 'd be downloading stuff or such
rather because I just wouldn't know what to buy - the stuff on mainstream radio just isn't worth it..
just my 2 cents
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
Actually you are surprisingly wrong.
According to PDF of study.
Among self reported music "Success stories" (Definition 30 or more hours working on music and 80% income from music)
45% said internet has big effect on "Made it possible to make more money from you music"
45% said it had small effect same
= 90% thought the internet helped them
While the same group
30% said it had big effect on "Made it harder to protect your music"
25% said it had small effect on same.
= 55% thought it made it harder to protect their music. This does not mean they nessesarly thought it lost them money.
Statistics in other groups are slightly less in both catagories, meaning they didn't think it made much of an improvment or made it much harder.
Thought 35% of Success stories did think file sharing was bad for artist, this is not very high but higher than all artist, of which 23% thought it was bad for them.
I'd like to believe that is what is going to happen, but there are a few important things to take into consideration.
The wierdest, most difficult to address assumption is the idea that people don't currently like what they really like. I'm inferring that from your idea that people will go more 'more directly in line with their personal tastes.' It seems like a logical assumption from the standpoint that if you were given 5 choices before, once you've been given 50 that included those 5, you'd statistically pick new things. But I think that reasoning ignores certain aspects of what makes stardom and pop culture exist in the first place.
People like to like the things that other people like. There are advantages of being into pop culture. It's a lot of common ground to have with strangers. You can talk about it and establish the overall persona of a person on fairly neutral territory. The statement "Did you hear the lead xylophonist of 'Lurch Cadets' had albino triplets?" isn't going to be as effective at deteriming how you relate to another person as talking about something you actually both already know about.
I think that independent artists will rise independently of any pop-culture fall. When you consider how many times people hear the same songs over and over again, there is plenty of room to have both massive pop culture and niche involvement.
Let's not forget that a lot of artists sign deals with RIAA-affiliated labels, only to have the label decide not to "push" them. The label can just sit on their work, and the artist has no recourse. They can't release it on their own because the label owns it. They can only sign a label deal if they sign over the rights. If the label then decides that you aren't the "in" sound, you are basically dead in the water. They control the content and the delivery system. Hopefully with things like satellite radio and the internet, this can change.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I found out that I'll never make it in the business, as I am a 30-something musician in the midwest.
My brother in law is in a band. A buddy of mine who's an agent wanted to play some of their stuff to a friend in the recording industry. They industry guy's first question? "How old are they?". When he found out they were mid-30s, he said to forget it.
All that the record companies want is pliable lookalike boybandz.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Most 'artists' (of any kind) don't make a living selling their work, sure most would like to, but the reality is that most are just hard average hard working 'Joes' (and just to be PC 'Janes'), many of whom have trouble buying $20 cd, as many 'non artists'.
For this to be a real survey they would need to beak the artists into several catagories:
I make enough money from music to:The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
How exactly can the artist make more money with a copyright that lasts longer than he/she does? Sure, the company can, but that's not the intention of copyright as written into the constitution.
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
It is really simple, they matter in "GPL source code theft" articles because there they keep information free while in P2P-Discussion Copyrights keep information closed away. It isn't really a contradiction.
Linux is not Windows
I just wish that more artists would realize the benefits of allowing the free distribution of their music.
Here, here. As a muscian I fully agree and have been directing every other musician I know to creativecommons.org.
If more people hear your music more people will buy your music, but that isn't understood by most musicians. The percentage of people that buy your music may be smaller, but that doesn't matter if you maximize the amount of people that hear your music your net will be larger.
If you are only getting radioplay locally and say 100,000 people hear your stuff and 2% buy it, you've sold to 2000 people. But lets say you reach 1 million people online through them downloading your music, to make the same sales only 0.2% that download need to buy.
I'm not sure what the numbers are (or if anyone knows for sure) how many people that download music actually buy it, but the numbers don't have to be big. Plus the exposure to further regions mean more oportunities to travel. Maybe your band is only slightly popular here, well it could be huge in japan or germany.. but if your music never gets there how will you know?
There are groups i would have never heard of if friends didn't send me mp3's (ie tarkan which a turkish friend sent to me). If I like it I pass it on to other friends etc. That way a band gets exponetially more listeners than local radio/video play. Alas some bands are dumb and do not understand this or think they are so huge and world renound they don't need such a distribution method (metalica).
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
So basically, that means you can copy as much as you want, even without permission, as long as you do not ever permit those copies to leave your own personal possession. It also means that if you download a work that was shared from an overseas location where copyright is not legally observed, neither of you is really breaking any law (although it's entirely arguable that it's unethical to do so without permission from the copyright holder).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
In addition to the other reply, no musician makes their money from CD sales. They make it by touring. Even small acts that produce and sell their own cd rarely recoup their costs on selling those CDs at shows. CD sales for an artist are 99% about getting their name/work out there so they can do more live shows. And when you get the RIAA involved it just gets worse, you in fact owe them the cost of producing your CD, so in addition to them keeping most of the royalties, you have to pay them what little you make to cover the costs of prodution/distribution/promotion. Again, you make all your money doing live shows. So I can't see why any artist has a problem with an easier way for their music to reach a broader audience.
:)
I think the problem is all the anti-social geeks pirating the music never leave their house to go to a concert
in bed.