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Gene Simmons Blames College Kids For Music Industry Woes
drcagn writes "Gene Simmons has blasted 'college' kids and claims that they have destroyed the music industry, with the labels also to blame for not properly suing them out of existence when they had the chance. When asked about Radiohead and Trent Reznor's recent support of a different direction in music distribution, he says "that's not a business model that works. I open a store and say 'Come on in and pay whatever you want.' Are you on f---ing crack?" When asked about music being free and making money off of merchandise, he says, "The most important part is the music. Without that, why would you care?" even though earlier in the interview he brags that he believes that KISS's merchandise is more profitable than Elvis's or the Beatles.'"
"If you're not a Liberal when you're 18 you have no heart. If you're not a Conservative by the time you're 40, you have no brain." --Winston Churchill (at least according to the first Google hit I found).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Because Gene Simmons certainly is.
Someone who was always about the merch and not the music would complain. Unless of course he's missing his weekly coke-money that came in from his risiduals which have all but dried up. Or perhaps the band just sucked and the kids have moved on 30 plus years later. I love the fact that industry that made most of it's money on the backs of the youth market has all but watched that market not only walk away but become outright hostile when sued (imagine that).
In other news of the worthy for Gene and his ilk - water is wet amazingly enough.
This is not the first stupid thing Mr. Simmons has said or done.
In a later Fresh Air interview, satirist Al Franken related to Terry Gross his own encounter with Gene Simmons. According to Franken, he was awaiting a racquetball partner at a club when Simmons, whom Franken had not recognized, challenged him to a match, stating "I'll kick your ass" only to suffer an embarrassing loss to Franken. Simmons responds by calling for another match and when Franken indicates that since his racquetball partner has arrived, he can't play Simmons again, Simmons responds by making loud "bock, bock, bock" chicken sounds. Franken then offers to play Simmons with $500 at stake, at which Simmons walks away.[3][4]Franken tells Terry not to blame herself for her experience with Simmons, and that Simmons behavior at the racquetball made him "the most awful person I've ever met."
It's clear what Gene Simmons' priorities are.
;)
Oh, besides being a greedy bastard.
Disclaimer: I do not read EW -- I just remembered that quote from a guitar magazine awhile back
The headline says it all.
"Music *industry* woes".
Music, itself -- the part that involves people getting up on stage and singing/playing/whatever, and maybe selling recordings if they're good enough -- is doing just fine.
People still write songs and play them, and will keep on doing so independent of the success or failure of any particular method by which others profit off of them.
Seriously. There is a story about this on Slashdot at least every other day with no actual new legal/economic/industry developments, resulting in the exact same comments and arguments rehashed. Yes, I know I can just ignore it. Yes, I must be new here. But what's wrong with some constructive criticism of Slashdot?
FWIW I think the only way we'll see the stories disappear is if we stop reading and commenting on them (which means /. loses ad revenue and will stop posting them).
I would have enjoyed a few KISS songs on how The Man is being let down by "college kids". "Obey the law or be sued" would make for a catchy refrain.
Everyone in the old guard says that digital distribution won't work. They watch CD sales slip away and think it's because of piracy, when it's actually the old business model falling apart. Sue college kids...Yeah, that'll get sales up. People are done buying 13 tracks of crap for the one song they like. The future is a la carte. Guys like Gene Simmons can either sink or swim, though granted I doubt he could sell his music to anyone under 40 anyway.
-R
This is they guy who will sue your ass off if you try and make a documentary about Kiss cover bands.
Luckily I don't know enough Kiss to fit 'sue' into a song title. Slow news night, I guess.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
the greedier they get.
I don't know much about Kiss, but I imagine he's getting to that age where he wants to tour less (and thus make less merchandise sales) and thus would like to live off royalties.
And I think he's generally right that pirates need to be taken to court and prosecuted. This is a far better alternative than DRM, which hurts legal users too. Prosecute the criminals. I don't think that the slashdot audience can be self-consistent if it's both opposed to DRM and to prosecuting criminals.
--
Get started with microcontrollers today!
Gene Simmons also advocates public executions for drugs. If it weren't for drugs how could half his fans endure his music?
The only reason why gold is expensive is because we all agree that it is. There's no real use for it, except we all agree and abide by the idea that gold costs a certain amount per ounce. As soon as you give people the choice to deviate from it, you have chaos and anarchy. And that's what going on. Hmmm...not certain if I follow his logic.
Seeing as how my first thought on reading the summary was 'who is gene simmons', I think its fairly safe to say the final score is:
College Kids 1, Retarded Old Drag Queen 0.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
So he wants to base his business model around suing college kids for downloading songs? Maybe if the recording industry focused more on innovation than lawsuits they wouldn't be in this mess.Everyone and their mother told them that the cd was a dead end, and yet they dragged their feet. Now, they can't catch up.
why is it morally wrong?
copyright law was intended to encourage artists to create new work by granting them a temporary monopoly on their work.
with mass-reproducible art forms - music, photography, print, film, industries were created which took copyright away from the content creators
once the copyrights have been acquired, the industry big-wigs have repeatedly bribed government officials and law makers into extending copyright protection to ridicules terms so they cab squeeze every penny out of each copyright they own, while the creator makes next to nothing from their work.
so, is it morally right for large corporations to bend laws and buy-out politicians to allow their business model to work?
is it right for laws to protect corporations over the rights of private citizens?
as a private citizen, I believe the current situation is unjust, and I believe that a moral person has a moral obligation to fight unjust laws. But I also come from a country where blank media is taxed, to compensate the artists. so I steal as much content as I can. I've got to get my money's worth.
I am a content creator myself, and I have been inhibited by these oppressive copyright laws.
-I only code in BASIC.-
As for myself: Because I disagree with the idea that someone who has created some content has the exclusive right to control distribution of that content. In short, I believe copyright as it works today does not benefit society, and should be radically changed. I believe there is no such thing as "intellectual property", because anything anyone will ever create ultimately builds on stuff that person has picked up from the environment and people around him/her. This does not mean there is nothing called originality, individual creativity and skill certainly counts for something. However, copyright removes, for an unjustifiably long timespan, content is withheld from the public domain where it would otherwise be used as a foundation for new and better content.
Of course, there are certain pieces of content that cost huge sums of money to create and where the creator will likely not go through the trouble unless he/she has some hope of return on investment. Certain types of software certainly fall into this category. Thus some sort of compromise is in order: I would propose that current copyright law is reduced to 5 years and that copying for noncommercial purposes is legalized. This would make selling pirated software, music etc illegal but permit filesharing.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
I once had a small business (really more of a hobby than a major enterprise -- something to bring in some extra wampum) in which I sold unusual esoteric merchandise to a small group of fanatics (I think at most I had a few hundred folks on my mailing list). Sales were down and the economy was bad, so one month I did a "name you own price" special -- you tell me what you want and what you think is a fair price and we have a deal. And I had a higher net profit in that month than any other that year. Apropos of nothing, perhaps, as I know every business and industry is different, but the basic point is that often it is the unconventional business model that turns out to be the most successful. The more set you are in your ways, the more you stand to lose as the world passes you by.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
There's something very basic in humans that less us understand the concept of "mine" and "yours", and apply it to physical objects. But what about ideas? Intellectual property is much more difficult for most people to wrap their minds around. For example, you don't understand it either. "Downloading stuff that you didn't pay for" is not stealing. Stealing is a criminal act where you deprive someone of the use or enjoyment of property. Making a copy of a work is not criminal, nor does it deprive the copyright owner of anything. It can be against the wishes of the copyright owner, and the copyright owner can assert that you inflicted damages, but it is not stealing, just as hijacking an aircraft is not committing insurance fraud.
So, we've got property rights that are agreed upon by a society, or so we think, and some of those, few people really seem to understand, and yet affect everybody. Worse, these are relative young "rights". Copyrights came in with mass printing and were built to combat mass printing. With the cost of duplication practically nil, and the means of communication readily available, Copyright law, as it is now, is just impractical: it's designed for mass infringement cases, not as a means of generating revenue.
On the one hand, human behavior in these matters has not changed since the beginning of written communication: people copy what interests them, and don't immediately grasp the notion of paying for an instantion of an idea (they do, however, immediately grasp the importance of paying someone to produce ideas). On the other hand, we have a handful of companies with a business model based on the high cost of mass production and distribution confronted with a change to an environment of cheap distribution and individualized production. And there's no worse citizen than a fading elite. The music industry in particular made this worse by focusing on saturating the market with a few insipid "hits", and overexposing the listeners: to the average person, that song that they're hearing several times a day isn't worth anything in itself.
So to answer your question: nobody's saying downloading music without paying for it is ok. I say that, yes, downloading music without paying for is ok, when the copyright holders make it available for free.
It is wrong, and illegal, but it isn't stealing.
Stealing and copyright infringement are covered by different laws and they have different effects on the victims of the crimes and society in general, they are not the same thing.
That doesn't make copyright infringement right. However, there needs to be some flexibility here.
For example, I generally download an album before I buy it. If I like what I hear I go out and buy the CD, if not, I delete what I downloaded. If I can't hear something before buying it I probably won't buy it because I've bought too many CDs I thought were going to be good and turned out to be complete crap. And what's wrong with this? Consider it promotion for the bands - if their music is good then it makes them more money because I'm more likely to spend my money on CDs I _know_ are good rather than taking a gamble.
Can anybody fill me in as to why downloading music without paying for it is ok?
It isn't. But can you fill me in as to why the following behaviour is ok:
At the moment, the quality of the official product is frequently substandard compared to the blackmarket product. People generally like paying and staying within the law, but when it starts to become impossible to use the legally purchased product, is it any surprise that people stop buying it?
http://blog.nexusuk.org
First off, some people need to RTFA, he is NOT talking about himself, but about new bands who dream of success who he claims will not be able to do it (or at least not the way he defines success, getting really rich of your image).
So?
Times change. Once you had far more theathers and far more places where plays could be held. Then the movie theather arrived and put countless performers out of business. Were once a musician was playing in bar now there is a sound installation. Where once there was an entertainer, now there is a big screen TV.
Movie theathers too took a hit with the arrival of television. Live tv broadcasts took a hit when VCR's arrived and even more with DVR.
Coal mines are gone in holland, because we discovered a gas field and bam, lots of people unemployed. Daf cars (trucks still exists) is gone and again, people out of a job because less and less people are needed to make cars and there are countries that can do it cheaper.
IT is being outsourced as are call center jobs.
The next generations job prospects are going to be different then today's.
In a way, he says that himself, no band has managed to overtake KISS in merchandising. HE himself killed the dream off new bands in becoming the next kiss because he refuses to step aside. Shame on him.
Lets say that not a single musician can make money anymore. Unlikely but lets assume it for a second, not a single person can make a single penny creating music. So?
Where is it written that you should be able too? I am by training a baker, I am fairly good at it, (but not exceptionally so) and I left the business because it is a dead end. People buy their bakery goods from the factory and opening a new bakery shop is far to expensive and legally impossible. Zoning restrictions, a bakery works at night and produces noise and smells while by its nature it has to be in a residential area. That don't mix no more. The hygience laws have become so strict that it costs a fortune to fit out a new building and the costs (and shortage) of skilled labourers, plus the restrictions of what they are allowed to do means you need a massive amount of very expensive equipment, which because the demand for small scale equipment has plummeted is increasingly expensive.
In short, society has killed the small baker shop. Of the people in my entire school only a handfull are still in the trade, a most of them because they inheritied the business from their parents.
Do I see Gene Simmons give a shit about that? No. Why then should I give a shit if some other person has to give up his dream of being a paid artist and find another way of making a living.
Lots of people try to make an argument that music sharing doesn't hurt the industry or that artist can compensate or that there are different methods of selling music.
I like to take it one step further, why should society give a shit wether music creators can make money? Do we really want to make rigid laws for all people just so a few can make a living the job they want? I want to bake bread. Should YOU be forced to go to a seperate store in your area for your bread rather then go to the supermarket? Should for instance the dutch be forced to serve pie again on their birthday from the local bakery rather then "vlaai" (a kind of pie coming originally from a dutch province that comes from a chain of stores that get supplied by a factory).
If you say no to that, then you should say no to everything the RIAA wants as well. Society should not have to bend over backwards just some people can make music for a living. Get a job.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As an intellectual exercise, let's stick to Gene's flawed analogy. Gold has a price because there's this idea that people "agree" that it should have a certain price. Now let's examine Radiohead's experiment. They're saying "you name a price, and we'll charge you that much". And so on an individual basis, each fan is agreeing with Radiohead that the price of the new album should be X dollars. Seems to me that Radiohead's model is exactly what he's arguing for. So tell me, what's wrong with giving away music?
Regardless, somebody needs to let Mr. Simmons know that he's living in a brave new world, and unless he has a burning desire to move in with the dodos, he needs to realize that the old models might not work anymore. That, or maybe he's trying really hard for the arrogant, self-righteous bastard image.
It's the same argument you hear from the hardest of the hardcore FOSS guys - that ALL products that can be reproduced electronically - music, code, games, books, presumably movies - should be available for free, and that the artists should support themselves either by asking for handouts or by selling something marginally related to their art.
I'd argue that rock stars don't WANT to shill t-shirts, or they'd be in a t-shirt company. And honestly, if you're looking for LESS crappy pop music, do you really want to encourage them to base their economics on having faces that look good on lunch boxes?
Same for programmers, of course. While the line is blurred in many cases, at heart I'd say many coders don't WANT to work as "support" for their own product. I mean, isn't that the basic coder stereotype, impatience with people who don't understand technology?
The paradigm breaks down even more for novelists. A novelist's entire skill set revolves around writing stuff, and anything he writes is gonna take ten seconds to copy and upload, so without "intellectual property" of SOME sort he's basically SOL.
FORTUNATELY, (and here's where I hopefully mitigate the -1 Troll points I foresee for this post), merchandising ISN'T the only way musicians can make money aside from CD profits. They also have that little niche called "live performances," which sustained them for a good 99.9% of human history.
I found a copy of Simmons' biography in a second hand shop and while it's an interesting read, he's a pretty dull guy. No vices apart from womanising, and it's fairly obvious that he saw music as a way of avoiding the day job, which he's managed to do for 35 years. It comes as no surprise that he mistrusts the way that the music business is going, and can't see the difference between file sharing and paid-for downloading. He is the epitome of senior music industry management - late 50s, tour jacket wearing, stuck in that notion of selling 'product'. Not being able to buy Kiss online won't trouble his income much, and it probably doesn't occur to him that more of his income these days comes from touring, merchandise and just being Gene Simmons. I can imagine that he was a slow adopter of the CD format too, and probably made sure that he got a good deal out of them before Kiss got digitised for the first time.
they got a heck of a lot more per album for themselves doing it that way than you get with your rip-off recording contract...
/me thinks he's just jealous he didn't come up with the idea himself... cos if he tries it now, he'll just look like a me-too wannabee...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Well if you start suing whoever is listening to your music then pretty much you would be left all alone to listen to it.
Music and art theft was and is a problem.
Radiohead has matured and has shown the way. Apple is showing the path.
Bands like KISS are still retarted and will always be. These guys want kids to pay $29.99 for a CD which contain 20 songs out of which 2 are good and rest are piss poor.
Now that kids have the power to resist such payments, and instead pay only 99 cents for each track they like and refuse to pay 29.99 for crap, KISS hates them.
KISS: Good riddance.
The world would be a better place if a band like you disappears.
Oh, and stop comparing yourself to Gold. Gold is valuable for 5000 years and still retains its lustre and value any day in any country.
Your songs are worth the crap that you are tomorrow.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
"with mass-reproducible art forms - music, photography, print, film, industries were created which took copyright away from the content creators"
Or to look at it another way, with mass-producible art forms, e.g. CD audio recordings it allowed musicians to create high quality products using their own resources for which they could retain copyright and sell directly to their public, i.e. via the web or at gigs. These people would invest considerable amounts of their own time and money in this creative endevour and it is a reasonable idea that they should be able to control its reproduction to gain financially.
The fact that it's so easy to replicate/steal, makes you wonder should it really cost that much?
If there was a machine that can replicate a 500,000 dollar car for 100 dollars....wouldn't you be asking yourself....should I really pay 499,900 dollars just for design?...should cars cost so much?
Did he write this or speak this? Are the capital letters from a citation that's accurate (Bartlett's Familiar Quotations?)
In any case the quote has always annoyed me... but not as much as the conservatives who quote it (with a "when you're older and wiser, you'll come around" attitude about them). As I'm getting older I'm paying more attention to politics and getting more involved, and probably even more liberal than I was at 18.
I've also taken it to mean that when you're 40, you have money and property you want to be greedy about and protect, and so don't care as much about the welfare of your fellow man. Likewise I'm better off than at 18, and it sure doesn't deter me from wanting to make the world better overall.
"I said Hey! You! Get off of my lawn" damn kids. . .
James A. Watson - Sluggy Freelance Microcircuit Design Engineer
"Stealing" is depriving someone of property, not gaining something for free. Downloading is copyright infringement, not stealing, as no-one is losing anything. The only way you can say someone's losing something is saying that maybe each and every person who downloads the music will no longer buy the album in a store - but if they're not going to buy it anyway, no-one's losing out. The music industry is different from nearly every other industry out there, as it exists only to further itself, and not that which it claims to promote - the artists. Artists get hardly anything from record sales, due to the labels using out-dated payment schemes based on low-yield vinyl production, which means artists get most of their income from live performances and merchandise. If you take the record labels out of the picture, the bands get just as much money as they did before, the bands get even more exposure (as everyone's downloading their music, thinking "wow this is great!" and going to their shows, netting the artists a cool $20 or more (compared to the cents an album sale gets), or the people listening don't like their music, and instead spend that $20 on a band they do like. You end up with artists getting paid a decent amount for their work, and music fans finding music they absolutely love, and getting to see these bands/artists live for the money they save on buying overpriced albums that only serve to fund the cartels controlling the sale of this promotional material (as that's what albums are - advertising for live gigs).
Gene Simmons is the product of the 80s hair band era where record companies were making money hand over fist. That era is completely gone, but his brain still functions with that time period in mind. In short, he's obsolete.
God gave rock 'n' roll to everyone... except for college students, who are crooks.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
You torrent everything we've got
You keep downloading and your disk gets hot
You drive us wild, we'll go sue crazy
We'll twist the facts till they go in a spin
The lawsuits just begun, we'll get you in
You drive us wild, we'll go sue crazy
You keep on shoutin', you keep on shoutin'
I wanna obey the law all night, and not get sued every day
I wanna obey the law all night, and not get sued every day
I wanna obey the law all night, and not get sued every day
I wanna obey the law all night, and not get sued every day
We keep on saying you'll be fined in a while
Smoking crack and opening shops just ain't my style
You drive us wild, we'll go sue crazy
Our lawyers demand everything you've got
Baby, baby thats quite a lot
And you drive us wild, we'll go sue crazy
You keep on shoutin', you keep on shoutin'
I wanna obey the law all night, and not get sued every day
I wanna obey the law all night, and not get sued every day
I wanna obey the law all night, and not get sued every day
I wanna obey the law all night, and not get sued every day
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/01/22/8397980/index.htm
Country Music is still profitable...
In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the c
It _is_ morally OK. Selling copies of a disk is wrong, because you're making money off someone else's work. Making a copy is sharing. Sharing is friendly and generous.
Should I be sued if I make a copy of a cd for a friend who couldn't afford to buy it anyway? Should I be sued only if he could afford it? Why don't we sue everyone who's ever taped a tv show?
If I want a friend to listen to this great song I discovered, I invite him home to listen to it. If he's currently living abroad, should I refrain from sending it by e-mail because it suddenly becomes evil?
I think what you fail to understand is that the music industry is not in the business of selling music, it is in the business of selling a media container, a physical object on which the music is stored. The artists let them sell these containers in exchange for a share of the profit.
For a long time capturing the music on a physical object was an expensive process, as was duplicating said object, wich justified the relatively high price of records. Modern technology makes recording and duplicating cheap and easy, so these people (music industry) simply have nothing to sell anymore.
As for the artists, they will be just fine. There's plenty of ways to make money off your music. You can play live shows, you can offer it for download with ads on the page, you can sell merchandise, you can sell a container that's desirable and expensive/hard to duplicate (a cd in a nice looking digipack, or with a poster or whatever)... And yes, there was music and professional musicians before the invention of the gramophone.
Say funeral arrangements. People do indeed provide that service, and we pay them for it. Now say that a medical breakthrough happens and dying becomes a thing of the past. No more dead, no more need for burials. Should YOU then be legally forced to die, just so funeral directors can continue making a living supplying that service?
What I am saying is that if musicians can't make a living making music, they should stop doing that. Demand and supply, this does NOT mean, as you seem to think, that if you supply that you are entitled to a demand.
Times change. Monks were once able to support their monestary by handcopying books. With the invention of the printing press, that job vanished. Should society be forced to stand still just so a handfull can enjoy the living they once did.
Get this straight, I am not saying music should be free. I am saying that if people don't want to pay for your music, don't make it.
Perhaps I spend too much time around performance artists. This is a group of people that feel they deserve tax money for their art. They need the tax money because nobody is willing to pay for it.
I am going to introduce a law, and you must follow it, when ever you come across a street performer you MUST donate 10 dollars. You saw it, you gonna pay for it.
Offcourse that is silly, as silly as people thinking they have a right to make a living in any job they feel like. I would LOVE to make a living as a gigolo for beautifull young ladies. Ain't going to happen and if the world isn't willing to bend over backwards for my needs then I sure as hell am not going to give a shit about some kid who wants to become rich making music in world that doesn't want to pay for music. Find another job, do it for free. I had to do that, I am forced to just do my amazing love making as a hobby with no more compensation that a "job well done".
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Lately I've been forced to listen to the radio at a lot. Between NPR, user-supported radio, and the standard fare, I have come to the conclusion that the downfall of the music industry can be blamed on one beast - radio. Why is that you ask?
Think about it. You listen to FM radio all day and what do you hear? The same 10 songs (depending upon genre and station) over and over. So anyone wanting to hear new music (or even older music they have never heard) is out of luck. So what happens is people like me who gave up on the radio years ago quit buying music. We just listen to the same old stuff over and over again. We really have little idea that there might be something new and wonderful out there because the radio stations won't let us here it.
Oh sure there might be stations in larger cities, or on XM radio...but barring that you are sequestered to the same ol' mix of the same ol' songs day in and day out.
Oh and it doesn't help that there is hardly anything new and wonderful out there these days. The radio waves are filled with talentless hacks and CEO-created boy and girl bands, increasingly angry and ego-maniacal rap, depressing country...you get the idea.
So maybe the recording industry should stop trying to lay blame on music pirates because they are typically only pirating old music because it's the only thing worth a damn anymore. Instead they should point the finger of blame back at themselves. Why?
1) They bleed the musicians of all their profit.
2) They only produce what they think are "sure things" which are, ultimately not. In that process they side step possible, actual talent!
3) They create a situation where radio stations can only play what the music industry considers a "sure thing" thus filling the air waves with the same ol', played out music that we were tired of hearing a decade ago.
Maybe the whole idea behind the advent of radio stations should come back to haunt us - to play good music. To play music worthy of buying. But that's not going to happen because there is no profit in that.
And that's what it's all about you hokey pokey people.
Blah!
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
Let's remember a little history - I'm a geezer geek, so I'll help. AFAIR, Kiss hit the stage in makeup to cover up their day jobs - and it was popular knowledge that one of them was an accountant and they were all white-collar, up and comer types.
Cheech and Chong, in their Alice Bowie schtick, referred to them lyrically as, "And I only know three chords!!" (Or was that Bachman, Turner, Overweight? Another distinction without a difference.)
I knew of NO ONE at the college I attended in the early '70s ever owning, or even tolerating listening to, Kiss.
One of the Marsalis brothers put it succinctly - it's a thing called rhythm. Young or old, college or not, there's a whole planet full of people that get that simple thing.
Then, there's the rest of the polyester-wearing, mass-media slurping ugly crowd, served by "rock" bands like Kiss (apologies if reading rock and Kiss in the same sentence makes you as sick to read it as it did me to write it). Kiss "music" (translation: drek) seems targeted to only increase the population of the slurping Eloi - it's just part of the 8-track in the brain, endless loop program that most idiots seem to have running around in their heads. I'm sure there's an industry for that, but in the day, we referred to it as Madison Avenue, not the music industry.
Eugene's only real problem (may we call him Eugene?) is that he's going to be the first to whine when his brane-programming revenue is threatened.
Here's another happy slogan from an old college student of the '70s: When the revolution comes, he's going to be among the first with his back to a brick wall being offered the choice of a blindfold - or not.
Hope this clarifies things from a certain point of view.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Not that I don't believe you, a quick look at the Wikipedia pages on DAT and SCMS (DRM used on DAT) mentions RIAA actions - but honestly, I never knew about it or noticed it at the time. Until you mentioned it and I looked it up, I actually had no clue that DAT even had a form of DRM - I used it solely for original recordings.
A quick explanation for those that don't know - DAT is a digital audio tape, using PCM and roughly the size of a regular audio cassette. ADAT is similar, but uses something the size of a VHS tape and is capable of recording/playing 8 channels - until digital audio workstations and interfaces were common ADAT was the de facto standard for use in multitrack recording.
Thanks for bringing that up, it brought me back to a time many years ago, and taught me a few things along the way
Just because Gene Simmons can lick his own ass while playing guitar, he thinks he's qualified to comment on anything else?
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
I would hesitate to look at Gene Simmons for any kind of intelligent statement on anything.
I never liked KISS.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I think he got so angry that he might have dribbled a bit over the top of his Depends®.
Once something has changed that's it. You will need to lock up a lot of people to change the situation.
It's the same with alcohol and drugs, once they've taken hold it takes a very determined leader to try and exstinguish such things. It was tried in the US in the early 1900s and failed.
Gene is old school, he simply doesn't understand the way people think these days. I would love to see him survive on the money available to an average college student.
Well, Gene Simmons is right, sorta, when he points out the core issue:
The only reason why gold is expensive is because we all agree that it is. There's no real use for it, except we all agree and abide by the idea that gold costs a certain amount per ounce. As soon as you give people the choice to deviate from it, you have chaos and anarchy.
No, he isn't. Gold has utility beyond holding arbitrary worth. It's responsible for jacking up the price of certain cables by 1000% for its presence on connectors. It's also GREAT for plating things with. Plus, it's really dense so it's good for throwing at stuff, too. Plus it's really useful for making idols out of. AND you can look really cool when you get a gold coin and you bite it to make sure it's real. So I have to take exception to Mr. Simmons' words here and to your endorsement of them. Since I can't disagree with Mr. Simmons to his face, I'll take it out on you.
http://xkcd.com/386/
If you're not a Conservative by the time you're 40, you have no money.
A liberal wants you to give your money to the government so the government can give it to the poor.
A conservative wants you to give your money to the government so the governmnet can give it to him. He says he's against taxes, but he's only against himself paying taxes. If you don't pay yours he's up in arms.
The guy you see risking his life and spending his sweat to build that road isn't getting the government money. His employer sits back in his air-conditioned office and pays hime a pittance from the vast fortunes government gave him to build the road.
Wealth isn't created in the board room or on wall street. Wealth is created in the factory, behind the fry cook's stove, in the programmer's cube, on the construction site. The wealthy don't create wealth, they aggregate it.
America is strange in that its "conservative" party the Republicans would have you believe that they are Christians, when Christianity is decidedly anti-capital.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
"That's not a business model that works."
Truer words were never spoken.
Here's the truth also, Mr. Simmons. No business model will work because in the age of computerized publication, content is no longer a business. Period. It's too easy to produce when your average high-school student, with a job as a checkout bagger, has access to cheap (and complete) digital publication and production tools.
I can do the job of what used to be a $1M+ recording studio/pressing plant on a $500 PC, and post it to a bittorrent on a $25 Internet account, and retain full rights. This means I can't make money off of the music alone. QED.
This brings us back to square one, as you say, "The most important part is the music. Without that, why would you care?"
Right again, Mr. Simmons. Music is no longer a business. Trading oil futures is a business. Music is not. It is about the music, again. All you businessmen need to find a business to get into. I suspect you were never actually a musician, but I could be wrong.
Gutenberg put a lot of preachers and wandering storytellers out of business too. He put the entire Catholic Church out of business, in fact, in the space of about 100 years. This is the kind of change we are talking about here. This is big. I think we should do it with fewer "Inquisitions" this time, if we can avoid them, as you so stupidly encourage.
It's also quite normal. The world changes. There is no longer a business model for making money off of content. End result: There's a mountain of crap out there and it's harder to find quality stuff, but there's a banquet of quality under that mountain, so you must make money some other way. There's no longer any money in content alone.
You want a business model? Reliably help people sift through all the crap. You'll be in direct competition with Google, of course.
Sad but true. Your day is over, Gene. Adapt or die already.
--
Toro
If you're unsure that Gene Simmons really isn't an idiot, read this transcript of his interview with Terry Gross on NPR:
http://www.rof.net/wp/carriep/TERRYGRO.HTM
Terry Gross: Are you trying to say to me that all that matters to you is money?
Gene Simmons: I will contend, and you try to disprove it, that the most important thing as we know it on this planet, in this plane, is, in fact, money. Want me to prove it?
Terry Gross: Go ahead.
Gene Simmons: The first thing you need -- besides air, which so far is free, and by the way if you went scuba diving, you're paying for air -- the other thing besides that is food, it's what we need to survive. I don't know what other tool I would use besides money to buy it. Although, as a woman of course you have the ability to sell your body, then get the money, and then, with that, get food. But ultimately money is part of it. And so --
Terry Gross: [laughs] You -- you -- you are weird.
Gene Simmons: Really? How do you get food?
Terry Gross: Well, not by selling my body. But --
Gene Simmons: But that's a choice you have that I don't. But getting to the money part, money is the single most important thing on the planet, including the notion that uh, love gives you everything. That's a lot of hogwash. Because although I subscribe to the romantic notion of life --
Terry Gross: Well, let's cut to the chase. How much -- how much money do you have?
Gene Simmons: Gee, a lot more than NPR.
Terry Gross: Oh, I know. I -- you're very defensive on money, aren't you?
Gene Simmons: No, I'm not, I'm just trying to show you that there's a big world out there, and reading books is wonderful. I've certainly read, well, perhaps as many as you have, but there's a delusional kind of notion that runs rampant in --
Terry Gross: Wait, wait, could we just get something straight?
Gene Simmons: Of course.
Terry Gross: I'm not here to prove that I'm smart --
Gene Simmons: Not you --
Are you sure about that? I've never heard of "theft of service" and can't find it anywhere in my states' laws. It seems like in the case you mention there's a much simpler and less contorted charge that would also land you in jail -- trespassing.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
GENE SIMMONS NEVER HAD A PERSONAL COMPUTER WHEN HE WAS A KID.
How do we know? We know because our own well-documented research has shown conclusively that a child who lacks his own personal computer during those earliest school years will very probably grow up to be a bass player in a heavy metal rock band who wears women's fishnet pantyhose and sticks his tongue down to his kneecaps. Just like Gene Simmons.
Your child's future doesn't have to look like this.
The Banana Junior 6000 Self-portable Personal Computer System, complete with its optional software - Bananawrite, Bananadraw, Bananafile, and Bananamanager - is just what your four-year-old needs to compete in today's cut-throat world of high tech and high expectations.
The Banana Junior 6000...Buy one before it's too late. Gene's mother wishes she had.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
'Come on in and pay whatever you want.' Are you on f---ing crack?"
He's right about that... the "pay what you want" model won't work long term. It works now because it is novel, because the fans want to support the artists in this movement, and because nobody knows what everyone else pays... yet. But it would devolve into people just taking stuff because they'd feel like suckers whenever they found out they paid more than average. "Pay what you want" would end up like every other soft shareware project.
But that's not the point: the point is cheaper a-la-carte music, where more of the money goes to the artist and less to a marketing/distribution corporation. The price can still be set, like at iTunes. But there's finally a little competition in music distribution industry (thanks to illegal downloads) and as with most competition, the consumer wins.
Cheers.
Gene Simmons saying "It's about the music." I thought it was about the merch and pyro?
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Sue the college kids out of existence? What, all of them? Aside from being impossible, the economic consequences would be pretty devastating.
I didn't read the article (sue me), but I have never found "are they on crack" to be a logically-sound attack or defense for an argument. Sounds like he can't get his head around the peculiarities of digital distribution, nor the reasons why such peculiarities could potentially make such a business model functional. Even if it turns out that this business model is doomed to fail, it won't be for any of the reasons that Gene Simmons would offer.
Times change. Cope.
I can speak to one commercial use of DAT... Before moving to a randomized playlist controlled by computer, a radio station where I grew up prerecorded shows for their late night hours on DAT and had 2 decks they swapped between. They recorded new tapes about once a month to keep up with what was popular, randomized the order they played the tapes in every night, and just had some poor bastard sit in the studio and transfer between the two for the graveyard shift.
Actually, I'd say that would be a great job - just having to push a button or two and change a tape every hour or so - but because of FCC regulations against broadcasting dead air, they actually had to listen to the crap that was being broadcast to make sure everything was working as it should. Poor sap.
Well, that, and I had actually had a job where I was paid to sleep 7 out of 8 hours a day unless there was an emergency. Kind of hard to beat that, even if the pay was horrible.
>Musicians make money from live performances, not record sales. Records are advertisements for their live shows.
This is a stupid notion that will not die. Musicians do make money from record sales. Sometimes, their percentage is low, but thats because they probably sold the rights to publishing houses which do make money off record sales. If there was no protection on published music, musicians would not be able to do that. Indirectly or directly, lack of record sales hurts musicians.
Fact is that their works, under copyright law, are protected. Even if artists never made a dime off of recorded music, there is still the fact that pirating music is illegal, and that *only* owners of copyrighted content have a right to decide the method of distribution for their works.
>Records are advertisements for their live shows.
No they aren't. Records are protected works. They could be used as advertisements for some artist's live shows, but thats up to the artist to decide - not you.
Don't assume that you're getting all that stuff from federal income tax. Most of that is allocated to paying off loans, so you're actually mostly servicing the banks, not The People.
All those nifty civilized things your tax money gets that don't count as usury or murderous are primarily coming from the plethora of other less obvious taxes: property, goods/services, state income tax, etc.
If we had all the money back that we've flushed down the Iraq toilet, who knows what all nifty stuff I'd be getting for my investment in this nation?Yeah, I wonder just how effective half a trillion dollars would be if applied to international pro-democracy propaganda, educational support programs, donations to civil society, and even providing support for local pro-democracy institutions? You know, empowering local Iraqis and Afghanis to rise up and build an equitable system from the grassroots? I'm guessing 500 billion bucks buys a lot of freedom using non-violence-- if that's actually your goal. It's ten times the domestic annual education budget, so one could easily double the domestic budget, and 'educate' the world too.
Here's what Americans would have gotten out of such a radical foreign aid approach: goodwill, security, credibility, a stronger domestic civil sector, more freedom at home, less fear and twisting of the national political culture. Less opportunity for kleptocrat fascism at home. Very likely, actual modern democracies in target countries. A safer world, a smaller american military, fewer overseas bases and invasion forces. Less money and power flowing into Halliburton, Lockheed et.al., and a different track for the future, one that doesn't need FEMA preparing for martial law.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I would hesitate to look at Gene Simmons for any kind of intelligent statement on anything. I never liked KISS.
That is a fairly ignorant statement, personal opinions regarding his music prove nothing. If anything, a quick investigation of his career should demonstrate that he is highly intelligent and highly successful in areas of business.
Besides, doesn't the evidence prove him correct? Bands that were incredibly well known and highly regarded, thanks to the promotion of those evil record companies executing that old business model, chocked while experimenting with a new business model. What do you think will happen to new and unknown bands? Face it, artists have always needed sponsors, the royalty and churches in the past, the record companies in more recent times. Support directly from fans yields merely subsistence in the optimistic scenarios.
This was a band that was putting itself on kid's lunchboxes, launching a cartoon, and putting themselves in comic book form almost from the minute they formed. Gene Simmons has the gall to say "it's about the music" when his band concentrated much more on their marketting and pyrotechnics show than they EVER did their music, and when his whole shtick was to wear stylized makeup and create an on-stage persona that played to lip-synced tracks.
Who the f**k is he kidding?!?!
Gene Simmons is just a greedy old fart who is mad than he might take a hit on that monthly royalty check that he so richly undeserves. He's worried he might have to cut back on his "Jewel-Encrusted Ferarri" budget this year.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Radiohead and Reznor have more creativity in their little fingers than Simmons ever had.
Musical creativity does not indicate business sense. I believe that Simmons has adequately demonstrated that he does have far greater business sense. I wouldn't dismiss his insight so quickly, we are discussing a new business model.
Radiohead and Reznor have deviated from conventional rock mediocrity and at least been creative. Kiss just upset parents in the 70's and sang the music that now appears on MOR stations everywhere.
And your children/grandchildren will be saying that Radiohead and Reznor just upset parents in the 90s and merely appear on the oldies stations nowadays. Musicians sell rebellion to youth, they engage in the outrageous to establish credibility. The bar gets moved up and their antics become quaint in a couple of generations. Sorry, but Reznor will join Elvis and the Beatles in this regard. I'm not sure he will have their longevity though, he may be too closely tied with the culture of the 90s.
I would just like to point out that in all my years of reading Slashdot posts, yours is the single best post I have ever seen with regards to both eloquently explaining why copyright infringement is not the same thing as theft, legally, and also conceding the fact that it is still illegal and wrong. I predict many other posters will take you to task over what you said but you really nailed it perfectly.
Schnapple
People complain that KISS is not exactly great music. Of course not. This is the band that had to dress up in ridiculous costumes, employ every gimmick imaginable from fire breathing to smoking guitars to get peoples' attention. I'm amused at this point, that people don't realize Simmon's chauvinistic and anti-P2P comments are merely part of the same gimmicks he's always employed to get attention: do/say something obnoxious.
Simmons falls into the same category as Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly. The worse thing that can ever happen to them is to be ignored. If you really want him to be as irrelevant as he ultimately is, you'll ignore his idiotic rambling. Even his reality show is staged. It's all a farce and he's laughing at all of us for even taking the time to call him a douchebag.
I would hesitate to look at Gene Simmons for any kind of intelligent statement on anything.
Okay, admittedly, Shannon Tweed is only his "common law" wife, but she was the queen of the B-movies, back in the 1990's.
Her magnum opus, A Woman Scorned, is one of the epic B-movies of our era.
Check it out some time.
"with the labels also to blame for not properly suing them out of existence"
College kids are, and will be a higher priority then music industry. Hell, we can live without good music, (remember the 80s?), but we cannot, as a society, live without college kids.
Everybody Lies. But it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
I can basically do Decca Records circa 1934, or Motown circa 1965, on a $500 machine, right now. Not the masters, of course, but the end product that everyone listened to and loved. That's what I meant.
Nobody cares about the lost fidelity. Damn few can hear it. I happen to be one of those who can, but that doesn't mean that I'm blind to the realities of the popular music market. They're compressing most of the fidelity out of modern pop recordings now, precisely because people can't hear the difference.
Didn't the word "pressing" tip you off? Or perhaps you skipped over the words used to be. Re-read it. I was thinking of a studio and record pressing run circa 1965, played back on the technology of the age or through a transistor radio.
I can absolutely produce that sound on $500 worth of equipment.
--
Toro