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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."
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
(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...
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
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!