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

Posted by timothy on from the but-how's-the-marrow? dept.

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."

7 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, but because by saloomy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Yes, but because by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re: Yes, but because by srmalloy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. Tons of free music out there by future+assassin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
  3. This is not a new idea. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  4. re: Empty B.S.? by King_TJ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:Why bother Steve Albini? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.