Steve Albini: The Music Industry Is a Parasite -- and Copyright Is Dead

journovampire sends word of another thought-provoking rant from Steve Albini (mentioned here last a few years back for his paean to the beauty of analog tape for recording): The veteran producer addressed an audience in Barcelona on Saturday: "The old copyright model – the person who creates something owns it and anyone else that wants to use it or see it has to pay them – has expired."

Comments

Yes, but because

[saloomy]

The industry was created to cover the cost of production and distribution. Both of which today are much cheaper and can me made by individuals who have not "made it" yet.

Re:Yes, but because

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet the industry saw fit to extract payment from radio stations who doubled as advertisers for them.

The industry has been a parasite for decades.

Re: Yes, but because

[guruevi]

The artist who is doing well is the exception and not the rule. Regardless of marketing model, there are more artists that have served you coffee or fries than artists you may have bought an album from.

Re: Yes, but because

[srmalloy]

The artist who is doing well is the exception and not the rule.

'Doing well' isn't necessarily a good metric to use. A few years ago, I was listening to a piece on PBS about musicians and self-publishing, and they had one artist who was talking about their switch to self-publishing; they had cut an album for a commercial label, and despite it having sold several tens of thousands of CDs over a span of three years, the label claimed that they were still 'in the hole' for production and advertising costs, and the artist had not seen a dime beyond their initial advance. Meanwhile, an album that they had produced themselves and sold through their website directly via a service (the music equivalent of an 'instant print' service) gave them about $7 per CD sold, and in one year had already produced income more than triple the value of their advance from the commercial label. Now, that artist's income from marketing their work directly may not have been 'doing well' in an overall sense, but the relative payout from working with a commercial label and independent publishing certainly qualifies, for the return on their work, as 'doing well', even if it's not of itself enough to support a 'well off' lifestyle.

Re:Yes, but because

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Because music, books and movies are part of our shared culture. You get culture for free just by being part of it.

2) Because the cost of duplication is essentially zero. So the cost of making the works has already been paid. The millions of dollars profit that some movies or music makes is evidence of double dipping, basically making society collectivelt pay more than it costs to make the work. Which is economically inefficient, BTW.

3) The people who are downloading copies are not likely to be in the market in the first place. See 1) for why people are likely to download random shit off the internet that they would never go purposely into a store to buy.

   

Re:Yes, but because

[Nyder]

The industry was created to cover the cost of production and distribution. Both of which today are much cheaper and can me made by individuals who have not "made it" yet.

I don't agree. While I don't work in the music business, I have friends that do, some successful, some not.

The music industry wants you to think it costs a lot to put out your own albums, and it doesn't. It never has. Smart artists, like Steve Albini, figured this out, and produced their own music. Cost was a few thousand dollars.

Distributing is where the record companies have it made, until internet, because they already had a presence in store and with advertising, as long as they felt your work was worth being advertised.

When you come to the record company with no demo, no master, and they sign you a contract, you end up paying way more then you would otherwise for getting that master done, and generally, unless your first album does really good, you don't make any money and don't pay off your debt to them. So you make a second album, increasing debt, etc... Sort of like borrowing money from a loanshark.

So before the internet, you could make a master, print out records/tapes for relatively cheap, but selling them was the hard part.

Now with the internet, honestly, you'd be a fool to sign on with any major recording company.

Re:Yes, but because

[Nyder]

fuck, totally replied to the wrong comment. my bad. I'm stoned and doing 5 things at once.

Re:Yes, but because

[trout007]

Like all Intellectual Monopoly faithful you are missing the point.

The whole concept of property rights exists to determine who has the best claim on a scarce resource. I own my car so I get to determine what happens to it. If someone steals it I can't use it.

Ideas are not property. I can come up with a recipie for a great soup and share it with you and both you and I can still use it.

By creating laws granting intellectual monopoly this violates property rights. I supposedly own my hard drive but now because someone wrote a song and broadcasted it onto my property via radio waves they now have a claim on my hard drive. They will use force against me if I arrange the bits on my hard drive in a way that represents the radio waves they broadcasted onto my property.

Re:Yes, but because

[Altrag]

There's absolutely no reason copyright should not be infinite years

There is one reason: Derivative works. Since copyright as its currently defined generally prevents derivative works, having it expire into the public domain is necessary for the next generation of artists (or currently, their great grandchildren..) to build upon those works.

How many movies and books wouldn't exist if things like Homer, Shakespeare, Brothers Grimm, etc weren't considered public domain? How much Disney (aka: the primary proponent of perpetual copyright extension) wouldn't exists without those?

How much music wouldn't exist if Bach and Beethoven and other greats weren't generally available to modern musicians (or even music schools) because their estates still held copyrights and demanded $10,000 per "performance?"

Re:Yes, but because

[bzipitidoo]

It's fine that you realize that copying is inevitable and unstoppable, but you are still talking as if copying is immoral. It is copyright that is immoral. Copying is a natural right, and the way that the universe works. A radio broadcast or a concert or even just singing in the shower creates countless echoes of information. A shining light on a painting or written page bounces photons into the eyes of anyone looking that direction. Copyright is an entirely artificial restriction on these wholly natural processes. And for what purpose? To encourage the creation of more art. That is hardly the only way to encourage artistic endeavor. As to complaints that artists will starve without copyright, no, they won't. To support art, there is patronage, crowdfunding, performance, and endorsements, to name several other ways.

For copyright to really work, we are supposed to ignore all these echoes. See the movie at the theater, then buy it on DVD (or pirate it of course) if you want to see it again and your memory of it isn't satisfactory. The day may come when we all have inexpensive devices that augment our memory, allowing us to perfectly recall anything we see or hear and copy any of that we wish to another person or data repository, and then what of copyright? Copying has become so much easier to do over the past 40 years that copyright is already absurd now. With technology like that, copyright will be ridiculously archaic and worse than useless, it will be a major hindrance to the ability of its followers, if any, to function in society. For now, copyright blocks and slows the coming of the digital public library, a huge, huge improvement over the traditional library full of bound papers. The private bookstore is dying, and good riddance. Accepting copyright is like accepting a proposition that we should all use only one arm until the holders of the rights to use our other arms grant us permission, and each time we want to use our other arm, we have to ask for said permission and pay a fee. The industry has done an effective job of pushing the propaganda that copying is stealing, and hurts artists and is therefore unfair and immoral. They've confused the public with the seductive simplification that property is property and there is no difference between the physical and the intellectual variety. It's a simple, easy way to view the matter, but it is wrong, and the secret is out now. More and more people are seeing through their propaganda, ironically helped by the industry's clumsy, extreme, and harsh enforcement tactics that earned them the moniker "MAFIAA". For yet more reason why the industry is parasitic, a broad and extensive propaganda campaign, plus a terror campaign to scare the people who weren't fooled or who don't care, is just the sort of thing one could expect from parasites.

It's not just the future in which copyright doesn't work. It never has worked well, ever. Civilization would not have advanced to where it is today had ancient civilizations been able to lock down all information. No matter how much an ancient civilization wished to keep a new battle tactic or weapon secret, once used, their enemies would see it, and the survivors would not find it hard to understand and duplicate, or perhaps counter, or even improve.

Re:Yes, but because

[CrimsonAvenger]

There's absolutely no reason copyright should not be infinite years

Other than that phrase "for limited times" in the Constitution, you mean?

Re:y0V F41l 17

[techno-vampire]

If that's your opinion of Steve Albini and what he's saying about the Music Industry and Copyright, I have no choice but to agree with you.

Tons of free music out there

[future assassin]

the best site I discovered is http://www.ektoplazm.com/ Obviously Trance/Goa/Spy/Etc is not everyone’s cup of tea but there are tons of net labels out there that license their music CC.

I discovered http://www.embarrassed.nl/ on Ektoplazm and their Tales of the Coin Spinner would rival any commercial electronic music release especially in the mide/late 90's style.

I agree and disagree

[aitikin]

I love Steve. He's freaking ridiculous. I've known him for a few years. That being said, he's a niche at best. I've never agreed that he is the mainstay, nor that his mentality is even remotely standard for the industry, but I love the way he goes. He's literally never taken "points" (percentage points) as a producer of a song/album. He sees it as he gets paid out right for it and that's that. I love that about this guy!

I can't say I agree that his mentality of musicians not holding copyright is normal or correct, but I respect the guy and love seeing him and his articles/arguments.

Re:I agree and disagree

[raftpeople]

It seems like his point on copyright is accurate in that it's kind of swimming upstream these days, it's almost impossible to control the easy flow of content.

The article doesn't say, but I would be curious if he had ideas on what kind of arrangement would allow artists to get paid and that accepts that content can't be controlled.

This is not a new idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." ~ John Lennon

Re:GPL and copyright

[SirSlud]

"The old copyright model [...] has expired."

Nobody is saying copyright law shouldn't exist.

re: Empty B.S.?

[King_TJ]

No.... I think it's actually pretty accurate to make the basic statement that "copyright is not working". I'm not saying the entire concept needs to vanish. But I think it's pretty clear that the way it works today, copyright only benefits a relative few people at the top of the "pecking order" for a given business pedaling intellectual property.

As we see the increase in popularity of streaming music services/subscriptions, for example? Copyright as a means to ensure an artist gets compensated fairly for his/her work starts looking like an utter joke. What compensation do they really receive? Fractions of a penny each time a song of theirs is streamed! The only people who stand to do well with this model are the services doing the streaming itself, who collect money for the subscriptions no matter what the subscribers listen to (and a rate that's the same whether they listen to a lot or barely anything at all in a given month).

And who is copyright working for when you have people simply trying to build emulators so people can run 20+ year old games again for nostalgia, but it's technically illegal to distribute the software collections due to a (now non-productive) copyright preventing it?

IMO, the only real value of copyright for a creator of a work is in providing some INITIAL protection when the work is still new. The lion's share of income is normally when a work is brand new and nobody has access to it yet. You want to encourage people to keep creating new things by letting them earn that big, initial profit when the new movie, book, video game or music album/single is a "new release" without it being hijacked .... But once the I.P. gets "stale", meaning almost everyone who wants to view/read/listen to it has pretty much done so? It's time for copyright protection on it to wind down.

Re:Why bother Steve Albini?

[Anonymous Coward]

many services that are working on music being aggressively categorized by moods, styles

That's nice, but how is it relevant?

The music industry has been ridiculously dynamic and new innovations have changed

And now you sound like a broken industry advertiser machine. Yes, they have been pushing DRM on us and bribing governments "protect the.." ...their way of doing business. Yes, paying the artist 5% of profit is piracy because you no longer distribute physical vynil disks that suffer from "breakage" -- actual term used in a contract for distributing mp3s.

If the entire industry disappeared overnight we would all be much better off, even after factoring in their unemployment checks.

Re:And..

[srmalloy]

me WaNt TEH MONIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

That's oversimplified. "We believe that individuals should pay for our granting permission for them to listen to music whose copyrights we hold, and if there were some way for us to guarantee that you would be charged each time you listened to the work, or idly whistled or sang it in a public place (a 'public performance' in violation of copyright), or even sang it in your shower where someone else could hear it, and prevent them from listening to or performing the work if they declined to pay, we would be throwing billions of dollars into trying to buy enough politicians to enact laws to make those controls mandatory for all works we hold copyright on." would be a better approximation. And that still doesn't plumb the depths of their greed.

The corporate industry just stagnates music

[LostMonk]

I wholly agree with Albini, the corporate music industry as a whole just stagnates music. The industry cherry-picks a tiny few young presenters, suit them with what is believed to be the most likely to succeed set of styles and hype their image beyond all proportion.
And in the background everything that is deemed "not popular/unlikely to succeed" is simply ignored. This how you get crap-loads of songs and music videos that are practically indistinguishable from one another.
Not too long ago music artists earns their living from live performances only, recordings changed that and allowed top performers to become very rich. Nowadays we might see things go full circle... A good artist should be able to make a living off her art, there's no law that says she's supposed to become a millionaire (and certainly not her manager).
Music has been around since humanoids could bang two sticks together and hum along, its not going to disappear -- hurting the industry is not "Destroying Music" like some would want us to believe -- Doing anything to damage the music industry in its current form will only do good for music in the long run.

Re: copyright protects punk rockers

[Jason Levine]

If there was no copyright, someone could release a sing and have it immediately appropriated by some politician/organization who they completely disagree with for no compensation. The artist could also wind up competing to sell his works against others selling his works.

The problem is that copyright has been extended to ridiculous lengths. Drop copyright down to shorter lengths (14 years plus a one time 14 year extension) and many of the copyright problems would vanish.

Copyright shouldn't be free-as-in-beer

[CanEHdian]

One of the problem is that copyrighted works can sit on a shelf for 100+ years and it doesn't cost the rightsholder a cent. So yeah, sure, increase copyright terms. Please. At zero cost, even a trillion-in-one chance of a work-on-the-shelf ever making any kind of money is still better than zero.

Even a use-it-or-lose-it system won't work, as you'll see extremely-limited runs just for copyrights' sake. NOT any other.

A proposal is to limit copyright to (compared to the current situation) a very limited time, say 10 years, with an optional extension -at a fee and with registration- for another 10 years. This would total 20 years, the same as inventors get to exploit their ingenuity and creativity at the cost of filing for a patent. This would level the playing field between the two, open up a gigantic public domain, and still give creators a full 2 decades to exploit works.

The most vocal opponents of this proposal will be: (1) the copyright industry, (2) "made men" (dead or alive) that somehow still cash in today for what they did many decades ago and (3) the Hordes Of Entertainment Lawyers that make a good penny with all the legalities, paperwork, clearances, etc. that comes with the actual use of copyrighted works.

Re: Empty B.S.?

[Opportunist]

Copyright in its current form is not only not enforceable, it's actually harmful to artistry in general.

The idea behind copyright was to encourage to create. Before copyright, you needed a patron. Either that or you were busy running from one bar to the next with your new song to play it yourself before someone else copies you. Back then, the main danger was someone else playing it (that was long before the means of reproducing sound and moving image), not someone "copying" the song itself. It was more to protect composers against what happens now constantly: Some orchestra playing a song composed by Mozart, Beethoven or Bach. With the difference that these people were still alive back then. So the best they could get without copyright was to be the first to perform their new compositions.

It was worse for writers who really had to hurry from printing to selling because often before the first batch of books was sold reprints would appear, then of course cheaper because there was no artist who wanted money. Actually, it was worse for printers (producers) who actually bought books from artists. And they were also the ones pushing for legislation in this area.

Or, in other words, copyright was never intended to protect the artist. It was from its very start an attempt of publishers to protect their investment in artists.

But I digress. Original copyright was 7 years, and that was pretty tight back then because then it took a long while for things to get published and noticed by the public. But 7 years was enough to be an incentive for publishers to actually buy books from writers. And later to buy songs and even movie ideas.

Today, in a time when publishing, advertising and selling content has reached the level where it's measured in days and hours rather than years and months, we have a copyright of 70 years. Counting not from the moment of its creation but from the moment the author died. That's pretty much the lifetime of a person. I will probably not see the copyright expire of an artist who died when I was born. To give you an idea just how long this is, James Brown had his first hits just after WW2. He died in 2006. His works would enter public domain in 2081 if this law had been already in existence when he created it (actually, the insanity only dates back to 1978). Another thing that a lot of people probably know is "White Christmas". It's near impossible not to know it. Copyright expires under this law in 2051. That's over a century after its creation.

Who, I have to ask, is to be protected by a copyright that outlives the content's creator? His heirs? Why should essentially three generations of descendants be entitled to royalties of something their grand-grandfather created? Do you even know your grand-grandfather? Imagine you still got money from something that guy once did.

Nobody can tell me that this has any roots in reality. This is insanity.