Slashdot Mirror
Reflections On the Less-Cool Effects of Filesharing
surpeis writes "This snub is an attempt to point the finger at something I feel has been widely ignored in the ever-lasting debate surrounding (illegal) filesharing, now again brought in the spotlight by the Pirate Bay trial. I should state that I am slightly biased, as I have been running my own indie label for some years, spanning about 30 releases. It's now history, but it was not filesharing that got the best of us, just for the record." (surpeis's argument continues below.)
I try as far as humanly possible to view the debate from all angles, and before entering the music biz myself, I was a strong believer in Internet as the driving force to develop new markets. Since then life has taught me a lot, and as said I will try to share one of my major concerns in this (hopefully) short snub.
My observation is based on a lot of trying and failing, as well as being a moderate user of filesharing myself — mainly to check out stuff I read about but cannot get my hands on in the local store back here in Norway.
My concern is about this argument, which has been seen in most any debate about this subject for the last 10 years, usually formulated roughly as below:
"Filesharing will provide massive marketing to new artists, and drive forward a new and more dynamic music market."
I beg to differ.
One thing that has become more and more obvious to me is that the power of the market more than ever is still safely held by the biggest corporations in the music biz. I will try to explain why.
If we use TPB as an example, they have about 10M visitors per day, which gives us a good base for pulling out stats. If you look at their Top100 list at any given time, you will find exactly 0.00% artists that are not (major) label signed. This might not be very surprising, as TPB naturally would reflect the music market in general.
But if one starts thinking about it, it has the ironic effect that TPB is a driving force of consolidating the market power of the major labels rather than driving forward any new music. The conclusion has to be that "pirates" are just as little resistant to the major label marketing as any other person. Even though there are thousands and thousands of artists out there that want their music to be shared and listened to, they are widely and effectively ignored by the masses. In fact, one might say that TPB and the likes are countering the development of new markets, simply because the gap between the heavily marketed music and 'the others' is wider than ever, when the bare naked truth about peoples taste in music is put into such a system.
This puts a heavy responsibility on the pirates, one that I don't think they are aware of nor able to handle. The day we find the top crop of the aforementioned artists that are actually free to share on the top 100 list, we have a winner. Until then the only thing that we will see "die" is the small indies that cannot benefit from heavy marketing. Thus, more market power is given to the major labels, and all of us reading this will be dead and buried long before they stop making a reasonable income from selling oldies and goldies, radio play, publishing, etc.
The actual 'mystery' is why the major labels don't see this themselves, and continues to take services like TPB to court. They are, and I'm pretty sure about this, the actual winners in the ongoing war. The price paid is extending the status quo when it comes to growing new markets.
So, ladies and gentlenerds: Are we really driving forth the music scene of the future? Or are we actually turning into useful idiots keeping the arch-enemy strong and healthy while the suppliers of correctives (indies, free music) are effectively kept out of the loop? What could possibly be done (technically or socially) to provoke changes to this and hit the major labels where it actually hurts?"
My observation is based on a lot of trying and failing, as well as being a moderate user of filesharing myself — mainly to check out stuff I read about but cannot get my hands on in the local store back here in Norway.
My concern is about this argument, which has been seen in most any debate about this subject for the last 10 years, usually formulated roughly as below:
"Filesharing will provide massive marketing to new artists, and drive forward a new and more dynamic music market."
I beg to differ.
One thing that has become more and more obvious to me is that the power of the market more than ever is still safely held by the biggest corporations in the music biz. I will try to explain why.
If we use TPB as an example, they have about 10M visitors per day, which gives us a good base for pulling out stats. If you look at their Top100 list at any given time, you will find exactly 0.00% artists that are not (major) label signed. This might not be very surprising, as TPB naturally would reflect the music market in general.
But if one starts thinking about it, it has the ironic effect that TPB is a driving force of consolidating the market power of the major labels rather than driving forward any new music. The conclusion has to be that "pirates" are just as little resistant to the major label marketing as any other person. Even though there are thousands and thousands of artists out there that want their music to be shared and listened to, they are widely and effectively ignored by the masses. In fact, one might say that TPB and the likes are countering the development of new markets, simply because the gap between the heavily marketed music and 'the others' is wider than ever, when the bare naked truth about peoples taste in music is put into such a system.
This puts a heavy responsibility on the pirates, one that I don't think they are aware of nor able to handle. The day we find the top crop of the aforementioned artists that are actually free to share on the top 100 list, we have a winner. Until then the only thing that we will see "die" is the small indies that cannot benefit from heavy marketing. Thus, more market power is given to the major labels, and all of us reading this will be dead and buried long before they stop making a reasonable income from selling oldies and goldies, radio play, publishing, etc.
The actual 'mystery' is why the major labels don't see this themselves, and continues to take services like TPB to court. They are, and I'm pretty sure about this, the actual winners in the ongoing war. The price paid is extending the status quo when it comes to growing new markets.
So, ladies and gentlenerds: Are we really driving forth the music scene of the future? Or are we actually turning into useful idiots keeping the arch-enemy strong and healthy while the suppliers of correctives (indies, free music) are effectively kept out of the loop? What could possibly be done (technically or socially) to provoke changes to this and hit the major labels where it actually hurts?"
The assumption is that pirated music should favor the less known artists somehow? Why would anyone be surprised that download statistics mirror sales and radio stats in general? It's just another outlet, but it CAN create awareness if sparked properly by other means
... you run an indie emo music label?
I have accounts with waffles.fm and what.cd and their top10s are almost always filled with non-major label releases. Maybe thepiratebay is a haven for major label listeners but that's because it's public and all of the people who don't spend time figuring out what non-major label music is good go there for their top40 hits. Waffles has a huge amount of music tracked and the data going through their torrents is huge... maybe not on the scale of torrents that thepiratebay is hosting but still significant.
If patriotism is racist, is racism patriotic?
This guy makes a big claim, that filesharing services such as TPB are hurting indie artists, but provides abosolutely no evidence to back it up. There is absolutely no evidence against this either: "Filesharing will provide massive marketing to new artists, and drive forward a new and more dynamic music market."
The closest thing to evidence he has is a list showing that the Top 100 contains only popular stuff. Duh. Not saying he is wrong. I have always thought that the "we are helping indie artists" was overplayed by freeloaders such as myself who like to get something for nothing. But this guy wrote too many paragraphs to supply no evidence.
If we limited commercial copyright to 5-10 years, then it would hugely help new artists. By reducing the value of the back-catalogues, it would mean a strong incentive for publishers and music-labels to support new music.
Unless people are exposed to new music, through word of mouth or otherwise, they won't know its out there. For instance, there might be a song written that resonates with my soul and will change my life, but if its made by an indy artist in norway, how will i know its out there?
File-sharing is an on-demand service, people don't browse through looking for titles of songs that sound nifty (that's what pandora is for, finding music relevant to their interests), they punch the name of a new release dvd into the search box and hope axxo has ripped, encoded, and uploaded it. Why do they seek out these movies? Because they were made aware of it. Say that I tell you to seek out the movie called Brazil. You might seek it out, but why? Because I (someone) told you to.
I thought all of the above was obvious, filesharing is not the step 1 in the following, but it might go something like this:
The hypothetical "P2P as marketing" steps. (not saying this is correct, but it was always my understanding that this was how it worked whenever people argued that p2p was GOOD for artists).
1. People find out about your band(s).
2. People search for those bands in TPB or their p2p client.
3.People fall in love with the music.
4. ???
5. Profit!
Leave out step 1 and there is no Profit!. And no, steps 1 and 2 are not reversible for 99% of the population. Also, i'm not going to go into what is required to fill in step 4.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
The old distribution models no longer work. So the people losing will fight it tooth and claw. There are winners and losers in a New World Order. Artists can still make money, but they'll have to play more live shows and their recorded music is nothing more than promotion(fame) for shows.
I truthfully don't care about music. What I care about is when textbooks start becoming free. It will be a revolution in education. This will be especially the case when people write things like,"The comprehensive guide to calculus as to be learned by anyone who knows how to count" The computer means it can be an advanced and interactive media session. The free distribution will mean anyone can have it in their hands.
People will still try and discover new things even if they can't get paid for the information directly.
God spoke to me.
as an indie artist, he is deluding himself. It might happen, rarely, but not often.
Yes, filesharing does open the markets to new bands. BUT, the band has to be good enough to make it in the market.
If people are downloading the top 40 crap, then what are they spending money on. I for one spend money only on unique music that has earned my support. 90% of my iTunes purchases are of stuff that will never appear on a top 40 playlist and that's where my money deserves to go.
describes the precise method used by Microsoft and Adobe to achieve their monopolies. The labels know what's going on here. And the "Streisand Effect" is being played to the hilt in their favor. And every year you hear about record profits somewhere in the industry, particularly film right now.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
I felt like posting a useless comment, troll, or flame, but didn't want to spoil a good thread. This presents the perfect opportunity to do so. Glad somebody set us up the anon.
The big names are on The Pirate Bay because they're well known - and the internet makes it easier for new artists to become well known by removing the previous barriers of entry small bands once had to go through to be broadcast to the general public. You have to find a better way to sell yourself. Magnatunes is an example of independent artists jumping over those barriers of entry to make their music available to the world at large.
However, you make the assumption that all 10M people reading here are actively polling right now from any one of those torrents. You'd be mistaken.
Some of my favorites exist from back in the '20s when rip roaring jazz was abound everywhere. We see avant jazz go all the way up to present, with other counties spawning jazz musicians. Classical has mostly stagnated, but those who like those "stuffy sounds", that music has existed from the 1700's when the Church commissioned those pieces to begin with. We really start to get to the heyday of music, from the rock era starting in the 60's to the 70's. And we all know the groups that came from that time.
Now, if my numbers are correct, nearly every work published since 1/1/1922 is under full copyright protection. So... most "popular musics" are covered by somebody's copyright. And it turns out, if the record companies didn't own it, they bought it or sued for it. Big surprise.
Of course, you have indies and such, but they really dont matter (sorry). Yeah, if they organized into a force to fight against the ilk of the RIAA, they might have a chance, but then they would turn in to what they hated and originally fought against.
If you havent realized it already, but copyright is really useless in its present form.
*said while listening to music from ocremix.org , a free music site in dedication to remixing game music.
That was a very poor argument. You're basing your argument on the top 100 torrents, this is like an inverse of the "long tail" argument. But that's the only data you have, since you can't look at the top 100,000 torrents.
There are other ways to look at this. For example, I used to be active on usenet in some specialist binaries newsgroups. We traded obscure music in our genre, none of this was new or of wide interest, it was definitely a niche. I did one vinyl rip and restoration of a very obscure LP that I might have one of the only existing copies, it took weeks to restore and clean up all the pops and clicks. That rip was traded back and forth repeatedly. Then all of a sudden, a new remastered CD of the album came out. I'm convinced that repeated trading of my vinyl rip proved demand and the record company was watching, and decided to remaster and rerelease it.
Now if that (admittedly anonymous and unsupported) anecdote doesn't convince you (and why should it) then the mere existence of niche trading sites (on usenet and torrent trackers) should convince you. Take a look, there are plenty of them, within easy reach.
If you're going to argue that the most easily available torrents are the most easily available mass-trade products (like top 40 music) then you've found the perfect set of stats to prove your point. Maybe you shouldn't form your hypothesis and then go looking for data to fit it.
I think the poster is making the mistake of trying to pigeon-hole 'pirates' into a category of tech-savvy computer nerds out to liberate the indie musicians from the suffocating embrace of the RIAA and Big Media and enforce a massive paradigm shift upon the distribution and consumption of entertainment. Sure, such a demographic is no doubt largely represented among the 20 million or whatever Pirate Bay visitors, but I'd wager that an equally significant proportion are just your typical Joe Sixpack consumer with enough technical knowledge to download a torrent - teenage girls downloading the High School Musical soundtrack, bored housewives and college students downloading the latest episode of Lost and so on. So bemoaning the fact that the 'pirates' appear to be downloading the exact mass-produced tat that the same 'pirates' are supposed to be railing against seems, to me, to be disingenuous.
On the one hand, it may seem counter-productive that the majority of media being torrented is largely big-label and megacorp product because these 'civilly disobedient' keyboard warriors decry it and should boycott it completely instead. However, on the other hand, it may help the ultimate cause of filesharers by highlighting the fact that the pirate demographic cuts huge swathes and that it is mostly normal people who don't see a problem with sharing files with eachother, rather than a bunch of fringe computer nerds who make a convenient target for media types and politicians.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
While I am in favor of limiting copyright in that way, I doubt it would have the effect of reducing the stranglehold of the major labels. After all, they do tend to support plenty of new, popular music.
This story was lamenting that indie bands and labels, new or not, don't benefit greatly from piracy, and may be hurt by it. I don't think they'd benefit greatly from reduced copyright, either, other than by having more sources to draw upon.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
People go to Pirate Bay for illegal stuff.
How many views on YouTube do unknown artists get, where their content can be viewed legally? It is difficult to get a realistic idea, but a cursory glance would suggest thousands of musicians getting a hundreds or in some cases thousands of views each.
Special treatment? All the time I've heard about how the labels control music, it's about how they control the radio and tv ads, they control the shelf space, they make sure you don't get heard. So on TBP you're all equal, everybody downloads whatever they want from every label, everyone got access to your music no matter how obscure. Everyone's free to put together their own favorites or collections of music and share it with others without payola to get on the radio station's A-list. TBP is not going to solve the problem that people don't WANT your music, if that's what you think. Even though it's all formula-based, you realize they didn't just come up with the formula by accident right? It's sorta the point to hit the mainstream with it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
As TFS notes(and, in this case RTFA=RTFS, so I'm all set) pirates, on average, are distributing exactly the same major label top 100 stuff that people, on average, are listening to. There certainly are pirates that differ from this, just as there are the indie cool kids who hang out at underground record shops(in many cases, these populations probably overlap).
However, I'm not at all sure that this supports the contention that piracy is an advantage for the major labels. Essentially, the major label stuff is a "takes money to make money" enterprise. You have an expensive marketing machine mobilized to sell a huge number of copies of some blandly acceptable product. If you don't move enough copies, you lose a large amount of money. Here, you don't need "exposure", you've already paid for that, you just need to sell copies. Thus, the extra exposure you get from pirates is of minimal help, since you already own the airwaves, and the reduced sales hurt.
On the indie side, you don't get much in the way of increased exposure, because most pirates are pirating top 100, and (given the way p2p works) the fewer people are interested in something, the lousier your downloading experience is going to be.
I suspect, ultimately, "piracy" in the classic piratebay/sons-of-napster sense isn't a huge visibility win for the indies(though online distribution of samples and promo material through music blogs and the like might well be); but it is, at the same time, a considerable threat to the major label model.
You're missing the point of the essay. The author's point is that the old promotion models still work pretty damn well; this is why the top 100 on The Pirate Bay is all major label artists. So, overall, even if the major labels are suffering right now because of the breakdown of the distribution models, they're still going to come out as winners.
Are you adequate?
Using TPB's Top 100 is a terrible example of 'pirating's effect' on.... well.... anything. It almost looks like an attempt to use the media hype around the trial as advertising itself, and no real a slashdot substance. Too bad the band wasn't mentioned.
Seriously though. I'm sorry, but little evidence with a bad conceptualization of cause/effect..
I personally have come across 90% of indie bands on bittorrent, because I cant find them anywhere else. Whether I buy after that, is up to me, yes. But theres a 0% chance Ill buy if I never hear or know about them. And I wont hear or know by simply looking at TPB. Or any other similar service.
Are you serious?
Let me tell you a little secret, bittorrent communities (especially TPB) are a horrible place to spread a concept. They are very loosely knit, with very few members or even users frequenting the forums and discussing things. No discussion means no recommendations from other users. No recommendations means your word is never spread. How is someone supposed to glean a band out of thin air, try every new music torrent that is posted? Filesharing is an extremely effective method in other areas though. I have been an active user on Soulseek for probably 5 years, and participate in several different music communities there. Nothing else in my life has influenced my taste more than the people I've met in the chatrooms there. And I'll just tell you right now that I'm about as far off the mainstream track as you can get.
Just do it better.
As long as the world lives under this glitzy market economy, there's not a chance. If people are to resist here, they'll start doing it in other facets. This market absolutely depends on frivolous purchases. Tear that down and you'll have to find an entirely new way to motivate people.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
... they do tend to support plenty of new, popular music.
Most new music is not popular. Familiarity breeds interest. Exposure creates markets for new sounds. With enough repetition, people can learn to like any kind of garbage. Witness the popularity of Rap for instance.
While I do admit that the poster may have a point, I have to point out one major flaw his example:
If you look at the Top100 artists, albums or downloads, you'll inevitably see the effects of all those marketing dollars the big record labels are chipping out.
Filesharing as a means of promoting new artists is at it's infancy, there's just not enough mass to compete with millions of $ in marketing budget.
It removes one of the penalties for liking terrible music. You should be forced to pay a fine ( the cost the label asks for) as well as the punishment of actually having to listen to top 40 crap. How else are teenagers supposed to evolve beyond thier terrible pop music phase? If I ever write a file sharing technology, I'll be sure to put in a good taste filter.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The thing is, I like music I've already heard.
And I just don't hear much indie music.
I first heard of my favorite bands from Guitar Hero II and III, and the rest of my regular listening setup is music from video games I've played and, for some reason, Sandstorm by Darude.
Maybe you should put music in Frets of Fire or one of those Linux rhythm games that sucks because there's no music for it.
I need to hear your song before I'll know if it's worth listening to, and worth pirating.
I agree with the author: filesharing sites may not help support Indie artists. However, that is not the reason that I tend to side with the pirates when it comes to these issues. I see piracy as a means of protesting the monopoly that the major record companies have on the distribution of music. The author is right that filesharing tends to mirror the major record releases, but I disagree the cause is the file sharing sites. I believe the fault lies with the record labels themselves. They remain, though they hopefully are fading, the most likely path to national and worldwide recognition. Regardless of how they got there, people will mostly want to pirate these mega-star groups, not because of allegiance to RIAA, but simply because they know who these popular groups are. What I find most infuriating about the tactics of the RIAA is their steadfast belief that the only way they can make a profit is through this stranglehold on distribution. They actively stifle other forms of publication, which is what ultimately hurts indie artists, as a means of perpertuating their control to release a limited selection of drivel. It is this monopoly, a completely artificial monopoly, that I hope piracy one day breaks.
When music was first (largely) being distributed via offerings like mp3.com and Napster, there was the ability to browse by genre and mine down to find various other bands you might like. There was lots of indie bands making their way to the surface, similar to Apples "genius" feature in itunes.
p2p is only a file sharing protocol, you still need to know what you're looking for before you can download anything, thus people are only going to download stuff they already know about.
If you want to unearth cool indie bands, you'll need a more traditional site with intuitive groupings to showcase them.
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
Hey, and thanks for posting.
I pretty much find this a valid and good argument.
It might reduce the willingness to take risk på biggerlabels, but on the other hand Indies has always been prone to take more risk than major label companies.
I see some other implications, f.i. it also would affect the possible "lifespan" income of artists significantly: However this is already a problem since the expected lifespan of an artists career has dropped significantly due to stuff that the Biz has brought onto themselves (at least back here).
Anyway: I think you are absolutely right that revising the copyright system is one of the things that could change things. But its a big task, and involves lobbyism and other crap that is out of the sphere where "you and med" can make a change. I still think there must be other ways to get more focus on how we can avoid being stuck with the major labels consolidating their marketing power through the (supposed) user controlled channels, and posting this reflection was my humble contribution... :-)
The less-cool effects of filesharing are by far outweighted by the cool effects of filesharing.
Filesharing is a product of technological advance. As every other technical advance before that, it has a negative effect on people whose business model comprised manual production of a certain product.
That way you also can write lengthy articles seemingly fraught with meaning about the less-cool effects of refrigerators, which made thousands of hard-working and family-feeding ice-collectors and ice-sellers unemployed. You could write about the less-cool effects of mechanized looms, which made hundreds of thousands unemployed and left to starving in the 19th century. In general, you could write general pamphlets against any kind of automatisation technology since it makes manual work not needed any more.
But in the end, you also will have to face the fact that you wont in any way be able to stop and wind back the clock of time and that the general market for "copies" of any kind has ended. With today's technology, we can replicate and distribute works of any kind ourselves and do not need you and your services any more. As somebody here said, "today, we are all printers". It may be true that in such a society there will be less new content created in total, but with free filesharing, we all will have access to more total content. The sole fact that you created something does not give you any kind of imaginary right to control how people will use it and how often they will copy and share it with other people. Also we people do not in any way grant you such rights, absolutely acknowledging that you may stop creating and publishing new works. We simply value our god given rights to free speech and free echange of information and culture than your imaginary, artificial rights to censor such natural human behavior in order to give you an incentive to "increase production".
The age of artificial scarcity and for-profit censorship has ended.
Enter the age of sharing and caring. Don't worry. It's going to be alright. :-)
I think he might have a bit of a bias being a failing indie band person. Strawman aside...
"There is no accounting for bad taste."
File sharing puts everything on equal footing based on POPULARITY. Think of torrents like a store... A store with 100million songs available. If not even 1 person is willing to seed your music the people have spoken, you SUCK. What does the top 100 have to do with anything? It is a reflection of the market, it drives it to some small degree but that is it. It makes everything almost equally available if there is some remote interest on the planet for it. Would you prefer a store with only 10,000songs? Where you are guaranteed to not be on the shelves.
Basically, suck it up. If you can't succeed in such an open environment on equal footing with any giant band (better than ones with RIAA fucking them over). Than it isn't the system. It is you.
You Suck.
You get a whaa whaa whaa piece on the front page of slashdot, but don't bother up link to a torrent of what you are offering. You failed because you are useless at getting the message out, and that assuming the material is even worth the infinitesimal costs of the HD space.
While it's true that it's worse for the RIAA labels if someone downloads an indie song that they like rather than illicitly downloading an RIAA song or buying an RIAA song, it's still worse for the labels for someone to illicitly download an RIAA song rather than buy it. So they will continue to fight TPB, even if it fails to help indie labels. Conversely, from the point of view of someone who wants to see RIAA labels hurt, it's better if someone illicitly downloads an RIAA song rather than purchases an RIAA song. Either way, I don't see how file sharing hurts the non-RIAA publishers. Either the RIAA music dominates the illicit channels as completely as the legal ones (in which case the indies are neither hurt nor helped by the illicit channels, but the RIAA labels are slightly hurt), or they do not (win for the indies).
The only case I can see where the existence of the illicit channels could hurt the indies is if they were trying to compete on price with the RIAA labels in the legal channels. I don't think that's the case.
My favorite least cool effect of filesharing is when your dumbass kids shut down your network with bittorrent because they don't know what they're doing. :)
Yeah, you can fix it after the fact but it's definitely confusing when it starts the first time.
This should be no surprise, since Bittorrent is designed to optimise downloads of popular stuff. More traditional P2P systems like gnutella are much more suited to rare content.
I'm not waying in on the filesharing debate as filesharing is irrelevant. That digital goods can be distributed for approaching zero marginal cost is an economic fact. Artists can now distribute products without a traditional middleman in place, where we once had labels we now have services like foxytunes. As the digital stores improve and prices are reduced, it'll be just as convienient to purchase music as it currently is to bittorrent it.
Old school record labels have been understandably reluctant to change and filesharing has served as a scapegoat for an outdated business model. The reality is that bands still require management, promotion and PR and they still require loans (AKA: advance payment). If you can do these things successfully, you have a business. If not... why should I care?
Using TBP download stat's as a source that people don't want to download non mainstream artists music isn't valid. People download music from TPB because they 1. Don't have access to it in their region, or 2. don't want to pay for it, but they knew what they were looking for ahead of time.
On the other hand with Indie music there are much better sources to distribute music in a p2p setting, such as Jamendo. It's better organized for Creative Commons music searches then TBP, hosts its own tracker, and offers direct downloads for content, in case the seeder ratio is low. Artists can classify their music based on style.
TBP and self promotion have nothing to do with each other. Youtube, and Jamendo are about promotion, TPB is about distributing in mass quantities. Once your indie gets huge overnight and you can't keep up with the requests for downloads, then you put your torrent on TPB, and they'll get it out there for you, but until then, promote.
I have never heard someone call their own actions a snub, and even if I had, this would not be one.
What you have written is a 'rebuttal'. When you 'snub', you dismiss, insult, or frustrate the expectations of someone who has expectations of you specifically.
Mostly I think the accepted linguistic use is that a snub is what the second party or a third party determines. It's not up to the snubber to decide if it's a snub or not.
Can anyone point to other examples of people calling their own actions a snub, in advance?
Not all of it in any case, the main flaw in timothy's argument. The vast bulk of TPB appears to be search driven, download what you already know. It's no surprise the system favours established artists. Usenet, in contrast, had finely grained per niche discussion tied to downloads. I stopped buying music soon after my ISP killed the binary groups for lack of exposure to new artists.
Probably. But I think the fundamental reason small labels and independent artists are struggling is because they are not publishing music that appeals to a broad range of consumers. The big labels are pretty good about picking out stuff that sells, and artists tend to gravitate towards larger labels. As a result, the smaller independent labels mainly get music that was not accepted by any of the big labels. This is a very narrow niche market that appeals to a very small number of people. All the statistics are saying is that the big labels are doing an extremely good job of picking and promoting music with broad appeal. Of course, that renders such music rather bland, but that's the price of having broad appeal.
I'm not sure how pirates figure into this. If anything, piracy hurts big labels much more than small ones. Small artists typically have more devout fans that would probably be much more likely to support the artists by buying their records. They also don't have a pre-existing business model that's based on selling a small number of hits in extremely large volumes.
... and that's what you pay for.
It costs tens of millions to make masses "like" some music. You could have a music genius playing next door, but you don't care. You want what you are repeatedly told everyone wants. You follow the herd mentality. Masses are inherently fascistic and kitschy in their tastes, and there is a price tag attached to feeding that mentality. This is what labels do for living. They manufacture mass desires, and that costs money. Artists are relevant as much as coca leaves gatherers in latin america.
Before the means of obtaining for free the commercial bits existed, at least those without money were spared from the participation in this musicjugend hordes. Now they also can participate, for free. The idiots even cheer this free access as some advance in civilisation and "freedom". Think of it freebie heroin. It eliminates choice.
The original comment is correct - zero cost for obtaining copyrighted material only strengthens the grip of labels.
How could illegal file sharing ever be good for the recording industry? It seems clear that sales are down by massive numbers and continue to fall. Most mainstream music is crap and I'll bet most of the indie music supposedly being snubbed is also crap. Good riddance! 8^D
If we limited commercial copyright to 5-10 years, then it would hugely help new artists. By reducing the value of the back-catalogues, it would mean a strong incentive for publishers and music-labels to support new music.
Yeah, definitely! If only Britney Spears' _OLD_ albums didn't outsell all the indie records coming out.
Wait, what?
Yes, TPB top 100 lists popular music. What is popular is popular.
Torrenting in and of itself doesn't advertise music. Me telling my buddy "hey, go download X", and him being able to download X does.
This treats nice indy labels and evil RIAA labels completely equally, because we don't give a damn about your copyright policies. We're going to ignore your claims no matter what.
Now, when I do decide to spend money on music, I'm not going to give it to the evil bastard suing the nice folks running trackers.
"it is a shame that the internet came and replaced my business model"
the internet is nothing but a superior distribution model that, fortunately for us, unfortunately for those invested in the old school, has no financial impetus. artists can distribute directly to their fans, without any filter in between
all music files are nowadays are nothing more than ad fliers for the artist's next show. revenue is made in ancillary streams: live shows, endorsements, etc. yes, this financial world is a lot smaller than the old one. and? why should we care there is less money involved? i am supposed to feel bad my artist will make $100,000 rather than $1,000,000? or rather, that my favorite artist's distributor makes $0 now instead of $10,000,000? besides, my favorite artist sits atop a pyramid of lesser artists who made pennies under the old model while their distributor reaped it all. and the lesser artists will actually make more under the new model, since there's no distributor to own and lord over their financial lives. the only artists who really suffer in the new model are the extremely well established artists: your metallica, your prince, your britney spears, your jay z. the highly-established artist who has muscled into the distribution model surrounding him
let's all shed a tear for fifty cent and the beatles
who fucking cares they will now make millions rather than billions
all that is dying is the old school distribution and financial model. everything else is upside
i mean it is a shame that the printing press put all those hardworking transcribing monks out of business too, but what are we supposed to do for those monks other than simply mourn their passing?
i mourn the passing of your era. that's all i have for you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
if it isnt a profit for the big 4, than its a loss. thier the ones with the guns...money. anyone who refuses to pay for their music will be shot...taken to court. sure, we could all go out and support that indi artist, only to find that the indi lable is another one that is owned by the big 4. they change names daily. the only way to not give them your money is to...not give them your money. when everyone stops buying music, and the big 4 start hurtin, then taxes will increase and t hey will get bailed out.
they will take your money, u dont even have to give it to them. :)
now we return to our regularly scheduled programing
The original mp3.com or the cnet advertisement with the random give-aways? Because Michael Robertson's mp3.com was novel, and way ahead of its time, the spam site is/was garbage.
Quack, quack.
I love them. What-ever they are, they are yummy. Just saying.
I doubt it... If you limit copyrights to 5 to 10 years you will only put more power into the hands of the major labels.
Part of the major problem is marketing. Indie labels can't market like major labels because they do not have the power. What Indie labels hope for is that people will "discover" them out of pure chance, and it seems this is not happening. I can understand that because like the fat tail book was wrong.
What they have found in terms of Amazon is that indeed there is a long tail, but it is much thinner.
So by limiting copyright you as an artist need to make money quickly, and that means marketing quickly. Guess who can do that? The major labels, and not the indie labels...
Would this mean new artists? If you mean boy bands, and girl bands who would sell their souls for a single hit? Yupe you would get more of that. If you mean bands like the Rolling Stones? Nope, not likely...
Want to get more new music? Simple STOP BUYING THE CRAP MUSIC!!! It is really that easy...
The market is a reflection of what our buying habits are...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Too bad that you are anonymous because you are hitting the nail on the head...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Just check out myspace if you want to see a proliferation of indie labels and artists. Pirate Bay and other mainstream file sharing programs are just that MAINSTREAM. There are other file sharing tools that focus purely on obscure indie music and genre's. These programs show an entirely different view of music sharing. Almost no one share mainstream pop crap.
If it helps giving you a sense why you'd very unlikely get free and quality textbooks: I know enough calculus that I'm quite willing to teach you for free when I have nothing else to do, but writing a textbook takes an organized effort beyond what I'm willing to do for free.
Not to say that writing a textbook about emerging fields for graduate students (or advanced undergraduate students) involves hours and hours of survey and comprehensive study of related papers. These papers only describe incremental developments of a concept, and are targeted only for researchers in the same field. The papers are, in a sense, a bush in the forest, and writing a textbook requires you to map out the entire forest by looking at a bush at a time. Then you need to figure out how to organize it in a way so the material is accessible to first-time readers of that subject.
I once had a signature.
what about the ability of major record labels to recruit "indie" music? No matter how you look at it, it's damn tempting to give a good share of the money they promise you'll get in exchange for the publicity that you'll receive. Sure some might just love music and realize that their talent might get them to that point eventually, but we all know too well that most are impatient and see this as an instant "big ticket". The only way to truly get rid of these companies is to have some way for the artists to be massively publicized routinely for nothing (or something close). But we all know that greed will make this extremely difficult.
Help fight spam
The phenomenon described in the article saddens me, but it is supported by theory. I have worried about this based on my limited reading about network theory. The popularity of a cultural work is largely a result not of any inherent qualities of the work itself, but of of the activities of the audience. If I like a piece of music, I am likely to tell my friends. They tell their friends, and so on and so on. (This is preferential attachment in a scale-free network.) So you end up with a small number of hits and a large number of also-rans. This is a power law distribution with its long tail. It explains why success in hit-driven fields is so unpredictable: much of the value doesn't come from the original work. The thing is, the easier it is for the audience to communicate among themselves (whether to talk about the work, or to actually distribute it), the larger the effect can be. When distribution and communication become easier, this enables the further concentration of attention on the hits. That seems to be the phenomenon described here. Someone else perhaps can comment on reasons this might not happen. I certainly find I read more widely as a result of blogs and the Internet, so it's not necessarily all bad. Another consequence of this argument is that copyright is unjust. Popularity is not just an arbitrary metric. It actually reflects real value being created. As people listen to a piece of music, for example, they increase its cultural significance. They associate it with events in their lives. They attach meaning to it. They reinterpret it. When a creative work becomes a hit it is transformed, acquiring significance and meaning and value it didn't have before. Think of the tune to the American national anthem for example: it was once just a drinking song. Here in Canada we can see this clearly with the old theme to Hockey Night in Canada. Over the years people came to see it as the soundtrack to their lives. Well, copyright reserves the profits from and control over a hit for its authors. Nix that: typically it reserves them for a few big media companies. Regardless though, the audience who created so much of that value - indeed in many cases the vast majority of that value - are locked out. The rightsholders free-ride on the effort of others, while those others are not permitted to transmit the meanings and value they gave to the work. From that perspective, one approach might be to open up those hits to reinterpretation by others (i.e. derivative works). Then instead of being locked out by the structure of the network, indie artists can be part of it (and leverage it for their own works). And in fact we are seeing a lot of this with remixes - creativity that copyright places outside the law.
I'm an unknown artist who publishes some of his work under the CC-BY-SA license, so if you're feeling generous I guess you could count me as one of these indie people (not on the music industry though).
Every time the *IAAs make a huge dick move, specially one somewhat successful (don't see too many of those, BTW), I privately cheer for them, as I think the more they alienate their customers, the more they will turn towards indie, free, non-restrictive, non-DRM ladden stuff. Their "wins" are actually their loss - and their losses are my wins, so to speak.
If the *IAAs and their ilk got absolute, sweeping legal victories, and every piracy outlet in the world were to shut down (unlikely as that notion might be), then I have no doubt a large part of the population would finally snub the major labels, turn to indies, and hopefully discover the jewels they hadn't even looked at before.
I don't know whether it's alright to blame piracy for this, though. It's just what the current situation is, no more and no less.
For what is worth, I have heard a similar argument coming from the Linux community (i.e. "if people couldn't pirate Windows, many more of them would use Linux instead"). And I have personally seen this happen plenty of times (people buying Linux PCs, then turning around and installing a pirated Windows copy). Perhaps it's not so different from what the OP says?
... especially when an entrenched monopoly (RIAA) is involved. The RIAA has the power (both economic and political) to make it very difficult for alternatives to the RIAA to gain a significant foothold. That is not to say that the RIAA will never be overthrown, it will just take time. The major labels need to see a more profitable alternative to the RIAA, but that will not happen unless/until more internet-savvy executives populate the upper ranks of the record labels.
He is a former pirate radio DJ, magazine editor and entrepreneur and have written the book "The Pirate's Dilemma". Excellent book which you can get for free att his webpage.
http://thepiratesdilemma.com/
review: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/05/book-review-2008-05.ars
Also check out the talk by him:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6483543718966313073
Agreed. The author seems to be implying that he was promised P2P would solve all his marketing needs. As a distribution system there is only one thing it reliably does: distribution.
True, but I think there's more to it than that.
Yes, P2P doesn't solve marketing needs. But it also does something else: drive distribution costs to 0. This is the critical issue: Right now, while the big labels are still fat off of profits from non-P2P, they use those profits to market, and they conquer all markets that way - non-P2P and otherwise.
But once P2P is the main game, and it's just a matter of time, then the situation will be radically different. The big labels and the big artists won't have those non-P2P sources of cash, so they won't be able to flood the planet with their marketing. This will be a huge boon for indie artists.
So, the original argument is valid right now. But not in the long run.
Corporate music almost always sounds good (in the genre of your preference), indie music almost always sounds mediocre or poor. That's the simple truth of the matter.
Even a band who managed to stay independent and relatively popular for a while (example: Rage Against the Machine), eventually ends up going corporate - and why wouldn't they? There's more in it for them, even if they become a major part of "the machine"
If independents want to really compete with the big boys, they need to market *creatively* and be innovative, and use some business sense - lots of independents lack this last component. You'll never beat the big guys if you play their same marketing game, even with them being beat up as much as they are, they'll still outspend you 100 to 1.
I think the market is RIPE for an upstart independent to eat the lunch of the big guys. They don't know what the hell they're doing. They're completely lost! If an independent could put together some kind of workable micro-royalty system where consumers could conveniently and easily download a song for, say 5 cents, I think even the completely broke college students would come over to the micro-royalty system, because it's more convenient and worth the small amount of money.
The market is in complete disarray. When this level of creative destruction occurs, a new competitor almost always takes the market by the balls. The future dominant force isn't going to be the person who complains about how the labels still have the advantage in the old world, it'll be the person that has the business discipline and knowledge to create a new world.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Whether or not filesharing hurts or helps unsigned artists or indie labels does not change the following fundamental point:
_The Legal System Does Not Exist To Make Your Broken Business Model Work_
This is equally true for small and large record labels. If you run a business, it is your responsibility alone to make people *want* to give you money. If you were really using your head, you'd be advertising on TPB by now.
Even if you look at the top 100,000 torrents, you'd still find that most of it is going to be releases from commercial artists. Not that there are 100,000 artists, but most torrents share one album at a time (each artist has multiple album releases), and there are lots of dups.
A more realistic measure is the seeder and leecher count. Most of the commercial artists have thousands of seeders and leechers at any given time. Some of the less popular stuff I tried to download have 0 seeder and 1 leecher; that leecher was me. This should give you an idea of the unfairness of the distribution.
I once had a signature.
What TPB and other sites like it do is insure that all music is free. Many indie artists would gladly give their music away to get discovered. Major labels and artists would never do this. No matter due to TPB and others all music is free. So without these sites indie artists might have an easer time getting attention.
This is what has kept windows on top for so long. Virtually everyone gets it for free. Either it comes on the computer when they buy it or they have a friend loan them a CD. Very few people buy windows.
Why bother with free things like Linux when what everyone is using is free?
When music is free (filesharing) you don't have to worry about costs. Most everyone will download big label releases of any interest because they're free--but they will also download indy releases. In the aggregate more people are downloading the same big label releases, true. But that doesn't means more people don't end up listening to the indy stuff. It is giving indy music a placing... it's not making indy music takeover and kill off big labels.
When someone knows he's downloading a Madonna album, he knows he's taking a couple bucks out of a multi-millionnaire...
When someone downloads and learns about a fairly unknown group and he likes what he hears, he know that if he buys a CD from that group, the group won't see his money as useless change while they ligth their cigars with 100$ bills... the smaller groups needs the money and people know that... people commit much more into buying indie albums than buying the latest Celine Dion because they know that if they can make the album more known, the group will want to release more and bigger is usually "better" for the fans
Yes, this. The biggest problem with copyright today is NOT the fascist attempts to enforce valid copyrights. No, the single biggest problem, is the corruption of copyright law. If a song hasn't earned enough money after ten years, that's tough. It's just a damned song. After ten years of collecting royalties, it should be released into the public domain. Books, I can see copyrights of 25 years or so.
But, I don't expect to see this happening. Instead, the corporations are going to buy off enough politicians that copyrights remain in effect for_freaking_EVER!!
Eventually, (maybe 20 years, maybe 50) there will be one monopolistic corporation. AllYourTunesBelongToUs
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
In theory, popular music should make popular torrents, not the other way around (the egg came before the chicken, people). The reason independent artists aren't as popular is to do with level of awareness. It is far easier to find out about labeled brands than independent ones. Perhaps someone knows of a good list of such artists, or could make one? (Wikiart, anyone???)
Excuse for why is your room always messy?
Baen Books, for instance, reports a rise in the sales of older titles after making those available for download (in this case legally).
As others have posted before me, The Pirate Bay is a terrible place to promote stuff because you disappear in the mass.
Myspace is probably better for music, but what you really want is a website that is known for offering similar music for download. That will give you the best chance that potential customers who like the genre listen in.
The Baen Free Library (http://www.baen.com/library/) is a good place for checking out Science Fiction authors, and I buy most of my entertainment books from Baen these days.
If you can find a similar place to promote your style of music, I'm sure it will get you more attention than TPB.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Music has never been better. Filesharing has been going on in the last 10 years and music has gone a long way in the last 10 years. Filesharing is only hindering the money which big record companies are making, and as for my artists I prefer them starving. Point is, if we take money out of the art equation, then we'll get less artists doing it for the money and more artists doing it because they are passionate about their art and would do it for free anyways. This is just an issue of an existing market trying to survive. If we had invented the internet and filesharing before CD's, the market would have never existed and we would not even be talking about this right now. It's akin to china's use of coal as energy, it's dumber from every angle but people still do it because people have their lives invested in it. I say fuck them.
Maybe the indies and the private trackers would be able to to do some serious crowdsourcing/microfinancing business if the big guys would leave each other alone. If the authors premise that TPB and the RIAA are reinforcing each other is true, this would be a good path. It seems however that the obvious trend is that filesharing is a permanent fixture of the new distribution model and that whichever side figures out the best way to monetize everything else while leaving the actual songs completely free will be the victors. Whether the pirates are involved is a superflous concern. They just happen to have a better grip on the technology at the moment. In the end, its about efficiency. In a time of recession this is even more pronounced. Torrents or something similar will always provide a cheap way to distribute information. Just build an economy around it :)
By reducing the value of the back-catalogues, it would mean a strong incentive for publishers and music-labels to support new music.
I refute that claim thusly:
New Kids on the Block
Backstreet Boys
'N Sync
(etc.)
All you'll get by limiting the commercial music copyright to 5-10 years is the same old thing repackaged and resold under a different name. The faces may change, but there won't be anything "new" about them.
The Pirate Bay have several times changed their doodle to promote independent artist. Some of these are Lamont, Max Peezay, Timbuktu and Organismen (Organism 12). This has been done in collaboration with the artists. Here is one example: http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-sponsors-rock-band-071103/
Thank you xtrafe for reminding us of this crucial point.
Let us also remember that Music is not at all the same thing as The "Music" Business. I have read a bit of history, and it seems that there was music, nay MUSIC, before there was copyright law, and long before there were copyright brokers.
I am having the musical time of my life listening to Canon Rock on YouTube, to the entire line of Magnatune CC-licensed music (http://www.magnatune.com/), for which I paid a flat fee to download past, present, and future selections, local live concerts, all sorts of things on Internet Archive, some Nine Inch Nails, and nothing touched by RIAA.
Oh, and singing.
"Living in the heart of music,"
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
Sorry. Bouncy three year-old on my arm when I clicked "Submit".
The phenomenon described in the article saddens me, but it is supported by theory. I have worried about this based on my limited reading about network theory. The popularity of a cultural work is largely a result not of any inherent qualities of the work itself, but of of the activities of the audience. If I like a piece of music, I am likely to tell my friends. They tell their friends, and so on and so on. (This is preferential attachment in a scale-free network.) So you end up with a small number of hits and a large number of also-rans. This is a power law distribution with its long tail. It explains why success in hit-driven fields is so unpredictable: much of the value doesn't come from the original work.
The thing is, the easier it is for the audience to communicate among themselves (whether to talk about the work, or to actually distribute it), the larger the effect can be. When distribution and communication become easier, this enables the further concentration of attention on the hits. That seems to be the phenomenon described here. Someone else perhaps can comment on reasons this might not happen. I certainly find I read more widely as a result of blogs and the Internet, so it's not necessarily all bad.
Another consequence of this argument is that copyright is unjust. Popularity is not just an arbitrary metric. It actually reflects real value being created. As people listen to a piece of music, for example, they increase its cultural significance. They associate it with events in their lives. They attach meaning to it. They reinterpret it. When a creative work becomes a hit it is transformed, acquiring significance and meaning and value it didn't have before. Think of the tune to the American national anthem for example: it was once just a drinking song. Here in Canada we can see this clearly with the old theme to Hockey Night in Canada. Over the years people came to see it as the soundtrack to their lives.
Well, copyright reserves the profits from and control over a hit for its authors. Nix that: typically it reserves them for a few big media companies. Regardless though, the audience who created so much of that value - indeed in many cases the vast majority of that value - are locked out. The rightsholders free-ride on the effort of others, while those others are not permitted to transmit the meanings and value they gave to the work. From that perspective, one approach might be to open up those hits to reinterpretation by others (i.e. derivative works). Then instead of being locked out by the structure of the network, indie artists can be part of it (and leverage it for their own works). And in fact we are seeing a lot of this with remixes - creativity that copyright places outside the law.
>
I see some other implications, f.i. it also would affect the possible "lifespan" income of artists significantly
Okay, I've seen you post "f.i." twice now, and since it doesn't seem to exist anywhere as an abbreviation except by you, I will presume to ask you what it means.
I can think of 3 abbreviations you're likely trying to use: FYI (for your information), i.e. (in other words - Latin), e.g. (for example - Latin).
To almost any musical act: "Airplay" is everything! File sharing may not be the most efficient way, but it does accomplish what all entertainment wants: "Airplay". Also remember the basic right: 'Try before you buy'. The article is bullshit; no way in hell can anyone expect payment for all times a song (or movie) is played. Within the people I know, the vast majority of downloads are discarded. It would be unacceptable to pay for everything. There is no better way to discover new talent. If the mass media radio won't play it, you must take it and see/hear it for yourself.
Its like free software. Mostly you either toss it, but if its a good idea, you expand on it. Somehow I can't see the difference: Market sets the price. Stamping on price tags is just a delusion from those that think they are worth far more than the market provides. ANY COST is set by the market, not the producer.
BillSF
What he's saying is that, even among pirated songs, Britney Spears (or some such) still tops the list. That argument is invalidated for two reasons:
1) It doesn't take into account the changes that would *have* to happen once we do away with copyrights, broadly speaking. Because we do not have such a world right now. We. Simply. Cannot. Know.
2) It doesn't take into account that 100% prosecution of sharing implies 100% loss of freedom to share legitimate stuff.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
People have always sought out new, interesting things based on stimuli from their surroundings.
I think the ubiquity of the Internet has merely caused a decline in the importance of advertising. In the past, it was perhaps more important, but the Internet has made people more interconnected than ever before. It's easier to seek out like-minded people and find out their interests.
To put it simply, I believe the input of your "friends" is the dominant stimulus nowadays. This naturally encourages file sharing. The word of a friend alone may not be enough to cause you to spend money on something, but the threshold to download is much lower.
This kind of behaviour has the potential to expose you to a much greater amount of entertainment, as it's not limited by what the labels choose to advertise. Of course, it won't always lead to a sale, and many people will become freeloaders, but that is unavoidable.
I believe the only way to combat illegal downloading as a source of entertainment is to provide a legal solution that is both as easy to use as your favourite torrent tracker *and* price it so that the majority of people pay it for the sheer desire to be a law-abiding citizen.
As a personal anecdote, most of my books, games and DVDs I bought exactly because I had access to the material on the Internet. This includes many imports that would never be locally advertised.
The only exceptions are my PS3 games (minus a few shared PSN games). Even those I bought either after trying them myself or because I couldn't stand my friends going on about how awesome they were.
Even the uninitiated can see how the model works. An artist, by some miracle (or act of politics), is recognized as having money making potential and the industry fires up its marketing machine. The machine not only puts the actual product together, but they also arrange for play on radio, on TV and even in movies. Now the public sees them and are told they like them. The public obediently agrees and gets in line to buy their published goods.
The machine is the same but sometimes the stars become too big and eventually independent. The industry can't have this so they no longer promote the TRULY amazing artists... they instead recruit mediocre talent that has no spirit and so can be controlled, cloned or killed at the industry's whim. Is it any wonder why 40 year old music isn't being called "oldies" yet and that my teenage sons are listening to the music *I* listened to as a teen??? Truly good stuff isn't being pushed by the big machine, that's why.
I am sure some people will beg to differ with me and go ahead. But I think in the coming ten to fifteen years we will ask the same questions more often and especially why almost nothing of the 80's survived and are still playing with the same money-making popularity of the likes of James Taylor. (That guy is OLD and still makes millions for each appearance.) So differ with me, but you need to cite examples of people who have at least survived 25 years and are STILL popular today.
The people are addicted to the machine because the machine offers it all up in a brain-dead fashion. Meanwhile, indies can't access the machine... why? Is it because the same companies that market their artists ALSO have ties to the oligarchy that is the radio and TV market? No... can't be... the justice department would be all over that. Is it because of various payola schemes that are still in action today? No... they would never do that... the justice department would have been all over that too. Can it be that the big marketers are capable of spending the kind of money that keeps the cost of entry so high that indies can't afford to participate? That's an argument I could get behind. (And yes, it is sarcasm that I said "no" to the first two because the justice department HAS been involved in investigations of big radio/tv and big publishers... and still are)
ZOMG! No traded my crappy bands on the pirate bay!! File sharing sucks!
The flaw of the article is that the recording industry is not capable of change.
If it turns out that they suddenly only have 95 of the top 100, they will make it their best effort to sign the 5 that they missed and make a new label to court others like them.
Sort of like how Sundance Film Festival used to be all about the indies... until they started getting recognized...
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
maybe it's just your music that sucked.
I've been a fan of japanese indie bands and doujin artist. Since it's virtually impossible for people outside japan to get their tracks, internet (read: CD-RIPS) is the only option.
Remember this thing: if you want your music to be listened, make a(some) good one(s). Users will eventually take a note of them and keep looking back for more.
And a sure-way to note your success is when users start to upload your works to P2P, not you.
The reason you don't (or shouldn't expect to) see freely shared music in TPB's Top 100 is that you don't need TPB to find and acquire freely shared music. It has other legitimate sources which aren't in danger of being shut down through legal action - although Big Music would certainly shut them down if they could.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Thanks for posting
I humbly disagree (totally...hehe) to your analysis of the quality of major biz music compared to indie music. As I read your arguments you basically want to keep the commercial music scene strong and healthy.
The micro-royalty idea is an idea I have seen brought forward many times the latter years, and I think it is a very interesting thought. Do you or anyone else here know if there are any initiative going on that is worth readin up on?
The article simply describes a marketing failure.
Unsurprisingly, until marketing unites with Internet, the small labels will suffer.
There have been a lot of artists that I have supported that I wouldn't have bought if I hadn't listened to them through a copyright-infringing YouTube video. For example, Nightwish. They aren't a mainstream band really here in the US, you can buy some of their CDs at specialty stores, but if it wasn't for a YouTube video that technically violated copyright, I wouldn't have known they have existed. Since then, I have bought several of their CDs both physical and digital. While a lot of people look at P2P to solve all problems, YouTube and other streaming services actually help more.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Filesharing never said it would bring forth a massive wave of indie rock, but it certainly has helped that particular genre of music greatly. Between working at a college radio station (WUAG, bbbbbaby!) and partaking in P2P networks since good ol' Napster, I've discovered many artists I would never have heard of, and, consequently, bought merch, gone to shows, even got to meet The National after a show here. Without P2P, The Octopus Project probably never would have come to my town to play. While it hasn't propelled indie to the mainstream completely (and is that a bad thing?), it certainly has helped many artists reach a much broader audience...such as Of Montreal, Cut Copy, Girl Talk, The Fiery Furnaces, Broken Social Scene...to name a few, at least in my experience, because I probably wouldn't have heard of any of these bands and many more without P2P.
I would posit that the most seeded content isn't top 40 music or movies, its things like MMO clients and Linux ISO that are legal to seed. If you want more people to seed your content make it clear that you are giving it away... otherwise you are complaining that people aren't stealing your stuff often enough.
Not to mention that if I did pirate music I wouldn't even consider stealing indy music (with the possible exception of John Darnielle Said it was OK to Steal These Song for obvious reasons) since indy artists/labels actually need my money to stay in business.
and i can share the glories of the pakistani taliban versus zombie flick:
http://www.zibahkhana.com/
you act in good faith, so all i can offer is good faith of my own:
"I WANT to see a new era grow forth, and my post was a concern on why this is not happening after ten years of mindless arguing from both the biz and the filesharing community"
#1: there is no compatibility between the two communities, nor will there ever be
#2: one community's argument is nothing more than "why am i dying?"
there is no rapprochement between the transcribing monk and the printing press
all that happens is one dies, and the other lives
just say goodbye to the biz. its dying, and has no way not to die. thus its insane measures. it has a warchest, and all it is fighting is its own obsolescence
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You argue that p2p levels the playing field and lowers the barriers to entry. But that is not neutral at all: it benefits some more than others. Attention is a scarce resource. At some point people must decide where to put their attention and time - and, at least as importantly, where to put their heart. Because that emotional meaning-making increases the meaning of the music to them, to their friends, and so on to other people. For the scenario you describe to come true, in which both hits and unknown increase in popularity, one of two things must happen: the middle must be squeezed, or the role of music in society must change.
Now for a quibble. You call p2p nothing more than a distribution channel. This obscures that it is fundamentally a social phenomenon, one that is qualitatively different from what came before. By making it easy for you and your friends to listen to all share your tastes in music (without passing around mix tapes or buying CDs), it collapses the time and the space that separate what you like from what they like. It will not only increase popularity of hits (as I described), it will also change the dynamic. Just as cell phone use cut into candy bar sales, just as television drew people away from social interaction with their neighbors, so changing the accessibility, diversity, and pervasiveness of music - and of talk about, interaction with, and meaning-making around music - so changing these things will change the role of music. It might do so in a negative way. We cannot know this simply from theorizing about it. We need experience and empirical evidence.
Indie artists have less perceived worth than major label artists, therefore no one is bothered about pirating them.
I bet you wouldn't get many more downloads if you simply gave the mp3's away for free.
What about selling them by heavily marketing them on the web instead, and giving them an inflated price. 'Best New Artist of the Year!!!' kind of thing, with an album costing $50 or whatever currency you're in. When the perceived worth increases, I bet you'll see all sorts of rips of it appearing on torrent sites. I'm not sure how that helps you in the end but are you surprised that indie label artists with hardly any marketing don't become popular?
But he forgets the long tail. There are currently 1.741.982 torrents on TPB. The numbers of downloads int the top-100 is nothing compared to the number of downloads in the rest of these torrents.
"For instance"
Note: For the legally squeamish, I shall be referring to two fictional torrent trackers: "squeak" and "pancakes". The rest of you can just deal.
Once upon a time, I was one of the music industries greatest customers. When I was in highschool I'd make a weekly pilgrimage to the big record-store downtown and spend hours scouring the racks for tunes. I'm old/young enough that, at first, it was tapes, but I later progressed to CD's. My earliest albums are all popular well known artists, but I soon began to branch out into other genres that were, at the time, marginal. Classical. Electronica. You name it.
In the late nineties I started using Napster and a variety of other sharing sites, but sweet, glorious usenet above all else. Sure, you needed luck and a commerical usenet account to find what you wanted but, if you could find it, it would download. (rather than sitting at 32% like so many file sharing networks of the day!) It was like a smorgasboard. You could just download things at random and find yourself on journeys of musical discovery. I was still buying a lot of albums in those days. Primarily albums from groups I discovered through usenet but hadn't been able to find anywhere. (These were often ordered through the mail.)
I always felt a little guilty about hanging onto digital copies of albums I had downloaded without buying, but I figured things balanced out since I was really spending more money than I could afford on music anyways. Then, Metallica started suing people and Napster got shut down. Usenet was still fine, but suddenly the relationship between artists and fans was tainted. I know it's not justifiable. It's illegal, immoral, whatever. But I haven't bought a single album, online or otherwise, since that day. I can't explain it, but suddenly a group I loved was calling me a thief. I realized it was true, and strangely enough, I stopped caring.
For a while I continued downloading music through usenet, but that phase sort of waned. So much was being posted there that it was taking hours a day to sift through just the lossless groups. For every great new track I found, I found hundreds of tracks I loathed. I'd find artists that cut one decent song in their careers and then nothing but crap. My music collection stood still for several years.
Then squeak came along. Instead of passively sipping from the usenet garden-hose, you could actively search for music that interested you. Squeak had almost *everything*. Odds were that, if you could think of it, squeak had it. Unlike open torrent trackers like TPB or the various sharing networks that came before, the closed ratio-enforced nature of squeak ensured that whatever you did find downloaded nearly as fast as if was coming off of usenet. The comments people posted to torrents were frequently a goldmine of information for finding new music too. My collection expanded quite a bit during these years.
Then, one day, squeak was shut down. I really felt cut off from music that day. iTunes was going strong, but even they had relatively little compared to squeak and, at the time, the quality of their lossy AAC tracks was poor compared to the lossless that was so easy to find on squeak. I realized that squeak really was something special, and just as I used to pay a monthly fee for usenet I'd have gladly paid a monthly fee for Oink. Why couldn't the record industry find some way to provide that service and take my money? I didn't feel guilty about pirating music, but I did feel weary of moving around trying to find music in the "old ways".
A little while later, while casting about for an oink replacement, I got an early account on "pancakes", but it sucked. There was nothing there. It felt like a refugee camp, except all the cool people had gone to some other, cooler camp and this one was for the rejects. Eventually, I despaired and went through another dark, period of zero-musical discovery. My original pancakes login was soon forgotten.
A while back,
A buddy of mine was in a band which had really lackluster album sales, but for whatever reason, traded well on Napster (back in the day). Whenever they went on tour, wherever they went, they would fill clubs, and they'd see people in the audience singing along. This certainly isn't the pinnacle of success; none of them are professional musicians anymore, they never got a major record deal, but they were able to support themselves for several years, and see the world, even if most of it was out of the back of a van. Without the Internet, without filesharing, they would have remained a local also-ran.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Seriously. What service are they providing? If they can make money because they have some marketing skills, great for them. Consumers have no obligation to support their industry because it was once relevant. That's why it's called a 'market'. These days, many artists can create, promote & distribute their own material and keep all the dough. The definition of property has changed no matter what courts say. It doesn't really matter though because the labels days are numbered. It's only a matter of time before ALL artists realize they don't need them and the 'industry' won't exist or else be very different. Before Caruso and phonographs/cylinders, musicians made money as PERFORMING artists, rather than RECORDING artists. The idea has taken over modern thinking that if you can get an idea (think patent) before anyone else, you should be able to claim it as your own and make money forever on it without ever having to do anything again. Like snatching up domains. Uggh.
THanks for a very good post
Its a shame you are back in Canada (im of candian origin myself), or i would invite you out for a beer sometimes as i think it would make an interesting aquaintance.
Im not gonna add alot to your post, other than mentioning that we have the same taxes on CD-Rs etc over her in norway that secures the artists some income, at least as long as there is a physical medium involved.
Have you checke out Spotify, if it is available over there? Its streaming, but they have buildt up a stron catalouge already and are rapidly growing. They base it upon som e advertising now and then between songs, as well as ad-free subscriptions with som other minor benefits. Its in beta stage, so you need an invite to install it though... I might be able to cough one up if its possible to use over there...
Anyways, thanks again for an insightful post that really puts the user experience in latter years into perspective... :-)
I don't think the RIAA would agree with the micro-royalty system, though. As much as I agree with it (if I don't like a song, it's not worth my time to fight over a nickel or a dime), it doesn't tie in with the RIAA's philosophy - get money from EVERYONE who listens to a song.
One time when I worked at Staples, I got the deal of a lifetime - Adobe Photoshop CS2 for $4.50. Full, retail Photoshop for $4.50. I'm sure that 98% of people who use cracked copies of Photoshop would buy it if it were $4.50. I told one of the guys who replaced me about it, and his response was, "even at $4.50, I still wouldn't buy it." "Do you use it?" "Of course!" "So why isn't it worth even $4.50 to you?" "Because I can get it for free". People like this guy are the reason why the *AA wouldn't go for micropayments, because people like him are seen as money left on the table. They feel that they can't let that happen, and they figure that if TPB/Mininova/Your Tracker Here were shut down, then people like him would be forced to pay $599 for Photoshop, and that he would be willing to do so.
Is that there isn't anything as awesome as the old MP3.com.
Seriously.
I probably haven't been exposed to one independent song in the past year. When mp3.com was still here, I downloaded a ton, in a variety of genres.
Does anyone know of a (good) site like the old mp3.com that offers the same scope of music AND free downloads?
"copyright law in the US at least was created in 1790. What methods did they have before that date that allowed the almost flawless recreation of works?"
According to what I have read, there was a lot of unrecorded music. Even before 1790. Some of it has come down to me in musical notation, some passed through the oral/aural tradition, some is just a rumor. Probably a lot of it served to lift the spirits of those living at the time, and does nothing directly for me today. But I don't begrudge those ancients their own music.
In my Historical Anthology of Music, by Davison and Apel, the first piece is a Chinese "Entrance Hymn for the Emperor," estimated at 1000 B.C. The earliest ones that I can attempt to sing are newer: only about 1,800 years old.
What is this "flawless"? I love recorded music, even when it flawlessly records the flaws. There are different sorts of flaws. When my mother sings "Kayro Kymo Deemo Wep," I consider that to be a flawless transmission of my ancestral music, even if the waveform may be different from the one produced by her mother's mother.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
I've noticed that when I try to find "not so popular music" it's a pain in the ass. TPB, ISOhunt, you name it. I can't often find the music I am looking for unless it's already "popular"
Surpeis - a few notes: Nice thoughtful note ... even in English as a second language !
I was thrilled about a decade ago, when the opportunity for artists to self-promote and self-distribute their own music seemed just over the horizon, freeing new artists from the stranglehold that the major labels had on music distribution. However that opportunity seems, unfortunately, less likely now than it was a decade ago. Itunes isn't motivated to promote free music, tho their Genius capability would seem to be tailor fit for providing 'others who downloaded this free indie music, also liked *this other* music.
With that said, you're brave posting, your *thoughtful* post to the /. community. A lot of the posters from this community clearly thinks that taking things *because they can*, such as pirated music, is somehow rationalized over taking things that would *likely result in being caught* such as, say soap on a grocers shelf. Sorry to say that expecting a rational discussion from *those who rationalize stealing* is more than a little optimistic.
The big labels are pretty good about picking out stuff that sells, and artists tend to gravitate towards larger labels.
Is the industry good at picking stuff that becomes popular and sells? Or does it become popular because the industry tells us to like it and provides no alternative?
The entertainment industry doesn't just sell products. It commands its (mostly impressionable and young) customers to like what it is selling via hype, celebrity endorsements, manufactured peer approval, and other forms of marketing pressure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddn4MGaS3N4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O2aH4XLbto
Etc...
One problem is that you're examining bittorrent - designed for distributing large chunks of data (like long-lived band's discography) amongst a large number of peers (the bigger the swarm, the better - not so good for obscure, low-demand content). So... yeah, of course torrent sites are naturally geared toward already-popular content.
Popular music more popular!
Obscure music less popular!
Regardless of distribution method and media!
Also, sky is blue, water is wet, candy tastes better than cardboard and I am stating obvious things.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I truthfully don't care about music. What I care about is when textbooks start becoming free. It will be a revolution in education. This will be especially the case when people write things like,"The comprehensive guide to calculus as to be learned by anyone who knows how to count" The computer means it can be an advanced and interactive media session. The free distribution will mean anyone can have it in their hands.
You can see a (slightly older) revision here. It still has a long way to go, but I'm working on it! Feedback is always appreciated. There will be a new revision out within the next two months, key features will include a far more in depth look at calculus, and the philosophy of mathematics...
And I'm hardly alone: there are lots of other such projects around.
unfortunately, people will see music, available for download, and go "oh, this must be music that i would have to pay an extortionate sum for. i'm not doing that".
in other words, they *think* it's a multi-mega-corporation-backed rip-off when in fact it's nothing of the sort, and the rippers don't care about making a distinction between the indie bands' rip-off and the multi-mega-backed rip-off, so the downloaders aren't being informed.
music. Let me on behalf of my Russian counterparts assure the original author that niche music is very much a beneficiary of trading and scene releases. That any author might complain about lack of diversity points more to the superficial level of the authors knowledge.
And FTR, I pay for most of my music. But the scene is one of the best resources for discussing and discovering new music. These kids really love this stuff.
Quack, quack.
This is a ridiculous argument.
Filesharing is not the reason that most of the music heard is by the top 100 artists from major labels.
It was that way long before TPB or even the Internet, or even computers, or even CDs.
Hell, it was that way before 33 1/3 RPM records. Even before recorded music, when songwriters made their living from selling sheet music, it was the music from the big publishing companies that got most of the attention.
The reason most of the music heard is from these major label artists with big money behind them is because those labels are spending a load of money on promotion, advertising, marketing, product-placement, mass media tie-ins, everything.
And, unfortunate as it may be from your prospective, Mr Indie Label Man, wanting music to be heard and wanting music to sell are now two different things. The sooner you change your strategy to reflect that reality, the better. Time's not going to stand still because you decided on a career in the arts.
There are other ways to make a living as a musician besides relying on traditional record sales, and they don't require selling out or playing weddings. I know this for a fact, empirically.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It is despicable to try to play upon the emotions of music consumers using a fallacious argument that they are helping The Man keep Real Artists down.
Maybe the harsh reality is that there's no more room in the music marketplace to support the existence of outmoded and redundant entities like "indie labels" or even record labels at all.
You're fired.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Is this how a truly free market corrects itself? We talk about the market place and we talk about business interests within the market as if the two forces are the only concrete forces at play.
'Nature abhors a vacuum' - Aristotle
Quack, quack.
Squeak == Suprnova, Pancakes == Demonoid?
FWIW - paragraph formatting changed your post from the rantings of a crazy loon to something very insightful.
Without your repost, I would never have read past the 4th sentence or so.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Let me add some personal insights to the (admittedly well-thought-out) OP account and try to point out a few complementary facts.
It so happens I have never used TPB, but I have been employing torrents to some extent, and P2P much more so (the "clean" kind: soulseek). The RIAA need not worry [smile]: out of my 10000+ tracks hardly any appear in their Top lists (and, may I add, the majority of what I have downloaded I already own, on CDs and LPs, so it was mainly a matter of convenience). I do, however, have quite a bit of material from new, indie bands and performers, that I met and I happened to like. Some of them I encountered through MySpace, last.fm, vampirefreaks and related sites. And yes, when I find something I like I do buy it, to support the artist and do my bit to ensure more future releases. I prefer models of support where my money goes to the artist and not to the advertisement/distribution network of a large corporation.
Over the years I have met a lot of people in such music scenes -- from all walks of life (and from 4 of the 5 continents). Not all do as I do, of course -- but consider: There are quite a few among them who have just about enough for life's basic necessities. They wouldn't go out and buy CDs one way or another. The day may come, though, when their fortunes improve, and they do start buying... especially if they can do so at a reasonable cost, and not one inflated by hype, pomp and circumstance. Some bands already provide this approach.
It seems to me the large music companies will find the erosion of their stranglehold increasing, and inevitably so. Recording used to need a studio; nowadays a PC is enough. Distribution and advertisement used to require an elaborate (and expensive) edifice; nowadays the realities of the Internet dictate otherwise. Said companies find themselves progressively denuded, more and more so left holding an emptying bag. It reminds me of Eco's comment in a different setting: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.
Is it too challenging for the savy to hook into MTV or online radio and simply edit out tunes in the programs that we don't like? That way you end up with the music you like without conventional file sharing at all. If one like odd music the chances are that it can be found online in a stream or even in an FM radio broadcast.
Frankly the music industry is stupid in trying to track file sharers and file sharers are also sort of dumb in that there are better ways to pirate
tunes with zero risk involved.
This really seems a bit of a self serving cry in your milk story. If your business plan is not making money then you are doing something wrong. Instead of doing what small businesses do best and adapting quickly to new developments in the marketplace, this just talks about how unfair the world is. A sense of entitlement is not going to make you any money.
It's disappointing that you were modded up, because it's clear that you barely read the article properly- if at all. You wrote a fairly detailed response to the expected "OMG, filesharing killed my record company" spiel... except that wasn't the point he was making at all! (Matter of fact, he explicitly *didn't* blame filesharing for the demise of his company).
In fact what he actually argued was that the nature of engines like TPB *consolidates* the market power and hype of the major players and well-known artists.
While that may be open to question, it would at least be helpful if you addressed what he actually said instead of your kneejerk assumption about the content.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The argument for indie labels always seems to base itself around the premise that indie=good and good=indie, and also that there is such a thing as music that is good or better. However this snobbery can sometimes blind those involved in music production and distribution to a fairly simple fact, in terms of art, where opinion is subjective, popular = good. If there really must be a debate about what qualifies as good music, surely that which appeals to the broadest spectrum of people on some level must be the best? Now I appreciate that based on artistic merit and peer review artists like Madonna may come up a bit short, and I very much doubt that anyone is touched deeply and emotionally by any of her songs, but most people like them. That's quantifiable. There could be some Patagonian pipe music which speaks to me on a deep, emotional level, but if to the other 6 billion people on earth it sounds like a guy blowing into some bamboo then who is saying it's better? Only me; and that's the point with indie music - people like indie artists more, but less people like them. That's how it works and for the most part that's why they're indie. If they wanted to become mainstream, they'd have to stop being 'indie'.... Also, I'm never entirely comfortable with this idea that the advertising budgets of big labels can make people buy music that they don't like. The whole argument behind this notion seems to imply that the majority of people are too stupid to realise that they are listening to things that they don't like. When in reality most people probably just don't really care about the finer points of the music they listen to, they don't care about the wonderful drum work, and they certainly don't need their music to 'speak to them'. This is no different to not really caring about fashion, computers, cars or the interior decor of your house. You get afficionados of most aspects of life, but I don't remember the last time I heard someone claiming that someone was forced to paint their bedroom magnolia because of 'big paint'. Indie music proponents should just be happy that THEY like it, they're in the know and that they have found music that appeals to them. Odds are they are just the sort of people who need their music to do this. Most people just want something to listen to in the car on the way to work, and considering humans are really quite similar, it's hardly surprising that they like a lot of the same music.
I was an avid user of eMusic, but as an Australian I was denied too many downloads so I lost interest. But, for North Americans eMusic is a great service for the discovery of new music and indie material. Plus the artists actually make some money out of the downloads. The other place to go is YouTube, anyone can upload a video of their music to a large audience. As has already been stated Bittorrent is just a transport medium, I would have no expectation of it to promote an unknown artist.
A minor point, but this:
The popularity of a cultural work is largely a result not of any inherent qualities of the work itself, but of of the activities of the audience.
...doesn't work with this:
If I like a piece of music, I am likely to tell my friends. They tell their friends, and so on and so on. (This is preferential attachment in a scale-free network.)
Why do you "like" one piece of music more than another. Why do all your friends pass it along. It's because of something inherent in the "work itself", isn't it?
maybe
The sooner "piracy" kills off the record labels and their marketing machine, the sooner independant bands will get a fair go. Music will then be popular based on HOW GOOD IT IS rather than how much it's shoved down peoples throats.
So he's saying that because the costs of entering the market are now so low, he can't compete. Wow. Would you rather we artificially inflate the costs so you still couldn't compete?
The internet lowers these costs, this enables you to make something of yourself, if you are able to connect with your market. In this case, it seems you failed to connect with your market, perhaps you don't move in those circles? Perhaps you didn't do anything they are interested in?
If you want to be successful especially in the music industry you need to build this base, either through a fuck load of touring, or doing something really outstandingly different, or similar.
Find a way to connect, then find a way to value add.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
If the problem is being lost in the crowd -- move away from the crowd.
So instead of relying on a tracker like TPB that carries absolutely everything from everywhere, run a public tracker that handles ONLY indies.
--Filter out the big-name stuff.
--Make it easy to FIND the new artists rather than having them lost behind the high-volume clutter from the label artists.
--Make sure the filesharing world knows your tracker exists. Publicize it everywhere P2P is discussed.
--Make sure everyone knows right up front that no one will be sued for downloading/sharing from your artists.
--Let people post reviews and comments, just like TPB does. Word of mouth is important.
--Offer links to concert tickets, CDs, T-shirts, whatever each indy label or artist has for sale, and do it from the review page so folks can find it again easily.
--Offer inexpensive site subscriptions in exchange for whatever perks seem good, with some percentage being paid to the artists who participate.
And of course, sell ads just like TPB does. If you need to pay a percentage to the artists to attract them, do so. Likely the same artists who already allow royalty-free use for internet radio would be receptive to the concept.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
It's not about indie or mainstream, it's about business models.
The current music business has a business model that is anathema to file-sharing. Regardless of whether you're indie or mainstream, if your business model looks like record:promote:sell then P2P is going to hurt you, because you will be spending money promoting while a share of your sales will be disappearing to P2P.
The business model that P2P helps with is record:share:merchandise (basically making money off t-shirts and concert tickets rather than the actual music itself) amongst others (record:share:donate for example).
The original author needs to rethink his criticisms of P2P, and use P2P as a powerful viral marketing tool for promoting his t-shirt-and-concert-ticket business.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Just looking at TPB's top 100 doesn't tell us anything. We need to know how many downloads ARE there for bands not signed to a major? What is that in terms of percentage of music downloads? How does that raw count and percentage compare with CD sales? How about CD sales in retail stores?
It's not sensible to expect that a relatively unheard of band will be more downloaded than one that has the massive marketing engine of a major label behind it. Most people on TPB search for something by name rather than browse. They have to have heard of it first. It MAY be that being free does boost the numbers for a less known band compared to retail, but without additional marketing it doesn't get to the top 100.
Certainly some works are better - often much better - than others. I only said the popularity of a work is largely due to the audience. The greater the popularity of a work, the greater the effect.
That does not mean that works do not have inherent qualities, nor that those qualities vary greatly, nor that many artists are brilliant people whose contributions to society are essential. Those things are all true. But the greater popularity and hence value (social and economic) of a film like, say, Star Wars compared to, say, Once Upon a Time in the West, is mostly - perhaps nearly all - due to the audience.
Yes, but it is also due in large part to what I bring to the music, the circumstances in which I heard it, how my friends and I relate to each other around music, and so on.
There is a study I read about online which I would really like to locate again. Participants were divided into two groups, and listened to a number of pieces of music. Each then rated the music. In the control group, the listeners did not communicate with each other. But in the experimental group they could see the ratings assigned by other people. The result was dramatic: preferences clustered in the group where the participants communicated among themselves. Furthermore, in different runs of the experiment the ratings for the same songs varied widely.
The field of cultural studies provides lots of support for the importance of interpretation and meaning-making by the audience. The audience is never really passive. In reality, they are active collaborators in art. That's probably why, like artists, they care so passionately about it.
It's entirely possible that the reason many independent "artists" don't sell a lot of records or get listed on popular charts is, amazingly... because they actually aren't very good?
If they are very good, well, more often that not in the case of artists who are good who are independent, they will be offered lucrative deals by the industry and they'll sign up. Here's 5 million dollars. You can have it, you just have to compromise your ideals slightly.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Using the TPB Top100 to determine if New Artists are able to break out through file sharing is fundamentally flawed.
The Top100 represents what people want, now, not what people will want. Top properly use these statistics you would need to do the following:
Identify all artists being traded illegally on TPB. Track them. See if they eventually become Top100 artists (esentially satisfying the hypothesis "piracy marketing" works). Then compare this with emerging artists using only "traditional" means of promotion. Even then you are only using one source, TPB, and not all artists that allow their music to be traded illegally to see if they then become successful.
I have never used TPB so I don't know if they do this, but from the sounds of the author they don't. Demonoid actually has a main page where articles are posted about indie bands that have actively submitted their material to the site. I always thought it a neat idea and often enjoyed some of the stuff I downloaded and wouldn't have otherwise.
Filesharing does not help small artists; the internet does. There is nothing that filesharing adds to the equation. If an artist wants their music out there, they can setup a website. If they don't have enough money for a website, or don't want to pay for bandwidth, they can put their music on MySpace. Google works perfectly well for finding their music; filesharing offers no additional benefits over the internet.
But first, Torrents and tracker sites would be a poor way to market or otherwise gain exposure for new artists since that medium is all amount mass. Not a good place for Indies at this time. Magnatune and similar, LastFM etc, gorilla marketing campaigns, anything to get exposure including a link to your website on this Slashdot post. Rapidshare is available if you need it and you might as well give it away as to try and make money in the early rounds.
And making money? At least musicians have a fighting chance of drawing large crowds to live shows. Not so sure about fledgling cinematographers and authors.
Your main point about distilling marketing power to large labels is spot on and I also agree that those labels are indeed missing the point while fighting against opportunity when the catalog is vast and people will pay for convenience. Why then fight the tide trying to maximally monetize a small subset of the catalog while ignoring the rest.
Yes, people will flat out steal product but they weren't buying anyway. That's the part of the story media companies gloss over while promoting the idea that downloading leads to lost revenue. Indeed, stealing does have impact but it can be as positive as negative and quite possibly more so given the numbers of people who may be introduced to an artist or a genre of music they would not otherwise have been, in turn leading to increased sales especially if the price is agreeable.
Take for example people who like the band ACDC. It is interesting to note that while everything in the ACDC catalog is easily assessable via P2P and other file sharing protocols, that people who value the work invariably purchase the CD's and proudly so. It is the pride of ownership those CD cases display, announce and symbolize even though they may have multiple 128K rips on their hard drives. It's not the same thing.
But first they have to learn that music is out there and then discern whether of not it has appeal and then to what degree it might. No longer will people be goaded into dropping large coin on one hit wonders (for example) and in that regard file sharing breaks the existing model being music purchased must first demonstrate sufficient value instead of having things the other way around.
If media companies viewed file sharing like they do radio airplay we wouldn't be having a problem.
Now what happens when the entire back catalog becomes as assessable as the current top forty and how does a new artist break into the market when they have to compete against all recorded music? That music is both timely and timeless while reaching across generations yet speaks to and for each in different ways, a personal beast oft times of peculiar taste, flavor, immediacy and importance - I trust there is room for inclusion of new as each passing day turns another page into history for all.
This is kind of off-topic, but I find it a worthwhile thought:
The current Situation is, that I have to visit numerous places to get the things I want.
I have to google in order to find what I need and the media is spread over A LOT of trackers.
Now, I feel that free access to media is a human right, not a luxery. So, how to achieve this dream?
What I would like to see, would be an international library, where ALL media is stored. The artists and producers that make this media available are to be paid by an international organization, receiving funds from the various nations (which could be payed for by the state or a special tax which allows access to this library).
It would be quite easy to understand how many times item X has been distributed and the artists could be payed accordingly.
This library would be very cheap to maintain since the bandwith would be mostly donated by users (think of one torrent worldwide for item x, 100000 seeders, no problem.)
The only real cost would be the licence for the media, which when payed by all nations of the world together, might come very cheap to the individual citizens of those nations, while still being enough money to pay what normally would have been gained by selling dvds and cds.
well, retailers would be obsolete in this scenario. There would be one retailer for media and that would be the central library of earth or whatever to call it.
well sure thats an utopia not easy to achieve. but it would benefit all people and make our lives a lot easier.
but I don't think so. I don't choose music based on marketing by the record companies or the top 10 list on TPB. I've quit bothering listening to new stuff unless it gets pushed into my ears. It has to be on the radio/tv/video or recommended by a friend. I don't even bother to try new stuff any more. I tried listening on a site that would recommend music based on what I said I liked. I found I was wasting a lot of time listening to drek.
Rap is not music, it's talentless idiots chanting to a recorded clap track.
Country is too whiney.
Most rock is too angry.
Almost none of the songs I hear has anyone with any musical talent associated with it. I think marketing is hard and most bands aren't good enough, or lucky enough, to get noticed.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Is the industry good at picking stuff that becomes popular and sells? Or does it become popular because the industry tells us to like it and provides no alternative?
Music by its very nature is "sticky". If you hear something long enough you will become familiar with it and start liking it. (If not, then it's not musical.) The more similar it is to previously familiar music, the easier it sticks. What the major labels look for is music that is sufficiently similar to current mainstream to be cheap to make stick (say play five times over a week on radio, as opposed to 30 times over two months), while having at least some trivial differentiation and non-music appeal. Be it sexiness, dance skills, rebellion, or some other unrelated appeal.
Music doesn't spread by "word of mouth". It spreads by your friends playing it over and over while you're in their presence. It's a push process, not pull.
It's not surprising that teenagers and kids in their 20s download for free - because they can't afford to buy everything they've developed familiarity with. They lack the means to carry to the entertainment industry on their shoulders. And not having access to popular culture pretty much makes you a social outsider - not good for the development of teenagers, or the life of 20-somethings when so much hinges on social drama. Those of us who are older certainly pay for our music, but we can also afford to.
You are sick and disgusting to the extremee, which I will paint on your imaginary garage doors every day because it's my god given right and if you don't like it you can stop living there and move to where all the freaks live, San francisco
But if one starts thinking about it, it has the ironic effect that TPB is a driving force of consolidating the market power of the major labels rather than driving forward any new music. The conclusion has to be that "pirates" are just as little resistant to the major label marketing as any other person. Even though there are thousands and thousands of artists out there that want their music to be shared and listened to, they are widely and effectively ignored by the masses. In fact, one might say that TPB and the likes are countering the development of new markets, simply because the gap between the heavily marketed music and 'the others' is wider than ever, when the bare naked truth about peoples taste in music is put into such a system.
Indeed. So obvious, so seldom stated. I made it point 0 of http://www.slideshare.net/mlinksva/five-myths-about-the-future-of-culture-and-the-commons-presentation
The problem is (as said in the subject) counting on a little bit of technology to overcome a massive amount of marketing.
Nobody's going to download the content if they don't know about it.
The only way to get more people to listen to your artists is to promote them at (or above) the level of major labels. Unfortunately, there are pretty high barriers to entry. You can leverage the social web to your advantage, however the major labels are already doing that- plus radio air time, plus in-store advertising, plus cross-promotion, plus plus plus...it's quite the goliath to take on. The best you can do is hope to take the advantage by fighting on your "turf" (the Internet). But even that would require some pretty heavy lifting as far as research is concerned- including lots and lots of trial and error. To win (in this case, winning simply means competing- that's really the best you can hope for), you'll have to do something that the major labels aren't already doing and aren't able to do- probably by taking advantage of the fact that their decisions are decided by boards while indie labels' decisions are generally made by a smaller group of people or the artists themselves.
However, expecting Indie to win against Major Label (even in the court of illegality) by simple virtue of the means of acquisition sounds pretty naive (no offense intended). It's effectively the same as expecting indie to win against Major Labels in retail outlets without spending a dime on advertising.
Speaking as a fan of Indie music: of course indie by its very nature is not built to become mainstream, so the numbers will usually be lower- artists are generally more free to innovate and do what they do out of love for their craft (leading- usually- to a better overall product) with fewer listeners than those with a large following- and not just from an "employment" standpoint. The pressure to produce for the fans instead of the self can be too much for some artists, and it's far too common to see them fizzle out into nothing, while the fans scratch their heads wondering how an artist who once seemed to speak to them now produces generic tripe.
+1 mod parent up
If you're upset that your music isn't as popular as mainstream music -- cop their style. Mainstream music satisfies the listening requirements for the largest base audience that it can -- that's how it becomes 'popular'.
If you run an indie label that releases edgy new artists with unique sounds.. count on your hand how many edgy new artists you see on MTV per year and if you're close to that number you're on the right track.
Otherwise, don't use MTV or TPB as your metric. The sad truth is there are many talented artists who toil in obscurity till the day they die. It's the lucky ones who can rise to the top to get any notoriety. For every awesome band you signed there's going to be 100 Rednexx cover-bands line before them to get some of the spotlight.
And, to be honest -- it's not that the lack of pirate availability of your material is your problem -- sounds like it was marketing. If there's demand, there's demand.
To recap:
If you are #1 downloaded band on TPB and you have no sales, that's unlikely.
If you are #10,000 band on TPB and you have no sales, you might have greater expectations for demand than there will realistically be.
If you tried to keep track of every indie record label that surfaces, releases a few records and is never heard from again you'd be a busy person indeed.. TPB didn't do this to you -- being an independent label sucked for a long time before torrents were around.
Just as Bill Gates said, "A Necessary Evil"
It's a compelling argument. But think of it another way; what if what's happening is that the major labels are driving the development and deployment of the technology (to their detriment, or so they say). The infrastructure is in place; it remains for you and other indies to figure out how to make use of it.
The porn industry drove the development of home video technology. The major record labels and the pap they produce are the porn of the music industry. I'm not surprised it tends to cater to their content.
It seems to me that the next move is yours. You and your compatriots need to figure out how to bend filesharing to your needs.
Consider this: What do the labels really provide? Marketing, right? Ok, let's look at an analogy -- how are the newspapers and network news doing? Generally going down the tubes, right? Because you can selectively pick and choose from a much larger pool of news online. Well hmm. An effective grassroots filesharing infrastructure exists. Perhaps what's needed now is a significant grassroots marketing effort. Not just sharing files, but sharing, I dunno, taste.
These days I tend to listen to indie artists. I hear about them through word of mouth. There's probably a better way, but I don't know what it is yet.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Mine isn't.
And I'm not a farmer nor survivalist.
'Sharing and caring' only works if people are TRULY 'their brother's keeper' where money isn't necessary to survive or get things done.
Until then, anybody alive in a money-driven, capitalistic society EXPECT to be paid for the goods and services they produce -- it's the ONLY socially acceptable way to survive in such societies.
The alternatives are either communism or anarchy.
The internet has essentially killed the sale of ideas--making them worth almost worth nothing. They are only intrinsicly worth the computer storage space necessary to hold a digital copy of the expression of ideas that can be mass distributed across the internet.
The only things you can make money off of nowadays are services or three-dimensional products that you CAN'T transmit through the internet as a computer file.
The article kind of muffed it's key point I think, but it's there if you read it carefully. Let me try to restate it.
1) First, suppose there were no way for anyone to get major lable music for free. Piratebay provides this service.
2) Now in such a world, an indie label could establish new artisits simply by giviving away free music. People like free, so it would get downloaded and played.
3) Of course Indie lables sometime do that now, so why are not people gorging on it? The reason is, they can also get free mainstream music from pirate bay, which being lazy and suceptible to marketing and peer pressure they prefer when all else is equal.
Thus the author's thesis is simply that free mainstream music is choking the market and denying the indies an avenue to distinguish themselves. He would prefer that "all else" not be equal. That one were instead choosing between taking a risk on free aural adventures he was offering or the non-free but shiny comfortable mainstream music.
His problem is that because prirate bay is actually something only adventureous people do, that it's sort of actually one more obstacle for these folks on their way to other adventures in free music.
Another way to put this is that, if indie music is free one might think it is not worth as much as music that you have to pay for (but can get free by pirating it).
His thesis is logical. It only goes wrong at the close where he wonders why the record labels chase the pirates. The point is they can't make it easy to get it for free. Just easy enough to satisfy the hard core folks and further advertise their wares, but not so easy that everyone stops buying music.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The whole discussion on filesharing has seemed moot to me for a few years now. The simple fact is that people can and will be able to freely and easily share any digital content they wish. This means that the value inherent in copies of content has become zero. Want to make money? Play live.
*warning* boycotting the dominant culture may contribute to social alienation *warning*
1995 called, they want their dial-up internet back. Using BitTorrent to download music is like using a sledge hammer to crack open a peanut. Broadband proliferation means now the kids are sharing feature length films in HD.
We get it already. People will continue to create music after the collapse of the recording industry, like they did for centuries before the phonograph was invented. Can we please move on to talking about how people will continue to create multimillion dollar blockbusters after the collapse of the motion picture industry? Don't even try to suggest YouTube as a substitute. Without movies people might start going outside and talking to each other. We can't have that!
As I read your arguments you basically want to keep the commercial music scene strong and healthy
I wouldn't say that, exactly. What I would say is that as a consumer I don't really care one way or the other, and neither does 99% of the consumer base out there. I had a friend once that had an independent label. They had some cool bands; great bar bands... cool guys.... fun to hang out with, and I had an awesome time every night I went to a local show! But out of all of the music I ever saw at any local show, was any of it good enough to be on the radio during normal (i.e. non-local) station programming? Honestly... no, not really. And I feel bad saying that because the band members were all totally cool... but that's the fact. The bands were all good, but they didn't have that extra something that it takes. After reflecting on it occasionally, I think the thing that differentiates those bands that make it from those that don't is a very unique sound while still maintaining a mass appeal. Read: Layne Staley's (sp?) voice, Santana's guitar, Tool's... well, everything I guess
I have no idea what kind of music you're into, but I like Rock/Alternative/Metal stuff (not 80s metal though - puke). I saw a pretty good number of bands that were good (and yeah, some shitty ones too) and had some pretty good sounding mass appeal, but they didn't have that little bit of extra whatever it takes to stand above and hit the big time. On the flip side, you've got some supposedly awesome musicians (musicians have told me they're awesome, but I don't have the ear for it, I guess) who, in terms of musical skill beat the hell out of most commercial bands on the radio, but have never made it big. And they never will make it big because they have no appeal to the musically uneducated drecks like me. I have yet to hear an independent musical artist where I have *truly* thought... yeah, I can definitely picture this band on my favorite rock station as a superstar. In this sense, it's almost bad that those in music have such a good ear. They can't really appreciate the fact that those who don't live and breathe music often don't see the point of the music from extremely talented individuals.
Now, as somebody that loves music, you may have found the term "mass appeal" slightly disgusting, but it's my opinion that if you did, you're probably going to have a difficult time building a business you can live off of. You need mass appeal to make sales, and sales is what keeps the lights on. (I've got an MBA by the way... can you tell yet?)
Anyway, sorry, I've just been rambling. To my main point... record/movie companies, news organizations, phone companies, etc, etc are all victims of old men. These old men running these legacy companies do not understand computers AT ALL. Many of them don't have a computer on their desk and never intend to have one. This is the reason for the push back, asinine decisions, mixed signals, all of these retard companies are putting out. Because of that, unless they straighten their act up, someone will beat them. In fact, I'm honestly surprised no one has yet. Every one of those industries I've previously mentioned is now an information technology company - they just don't realize it yet. They need to know how to write and develop in house applications at their companies as a *core competency*. Right now, computing is just another cost center for these old men.
Therefore, the company that can develop, promote, and continually enhance a system for delivering music AND develop and maintain musical talent will take the whole market (currently, Apple does only 50% of this). One way to do this would be micro-royalty (no, I'm not aware of anything on this topic, but I don't spend any time on this, so I'm not a good person to ask), another would be the Richard Branson method and find one major act (I think his was the Sex
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Registered user posting Anon. because of mods elsewhere.
Yes, there is a "noise" lazy-pirate element too, but as a small hobbyist I have not found consolidated batches of artists who want to be shared freely for the exposure. (I carefully said "haven't found" - I just haven't really scoured the issue yet.)
I peeked at Legal Torrents, which is the right idea - but they only have some 40 items per category.
So, if you have any connections left from your label days, post a link to a page with your entire consolidated list of who "wants to be shared".
I believe all IndieLabels should have a signed band statement on file per music project explicitly promoting the free sharing style. A lot of the bands I have talked to at the local level "sorta allow it" but secretly wish to be big enough to graduate to the **AA LockDown model.
The majors are in it for the money, so they're going to find out what people want most and sell it to them. I'm sure marketing has something to do with the populrity of the major's music. But it's not everything.
1. I listen to music that I like. In order to like music, it has to sound good - that means good recording equipment/techniques and decent mixing. And that, in turn, requires money.
Any jackass can record his band with a digital 24-track and $3k worth of mics, but getting someone who actually knows what he's doing for the recording and mixing is _expensive_. There aren't many indie bands that can spend tens of thousands of dollars recording a single album... and sadly, it shows. I can't think of many indie bands I'd be willing to listen to, purely because of the production quality.
2. Why go through freakin torrents if you can download $indieband's MP3 files directly from a webserver for free anyway? It's not like MP3 files are so big that distributing them via regular HTTP or FTP is particularly hard, so why put them on BitTorrent? ThePirateBay Top 100 _obviously_ don't include any indie artists, because people don't _need_ to torrent their work...
You're basing your study on the soul reasoning that Pirate bay is the end-all be-all file sharing enigma. In fact, there are millions upon millions of people who use hundreds to thousands of different forms of file sharing. The majority of file-junkies I know get B-movies, underground music, and various books that are very hard to find because bookstores do not provide a decent mode of searching for the desired book. In essence, your study is flawed, and therefore needs to be redone, with a non-bias pole or statistic. Also, what drives people to download music, is the knowledge that said music exists. How are you going to know you want something that you don't know is out there? That's like saying you love to eat tripe but you have no idea what tripe looks, tastes, smells, or feels like.
"...are we actually turning into useful idiots keeping the arch-enemy strong and healthy..."
I don't think you understand. I do not pay for the songs i download over P2P. They are free. By downloading for free, rather than paying, i am actually hurting "the arch-enemy".
As a result of my download, the torrent file's ranking will increase on the "Top 100" list. By freely downloading a song, i have dealt not only the initial blow to "the arch-enemy" (as it will not be receiving any money from me), I have also dealt an even greater blow, by promoting the song to others, who like me, will not be paying "the arch-enemy" for their consumption.
Yes downloading popular music over P2P networks will promote it. However under the majority of circumstances it's only promoting it to people who will not be paying for it.
The other problem is that the truly great musicians out there are usually interested in ALL kinds of music; they defy classification by genre, and thus don't fit into the record label's boilerplate marketing plans. So the people that are into music solely for love of music seldom get promoted. Even well-established artists can't sell music that doesn't fit their "mold"; how many people have even heard of Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" or "The Ghost of Tom Joad" albums? (His best work, IMHO.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The real problem is unchecked Conglomeration and it's affecting all media and culture at least in the U.S.. It feels like we've been frozen in this stale teeny-booper, hip-hop malaise well past its normal expiration date since the late 90's. Remember the 80's, remember the early to mid-90's? Even if you hated the music, the fashion trends, there was at least a social flow. As media outlets and record labels have been snapped up by an elite few corporations, who in turn maintain a stranglehold on the major outlets (tv, radio, etc.) there's no motivation for turning over new artists because it's perceived to be more cost effective to recycle the same bullshit ad nauseam, and limit investment in emerging musicians. By the time the current generation of consumers is bored, there's a whole new lot whose fresh palette and less discerning taste is ready to eat the same stale drivel. There's no real competition anymore, there's no real forces out there to give rise to the next unplanned musical or social trend. The internet, for all its positives has yet to find a way to really connect people to new artists, to drive any new trends with the exception of the occasional 'viral video.' Sure, there's probably a few minor success stories, but can any of them match some of American Idol's more successful rejects? Until the internet finds a way of giving birth to independent and new voices, or a media upstart with the intention of being one arises, then things won't change. Unless somebody at the controls wakes up or they collapse.
No, oink you yoik.. he even forgot to change it in his last paragraphs.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Big record labels market. That creates demand for copyrighted content. That demand translates into downloads via The Pirate Bay.
Other music, must do the equivalent 'marketing' via word-of-mouth before it sees that kind of interest. The illegal stuff has an edge since there is a level of interest already. When users can satisfy their demand for content with illegal stuff they know about because of marketing, or with something else they've never heard of, then all other things ( like quality ) being equal, they'll go with the stuff they know since it's easier.
Other music must be better in some way, such as appealing to a certain niche (better if that happens to be your niche) to be worth finding out. ( Search YouTube for Jonathan Coulton to see an example )
...
If you want to get new music you wouldnt use a major tracker, since as you said they will mirror the market. You should really look at the trackers which are set up for promoteing new music in which case you see a much larger range, i would suggest compareing differnt sorts of trackers befor makeing statements like this.
TPB is first and foremost a torrent-link site, not a community.
Years ago, I belonged to a filesharing BBS that did introduce me to tons of new music, all of it indie, because it was populated by people that were particularly interested in indie bands.
TPB is a "mainstream" torrent site, and therefore reflects those interests. If you saw the lawsuits stop tomorrow, guaranteed there would be plenty of targeted-interest sites out there.
I personally don't like recco systems (computer or vote-driven), because hearing someone talk about *why* they like a particular album, a person who's opinion I trust based on past successes, is far more valuable to me, and often results in my listening to music I wouldn't otherwise be exposed to. As said at other points in the thread, free downloads are only half the answer.
I'm a hobbyist indie artist, and the last place I'd offer anything would be TPB, because no one would ever see it. Instead I post to forums of my influences, under the appropriate "user created music" sections. It's a campaign that provides fewer listeners, but extremely targeted ones. YMMV.
I think that is an important point. The Pirate Bay is a central location on the web to find stuff that is heavily protected by copyright law AND things people want they don't feel (at that moment) they want to pay for (or at least the asking price). I think you also have to consider the dual marketing of both The Pirate Bay AND the Recording Industry makes albums that are marketed around the world are going to get proportionally larger global attention. The world is big enough that minor global attention generally beats out any kind of regional dominance; just being very popular in China OR United States doesn't mean you are going to be close to being #1 in the world. Just doesn't work that way.
Pirate Bay is about "illegal" sharing; it is a place where you can get stuff that you can not get elsewhere. If artists are sharing their music freely, because they use a Creative Commons license, what motivation is there for pirates to rescue it? There isn't anything to save.
It is like you have a headache. Some people swear my THC, because it is safe, natural, and minimal side effects compared to many other medications. However, in this legal environments, many countries outlaw cannabis, so they need to hit up their local drug dealer. But lets say you just want an Asprin; your drug buddies may have Asprin with them, but why not just go to the store where it is cheap and readily available? A closer analogy is probably amphetamine, because there are so many more varieties. Caffeine is cheap and in many food products, and popular, but not powerful enough and too many side effects compared to alternatives. Ritalin, Dexedrine, and their many flavors and varieties are popular and promoted by drug companies and doctors, quality controlled, but also patent controlled making it very expensive, especially if you do not have health / prescription drug insurance. Again, your local street dealer is going to give you a cheap alternative, except they may keep less fancy notes about what they think you are going to be using it for. And while it is still going to still be a bit more expensive, I'd bet plenty of street dealers keep plenty of prescription drugs on hand. I do not see it as ironic at all that street dealers would keep expensive and illegal drugs available, but won't sell generics or OTC. It is just economics; the financial motivation of the dealer, and the value to the customer just don't meet in those areas.
I used to "pirate" music in order to figure out what I wanted to buy. When the legal environment became hostile, the only thing I stopped doing was buying music. In recent years, I have not pirated any music for a variety of reasons, but my final reason is that I am not interested in hearing the voice or message of artists that actively or passively support a war against the consumer or free culture, with the exception of Last.fm and Sirius Radio. My preference and what I share with friends are links from archive.org and creativecommons.org such as Jamendo and Librivox. I also take the same approach with software.
As the OP pointed out, things are still very centrally controlled. This war isn't about piracy, it is about maintaining control, particularly in the realm of perceptions. There is more I could say, but nothing that hasn't already been said better in Steal this Film, Part II.
Screw those stats though: If you haven't seen a revolution in the freedom and availability of indie music, film, software, and all "IP" for that matter in this "digital age" you haven't been looking.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
It was one thing to make a mix tape, back in the day, and share it with a couple of friends (2) verses what's happening now.
How things have changed:
1970 vs. 2008 - or 2009
Scenario: Jack goes quail hunting before school, pulls into school parking lot with shotgun in gun rack.
1970 - Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack's shotgun, goes to his car and gets his shotgun to show Jack.
2008 - School goes into lock down, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized students and teachers.
Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fistfight after school.
1970 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up best friends. Nobody goes to jail, nobody arrested, nobody expelled.
2008 - Police called, SWAT team arrives, arrests Johnny and Mark. Charge them with assault, both expelled even though Johnny started it.
Scenario: Jeffrey won't be still in class, disrupts other students.
1970 - Jeffrey sent to office and given a good paddling by the Principal. Returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again.
2008 - Jeffrey given huge doses of Ritalin; Becomes a zombie; Tested for ADD; School gets extra money from state because Jeffrey has a disability.
Scenario: Billy breaks a window in his neighbor's car and his Dad gives him a whipping with his belt.
1970 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college, and becomes a successful businessman.
2008 - Billy's Dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy removed to foster care and joins a gang. State psychologist tells Billy's sister that she remembers being abused herself and their Dad goes to prison. Billy's mom has affair with psychologist.
Scenario: Mark gets a headache and takes some aspirin to school.
1970 - Mark shares aspirin with Principal out on the smoking dock.
2008 - Police called, Mark expelled from school for drug violations. Car searched for drugs and weapons.
Scenario: Pedro fails high school English.
1970 - Pedro goes to summer school, passes English, and goes to college.
2008 - Pedro's cause is taken up by state. Newspaper articles appear nationally explaining that teaching English as a requirement for graduation is racist. ACLU files class action lawsuit against state school system and Pedro's English teacher. English banned from core curriculum. Pedro is given his diploma anyway, but ends up mowing lawns for a living because he cannot speak English.
Scenario: Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers from 4th of July, puts them in a model airplane paint bottle, and blows up a red ant bed.
1970 - Ants die.
2008 - BATF, Homeland Security, FBI called. Johnny charged with domestic terrorism, FBI investigates parents, siblings removed from home, computers confiscated, Johnny's Dad goes on a terror watch list; not allowed to fly again.
Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary hugs him to comfort him.
1970 - In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.
2008 - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in State Prison. Johnny undergoes 5 years of psycho-therapy.
Scenario: Jack Buys the last Beatles album and records it to cassette, loans it to Trish to listen to.
1970 - Trish likes the music, returns the cassette then later that week buys the album.
2008 - Trish likes the MP3, adds it to her 128GB collection of music she has downloaded from Jacks site, Trish then puts a GB of music on a flash drive and takes it to Sally's house where they download it to Sally's Dell, where then Sally puts the music in her LimeWire share folder to share with her 750,000 closest friends.
Sally knows all the Beatles are rich and don't mind it if she gives away their music, it's OLD music anyway.
Someone online calls Sally a thief, Sally is outraged.
750,000 of Sally's closest friends come to her defense.
~hylas
Though he's got a point, the author misses out on an important trend. It's not just that pirates use the internet to get music, it's not the rating sites steering people towards certain major lable music. Advertising by minor labels can't possibly compete with major brand lables.
However, minor lables ARE making more then the used to. Why? Distribution by association. Many pirates also buy music. Sure, some flatly refuse on principal, but the bulk of pirates justify downloading as "I only have so much money to giove, the rest I steal, since they're not loosing the money i don't have anyway." They buy what they like. When they hear a good song, they're apt to find things like it. Many streaming music services, now even iTunes, provide you input into either what other people listening to what you like also like, or services like Pandora simply play other music like what you selected. You pick a band you like, and you hear a dozen other bands that are similar, regardless of label.
If "indie" lables can get their bands into services like iTunes, Pandora, and other music streaming systems, people hear the songs, and some of them will buy what they listen to regardless of what's advertised to them or recomended by some popularity chart.
I can say 100% for certain, never in my life have I ever sought out a band just because it was on a top 100 list (not for ANY genre, let alone the Pop top 100.) I seek out music becaus esomeone or something tells me "this other band sounds a lot like this, I think you'll like them" or I simply hear the song and like it and find out who it is.
The music industry however is not really dying from piracy. Most people who steal, as I mentioned, do so simply due to a lack of funds. They can only buy the tracks or albums they can afford. It used to be they bought only albums (once singles went the way of the dodo). $18 for 12-15 songs sounds like a good idea, and 20 years ago when a 12 track album had 8-10 good songs on it I didn't mind as much. Most bands I get 2-3 songs on an album i like, so at $0.99 each, why spend $18? (or $9-12 as it might be). Couple the uptake in DVD and games, and where kids used to almost exclusively buy music, annd an occasional VHS, now they're buying movies ($15-25), games ($20-80), computer software ($30-50), controllers ($30-50), and more! There's simply not enough money to spread around....
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
In the real world, different demographics shop at different stores. The same thing happens in the P2P world. The Pirate Bay is like Walmart: big, omnipresent, cheap (no ratio requirements or login) and filled with low quality product. Thus its not surprising that it would primarily have top 40 music.
Its not a very good predictor for the bittorrent community as a whole since its not a very good place to go for anything beyond the latest mainstream music and movies.
Not sure why we want to hurt anyone.
It would be good to provide room for innovation, and to encourage artists not associated with and controlled by the major labels.
There should be a way, but not if the intent is just to strike out at someone.
A flaw in the article is that is assumes that people would go to The Pirate Bay for indie music. When I get indie music, I either download it for free from the artists' web site; or I pay for it. The Pirate Bay really is useless for indie music when the artists are willing to give their recordings away for free or sell them without DRM.
No, I will not work for your startup