Slashdot Mirror
Indie Artists Support Peer To Peer
dpilgrim writes "Alex Veiga at the Associated Press has a good story on indie artists voicing support for file sharing networks. While not a new topic on Slashdot, it's great to see musicians speaking out about the value of p2p as an alternative channel for reaching audiences. Choice quote from Veiga's article, on what it's like to pass muster before a mainstream media company: "For Sananda Maitreya... online music distribution gives him the freedom he says he lacked when he was signed with a major label in the 1980s under his former name, Terence Trent D'Arby. Back then, Maitreya recalled, committees had to sign off on any music released. 'The Beatles could not have faced that criteria and come up with anything other than the most mediocre, conservative music,' said Maitreya.""
If you look back, even major label artists get helped by P2P. Case in point: Radiohead. Their 2000 album Kid A wasn't promoted in any way, however a copy was leaked onto Napster before it was released. Millions downloaded it, and sales went right through the roof. The same thing happened a few years later with Hail To The Thief, which sold more copies than the previous two combined.
I personally own about $500/250GBP worth of music CDs, none of which I would have bought without P2P being there. It does help the record industry make money.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Now if only someone ever listened to what the artists said...
Or to indie artists in general.
The media distribution companies, whether music labels, movie producers, or stock photography corps, all understand that when communication becomes much easier among individuals their business model suffers. The only service they really offer is making media easy to find and get. The internet has done that for everyone now, and frankly, I'm surprised it is taking this long for individual artists to get on board. One of the problems that still is being worked out is open, well supported formats for sharing information. Look what RSS did for blogging and what it is doing to traditional journalism. Imagine what similar formats and application to support them can do for other individual producers of content.
The Beatles have ripped off every single band after them. That's about as Conservative as anyone can get.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
How else would a staring artist afford music?
=)
Artists need money. Fortunately, audiences have money!
Artists don't need middlemen taking their money and screwing with their work. Fortunately, these days audiences don't need them either!
I'm not sure that the Beatles are a good example here. By the time they started doing really revolutionary stuff on Revolver, they'd already had 10 #1 singles. I'd suspect that any artist who reached that point would have a lot more freedom in what they did.
My userid is prime!
Peer to peer has a lot of potential, but up to now it has largely been disorganized. There is no easy way to go through a list of all the music, and no way to know which of the 1% of the songs are legitimate.
This means that the chance someone will download some indie music off kazaa is close to 0. There needs to be a way for artists to advertise their own, legal music on these networks. There are already websites that allow this, like http://www.garageband.coc. I think free download websites like this are a much better way for indie artists to spread their name.
Its these threats that's keeping indies like me down.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
That quote was seen on another article talking about the Grokster case. I read it the other day.
There are a few label artists that have filed amicus briefs with the court as well, the rock band Heart being one of them. They've been using p2p (the "weed" application) to distribute new material. Heart may not have any chart topping hits right now, but they've been around since the 1970's and have been a consistant solid touring act. Howard Leese (guitarist) still owns the "Bad Animals" recording studio up in Seattle.
Another 70's artist, Janis Ian, has also thrown her support behind p2p. After seeing older tracks winding up on p2p networks, they noticed that her older albums had in increase in sales.
p2p is great for indie artists, true, but it's also nice to see some longtime "major label" artists throwing their names behind it as well.
Yeah, that sounds just about like Terence Trent D'Arby.
I would agree that P2P helps the little artists. What is not as well known is that the label execs (many of whom I know and work with) rely on P2P statistics to decide which records to promote and which songs to shoot videos for.
A certain young artist from Sony just shot a $150,000 video, which will hit mtv2/vh1 next week. The original budget for the video was about $20,000, but after the song took off on the networks, the label delayed the album launch and put more money into the video.
For an Indie artist P2P is essential for helping to distribute their art to the public. They usually do not have the means to host a web server for themselves for listeners to download MP3's. Several websites exist for independent artists to share their music such as SoundClick and (the late) mp3.com which is nice when a potential fan already knows the artists' name and music. However in order to get introduced to the indie artist a listener must find his music somewhere. These days it definitely won't be on the radio or MTV, so that only leaves word of mouth or a BitTorrent amongst illegal ones on a P2P website somewhere. Speaking about Indie artists, check out DZK, a talented artist I never would have found if not for P2P.
- Cary
--
Anyone from Fairfax County or Northern Virginia?
I personally own about 47GB worth of music in MP3 format. I will never buy the album now. I got more music then I know what to do with before napster closed the virousa hole.
Would I have bought the CD's otherwise. Yes, a lot of them. No to some of them.
I am sure that the most downloaded artists need all the help they can get. I mean without p2p I woudl have never heard of Eminem or Britney Spears.
At least recogonize that in some cases p2p is detrimental to artists and I will have a fuck of a lot more respect for you.
This from the perspective of an "indie" musician:
P2P distribution + web advertising = no more requirement for RIAA to promote and sell your album for you.
ProTools = no more requirement for RIAA to supply you with a "professional" recording studio
ProTools + P2P distribution + web advertising = no more RIAA requirement PERIOD.
I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me.
Do Indie Rockers really support P2P? Or are they just saying they do, because its five years old now, and its retro-ironic to pretend you like it?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Most want some tracks shared, but others kept for CDs.
It's misleading to say that musicians favor P2P without considering what portion of their catalog they'd like to be shared.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Yes, and now that we have legal music services like iTunes and Napster, what's the point of P2P piracy again?
.99 a song, how can anyone justify P2P piracy anymore? If nine bucks for an entire album is still too much, then clearly your incentive for piracy is not a "communications movement" to "empower the individual," but is basic human nature--wanting something for free so you don't have to pay for it. Even chimpanzees in social experiments will try to swipe a banana if they learn they don't have to give something back in return.
.99 for a song that we know has been provided (illegally) to us for free on a P2P network. Just admit it, you know?
Even indie artists like those mentioned in the article could easily offer their music for free on iTunes. In fact, iTunes offers free downloads weekly, which is the same "free advertising" Slashdotters love to reference in these discussions.
At
Sorry to be so harsh. I guess I just tired of the whole "we're so noble" act. Just admit what's going on. We're pirating music so we don't have to pay people for it. Because we're lazy and don't feel like stepping foot in a store and paying money. And we're too cheap to go to iTunes and pay
It's always "the evil RIAA" with no mention of the human beings whose music you're actually taking and depriving revenue for because you want it for free.
It's not the artists music when they are RIAA backed. It's the RIAA's music and no matter how much the RIAA claims that they have nothing but the artists' best interests in mind they prove time and time again that they only have their own best intentions in mind.
Now, when there is a GPL violation it is sometimes by a corporate company (i.e. a company that distribute SOHO routers) that is using GPL'd software to drive their product w/o giving credit where it is due. The Slashdot community gets pretty pissed off when the corporations shits on the little guys.
Now, the RIAA is a corporation (convicted of price fixing none-the-less) that is shitting on the little guys in two different arenas. Both the artists (their monetary share of the profits are nil) and the consumers who purchase the music distributed by them.
I think that's the personal justification most Slashdotters use. But then again I'm speaking for a large majority in general terms.
The difference between music piracy and GPL violations is quite simple.
In the latter case, the company committing the violation is making a profit off the work of others, and in a way, cheating their customers.
In the former case, nothing is being stolen, and no one is being cheated, as many people would not have bought the CD or CD single to listen to the song(s) if they didn't download it.
It's about money. Nothing more, nothing less. That's just how I see it.
While not opposed to P2P, indie musicians have the chance to put themselves out there without relying on virus/spyware/legally-scarry loaded p2p systems. You can get webhosting CHA_CHA_CHEAP (500 gigs transfer for $50 a month ain't hard to find..and 500 gigs is a SHITTON of mp3's) to distribute your songs on a website. The hot part is you have the chance to actually track how many hits you get and control what songs are available, not to mention create more traffic for your site giving you the chance to promote tours/shows/t-shirt sales all in the same swing. In fact, in a shameless plug....I'm *IN* a underground band that records and puts out our albums all DIY with full album distribution on our website.
This is our new album
And this is our "main" website.
In fact, within a couple of weeks we will have a music video on the site as well, with not only the ability to stream the video but actually download it in high quality to your hard drive. I don't get bands that don't offer these types of features. It's insane!
adventure-today.com
Does this mean you feel guilty when you hear a song on the radio? The whole point of "indie artists support P2P" is to find better promotional distribution now that the musical community has outgrown the limits of clamped-down radio. Major labels have always had a stranglehold on radio distribution, but now we're in a world where smaller artists and labels have the power, technology and distribution to receive just as much attention as the artist who suckles at ClearChannel or MTV's teat. P2P is a way to get people to hear imperfect copies of songs - much like radio, but with more control. Does this create freeloaders? Sure, just as cassette tapes did in the 80's, but even if it's to a grander scale, the tape-to-purchase ratio of the 80's is nowhere near the mp3-to-purchase ratio of today - you can make some serious money from downloaders, oftentimes through ticket and merch sales even more so than album sales. "Most artists have not given their permission" - that's not the case, because if someone releases a CD, they want it promoted. They want to be heard so they can make some goddamn money. Consider P2P distribution a "marketing expense" and it makes complete sense. It costs less to seed a torrent and give away a few free copies of an album than it does to whip up a huge batch of flyers, for crying out loud!
I would like to now why the profit in the music business is so focused on the record sales. What about concerts? Videos? Interviews? Advertising? Soundtracks? It would be nice to have a break-down of the percentages of the profits with the traditional model and with the new model (where p2p comes into play).
I have such a lot of music already that I rarely find anything new of interest. But practically everything I bought in the last year was from a defunct San Francisco label named "City of Tribes." Beyond that it was a pair of Bill Laswell CDs, one by Lydia Lunch, and the latest Kraftwerk. Most of that stuff I had to purchase without ever hearing a single note beforehand - I just had to trust in the type of music I was buying. The Kraftwerk I downloaded first - and after I found I liked it, I bought it. I wanted a clean copy to rip to my music server.
Yeah, it's all lies. People don't really do that...
Please. Do you really think the majority of people who have 250GB worth of MP3s are doing it to go out and buy the CD afterwards?
There's a difference:
250GBP
250GB
$500/250GBP = about 40 CD's; a reasonably sized collection.
250GB = about 62,500 songs. Wow.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Well, let's clarify this. It's not the RIAA's music. The RIAA is just a representative lobbying body for a group of record labels. The record labels are who, to some degree based on the contracts the artists sign, own the copyrights to this intellectual property.
Now, read that again. "Contracts the artists sign." I see a lot of people vaguely describing evil actions against artists on the part of the RIAA, like some big conspiracy. Yet, artists willingly sign their contracts. Obviously, there are specific cases of business deals gone sour between artists and record labels, JUST LIKE IN ANY INDUSTRY. And nobody's claiming the record labels are these innocent little businesses who are in it for the music (though there are some).
But to keep regurgitating this non-specific meme of the evil RIAA hurting artists doesn't actually SAY anything. It's a convenient justification made in Slashdot posts to end a discussion thread. "I copy music, but the RIAA is the evil one because they hurt artists!"
It's a double-standard. GPL code is regarded as intellectual property whose license should be followed. But copyright infringement of media content that someone doesn't feel like paying for is okay.
I've already somewhat addressed this before.
.99 per song and $9 an album. I've seen magazines on my newsstand more expensive than that. I just don't see a valid justification anymore now that iTunes is such a huge success. People should put their money where their mouth is and show the music industry that consumers want to spend their money on digital formats.
1.) Artists willingly sign their contracts. There are "entertainment lawyers" who make sure to go through and balance out contracts for both parties. Record labels do a lot of stuff to make an album successful, from manufacturing and advertising to booking appearances.
2.) Music sells now for as cheap as
Permit me to generalize as well. You are right that it's a personal justification. Me, I'm a down-to-earth kind of guy. Yes, I've pirated music. I'm not going to sit here and claim it's some social movement against the evil corporate-controlled world. Slashdot makes itself look like such a ridiculous community with such opinions.
The vast majority of P2P piracy is nothing more than:
1.) People wanting stuff for free so they don't have to pay for it.
2.) People knowing what they do is ethically wrong, so they seek bad guys to shift blame to. "The RIAA made me do it!"
The ignorance of basic human nature and perception when it comes to the justification of copyright infringement on P2P networks is what kills me. It's so phony. People should just admit what they're doing. You're copying music so you don't have to pay for it. You don't want to shell out--not even $0.99 goddamn cents.
It's like this guy I saw during lunch in hi
If the government tries to outlaw this technology OR try some method of controling it directly. It's an anarchist technology and the type of thing over-controlling fascist governments hate. I don't think it will ever be fully controlled but it may be forced underground. Anyone else think the world is getting to be too much like "The Matrix"?
I could go to a used record shop and buy a CD for $5-$10 legally, but my favorite one down the block just went out of business, along with most of my other favorite ones. Don't tell me it's gone because of file sharing--it has a lot more to do with WalMart. So I download the track, and then go and pay for a concert ticket when the band comes to town. Usually I can by a copy of the cd at the show for $10, which I'm fine with.
Fact is, as long as music prices reflect huge marketting budgets that mean the stuff on the radio can't compare in quality to the cashless musicians who play at the bar down the road, I don't see a need to spend money on full priced CD's from the big labels.
As for the arguments that few musicians agree, i think that if you polled only the quality musicians you'd find a different story. And besides, bands like The Grateful Dead have been allowing fans to freely tape and distribute their concerts for almost 40 years. In the Dead's case, they'v made a hell of a lot of money in the process.
If you want to make a legal argument against file sharing, be my guest, you'll probably be correct. But please, quit the moralizing. I've done my part in supporting the arts financially through concert tickets and the CD's I do buy. More importantly, I've supported the arts by demanding quality and fighting the marketting monster that is the true threat to the future of music. I've fought it by covering my ears to top 40 garbage, and to complaints of those who shovel it in my direction.
the problem with music
by steve albini
excerpted from Baffler No. 5
Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.
Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke."
And he does, of course.
I. A&R Scouts
Every major label involved in the hunt for new bands now has on staff a high-profile point man, an "A&R" rep who can present a comfortable face to any prospective band. The initials stand for "Artist and Repertoire," because historically, the A&R staff would select artists to record music that they had also selected, out of an available pool of each. This is still the case, though not openly.
These guys are universally young [about the same age as the bands being wooed], and nowadays they always have some obvious underground rock credibility flag they can wave. Lyle Preslar, former guitarist for Minor Threat, is one of them. Terry Tolkin, former NY independent booking agent and assistant manager at Touch and Go is one of them. Al Smith, former soundman at CBGB is one of them. Mike Gitter, former editor of XXX fanzine and contributor to Rip, Kerrang and other lowbrow rags is one of them. Many of the annoying turds who used to staff college radio stations are in their ranks as well.
There are several reasons A&R scouts are always young. The explanation usually copped-to is that the scout will be "hip" to the current musical "scene." A more important reason is that the bands will intuitively trust someone they think is a peer, and who speaks fondly of the same formative rock and roll experiences.
The A&R person is the first person to make contact with the band, and as such is the first person to promise them the moon. Who better to promise them the moon than an idealistic young turk who expects to be calling the shots in a few years, and who has had no previous experience with a big record company. Hell, he's as naive as the band he's duping. When he tells them no one will interfere in their creative process, he probably even believes it.
When he sits down with the band for the first time, over a plate of angel hair pasta, he can tell them with all sincerity that when they sign with company X, they're really signing with him and he's on their side. Remember that great, gig I saw you at in '85? Didn't we have a blast.
By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum. There is a pervasive caricature in popular culture of a portly, middle aged ex-hipster talking a mile-a-minute, using outdated jargon and calling everybody "baby." After meeting "their" A&R guy, the band will say to themselves and everyone else, "He's not like a record company guy at all! He's like one of us." And they will be right. That's one of the reasons he was hired.
These A&R guys are not allowed to write contracts. What they do is present the band with a letter of intent, or "deal memo," which loosely states some terms, and affirms that the band will sign with the label once a contract has been agreed on.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Who's going to front the money to produce your music? Who's going to pay for the studio time? Not everyone has a DAW in their house, let alone the acoustical environment necessary for quality production.
I am a huge proponent of leveling the media playing field with appropriate use of P2P technologies, business models like Magnatune and tools such as the Creative Commons Licensing. Still, recording ain't cheap.
Jeffy Tweety of Wilco (mentioned in TFA), a popular indie band, is a staunch advocate of P2P music distribution and making music possible via the internet. When their label Reprise rejected thier album "Yankee Foxtrot Hotel", they purchased their master copies and streamed it online for free.
In other news, Jeff Tweedy and Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig will discuss their opinions regarding file sharing, free culture, and the arts. Lessig wrote the 2004 book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Steven Johnson, author of Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, will moderate the discussion. All LIVE from the NYPL in conjunction with Wired magazine.
Thursday, April 7 at 7 p.m.
Celeste Bartos Forum
P.S. Wilco rocks. Hard.
-----
Check out the Uncyclopedia.org :
The only wiki source for politically incorrect non-information about things like Kitten Huffing and Pong! the Movie !
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
Most artists have not given that permission.
Most artists that anyone has ever heard of, do not own the rights to their own music and cannot give permission.
It's always "the evil RIAA" with no mention of the human beings whose music you're actually taking and depriving revenue for because you want it for free.
Many artists get very little or none of the money collected for their record sales. They usually do better with t-shirt or concert ticket sales.
But the copyright holders who don't give permission also have the right not to, and if people want to pretend they have a moral ground to stand on, they'd respect the wishes of those people.
I don't violate copyrights as far as I know. I also have no ethical problem with those people who do. I'll tell you why. Copyright is not a natural right like the right to free speech or the right to freely exercise one's religion. Copyright is a special government sponsored monopoly that was supposed to be half of a two sided bargain. Artists were given a limited monopoly on commercial copying so that they could make money. The public was given the assurance that copies would then be made, thus making books, songs, and art forms more widespread and available. Also, it insured that our children would be able to freely read older works, which would be preserved for them.
That agreement was destroyed after big business began bribing (lobbying) the government to change the laws. They have removed their half of the bargain and left the public with jack shit. Copyright is broken. As a result of the current laws the majority of copyrighted materials are gone forever. No one can read them, hear them, or view them. Hundreds of thousands of works that are our artistic heritage are buried in the name of making a few more bucks and removing them as competition for whatever is being pushed today. If they could, corporations would retroactively gain copyrights on all the classic works and bury them forever too. It is a travesty and is helping to dumb down our culture. Most people don't know that things used to be different, or that the laws were originally designed to do exactly the opposite of what they do now. Copyright was supposed to help us preserve works, now it removes them for all time. Many of these works are owned by companies that don't know they own them, or no one at all, yet still they are denied to the public.
In light of this legal, but horribly unethical situation, I have no problem at all with anyone who wants to steal works, copy works, hack into big media's bank accounts, slash their tires, or kick them in the testicles or some other tender body part.
I directed a video recently for a band called The Decemberists who aren't on a major label. They have, however, drummed up a lot of mainstream press notice and attention and good sales for a true indie label band. Once the video was done, however, I got my obligatory MTV2 airings at weird times of the night. So how were we going to share it? There'd be a cruddy low res version which is barely what the band could afford to host. So we distributed via bittorrent directly. We literally gave their fans as high quality file as we could. In one week using only bittorrent and not including the low res Quicktime, we've had over 5000 downloads. This is in the same week that Universal Music Group (one of the titans) has declared that music videos will no longer be streamed for free. Wired ran an article with all the details here: Wired article on how to get around MTV And now? The band is at number 7 on the iTunes music store and 19 at amazon. That is with the marketing budget of a small indepdendent label. Rewards come to those artists who embrace and understand how to use this tech. BTW i kept trying to submit this story but to no avail.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
> Most want some tracks shared, but others kept for CDs.
And the ones people want to share are...wait for it...the ones you buy the CD for.
It's almost like they want you to *pay* for the music.
hmmm ... you also have neglected to study ethics.
first there are two conceptions of right, legal and universal. Legal rights are simply those protected by the law, a while universal right is defined as a permision to perform a certain action coupled with others obligations of non-interference.
while in this case it sort of supports your quasi point that we tend to over use the term rights, and to expand our conception of rights to anything we feel we should be permitted to do. Most of these actions do not also imply obligations on the part of others not to interfere.
For instance in the case of file sharing:
If one were to believe that filesharing was a Right then there would be obligations on the part of musicians not to interfere with that right. Which would seem to imply that they actualy had an Obligation to supply you with their music. Which is certainly not the case. If I as a musician don't want the world to hear my damn music I think I have every damn (actual right here) Right to do with the music I've produced as I please. This make sense. I have produced the music, I there for that permission to do with the music as I please, and no one better get in my way.
now how does this aply to the music industry? What have the actualy done in the production of the music? anything? have they contributed at all? (not really... small production stuff) but the music is still (in my humble ethics opinion) the property of the musician. Where they should still have the right to control their music as they see fit. Of course record labels wouldn't really exist if this was the case.
The Gpl does a pretty good job of this. In a twisted convulted mess of terms.
anyways I just thought I should clear up some terms.
Anders
I've spoken about distaste for pirating here in the past, but as the manager of an indie rock band, I'll also swear by P2P as a promotion mechanism.
Small bands make virtually nothing from club appearances. The money, at least at the beginning, is in merchandise- t-shirts, stickers, and CDs.
Every last one of them provides free downloads on sites such as Pure Volume or on My Space They still realize CD sales at performances and via web purchase as they chase the holy grail- the record contract.
File trading has, does, and will still work as part of a comprehensive business model. The Grateful Dead certainly did rather well considering that nearly everything they ever did can be downloaded from Archive.org.
P2P becomes dicey when a group's success is predicated on album sales, and not performance money. I don't think a lot of Steely Dan albums would have ever surfaced if P2P was a dominant medium in their period.
Most importantly though, it is still a decision that the artists must make- do they want to sacrifice the financial protection offered by copyright law or open the doors in hopes of atracting an audience. In the first, they've got a business entity whose hands are in the pot- in the latter, they are self-promoting and hoping to realize the success that brings.
If you want to see an example of how indie bands at their best work, check out Monty's Fan Club and see what a small band from Rhode Island can do with P2P and a willingness to get the music out there.
In the meantime, I'm going downstairs to get my kids to turn the damn guitars down.
befuddled (noun) 1. Unable to create a pithy sig
well... if you want to talk about the way people work in the world on talks about "universal rights" while they may not be entirely unviersaly there deffinantly apear to be a set of moral standards that all people adhear to.
for instance, in almost all societies murder is unacceptable. And at least in cases that directly effect us (relatively localized cases) I think it's safe to assume that there is something moraly at stake when someone takes the life of another.
I don't follow your logic on the record company arguement. I said that the musicians DO have the only right to their music. I didn't say that Record companies aren't in violation of that right every time they inforce decisions that go against the will of the artist. This a believe it true. Simply becuase a right exists does not imply that everyone is sticking with the obligations brought on by those rights.
Personaly I would love to see a non-prophit organization created to distribute music online for musicians that want to maintain control of their music. Release all music under the creative commons. Musicians make money off shows and merch, not on CD sales. CD sales in the end largely benefit the record labels. So even though dropping traditional distribution might be in the best interest of a musician, it's not really an option for a corperation.
I don't see (don't want to see) places like I-Tunes and the new Napster take the place of record distribution companies. I-Tunes will destroy the conception of the album, the entirety of music put together by an artist to meld together. This is alright when looking at the big name artists that only put out a CD full of singles, but for the most part, I only want to listen to full albums. that kind of aesthetic isn't available through current online distribution mediums.
maybe if you could offer torrents of albums, seed them yourself, and then offer the free. I don't know... that's my take on it all.
Anders
You're post deserves to be modded +5. Of course, that should be +5 funny rather than +5 informative.
Everyone and his brother raved about Radiohead's two albums prior to Kid A, The Bends and OK Computer respectively. And not only did they receive critical rave reviews, the music-buying public loved them too.
For example, Q Magazine's readers' poll of the top 100 albums of all time had both prominently in the top dozen or so, with OK Computer at number 1 in that chart. Of course, such a chart is pretty skewed towards recent releases but that gives you some kind of indication as to the popularity that Radiohead enjoyed before the release of Kid A.
Now, you may disagree but I think the success of Kid A had more to do with the fact that it was the much-anticipated, latest album release by one of the most popular rock bands on the planet rather than the fact that it was leaked onto a P2P network.
If you can't see that people who love an album will be very much inclined to rush out and buy the next album that the same artist releases then you really have no clue about how the music industry works.
That The Bends, OK Computer or any other Radiohead album hadn't previously been in the US top 20 is irrelevant. More relevant would be the sales figures for any of those albums (which could have been sure but steady rather than flavour-of-the-month in nature) and the number of people who'd paid to see them perform live in the three year hiatus between the release of OK Computer and Kid A.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg