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Brazilian Pop Music Scene Thrives on Piracy
langelgjm writes "When people talk about the failing business model of the traditional record company, they often only offer vague suggestions as to how things would work otherwise. But a concrete example of a music scene that thrives on piracy is to be found in Brazil, in the form of tecnobrega. From the article: 'While piracy is the bane of many musicians trying to control the sale of their songs, tecnobrega artists see counterfeiters as key to their success ... Ronaldo Lemos, a law professor at Brazil's respected Getulio Vargas Foundation, an elite Rio de Janeiro think tank and research center, says tecnobrega and other movements like it represent a new business model for the digital era, where music is transformed from a good to a service.'"
just because something is against the law doesn't mean that it's wrong.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Looks like someone finally got around to watching Steal This Film.
=Smidge=
This is an excellent example of how what we think of as ethical derives not from a god, but rather from evolved justifications of behavior. There's a mighty struggle going on to re-define taking music without the author's permission as ethical, based on the ego-soothing concepts that it's really in their interest.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Laws have never struck me as democratic. I don't remember ever voting for the DMCA.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
SELECT country_name, "Pop Music Scene Thrives on Piracy" FROM countries WHERE GDP_per_capita < some_limit
If "your thing" is not practicing your craft, and is instead to try to get us to pay you in perpetuity for the favor of having once played some music, go fuck yourself. You need to earn your money just like everyone else. You earn it by doing something. That something can certainly be performing music. I truly enjoy live music. I pay a lot of money for concert tickets. I buy SWAG at the shows.
I wish I could just sit back and let everyone who read my specs pay me a royalty for the favor of doing my job. Instead I have to produce new content. I could do this by charging per document I PRODUCE, but I choose instead to be an employee. Doesn't really change the model, though, to remain an employee, I must continue to produce useful work. Otherwise they'll show me the door.
Being and artsy fuck doesn't exempt you from needing to contribute.
My Babylon
King Copyright: I am your king.
Woman: Well I didn't vote for you.
King Copyright: You don't vote for kings.
Woman: Well how'd you become king then?
[Angelic music plays... ]
King Copyright: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Copyright, was to carry the DMCA. THAT is why I am your king.
Dennis: [interrupting] Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' laws is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
The concept of tecnobrega as discussed in the article is an interesting one. If you are planning on being a stage band and making your money off of the shows you perform then it's great. However what happens if that's not our thing. For a hugely sucesful artist who's shows are sold out they are being stolen from with no added benefit at all. This "tecnobrega" only favours the new or the unsuccesful.
And this is bad because? If your already successful and you can fill the biggest venue in any city then more money is the difference between a Rolls Royce or a Maybach. You can always set up endorsements for more money, sell media with added features, private shows etc... When your struggling to start any hand up will help. Right now it's a lottery mentality, 100 starving artists to each journeyman who lives off the industry. With a more distributed model there would be more people who can make a living off of music and less of a lottery. I'd imagine with more people making a living at it this would increase the amount of creativity.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Back before edison and all those other people figured out how to record music the musicians had to play music live.
"Piracy is the way to get established and get your name out. There's no way to stop it, so we're using it to our advantage," explains Gabi Amarantos, who frequently appears on Brazilian TV on the strength of bootleg sales of her CDs (from which artists don't get a cut).
Technically, there is no copyright infringement involved since the artists themselves allow their works to be duplicated.
What is however interesting is that this technobrega movement severely undermines one of the arguments frequently cited by the RIAA in favour of stricter copyright laws, which is that piracy undermines the ability of the music and film industries to invest in the next generation of local talent by lowering revenues from current sales.
Also from the article
The original intention of copyright as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause/ was
Given that the tecnobrega movement has shown that copyright protection is not necessary to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, isn't it time to reconsider the whole basis of copyright law?
With regards to your sig... one space after the period was not really started by the internet... but became the new typographic convention once everyone started using mostly proportional fonts. Its the defacto typographic standard these days and has been for quite some time. THe fonts these days are designed with having a single space in mind. Im not a graphic designer but have many of them as friends.
In Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig describes the doujinshi (copyright-infringing comics) industry in Japan and describes how it not only fuels the market for "official" manga comics but can influence them as well.
Linky: http://www.sslug.dk/~chlor/lessig/freeculture/c-piracy.html#creators
--
"Extra Anus Kills Four-Legged Chick" -- Headline
Just so you know, nobody listens to this in major cities. I don't think this stuff is nowhere near the airwaves of major cities. It's a very low-wage kinda subculture thing and as such gets very little attention. Except where it's lumpenproletariat galore, which is basically their scene, I suppose.
"Brega" means "tacky", having extremely bad taste. Like refrigerator penguins. Like when you try to interpret a fashion trend but get it all wrong because it looks so cheap and ridiculous. Imagine rednecks, but a 1000 times worse. Definitely not mainstream. And limited to a specific region of Brazil.
Low-wage Brazilians typically don't want to pay for anything. They get tax discounts after tax discounts. A typical porter or handyman is a tax-free guy. He gets free medical services and education (which both suck, BTW...), sustained by those that are between a rock and a hard place - the middle class that does pay a hefty 37% tax on income; and the businesses, industries, etc. That's 3-4 months working for the government. Yup. Doctors, engineers, consultancy firms - anyone who's not poor. The leftist corrupt government caters to these people, giving out more government aid and tax-cuts, because then they vote for them.
So why would they pay for music? They're already a bunch of freeloaders, anyway. If they're unemployed, they just pack up and go buy contraband products in neighboring Paraguay (they have a tax-free policy on imports, I think) to resell on sidewalks. No Union protest... Just their very own tax-free shortcut to survival. This is just how their life is. How fucked up. And now some foreigners and academics are fascinated with this...LOL.
Plus, that music sucks. Real bad.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
From the story: "Tecnobrega producer Beto Metralha said the music developed out of necessity in a place where few musicians could afford to pay a whole band and most music consumers don't take home enough money to buy non-pirated CDs. The average ensemble consists of little more than a keyboardist and a singer, sometimes accompanied by an electric bass. The signature shuffle rhythm is derived entirely from a single program on an electronic keyboard."
And: "Brazil's top-selling Banda Calypso, whose "brega" sound paved the way for tecnobrega, claims to have sold more than 4 million CDs nationwide, avoiding traditional distribution networks and marketing its CDs directly through news stands and other unconventional outlets."
And: ' "Before you couldn't get your record played on the radio if you couldn't afford payola. Now if a song hits big with the aparelhagens, the radio has no choice but to play it," says Metralha. "The dynamic has changed." '
Brazil seems to be ahead of the rest of the world in creating new forms of music. It's not surprising that cultural changes in how music is distributed happen in Brazil.
From the dawn of history, music has always been a service, and never a good. I don't see why the existence of ultra rich musicians should be seen as anything other than an anomaly.
May the Maths Be with you!
- Nobody purchases original CDs here. People just get them on the streets, with "3 for 5 reais" price tags (~$1 each CD)
- Trash music is everywhere. It is hard to listen to good music nowadays, be it in the radio, the clubs, or the stupid loud car sound systems around the city.
- Musicians get almost nothing selling CDs by normal means (recorder company contracts etc), if you're not a TOP 20 you make more money with shows/presentations anyway, making it very good to spread your music - the more the better
- "Lend me your CD so I can copy it" is normal practice, creating even many "pirated pirate copies" which are copies of pirate CDs purchased on the street.
- Soulseek, donkey2k, kazaa are your friends. You find everything Brazilian.
- There are a few websites promoting local FREE AS IN SPEECH music/art. Like Estudio Livre.
I have very few original CDs and don't feel any pressure into purchasing more. If things keep this way I will keep downloading free licensed and unlicensed content. The same applies to movies and games.Good stuff in these websites make me want more, make me want to know the artist behind them. Lately I was chatting with "Varios Um", a Brazilian artist which has very good FREE songs published here.
find -name "*base*" -exec chown us {} \; ; ln -s
Both directions apply.
Illegal does not necessarily equate with unethical.
Legal does not nessesarily equate with ethical.
It is illegal to sing happy birthday in public without royalty payment. This is not an unusual example. Copyright is long enough, where even when all authors are dead, some corporation is there to collect.
Currently, legal bribery by corporations plays a large role in forming laws. It should be no surprise that monopolies of many kinds are protected by the government at the expense of citizens.
RIAA,MPAA bought laws to extend the copyright monopoly to 95-120 years.
Drug companies would like to extend patents to milk every possible penny out of a discovery, even at the expense of human health.
Industrial farm companies, like ADM have extended patents to cover biological life, and would like to push things like terminator seeds for profit at the expense of humans.
Microsoft enjoys a unchecked monopoly granted by software copyright monopolies that last 95 years.
Software companies patent the most trivial algorithms, with these granted monopolies often slowing innovation.
Even with 95 year monopolies, media companies would like to further restrict media, by using DRM to encrypt media. The DMCA was bought by the media companies to protect DRM.
The release of expiration of copyright monoplies into the public domain stopped in 1975, and will be dark until 2018. At 95 years after media publication, the majority of publications are likely lost. I regretfully expect RIAA,MPAA to try to extent the copyright once more in 2017 fully to 120 years to beyond 2043.
Yes, there is a theme here. Government granted monopolies that last 20, 95 years are bad.
First, I never voted for the DMCA, and I know a whole bunch of people who would much rather it never became a law. The senators voted for it, not the citizens, and so if I choose not to follow the DMCA it doesn't mean I'm refusing to follow the vote of the citizens because they never voted for it. Also, because of the way our legal system works, just about the only way to have a law repealed is to be arrested for violating it and to appeal to the supreme court. Finally, I'm not asking for criminals not to be locked away, but the fact is, until you've been convicted and run out of appeals you aren't legally a criminal, therefore if you get arrested for violating a law, appeal it to the supreme court and have the law overturned, you're not a criminal. There's also a difference between saying you're innocent of a crime that you either committed but didn't want to be caught for, or didn't commit and are falsely convicted of, and saying you're innocent of a crime because you don't think it should be illegal in the first place. If you fall into the later category it's your duty to appeal to the supreme court and convince them of why exactly it is that that law should be repealed.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Nobody purchases original CDs here. People just get them on the streets, with "3 for 5 reais" price tags (~$1 each CD)
I do. I would rather buy music on a one-song basis from iTunes but due to this widespread piracy here, Apple doesn't seem to give a shit about Brazil.
Trash music is everywhere. It is hard to listen to good music nowadays, be it in the radio, the clubs, or the stupid loud car sound systems around the city.
Why is that? Maybe it has to do with the music industry being overwhelmed by these favela freeloader fuckers with no music talent but with a beat box and the street commerce that is driving artists to a difficult situation, while the very good Brazilian music people enjoy from London to Tokyo is having a hard time just surviving. Tom Jobim (the guy who wrote "The Girl from Ipanema") used to complain that an artist could never get filthy rich in Brazil, even though even Frank Sinatra recorded The Girl From Ipanema and Bossa Nova plays worldwide daily on thousands of radios ever since the late 50's.
Musicians get almost nothing selling CDs by normal means (recorder company contracts etc), if you're not a TOP 20 you make more money with shows/presentations anyway, making it very good to spread your music - the more the better
The music industry's to blame here. I remember back in the 90's when Real had dollar-parity, CDs here cost the double what they would cost me in New York. Now the cancer has spread and there's no stopping it.
Streets of Brazil are overwhelmed with street vendors ("camelôs") who pay no taxes and sell pirate products.
Yeah. Brazil's the future. You wanna see how bad it gets you just look at what's going on here.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
It's not so much that it undermines the argument, as it underscores it for what it is -- a business model they insist is necessary for the production of music, but which probably isn't.
Artists who embrace this self-publishing method don't need investment from the RIAA et all -- they make music, engage their fans, and help people to find and listen to their music -- then they coax them out to a show. They probably make a modest amount of money, but they don't have as much overhead, and they don't have middlemen to pay. They'll probably never be mega-stars either.
For the RIAA to invest in local artists, they need to find acts they think that they can sell, set them up with all sorts of help in producing something that is up to 'professional' standards, and then marketing it to as wide of a market as possible. In the process, the music tends to migrate to a boring degree of sameness, and the artists become beholden to the recording company, and has to sell a bazillion records to overcome the "losing money math" used by these companies.
They're not interested in groups which are locally marketed and have a good following. They're goal isn't to put music into the hands of people looking for it so they can actually hear good music. They're looking to find a group they can market to a very large amount of people -- ideally, conforming to whatever niche market they already have good marketing channels to get exposure to; take Clear Channel for example. Everyone, in every market, hearing a selection of songs chosen to maximize the commercial successes and sell records to the same established fan-base.
The RIAA doesn't care about artists who want people to hear their music and come to a live show in a local venue -- they don't make their money off live performances from what I know. The RIAA is making their money off the already recorded stuff, and to do that, they need to convince us that if it weren't for them, there wouldn't be any recorded music worth listening to. They just don't want you to know that an artist can make and distribute good music without their help.
There's a busker in the city I live in (Ottawa, Canada). He plays in the summer at an open air market. He's got a great whiskey-coarse voice, and plays some of the best steel guitar blues I've ever heard from a young-ish white guy. He sells his CDs out of his guitar case for 10 bucks a pop, and gets good tips for performing. I suspect he does alright for himself, because he always has a crowd, and always gets tips -- because he can sing, and he gives an earnest performance for the crowd. He may even actually play some club gigs as well, I've no idea.
I suspect these Brazilians aren't really all that different from local bands all over the place who manage to eke out an income by actually getting their music into the hands of people who otherwise wouldn't hear it. Unfortunately, the RIAA et al are trying to convince us that all of these "alternate distribution channels" are piracy so they can make people believe that any music not provided by them in a secure, DRM bundle must be illegal. They'd have us lock down any mechanism which they haven't vetted -- even to the exclusion of self-published artists who are encouraging you to give copies of their music to your friends.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
no mod points today, but this pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter.
There is no right to being rich just because you sing or are in a band. Play local shows, get paid for doing it. Use CDs and downloads to *PROMOTE* your music. If you become popular enough, play bigger shows.
On a somewhat related topic: Why anybody would actually pay for lossy downloads not encoded, tagged, or named the way you keep your own collection is beyond me. How about either providing in FLAC or sell CDs for $5?
Giving away CDs and downloads as promotion for your live shows seems like a good idea to me.
Why people are calling this "piracy" when the artists themselves are handing over the originals to be copied? This is not piracy, this is free, lawful, copying.
Close the world, open the NeXT
It's called civil disobedience. When you have a fundamental issue with a law sometimes the best way to fight it is to break it. Either enough people break it to make enforcement impossible, or you break it publicly to bring attention to the injustice.
It may hurt your head, but some laws are passed in undemocratic ways, or have consequences that harm democracy. For those times, you might need civil disobedience.
Other times, laws like copyright enforcement just simply go against the grain of human nature and will be broken regardless of government action.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
they'd just make sure that anything sold at their concerts had their logo on it.
Even the Blotters ?!?
music lover since 1969
You need to earn your money just like everyone else
It's a shame you can't get your head around the fact that some performances take years of prep and production work, and involve poeple who can only come together in the studio or in some other collaborative manner. Such recordings have plenty of audience interest, and involve material that can never provide income for the performers as they tour bars or concert halls selling t-shirts and getting a cut of the beer gross.
There ARE people who want to purchase a compilation of recordings from over time, or ensemble pieces that involved many studio sessions to create. They WANT the artists to be able to dedicate their time (and thus derive their income from) sales after the fact of doing that hard work. I don't want your desire to have that recording for free to prevent me from being able to purchase such recordings. But the sentiment that such recordinds should be fair game for ripping off because you'd rather suck down smoke or stand in line to take a piss at a concert venue is a false dichotomy. If you think a band can make a good living by giving away their work, and charging you for tickets and bumper stickers, great. I'm sure you can persuade them all to pursue that approach. But that has nothing to do with whether or not its up to YOU spread a studio work around to 100,000 of your very best personal, and completely anonymous, friends.
Don't like musicians and filmakers who choose to work FIRST and entertain their audience afterwards? Then don't do business with those people. Why are you ranting? Just do business with people who don't want to charge you any money for their studio work, and you'll both be happy. Leave the people who want to see films made or other long-term projects evolve do what they want. You can just ignore it. Except you can't, because you want those things too, you just want to be entertained for free.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Demand for Immediate Take-Down: Notice of Infringing Activity
URL: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=337017&cid=21086931
CASE #: [snip]
23 October 2007
Dear Slashdot,
This letter serves as notification under the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, 17 U.S.C. 512, or equivalent notice provisions of your local law,
that content currently residing within your computer system infringes on the
copyrights of the BBC Corporation. I am
authorized to act on behalf of the BBC in this matter.
The infringing material residing on your system is the comedy sketch from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. This comedy skit is,
copyrighted by and proprietary to the BBC, is on your system at the
following location:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=337017&cid=21086931
Posting of BBC's comedy lines as described above is not authorized by
the BBC, any of its agents, or by law. Pursuant to this notification, you
should immediately take steps to locate and remove and/or disable access to
the BBC comedy that is on your system at the web address detailed
above. As a service provider, you may otherwise be liable for copyright
infringement if, upon obtaining knowledge or awareness of infringing
material being stored upon your network, you do not act expeditiously to
remove, or disable access to, the material. 17 U.S.C. 512(c).
The information in this notification is inaccurate. I swear under penalty of
perjury that I am not authorized to act on behalf of the BBC in regard to its
exclusive rights in the work(s) identified above that I believe has been and
continues to be infringed as described above.
We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take
expeditious action to remove or disable access to the material described
above, and thereby prevent the illegal reproduction and distribution of this
idea via your company's network.
We appreciate your cooperation in this matter. Please advise us regarding
what actions you take.
Yours sincerely,
Detective asshole,
Internet Investigator
It's never been easier to produce music in the comfort of your own home
Really? You can seat a 40-piece orchestra in your home? You can shoot a mountaineering scene for a complex film in your home? You set up a grand piano and a choir in your home? No wonder you don't care that it costs money up front to prepare films and recordings as parts of large projects - you're obviously already very wealthy.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The parent post did say "to a level of quality that far surpasses the demands of regular popular music". Not a very high bar, and certainly not as high as you're setting.
OSx86 FTW
The parent post did say "to a level of quality that far surpasses the demands of regular popular music". Not a very high bar, and certainly not as high as you're setting.
The point is that his observation about whether and how you can make certain types of recordings/images at home has nothing do to, whatsoever, with whether it's reasonable for someone else to rip off that work afterwards. If you want to give it away to promote your other ventures, that's fantastic. But that's up to you, not the person who simply wants it whether you've put a price on it or not.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Stop bringing the straw man of movies into this. Some movies are worthy of seeing in a theater. I will pay for that. No one but you brought up movies. We're talking of music.
Stop? Why? YOU'RE the one that's bringing up the issue of producing something first, and then collecting money for it after the fact as people enjoy it, and saying that's a bad thing. A film could be shown millions of times after it's been produced. So what if YOU will pay for that. You know perfectly well that plenty of people who rip of music rip of movies, too, for exactly the same reason: they want it, and don't feel like paying for their entertainment. Are you saying that someone who spends millions of dollars to make a film should only be able to earn their money when the film is played in a huge, ugly, energy-inefficient building which you have to drive to in order to use, but that if the film is ripped off and played on a 60-inch plasma in front of your couch, then that's just too bad for the film maker?
There's simply no way you can be so intellectually dishonest as to think there's any meaningful philosophical separation between a laboriously created audio recording and a laboriously created film. The fact that you're pretending there is shows how craven you're being in defense of being able to rip off music.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
No, its simply that its a reasonable "performance" to see a film. There is an experience that I am unable to provide myself. I don't own a 40' diagonal screen. I don't own a 1000W 13 channel digital stereo system.
Like I said in another spot here, its not about what you think is intellectually honest, I'm speaking to the economic realities these companies/performers should deal with. If they don't, they'll be bankrupt. Just because its wrong to copy music/movies doesn't stop people from doing it, so you need to monetize your business in a way that others cannot easily provide themselves.
The basic numbers of cost/benefit analysis make copying music/movies worthwhile even given the court judgments that the MAFIAA have gotten. As long as that balance remains, the artists need to deal with the economic realities and adjust their business models. The road is littered with businesses who didn't change their models to deal with reality.
So wax philosophical all you want about what's right and wrong, all the while these companies are wasting their money screaming against the market forces that are quickly showing them to be outmoded. Innovate or die.
My Babylon