Why the RIAA Really Hates Downloads

wtansill recommends the saga of Jeff Price, who traveled from successful small record label owner to successful Internet-era music distributor. His piece describes clearly what the major record labels used to be good for and why they are now good for nothing but getting in the way. "Allowing all music creators 'in' is both exciting and frightening. Some argue that we need subjective gatekeepers as filters. No matter which way you feel about it, there are a few indisputable facts -- control has been taken away from the 'four major labels' and the traditional media outlets. We, the 'masses,' now have access to create, distribute, discover, promote, share and listen to any music. Hopefully access to all of this new music will inspire us, make us think and open doors and minds to new experiences we choose, not what a corporation or media outlet decides we should want."

Comments

D'uh from these quarters too.

[The Ancients]

I wrote a (very) short piece on this a while ago, in response to an article on El' Reg.

Again, looking at the list of 'discoveries' there, and at the reasons given here, it's hard to believe that the industry hasn't already fallen over in a big screaming heap. The only thing propping it up thus far are multi-album recording contracts, and their McDonald's inspired ability to foist very average fair on to the average user.

In the last couple of years with GarageBand etc providing the ability for anyone to make reasonable music at home, the iTunes Music Store and it's ilk providing the ability for almost anyone to publish their work, and social networking sites providing the marketing (often viral), it's time these commercial dinosaurs went the way of their reptilian cousins did millions of years ago.

Re:D'uh from these quarters too.

[aproposofwhat]

Well, I'm sitting here right now listening to Youssou N'Dour's latest album - 'Rokku Mi Rokka', which hasn't been promoted at all in the UK (he's Senegalese, and spends what he doesn't need on various projects in Africa).

None of the Subjective Gatekeepers have led me to this music - it's my own choice to buy the CD and support the artist.

I don't personally mind having to have my own 'not crap' filter - I can tell within 10 seconds or so whether a piece of music is being played well, and my tastes run from Gregorian chant to rap - the style is less important than the execution.

Give me variety, and let me choose - and let the A&R men and the fat cigar smoking publishers starve.

Re:D'uh from these quarters too.

[edumacator]

I definitely do *not* have the time or inclination to wade through the previous 2,999 iterations of their crap to find something I like. I want someone else to do that for me.

I don't think this is really going to be a problem if the big labels go away. It would have been fifteen years ago, but the internet is set up to take their place as music taste sifters. I'm sure there would be plenty start ups to fill the void. I can imagine a thousand different services that would help filter the crap for you. In fact, since these services won't need to find music for the masses, they will be able to filter for niche markets. This could be a boon for everyone.

Re:D'uh from these quarters too.

[Jarik_Tentsu]

There will still be gatekeepers, but the new gatekeepers will be bloggers and other online communities that promote music they've heard and appreciate. I think a good example is the trance DJ, Armin Van Buuren. He mixes the weekly 2-hour trance mixes called "A State of Trance" which has tens of thousands, more likely even hundreds of thousands of downloads.

It's played on proper radio stations, but is also available free online from many, many places at around 192kbps. He becomes the 'gatekeeper' almost - putting together good selections of recent music that the audience can be exposed to - some of it is obscure, some of it are big trance releases, but in either case, it's one source where the public can filter through all the crap and freely be given a good choice of music.

Could this be a potentially good model for other things as well? Podcasts and radio shows becoming the next big thing - played both on real radio and available online? A State of Trance is a model that really, really works well - I wonder if things like this can be expanded to other genres...though, obviously certain genres and types of music - like post-rock concept albums, or really unique Progressive Metal bands, might suffer from the inability to be juxtaposed with other music.

~Jarik

Re:D'uh from these quarters too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, don't know about the US but song ringtones are huge in the UK mostly due to teenage girls who feel the need to have shitty R&B playing at all times. (Including on public transport, yay.) A few years ago some tune (by Girls Aloud or the Sugababes?) had the dubious honour of being the first to sell more copies as a ringtone than a single, and this trend has continued.

Re:D'uh from these quarters too.

[plover]

The problem is not "will I be able to find a good gatekeeper whose musical tastes I agree with", but one specific to FM radio and publicly broadcast music. There are simply a limited and finite number of frequencies available, and these reach many more people daily than the average Shoutcast stream. Highly specialized tastes in music target a tiny audience, but radio is broadcast to hundreds of thousands of diverse listeners, and has to appeal to a broader audience.

The radio audience is definitely different -- in many ways, they're more "captive." They're on their way to work in their cars, or agreeing on a shared radio station at the dentist's office, or playing a radio at an impromptu picnic. Frequently they're mobile, which for most citizens still means "no internet", or at least not enough with the bandwidth to play music.

In a car, that doesn't matter as much. iPods and podcasts can give that measure of control to people who think that choice of music is important. But most people don't care about their music enough to mess around with podcasts -- the "pop" or "country" station is good enough to meet their need for an auditory background during their commute. And for many people, the DJ with the morning news becomes a personal friend. Again, podcasts lack that touch unless you're extremely diligent with syncing your iPod every morning moments before heading out the door. (That's still way too much effort for the average listener.)

iPods also fail miserably in the case of crowds joined for reasons other than music appreciation. I promise you that there isn't enough music on my nephew's iPod that I could sit through for 30 seconds. (Actually, that's true for all the music choices of my nephews and nieces, and most of my siblings-in-law.) I'd likely sabotage the damn thing before the end of the first George Strait song. Similarly, my collection of electronica and trance would be nothing but noise to him. A "classic rock" station may be bland enough as to not offend either of us, but neither of us may have any classic rock on our iPods. So where do you find a classic rock station at the beach, or on a picnic, or in a car? The answer today is still broadcast radio.

Perhaps in this new world the role of gatekeeper doesn't have to be a hand-picked RIAA payola jockey, but there are only a handful of frequencies to fill, and the public still wants "generic bland" music readily available. How are those few gatekeepers/DJs selected? Who identifies the DJs for the mass markets?

Re:D'uh from these quarters too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Again, looking at the list of 'discoveries' there, and at the reasons given here, it's hard to believe that the industry hasn't already fallen over in a big screaming heap. The only thing propping it up thus far are multi-album recording contracts, and their McDonald's inspired ability to foist very average fair on to the average user.

I think you're making a big error in logic because you're not looking at the data closely enough. If you're comparing the music industry to McDonalds because of their mediocre products, it would be logical to also note that McDonalds makes bucketloads of money, presumably because consumers tend to like predictable, mediocre products.

Almost anybody can make a vastly superior burger at home, yet McDonalds thrives. It's not hard to find really good burgers in most any town, yet people keep buying Big Macs. Any high-quality, but rinky-dink band can offer their songs on their own web site with little effort, yet iTunes completely dominates. Independent bands can easily get their songs on iTunes, yet the latest major-label hits account for virtually all the sales.

As it turns out, people don't like to do hard things, and searching for the best music on the internet is hard. Searching for the best music within a single site online is hard, too. Listening to the radio, hearing a nice song and then finding that song advertised on the front page of iTunes is easy, familiar and confortable, just like a Quarter Pounder. One click and you're done. As long as major labels control these resources, and they're experts at controlling these resources, they'll continue to make lots of money for some time to come.

Re:D'uh from these quarters too.

[sm62704]

But the one thing that makes the ringtones have any value at all is the song behind the ringtone, or rather, the famousness of the song behind the ring tone.

If the labels ever lose their monopoly on radio airplay they'll finally get the death we've all been waiting for. Unfortunately we're going to need ONE non-college radio station to get the ball rolling, like KSHE started FM rock radio.

You can see now why they wanted internet radio dead, having all those usarious fees heaped on it.

Re:D'uh from these quarters too.

[sm62704]

They historically provided, out of economic necessity, whatever music was (subjectively) "the best."

You're wrong.

When I was a teenager I walked into a record store and the most amazing music was playing. Song after song. I asked the sales clerk who it was. "A new band, Led Zeppelin". I bought the album right then and there.

The critics panned them and they never got any airplay; at least until non-critics and non-radio people found them.

My crazy friend Tom Egbert called me up one day after school. "Man, you GOT to hear this album! It ROCKS!" He was right: the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Are You Experienced kicked ass! He never got any airplay, either.

The Yardbirds never got airplay. We all found out about them from the local bands covering their songs. Meanwhile when you turned on the radio you got what they called "bubblegum pop". Yummie yummie yummie I got love in my tummy" - pure dreck, not unlike what you hear on the radio today, very similar to the kind of absolute crap put out by the likes of Britney Spears or the Backstreet Boys.

My oldest daughter is mentally handicapped. She likes the rap they play on the radio. My youngest (just turned 21) otoh is "gifted". She listened to punk and ska - and you didn't hear either of those genres on the radio (and never have outside the college stations).

In short, the major labels and the radio stations they bribe with their cocaine payola never had a fucking clue what young people want, and still don't.

to the radio in your car suddenly becomes like a Google search for not-crap, every time you try to use it.

It's like that now, and always has been. Thank God and technology for CD changers.

Sometimes, Britney will do.

No, Britney will NOT do. Britney is a talentless bimbo. John Lee Hooker will do (he never got airplay either). Led Zeppelin will do. Tchaikovsky will do. Merl Haggard will do. Bob Marley will do. The Pietasters will do. The Dead Kennedys will do.

Britney spears will NOT do. The Backstreet Boys will NOT do.

You would have loved The Archies. Sorry dude but you have no musical taste whatever.

Re:D'uh from these quarters too.

[dpilot]

Don't think of it as gatekeeper for a moment, but as travel agent. What do you want to hear, and how do you get it?

There are 2 such travel agents I can think of at the moment, with my limited experience - CD Baby and Pandora. CD Baby does small off-label artists, but they have a "sounds like" search that lets you put in major artists and find Indie music in the same vein. Then you can sample tracks and purchase, if desired. I haven't actually used Pandora, but according to friends it does "the Amazon thing," people who like this track generally like this other track.

Those models help you find your way to new music, but neither restricts you. Restriction is the essential model of a gatekeeper, which is why I propose travel agent instead.

Re:D'uh from these quarters too.

[Saint Fnordius]

It's all in the chosen metaphor... gatekeeper. Bouncer.

Jailer.

Instead of being guides leading you through the jungle, the established players want to restrict who actually can have contact with you. Thus the desire to keep the listener, the consumer as ignorant as possible so that they can maintain their Authority. The more information you have, the less you need them to play gatekeeper.

Re:D'uh from these quarters too.

[carnivorouscow]

Millions of paintings have been created, nobody needed a multinational corporation to filter those for us. Filtering isn't an either/or proposition regulated to what a giant company feeds us or an individual task sorting through 10^6 pages of Googled information. Most filtering operates out of our social circles; you get useful suggestions from your friends, family and various associates far more frequently than from an unknown third party. Branching out from your baseline music would be visiting live shows and specialized internet radio stations where you sort through the genre content or even algorithms run sites like Pandora that attempt to match your tastes against "similar sounding" music selections. I see the immediate future of music moving away from the big dinosaurs who act as gatekeepers and towards smaller groups/individuals who share their individual tastes. You can sort through information groupings of people you've found to have similar tastes to expedite the sorting process.

When I'm busy (running, driving, working ect) I listen to familiar content I've already sorted and when I've got time to listen carefully I explore other artists and genres. I know I'm not the only one who listens to music like this and I'd venture to guess that it's very common. The way we deal with information has changed, controlling distribution and advertising matters less than categorizing information in a useful manner. If big music labels want to stay relevant they need to figure out how to provide a useful service rather than using the courts to cling onto a model that doesn't work anymore.

Reminds me...

[_Hellfire_]

"...not what a corporation or media outlet decides we should want."

I never thought one could get pithy one-liners from a video game, but I think the GTA writers had the nail hit on the head with one of the radio station's advertisements (I think it was from Liberty City):

"We tell you what's good! Then play it 'till you like it!"

I think that sums up the Label's business methods quite succinctly.

Re:Reminds me...

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people miss the fact that a majority of the American music-buying population wants someone to tell them what is good. They want to turn on the radio and think that's a cross-section of the best music of the day or of yesteryear. That's even what most people who rail against the major labels want, except they turn to a different part of the dial (e.g., KEXP, which is IMO severely overrated by the indie-kid set) or go to a website that uses data conglomeration sites of users' music listening patterns to serve automated recommendations or playlists for them. Most people simply are not interested in spending time actively searching out music - reading through biographies, reviews, listening to sample after sample after sample, trying out random shit in a genre they don't know - just to find one more band or album they might like. Many people who say they love music even claim that there aren't any albums made that are worth buying, which I think is a tragic mindset and one I think tends to stem more from lack of curiosity than the realities of our day.

It wasn't the cannons man!

[Cordath]

The Spanish conquest of the Americas is often overly dramatized. In all instances I am aware of, it was *not* Spanish technology that carried the day.

Takes the Aztec's for example. Many story tellers will spin a glorious yarn about the siege of Tenochtitlan. Most of those will be glad to talk about how Moctezuma revered Cortés as a god. Most will also completely gloss over the fact that the Spaniards were only a small percentage of the force that laid siege to Tenochtitlan. The Aztec's were not very popular amongst their neighbors, so when Cortés marched on Tenochtitlan the Aztec's enemies came in droves to capitalize on a change to take them down. The Inca's were smack in the middle of a civil war over succession when the Spaniards arrived on the scene, and by pure luck, managed to kidnap the heir apparent. (They held him hostage for gold and then executed him.) Their timing was fortuitous, to say the least. However, the capture of Cuzco was the real fall of Peru, and by that time the Spanish had again picked up indigenous allies to fight for them.

Finally, there is the Mayans. If you watched Apocalypto then you probably got the impression that the Maya were living in big cities and making a mess of things when the Spaniards showed up and conqured/saved them. Nope. They had abandoned their cities centuries before. Even with their civilization an echo of its former glory, the Maya put up more resistance against the Europeans than, perhaps, any other indigenous people in the america's. Unlike the Aztec's and Incas, there was no single Mayan center which could be attacked and neutralized. The Maya were spread out in some of the densest, nastiest, most brutal jungle on Earth. The Spaniards would capture one town and move on to the next only to find that they had to recapture the previous town all over again the next time they went past it. It took centuries to subdue just a *portion* of the Mayan population.

Now, it would seem that we're way off topic, but we can draw some pretty interesting parallels actually. RIAA is a centralized body, much like the Inca or Aztecs. All it would take is for one major record label to withdraw their support to RIAA and that would be their end. Likewise, a change to copyright law could doom all the labels overnight. Music pirates, on the other hand, are by their very nature decentralized. You can squash as many individuals with lawsuits as you want, but the P2P network lives on. Finding those individuals and gathering enough evidence to bring a lawsuit that has a chance of winning if they don't cave and settle is also not an easy task. They are like the Maya. Hard to find, difficult to suppress, and resilient. If RIAA and the labels somehow managed to keep going as they are now, it would take centuries to bring piracy to and end at best.

Anyways, I'm at the point where I just want easy access to good music. If the labels brought back Oink in all it's glory at $30/month I'd be their first customer. If they insist that I have to spend $10 an album for lossy DRM'd tracks on iTunes or $15 for a CD, neither of which net the artist more than $0.15, then no deal.

The way I see it, there is an answer to music distribution. Say that somebody created a private torrent tracker site where the members paid a monthly access fee. Artists could seed their music on this torrent site and be paid a percentage of the gross according to how much their stuff is downloaded. No middlemen. No record companies. Just the artists and the torrent site. Potentially, artists could make a lot more money than they are now. However, there are problems. Perhaps the stickiest is that little issue of critical mass. If a handful of independents got together and did this, they'd fail miserably. Such a site would need a *massive* catalog to get off the ground. It would have to include a very large number of artists from day 1. Still, it is a beautiful dream.

Re:It wasn't the cannons man!

[aproposofwhat]

I've read 'Guns, Germs and Steel', and found it interesting and insightful.

GP, however, gives a perspective on the campaign that wasn't addressed by Diamond - I'd hesitate to dismiss his post out of hand.

Yes, there were benefits from the posession of technology by the Spanish, but the indigenous people weren't rolled over quite as easily as popular history reports - indeed, there are still indigenous peoples in South America that are still resisting 'civilisation'.

Re:It wasn't the cannons man!

[Reziac]

I don't know about elsewhere, but in Los Angeles there's already a pocket industry of small producers, who do the job for a flat fee of somewhere around $10k including all necessary studio stuff (tho I've heard rates as low as $1k, and a friend of mine will do it at cost just to get his name on the final product).

Re:It wasn't the cannons man!

[thenumberofthebeast]

I can understand your perception of how difficult and/or expensive it is to get technical assistance with creating your perfect recording, but you are not taking into account the fall in price of the necessary hardware and software.

Setting up a studio is a lot less than you might think - certainly cheap enough for a poor student to get a working rig together. As a gigging bassist in a number of bands, I can assure you that my first recording setup was less total value than my bass, amp and pedals and I have seen many (poor) muso's with substantially more expensive gear than mine.

Our local college runs a contemporary music and recording course - teaching general studio craft as well as Pro-Tools. Nearly all the students buy some form of recording set-up before the end of the course - they may not all become "genius producers", but in my experience there is some real talent there. Some of these guys have more of an interest in recording and production than in being in a band. It's just another form of expression.

This sort of thing is happening all over the country (here in the UK) - look in Sound on Sound mag and you see hundreds of adverts for courses. This months backpiece editorial was all about how there is an absolute glut of new recording engineers and producers desperate for work. You could look on this as the beginning of a new era - just like in the 70's everyone picked up a guitar and thought they could play, many now are entering sound recording as a pastime - out of this vast pool very few will enter large studios, most will end up doing it for themselves.

The main point is, *your* main thing is writing/producing the music, these guys main thing is recording - look around, maybe you'll find a local guy with a few decent mics, a macbook and logic.

The technical guys are out there - they are growing in number and have no industry to work in, so they are all working independently. Stick an advert up in your local music store and see how many responses you get!

Please stop & think a moment

[pandrijeczko]

I am in no way defending the RIAA or the major record companies but, looking at this purely from the perspective of a music enthusiast, I personally have no problem with the way things currently are with music distribution. I have more than enough good music to listen to and to go buy in the future, so please take this post as an observation rather than any gripes I might have with the music industry.

Firstly, I'm pretty happy with the price of CDs. Because I research my music well and, yes, I do use BitTorrent and Usenet to preview any albums I intend to buy that I cannot hear otherwise, I always buy a CD that I know will be good before I buy it. And then I source it online as cheaply as possible, usually below £10. That means I'm never disappointed by any CD and, before anyone accuses me of doing anything wrong, I own over 1200 of them.

Secondly, I do listen to some modern music but generally I listen to (mainly British) hard rock, rock, psychedelia and blues from the late sixties to the present day. Currently, a lot of this stuff is enjoying a resurgence - not only are existing popular albums being expanded & remastered (for example the back catalogues of Jethro Tull, Yes, Black Sabbath, etc.) but also a lot of very obscure albums from the late sixties and early seventies are being released onto CD for the first time. Currently, I am totally spoilt for choice as to what to buy next and I think the record companies a doing a pretty good job with this.

Thirdly, I'm sure there are a lot of good independent artists out there but, in my mind, whether the big four record companies are there or not won't change a thing for them. Okay, so the record companies are too narrow-minded and money-orientated to give these artists recording contracts but either way, they are still faced with the problem of self-promotion and getting people to their web sites to buy their music. And in my own view, I'm more than happy to listen to some of these artists and buy a CD of theirs - but there's no way, I'm afraid, that I am going to pay for downloadable music. The fact is, I like my music in the best quality I can afford on a reasonable hifi and compressed downnloads don't do it for me.

Fourthly, the younger generation may have a hankering for downloadable music but please do not confuse this with them having a discerning music taste. The fact is that they are the "now" generation with short attention spans and a complete lack of interest in putting any effort into anything. The fact that the charts are filled with plastic manufactured music shows that the majority will buy anything that is put in front of them purely because it is deemed fashionable and is easy to obtain. Anyone who believes these same people will go searching the the Internet for new independent artists rather than just going to iTunes for the latest fad music has no understanding of the way marketing and hype works on the minds of the younger generation.

Yes, the major record labels are killing their own industry because they're not interested in anything new but the latest Leona Lewis clone. Personally, I don't care, there's a huge back catalogue of older stuff to go out and listen to which I suggest the "discerning youth" should also go and explore a little rather than whining about modern music.

But downloadable music is also contributing to that death because it's turning music into a disposable commodity - don't like it any more? Then just wipe your iPod's hard drive and start again...

Re:Please stop & think a moment

[pandrijeczko]

You're missing my point entirely.

One of the arguments that is used as a "plus" for legal digital downloads of music is that it allows for independent artists to get in on the act, free themselves of the shackles of the mega record companies and just do their own thing, right from making their music in the first place down to distributing it (presumably) via their own web site.

Therefore, what the people that buy digital downloads are saying is that the music they want to buy is not available via the traditional music distribution process (i.e. CDs) because the big record companies do not cater for what they want.

By assumption, therefore, the music in the charts is not representative of the music most people like to listen to which therefore suggests that it is easy-to-manufacture, maximum-profit product.

Think about it for a minute - how many of the chart artists out there actually write their own songs now? Yet an independent artist is probably not going to have enough money to buy the rights to cover someone else's songs so therefore has to write their own stuff anyway.

But the fact is that digital downloads do not solve the indie artist issue alone. When you've got thousands upon thousands of (possibly very talented) artists distributing their music via a web site, how can they compete with the mega record corps who have millions of marketing budget and are, by virtue of the above, quite capable of shifting vast amounts of music which is not representative of what people want?

I Am The RIAA's Worst Enemy

[MichaelCrawford]

They're not afraid so much of losing CD sales to downloaders - they're afraid of being cut out of the business entirely.

I'm working on changing careers into music. But I'm not trying to get signed with a label; I've got my own damn label, thank you. I've got a business license, resale license, fictitious business name statement, checking account and everything for Ogg Frog.

For a few hundred dollars - a grand tops - a solo artist can purchase digital recording gear that puts the best of what the Beatles had back in the 60's to shame.

Any Slashdotter here who wants a free CD of my album - autographed! - just email your postal address to support@oggfrog.com My first batch goes out in the mail Thursday.

I've given away almost two thousand so far. my manifesto explains why I'm doing this.

You could really help me out if you shared my music over the Internet.

The Korean Answer for Legal P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

Soribada. A P2P network you pay a few bucks a month for membership. Korea. Files authorized to be distributed by the program are tagged with a special code in the file and only files tagged as such will be recognized by the program. Except that, MP3s flow like water and most artists in Korea have signed on so the catalog is chock full of almost every major Korean artist... Most of it lossy (but high-quality) MP3 but some are FLAC and APE files...

Just 2 notes.

[v(*_*)vvvv]

1. "Some argue that we need subjective gatekeepers as filters. "

We ourselves are our own filters. Some simple statistics about what others are enjoying would be enough to get a "big" picture. This argument shows no support for Record Labels, or any other "filters for hire".

2. "Hopefully access to all of this new music will inspire us, make us think and open doors and minds to new experiences we choose, not what a corporation or media outlet decides we should want."

You should be doing this already. Record Labels may decide what to sell, but you still have to buy it. You are free to pay the guy on the street an extra 20 bucks for his home made album if you like his music that much. You are also free to offer to become his agent and charge him the going rate if you think he is worth 10 million dollars.

I know this is knit-picking but I thought these angles deserved some light.

Current Radio Gatekeepers are Whores

[AioKits]

I'm going to try and not give off a tone of 'holier than thou' with this, but I have not listened, truly listened, to radio in about a decade. When things started becoming Clear Channel I noticed another change becoming more pronounced: More advertising. Sometimes it felt like ten minutes of music with 20 minutes of adverts. Since where I lived the only stations that didn't sound like you were trying to reach Alpha Squad with a WW2 radio were Clear Channel owned, it ment they pretty much had your ears by the balls. What ten minutes of music I was allowed to hear was the newest 'hot new song from X!' that was played at least once an hour. I just stopped listening to radio then. The gatekeepers which I had pretty much trusted since childhood to introduce me to new music failed.

Around that time I started discovering Napster and 'other' means by which to find new music. A friend goes "Hey man! Check out X by this band, their lead guitar kicks ass!" or "Pick up a song or two by Y, they have a female lead and her voice will make you cream your pants!" and I will most likely try it on their recommendation... My friends are the new gatekeepers and I am probably one of theirs. Now I listen to a lot of bands I probably would have never found it if weren't for listening to friends or just trying something new I see off of a Napsteresque style program. Whenever possible, I try to buy the CD from the band themselves, and if I really like them, buy t-shirts and the like. (I am not sure who they are with now, but I still love Nightwish.)

Does anyone know of any good metal band with a female lead vocal? Just askin...

The Recording Label's Four Services

[Jason Levine]

The Recording Labels used to provide four services to the artists and public:

1. Production. They would hook up artists with the equipment to produce professional sounding albums. A few decades back, this equipment was pricey so the artists could only dream about having access to it outside of a recording contract. Nowadays, though, you can buy equivalents to most of the equipment off the shelf for around $1,000 or so. You might not get a "100% professional" sound, but you'll get an album that sounds professional enough for 90% of the listening public. So a recording label isn't really needed for this anymore.

2. Distribution. If you wanted your album to get on the radio and in the stores, you needed contacts. This meant that you needed the recording label to contact the right people for you and set up the distribution channels. With digital distribution, though, any artist can upload their own music to their own website and instantly be their own distributer. If they want to parter with someone else, they can use a service like eMusic, iTunes, or Amie Street to distribute their music. They give up some of their revenue to do this, but not nearly as much as the recording label would take. A contract with a major label is no longer needed for this.

3. Filtering. Also could be called Separating the Diamonds from the Coals. Traditionally, the labels would promote the good music and filter out all of the bad stuff. With the Internet, the "bad stuff" problem grows exponentially since anyone can put their awful attempts at making music online. However, services like Amie Street are already coming up with ways of letting users themselves act as filters. (Amie Street's model increases the price the more people buy the song, to a maximum of 98 cents. So a bad song won't rise in price much, but a good song will rise in price quickly.) There's also an argument to be made that the traditional labels have failed in this service recently by releasing so many bad albums and so many bad artists.

4. Promotion. The labels would market new artists to get their names out and encourage people to buy their albums and attend their concerts. While Internet marketing and word of mouth might be nice, this is the only area that I can see a future for the labels. I think that they will eventually change into glorified marketing firms. Of course, their reduced roles will mean that a lot of fat will be trimmed from their organizations. It will also mean that they will have to accept less control over artists. I predict that, eventually, they won't seize the copyrights of the artist. Instead, they will enter into deals with artists to get a cut of album sales. (A much smaller cut than they currently get.) Artists will also be free to leave labels at any time if they are unsatisfied with their performance without worrying that all of their old music is "tied up" in the old label. I think that our grandchildren will grow up with music promoted by record labels, but will look at us oddly when we describe the power that record labels exerted over artists when we were their age.

Re:Uhhh.... Duhhh..... What????

[sm62704]

the large companies would be blindly signing literally everybody who made music so it could control them

Intelligent musicians are now turning the labels and their thieving contracts down. I believe this may explain the dearth of much listenable RIAA music this century; the bands with talent realise they have no need of the majors. I know at least one local guy who told two major labels to go fuck themselves, and I'm sure for every Joe Frew there's a thousand more non-idiots out there.

Re:Uhhh.... Duhhh..... What????

[The End Of Days]

It just seems like there's a serious assumption at the core of this, and a rather elitist (and therefore suspicious) one at that. In order to accept the premise that the RIAA "controls" music I'd have to accept that people don't decide for themselves what they like. I reject that as grousing by disenfranchised nerds who habitually reject anything anyone else likes as "not obscure enough."

In a signed band? You may already be this fucked

[kimvette]

Regarding "Independent" labels, see the following two URLs:

Some of your friends may already be this fucked:

http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/

Who owns who(m):

http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/whoownswho.html

Your favorite label may not be independent at all, but a shell company of one of the major labels.

There is good reason the RIAA members want to outlaw P2P networks, or if they can't squelch it, get the ISPs to pony up a levy to them; they are rapidly losing control of the music industry; it is quickly becoming a direct creator-to-customer venue, where a truly independent band can make a very good living playing small, intimate clubs - and can maintain more creative control over their work, without having to settle for a tiny percentage of their sales. They don't have to worry about appealing teenyboppers and having a manufactured, socially-engineered sound and rely on sex-themed promotions to sell their work. They can produce their best work, engage in long jams on gigs, and make a very good living selling not only their studio productions, but recordings right off the sound board (hope they have a good sound engineer, see below). Labels don't want bands that can sell a couple hundred thousand units and gain popularity over time; they want a major, earworm-inducing syrupy-sounding bubblegum band that they can heavily market through kids' shows and magazines and have a major hit to make some quick money, and who cares if the "artist" ends up a train wreck in 4-5 years and no one wants to hear them any more? They'll just hire some other skank or boy band and sell a new image. No big deal on the record companies' part. What we end up with is crap on the radio and getting innundated from all directions with these personalities, until they burn out.

Bands with staying power are usually the ones who started small, and gained popularity over time, due to contemplative lyrics, experimental sounds, or simply having GREAT talent. Bands like that have been Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Phish, and even No Doubt (Gwen's sucky solo work notwithstanding - without the rest of the band she SUCKS). Members of some of them (Pink Floyd and Phish notably) have bemoaned having lost "intimacy" with their fans in the big stadiums (that's what much of Wish You Were Here and The Wall were about) and the "evils" of the music industry. Think the big labels as they exist (or wants to exist) will ever produce another Pink Floyd, another Queen, or another Led Zeppelin? No; the way those bands start out don't appeal to the masses right off; long experimental jams, studio pieces that are "too long" for radio play, sounds that are just "too different," and in some cases focusing SOLELY on the music, and not so much on the personalities - or if they do make it, people will be only familiar with short, poppy-sounding pieces, and will probably never hear the less-played but far superior back tracks.

There is a plus to big labels: they generally have VERY good sound engineers; that is something lacking in smaller venues. It's one thing to know how components interconnect, it's another thing entirely setting it up to enhance the band's sound and not detract from it. A lot of sound guys in small venues SUCK - I've been at several shows friends' bands performed at where I had to go to the sound guy to tell him to fix something, or SHOW the idiot how to fix it, and at one I even had to move a mike because he had no clue what to do. However in gaining access to good engineers and good equipment, you often have to go with big labels, and end up in debt to them.

Tagged: someofyourfriendsmayalreadybethisfucked

Re:Uhhh.... Duhhh..... What????

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Humans are primates, and are social animals that form groups. Primate groups are united by "group calls" (somewhat like wolf packs). Whatever music you hear over and over again is subconsciously recognised as your group call, and you instinctively want to hear it more. What the record industry does is saturates your aural space with particular tunes, which your monkey brain then picks up as "your" group call. You could "choose" which group you belong to by picking particular radio stations, within strict limits. Nowadays, that's been shattered by the internet (thank fuck), but it's a genie they _really_ want to put back in the bottle.

Re:Uhhh.... Duhhh..... What????

[moxley]

Great post that I think illustrates a greater point -

" That's what scared them from the start...the loss of their ability to dictate our tastes in music and control the top 40 charts."

This is not only true for the music industry - it is even MORE true for journalism in general - because, right now I think anyone who in an even halfway savvy media consumer, (or really anyone who doesn't have blinders on) can see that the mainstream media is operating almost EXACTLY in the same way...

Blogging and other indie media have allowed the masses to get and produce news that is REAL news and that is relevant to them, not that "infotainment" Paris Hilton bullshit.

The government and MSM (via their symbiotic partnership) both do not like this - they lose ability to control the agenda, to list the plausible opinions which the sheep can debate at the water cooler - as I have heard said often back in school "the media doesn't tell you what to think, the tell you what to think about, they set the agenda" - Well, I would go further, I would say that now, for most Americans who are brain dead television receivers - they set the agenda as well as providing a "multiple choice" format what what the possible opinions of the public can be - then reinforce this with bullshit polls.

If you take it to the core of what I am saying - it is information in general, and the ability for the masses to access it readily, unflitered, and to share and create it in the same manner without it being sanctioned, filtered, and controlled by authorities (be they govt or corp) that the powers that be are goign to try to destroy.

When you look at the corporations and governments we have on earth right now, how long do you think we have before they find a way to subvert the freedom of the net? I have already seen the fear campaign is in full force from all angles - whether it's "Hackers shutting down the pwoer grid" to "Pedaphiles are EVERYWHERE on the net looking for your children" to "identity theft is everywhere" to "terrorists use the net to learn about nukes," - then you see the economic control side - the debate about "net neutrality" etc....Personally I wouldn't cal America a democracy or a democratic republic anymore. I would call it a corporatist feudal system....and there are many synonyms for such a system.

Re:Uhhh.... Duhhh..... What????

[MightyMartian]

Well, I'm another kind of downloader. I have a rather substantial collection of cassette tapes. Most are getting to the age where transfer leaves a lot of hiss, and I have little time or interest in attempting to remaster them after the fact. I've bought two copies of Steely Dan's Aja in the last twenty years, but rather than buy a third, I just went and downloaded the MP3s. The record company and the band have received their money from me already. I'm stealing buy RIAA's definition, but so far as I'm concerned, I've already paid for the product... twice.

Re:The real reason...

[sm62704]

They had a rudimentary form of track selection

You had a "skip" button that skipped to the next of four stereo tracks. In many (iirc, most) cases the skip was in the middle of a song! You still had to sit through half an album side. If it was a double album you had to sit through a whole album side. No rewind like cassettes had, only fast forward. If you forwarded past the beginning of the song you wanted, you had to keep fast forwarding.

With an LP you could lift the tonearm and place it at the beginning of the wanted track. Where songs started was clearly visible.

A few rare players could play a special version of 8-track: quadraphonic sound.

Believe it or not, quadraphonic sound was available on LPs, too. Stereo LPs were backwards compatible; if you played a stereo LP on a monophonic player, both channels would play (through the same speaker of course). This was accomplished by having both channels from the needle going up and down, and one channel with the sideways motion. The two signals were fed together to phase out one channel from the channel holding the up and down motion.

Quadraphonic was possible by modulating the two rear channels with a 40 khz tone and demodulating it on playback. Compare that to CD's 20khz ceiling. They used to have speaker enclosures with supersonic speakers called "super tweeters", which are no longer necessary since CDs can't reproduce frequencies that high.

Quadraphonic never took hold because of the expense of the equipment - you needed four of everything instead of two of everything. So a $1000 stereo sounded almost twice as good as a $1000 quadraphonic setup. That, coupled with the fact that in a live performance the audience is not usually in the middle of the orchestra makes the whole idea stupid on its face.

Surround sound happened because they've figured out that you don't really need more than one woofer. The woofer is the most expensive speaker, and speakers are the most expensive part of any stereo, especially now. The other electronics have vastly come down in price; in 1977 I paid $600 for a twenty five inch TV.

I knew a guy with quadraphonic cassettes. That's possible because a cassette has four channels. But you had to either rewind the cassette or listen to it play backwards when it was done.

Re:Don't worry about it.

[NekSnappa]

What you're looking for probably being produced, but it's just damned hard to find. I'm 44 and grew up on country music. In the late 50's and 60's Nashville was churning out a bunch of over produced, string backed stuff that was closer to Sinatra than Hank Sr. And the west coast movement was started by Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard, and those types, eventually dubbed "The Bakersfield Sound." This eventually spawned the whole "Outlaw Country" movement of Willie, Waylon, David Allen Coe etc. In other words country became more country again. Thing was, they were still signed, and promoted by labels. So it was still out there and available. These days country is just twangy pop music for the most part, with a sub-genre of Jimmy Buffet wannabe's (can you say Kenny Chesney?), and any band that sounds like real honky-tonk music can't get any action from a major label. The best way I've found to find these bands putting out old sounding new stuff is through internet radio. My favorite is Boot Liquor which is part of Soma FM. A great source for what is now called Alt-Country which ranges from country sounding country, to country sounding music with socially aware lyrics, to rolling honky-tonk stuff. My recommendation is find an internet stations that play the type of music you're into and you're likely to find newer stuff that fits your interests.