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CRIA Falling Apart?
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) has been falling apart recently. The biggest blow occurred when 6 major Canadian independent labels quit which was followed by some problems with the Copyright Board. Of course, this is all happening after the whole Sam Bulte incident. The article explains what happened with plenty of links for specific information."
Most artists just want to be heard.
Their music should be considered free advertising for their art form, and hope to get enough interest to then go on tour.
It saves them time running around town sticking flyers up on walls.
P2P networks provide the free distribution.
Artists win by selling concert tickets, putting on a great show so people want to come back, and sell t-shirts, posters.
They get 100% of the revenue and greedy corporate bastards have to go find a new job that actually creates products.
Why isn't the old school gone yet?
Because what you said it isn't true, at least not for all musicians. See, you have to separate the love of the art we have from our desirve to live a decent quality of life. Us musicians don't just want to make music for everyone's enjoyment, you see. Some of us want to eat as well!
Many musicians, especially big popular artists of course, want to sell music, and make their living from that. They don't consider their music to be advertising - they may rarely play a gig, they may never want to go on tour, but they may still love making music and want to be able to make a living from it.
Sadly, the people who mask their desire to download music for free from P2P networks claim they're doing it to "fight the man", destroy the evil record labels and so on. That's fine, as far as it goes, but it's an excuse and nothing more. It won't help people like me - I'm a solo musician who plays several instruments, but I'm not in a band. I can record stuff I could never play live. I've enjoyed gigging, but I don't think I'd like to tour really. But why shouldn't I make a living selling music?
If I wanted to sell my music, I'd like people to respect my wishes. If they don't, and I'm relying on making money from my music to live, then I'm fucked and I won't make as much more (if any) because I'll need a job to pay the rent. Which is why I've skipped trying to make a living from music, and instead I'm a games programmer who makes music in his spare time.
Game dev and music blog
I run a synth podcast show and because of legal reasons have had many contacts w/ labels (me contacting them for permission, not them busting me) and I can not emphasize how cool the nettwerk label is :
.... as per Nettwerk copyrights, we have never sued anybody and all our music is open source to encourage fans to share it with others and help us promote our Artists. As per those Artists we manage on other labels (Majors), we take issue with those labels claiming that litigating our fans is in our interest, as it clearly is not.
Check out their about page :
Nettwerk Music Group is Canada's leading privately owned record label and artist management company. Nettwerk is responsible for managing some of Canada's biggest artists like Sarah McLachlan, Avril Lavigne, Barenaked Ladies and many others. Nettwerk has several offices located around the world including offices in New York, Los Angeles and London; with our main office right next to Granville Island in Vancouver, B.C.
Litigation is destructive, it must stop
Even the smaller indie labels have not taken a stand as strong as Nettwerk has. Nettwerk is indie, but they carry Sarah Maclachlan, Delerium, Avril Lavigne and bands of that size, so they aren't exactly small.