In part because the people working at these labels - from the owners on down - make a lot less money and work a lot more hours. And somehow they still manage to give their artists better contracts (usually ~50% of profits). Small is beautiful - support your local record store, & support small labels. Of course when it comes down to it most Napster fans really just want their corporate crap music by numbers...
The weird thing is that the major labels were actually doing a *good* thing in this case. Protecting small mom and pop record stores from
the Best Buys of the world is a good thing - at least if you're a customer that values diverse and eclectic selections of music and knowledgeable salepeople.
Please don't give Chicago's city government any more ideas! They've already banned spray paint sales, and hanging out on street corners is called "gang loitering."
They've changed their name to
Gracenote.
This is mainly just a way to relaunch their brand since they now work on more than CD's - hence the old name is too restrictive...
While I think never buying anything from the Majors and their Faux indie subsidiares is a great idea, in the context of Napster it's kinda silly. Either you don't make a dent and your boycott is a joke, or you simply confirm what the RIAA is claiming: Napster users aren't music buyers.
Anyhow the following labels are really cool and truly indie:
Kent Beck's lightweight methodology Extreme Programming or XP does a number of things that reduce the likelihood of coder's block:
Pair Programming - two people at one machine. This means that you can pull each other out of ruts can create new ways of seeing problems. It also makes it easier to talk a problem through. It also makes programing more social!
No Overtime - XP recognizes that too many hours results in burn out, reduced productivity and poor quality.
Refactor - sometimes the reason you are stuck is because you are trying to build on top of a rotting design!
Writing unit test first (before coding) - this makes you think out the problem ahead of time and allow you to code fearlessly. You don't have to worry about your changes causing damage else where in the system because every piece of code has automated unit tests that should all pass.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. For more info on XP it's worth picking up a copy of Kent's book.
I don't think you really do understand my concern, nor do you understand what a compulsory license is, or you wouldn't be accusing me of using the government to bully others. Compulsory licenses are laws that require you to sell what you have to everybody at a government set rate for whatever purpose they desire it. If that's not government regulation what is?
The idea of releasing something in a form that cannot be altered is absurd: you can always make a crappier copy, and under this law reselling that crappy copy would be perfectly legal. Under compulsory licensing I'd have to let anyone resell my recordings and I'd only be paid a government regulated rate. Screw that. That's not just bad art, that bad for small vinyl labels like the one I own. And, yes, vinyl still sounds better than your lousy MP3s (heh heh)...
Not to mention the fact that one of the nice things I do in many of my record contracts is agree to package recordings exactly as the artist wants - this law could place small labels in ugly positions where the cannot protect the rights they contractually gave to their artists. Only lawyers can be happy about this one.
Of course you'd rather buy from the majors, with their 17.99/cd list prices instead of us indies who charge only 8.99/cd even though our margins are lots worse.
If I'm a small label and I want to release 100 7" 45's each month that only 100 subscribers get to have that's between me and my subscribers. My subscribers have no right to go out and then press 5000 inferior sounding CD copies of this record to sell to whomever they wish at inflated prices, while only paying a tiny royalty to my label (and thus the artists.) They paid for one vinyl copy and that's what they got. Period.
To have the government dictate my business model is b.s. I'm not the one committing antitrust/raketeering violations. To suggest that once you buy a record it is your right to sell zillions of repurposed copies is also complete b.s. This leaves indy labels wide open to being ripped off by majors, who won't need to negotiate with us to release our artists. If you don't believe me look at the case of DJ Rolando's recent hit "Jaguar." Sony and then BMG licenced an exact sound alike copy of this from an artist who wasn't DJ Rolando. As a result the bigger label with bigger distribution was able to charge consumers more money while paying Underground Resistance and DJ Roland the measily mechanical rate for the song (about $.07). This was Underground Resistance's first big hit in years, but Sony and BMG got to make all the money off of it - and consumers were duped into thinking that they were buying the real thing. The same scenario could be wide spread under Hatch's scheme because under it a major label wouldn't even need to make a sound a like version (which is much harder with vocal artists and guitar bands).
I'm not trying to be a jerk. You can take your CD, put cuts on your own mix tapes, scratch the record when you DJ, rip it to your P.C. so you can listen to it at work - whatever - that's all legal today under Fair Use doctrine (which I'm a fan of, BTW). But if you want to sell a mix tape or a DJ mix comp you have to negotiate a deal with the owner of the (p) copyright.
Why? Because as a label owner, when I put out a record, I also make a budget and I set the wholesale price per record based on my expenses. To have the government say that my record is worth.50/song or whatever rate they come up with means that I cannot charge what a record is worth.
What's a record worth? Well I try to break even, so it's the total cost of recording, pressing and promoting the record divided by the number that I expect I can sell. Usually I lose a little or a lot, but I'm doing it on my terms and on the artist's terms, not the government's, so no big deal if I make a bad judgement. I can still operate, almost breaking even and give you product cheaper than the majors. And release it exactly the way the artist wants it to be.
Under this new scenario, I have to assume that people are going to buy my recordings at a set rate, and I'm going to get less money than before. Ideally, I'd sell more with the internet, but with small acts you've got a pretty limited market and your fan base is pretty much the same size, since it is limited to people that have actually heard of the band (and having every damn band in the world promoting themselves on the internet does not make the pool of buyers that much bigger unless I have money for national ad campains, etc).
And really my costs are very similar to create one song or five, owing to the way studio time works. If I can only expect you to buy one song, my "cost" for that song is higher than my original calculation. But I don't get more money for a hit, even though its value to you as a consumer might be higher than the value of other songs. Anyhow expect singles to make a comeback. Right now they're sold by majors as loss leaders, but that is likely to change.
While technology has made recording cheaper, the cost for the physical space required for a recording studio is going up with the internet boom - ask any of the recording studios that once operated in Soma or the Mission (or closer to where I live, Wicker Park).
As a label owner I want a better model for electronic distribution. And I don't trust the government or the major labels to do this right for reasons that should be obvious. I want a format with fidelity that is acceptible, and I want to allow artists that don't want to go digital to have that right. Us indies have real problems with distribution and promotion. The the internet could solve many of them, but Orin Hatch's solution doesn't have a lot to do with us, and it could open us to hostile attacks from majors since we will lose control of our only asset - our recorded masters. Certainly, a new breed of indies will come in the wake of compulsory licensing, but it will also destroy the integrity of certain parts of the indy scene, like 7" labels and cool, well-packaged concept records. I want it both ways, because no single technology solution can suit all musical artists.
Senator Hatch's scheme is potentially problematic for many artists.
First, artists or labels might want to do a limited edition for any one of a number of good reasons (fan club, marketing, single of the month club, whatever.)
Artists might want to have an item deleted from their catalog. Once again, there are reasons why an artist would want to do this like they have changed their stance or aesthetics.
In certain cases an artist wants to control the format of a release. MP3's sound crappy - especially with certain kinds of music. An artist might not want to compromise the audio quality of their music. Or maybe they want to limit their releases to vinyl because they believe vinyl sounds better, or because they have an anti-technology political stance and don't wish tobe labeled a hypocrite.
Some songs cannot be taken out of the context of a packaged collection without changing their meaning. Albums can be meaningful collections of recorded songs, artwork and written text. A benefit compilation, without a statement of purpose are fairly worthless in terms of raising awareness for their beneficiary.
Compulsory licensing kills all this and takes away control from the artist. Now major label artists are used to this, but in indy land artistic integrity is still important.
Finally, a compulsory license most likely will make sure major label artists get paid, but won't offer as much protection for smaller independant artists. Of any of the objections this is the easiest to remedy, but I somehow doubt a good outcome.
Note that there is already compulsory licensing on published songs (compositions) - but this is different from a compulsory license on a recording of a song.
K-Tel would go nuts with this one, and you'd quickly see the death of the record album. The hit single would once again be *everything* as it was in the 50's and early 60's.
There is some irony here: Courtney's rant is totally like previous rants from Steve Albini (She totally hates Steve and thinks he ruined Nirvana's record). The similarities are all over the place - even down to complaining about how digital recording sucks. Maybe she and Steve should try to make up - haha.
Chicago has gotten used to random power outages. While ComEd trys to blame heat, it's more a matter of old unmaintained infrastructure. That said, New Years Eve passed without a hitch. Still with summer coming, you can bet there are more outages and more deaths to come.
This agreement has more to do with allowing mass merchandisers to advertise their low, loss leader prices without losing ad dollars from the majors. So in certain ways it's a blow to stores that deal exclusively in music. They sell only music, and make their money at this, while stores like Best Buy really just want to sell you a new Microwave.
Well, American CD prices are among the cheapest in the world, so I'm not sure where you're from, but it ain't Europe or Japan. Besides the cost of the media isn't what you're paying for. You're paying the musicians, the engineer, the producer, the studio time, the mastering, the packaging, the marketing, etc. The real crime of the music industry is that these costs are huge, and they all come out of the artist's royalties. See this article by Steve Albini to understand how screwed up things are.
According to Reuter/Variety, the Federal Trade Commission is also investigating CD pricing and will be filing a complaint tommorow. Apparently Time Warner, Sony, BMG, EMI, and Universal have all agreed to settle. The issue at stake is the practice of having a minimum advertised price for CD's. While the margins in the music industry aren't as great as some on/. make them out to be (hence the heavy focus on mega groups), it looks like claims of price fixing aren't all that far fetched.
I don't see this as being that useful on a PC. But on a handheld PDA or cell phone it could be pretty useful. The article suggests this technology would mean you wouldn't have to rip out an article with a URL to access the URL, which is dead wrong. With the PC barcode you have to have the physical paper to hit the URL. but if I could quickly store the link on my PDA, or surf immediately on my cell phone & make a purchase - now that's cool.
Jon, please clairify how "a new way of distributing music" will help artists. In your scenario, one person buys a very cheap copy, cracks it, and gives it away free to all comers. Your argument works for cassette tape, but it is fairly useless when you talk about digital copies, especially once broadband becomes common.
Maybe the end impact of all this is to return to the pre-rock days when music was made for and marketed to (more affluent) adults. Lawrence Welk anyone?
Well Metallica could *sue* for such a tattoo really. Disney actively fights tattoo shops that have Disney character flash as trademark and copyright infringement.
The above post could lead you to believe no royalties are ever paid - that's not exactly true. In the US, commercial radio stations pay licensing fees to ASCAP and BMI. These are doled out to the copyright owners based on some sampled estimate of airplay.
Well, John Williams has made a career out of the fact that Holst's works aren't (weren't?) in the public domain! Listen to the Holst's Planets and then Star Wars and get back to me! Holst's estate refused all movie licensing deals until Tarzan: Lord Graystoke (sp?).
In general you *can* perform John William's works - you just need to pay appropriate royalties. This doesn't mean you could use this music in your own commericial or movie - I believe you'd need to negotiate a license in that case. But for many other uses (like making a records) there are set mechanical royalities, and for other cases, like public performace, there are set fee schedules. Whatever the case you buy a license, you don't go to 20th century fox!
See ASCAP or BMI. for more info on public/internet/brodcast licensing.
See Harry Fox for mechanical licensing (used when your group records John Williams compositions for release).
Anyhow, the money ends up going to John Williams or whoever own the rights to his catalog (if he sold his publishing).
Minidisco.com imports a lot of cool new minidisc players and gadgets from Japan to the US. Now if only they imported some of the other items mentioned!
The initial post and the responses show that most people don't know the difference between Copyright, Trademark, and Patents. A trademark is totally different from a copyright. If you are doing trade or performing services under an identity, that identity can be protected. That identity can be stuff like your company name, logo, tag lines, colors and in Apple's or Coke's case the look of your product package. You can't trademark it unless you're using it in business. If you want to go the next step you can spend the money to register your trademark and you then get to change your little TM to an R. Copyright is about protecting a creative work, not a business identity. It can be a written work, a drawing, or a song - or a recording of a song which gets a (p) instead of a (c). Technically anything you create is instantly copyrighted the second you create it, but of course you probably still want to take better measures than that. Patent is about protecting inventions/innovations and has already been explained to death here. Suffice it to say it performs a different purpose and getting a patent is a different process with different results.
Douglas Hofstader's "Metamagical Themas" has a good essay on Turing and England's ugly treatment of one of it's war heros. If I remember Scientific American (the original publisher of the essays) was none too pleased with this and a few other of Hofstader's columns due to what the editors felt was a political slant in them...
Slashdot Mirror
More to the point why are CD's from labels like Discord, K Records, Kill Rock Stars, Thrill Jockey, and Touch and Go so much cheaper???
In part because the people working at these labels - from the owners on down - make a lot less money and work a lot more hours. And somehow they still manage to give their artists better contracts (usually ~50% of profits). Small is beautiful - support your local record store, & support small labels. Of course when it comes down to it most Napster fans really just want their corporate crap music by numbers...
The weird thing is that the major labels were actually doing a *good* thing in this case. Protecting small mom and pop record stores from the Best Buys of the world is a good thing - at least if you're a customer that values diverse and eclectic selections of music and knowledgeable salepeople.
Please don't give Chicago's city government any more ideas! They've already banned spray paint sales, and hanging out on street corners is called "gang loitering."
They've changed their name to Gracenote. This is mainly just a way to relaunch their brand since they now work on more than CD's - hence the old name is too restrictive...
Anyhow the following labels are really cool and truly indie:
- Pair Programming - two people at one machine. This means that you can pull each other out of ruts can create new ways of seeing problems. It also makes it easier to talk a problem through. It also makes programing more social!
- No Overtime - XP recognizes that too many hours results in burn out, reduced productivity and poor quality.
- Refactor - sometimes the reason you are stuck is because you are trying to build on top of a rotting design!
- Writing unit test first (before coding) - this makes you think out the problem ahead of time and allow you to code fearlessly. You don't have to worry about your changes causing damage else where in the system because every piece of code has automated unit tests that should all pass.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. For more info on XP it's worth picking up a copy of Kent's book.The idea of releasing something in a form that cannot be altered is absurd: you can always make a crappier copy, and under this law reselling that crappy copy would be perfectly legal. Under compulsory licensing I'd have to let anyone resell my recordings and I'd only be paid a government regulated rate. Screw that. That's not just bad art, that bad for small vinyl labels like the one I own. And, yes, vinyl still sounds better than your lousy MP3s (heh heh)...
Not to mention the fact that one of the nice things I do in many of my record contracts is agree to package recordings exactly as the artist wants - this law could place small labels in ugly positions where the cannot protect the rights they contractually gave to their artists. Only lawyers can be happy about this one.
Of course you'd rather buy from the majors, with their 17.99/cd list prices instead of us indies who charge only 8.99/cd even though our margins are lots worse.
If I'm a small label and I want to release 100 7" 45's each month that only 100 subscribers get to have that's between me and my subscribers. My subscribers have no right to go out and then press 5000 inferior sounding CD copies of this record to sell to whomever they wish at inflated prices, while only paying a tiny royalty to my label (and thus the artists.) They paid for one vinyl copy and that's what they got. Period.
To have the government dictate my business model is b.s. I'm not the one committing antitrust/raketeering violations. To suggest that once you buy a record it is your right to sell zillions of repurposed copies is also complete b.s. This leaves indy labels wide open to being ripped off by majors, who won't need to negotiate with us to release our artists. If you don't believe me look at the case of DJ Rolando's recent hit "Jaguar." Sony and then BMG licenced an exact sound alike copy of this from an artist who wasn't DJ Rolando. As a result the bigger label with bigger distribution was able to charge consumers more money while paying Underground Resistance and DJ Roland the measily mechanical rate for the song (about $.07). This was Underground Resistance's first big hit in years, but Sony and BMG got to make all the money off of it - and consumers were duped into thinking that they were buying the real thing. The same scenario could be wide spread under Hatch's scheme because under it a major label wouldn't even need to make a sound a like version (which is much harder with vocal artists and guitar bands).
I'm not trying to be a jerk. You can take your CD, put cuts on your own mix tapes, scratch the record when you DJ, rip it to your P.C. so you can listen to it at work - whatever - that's all legal today under Fair Use doctrine (which I'm a fan of, BTW). But if you want to sell a mix tape or a DJ mix comp you have to negotiate a deal with the owner of the (p) copyright.
Why? Because as a label owner, when I put out a record, I also make a budget and I set the wholesale price per record based on my expenses. To have the government say that my record is worth .50/song or whatever rate they come up with means that I cannot charge what a record is worth.
What's a record worth? Well I try to break even, so it's the total cost of recording, pressing and promoting the record divided by the number that I expect I can sell. Usually I lose a little or a lot, but I'm doing it on my terms and on the artist's terms, not the government's, so no big deal if I make a bad judgement. I can still operate, almost breaking even and give you product cheaper than the majors. And release it exactly the way the artist wants it to be.
Under this new scenario, I have to assume that people are going to buy my recordings at a set rate, and I'm going to get less money than before. Ideally, I'd sell more with the internet, but with small acts you've got a pretty limited market and your fan base is pretty much the same size, since it is limited to people that have actually heard of the band (and having every damn band in the world promoting themselves on the internet does not make the pool of buyers that much bigger unless I have money for national ad campains, etc).
And really my costs are very similar to create one song or five, owing to the way studio time works. If I can only expect you to buy one song, my "cost" for that song is higher than my original calculation. But I don't get more money for a hit, even though its value to you as a consumer might be higher than the value of other songs. Anyhow expect singles to make a comeback. Right now they're sold by majors as loss leaders, but that is likely to change.
While technology has made recording cheaper, the cost for the physical space required for a recording studio is going up with the internet boom - ask any of the recording studios that once operated in Soma or the Mission (or closer to where I live, Wicker Park).
As a label owner I want a better model for electronic distribution. And I don't trust the government or the major labels to do this right for reasons that should be obvious. I want a format with fidelity that is acceptible, and I want to allow artists that don't want to go digital to have that right. Us indies have real problems with distribution and promotion. The the internet could solve many of them, but Orin Hatch's solution doesn't have a lot to do with us, and it could open us to hostile attacks from majors since we will lose control of our only asset - our recorded masters. Certainly, a new breed of indies will come in the wake of compulsory licensing, but it will also destroy the integrity of certain parts of the indy scene, like 7" labels and cool, well-packaged concept records. I want it both ways, because no single technology solution can suit all musical artists.
First, artists or labels might want to do a limited edition for any one of a number of good reasons (fan club, marketing, single of the month club, whatever.)
Artists might want to have an item deleted from their catalog. Once again, there are reasons why an artist would want to do this like they have changed their stance or aesthetics.
In certain cases an artist wants to control the format of a release. MP3's sound crappy - especially with certain kinds of music. An artist might not want to compromise the audio quality of their music. Or maybe they want to limit their releases to vinyl because they believe vinyl sounds better, or because they have an anti-technology political stance and don't wish tobe labeled a hypocrite.
Some songs cannot be taken out of the context of a packaged collection without changing their meaning. Albums can be meaningful collections of recorded songs, artwork and written text. A benefit compilation, without a statement of purpose are fairly worthless in terms of raising awareness for their beneficiary.
Compulsory licensing kills all this and takes away control from the artist. Now major label artists are used to this, but in indy land artistic integrity is still important.
Finally, a compulsory license most likely will make sure major label artists get paid, but won't offer as much protection for smaller independant artists. Of any of the objections this is the easiest to remedy, but I somehow doubt a good outcome.
Note that there is already compulsory licensing on published songs (compositions) - but this is different from a compulsory license on a recording of a song.
K-Tel would go nuts with this one, and you'd quickly see the death of the record album. The hit single would once again be *everything* as it was in the 50's and early 60's.
On Sigue Sigue Sputnik's album Flaunt they sold ads between each album cut.
While you're there you should really check out Negativland's page on Intellectual Property Issues.
I'm just glad I work on a laptop.
Read more about Why Napster is bad and about a proposed improvement to Napster.
Well I understood him just fine. I'd say you don't grasp any of what this involves either (in terms of the realities of the music industry.)
It's bad enough that all but a few lucky musicians are screwed by their labels, but now they're also being screwed by their so called fans...
This agreement has more to do with allowing mass merchandisers to advertise their low, loss leader prices without losing ad dollars from the majors. So in certain ways it's a blow to stores that deal exclusively in music. They sell only music, and make their money at this, while stores like Best Buy really just want to sell you a new Microwave.
Well, American CD prices are among the cheapest in the world, so I'm not sure where you're from, but it ain't Europe or Japan. Besides the cost of the media isn't what you're paying for. You're paying the musicians, the engineer, the producer, the studio time, the mastering, the packaging, the marketing, etc. The real crime of the music industry is that these costs are huge, and they all come out of the artist's royalties. See this article by Steve Albini to understand how screwed up things are.
According to Reuter/Variety, the Federal Trade Commission is also investigating CD pricing and will be filing a complaint tommorow. Apparently Time Warner, Sony, BMG, EMI, and Universal have all agreed to settle. The issue at stake is the practice of having a minimum advertised price for CD's. While the margins in the music industry aren't as great as some on /. make them out to be (hence the heavy focus on mega groups), it looks like claims of price fixing aren't all that far fetched.
I don't see this as being that useful on a PC. But on a handheld PDA or cell phone it could be pretty useful. The article suggests this technology would mean you wouldn't have to rip out an article with a URL to access the URL, which is dead wrong. With the PC barcode you have to have the physical paper to hit the URL. but if I could quickly store the link on my PDA, or surf immediately on my cell phone & make a purchase - now that's cool.
Jon, please clairify how "a new way of distributing music" will help artists. In your scenario, one person buys a very cheap copy, cracks it, and gives it away free to all comers. Your argument works for cassette tape, but it is fairly useless when you talk about digital copies, especially once broadband becomes common.
Maybe the end impact of all this is to return to the pre-rock days when music was made for and marketed to (more affluent) adults. Lawrence Welk anyone?
Well Metallica could *sue* for such a tattoo really. Disney actively fights tattoo shops that have Disney character flash as trademark and copyright infringement.
The above post could lead you to believe no royalties are ever paid - that's not exactly true. In the US, commercial radio stations pay licensing fees to ASCAP and BMI. These are doled out to the copyright owners based on some sampled estimate of airplay.
In general you *can* perform John William's works - you just need to pay appropriate royalties. This doesn't mean you could use this music in your own commericial or movie - I believe you'd need to negotiate a license in that case. But for many other uses (like making a records) there are set mechanical royalities, and for other cases, like public performace, there are set fee schedules. Whatever the case you buy a license, you don't go to 20th century fox!
See ASCAP or BMI. for more info on public/internet/brodcast licensing.
See Harry Fox for mechanical licensing (used when your group records John Williams compositions for release).
Anyhow, the money ends up going to John Williams or whoever own the rights to his catalog (if he sold his publishing).
Minidisco.com imports a lot of cool new minidisc players and gadgets from Japan to the US. Now if only they imported some of the other items mentioned!
The initial post and the responses show that most people don't know the difference between Copyright, Trademark, and Patents. A trademark is totally different from a copyright. If you are doing trade or performing services under an identity, that identity can be protected. That identity can be stuff like your company name, logo, tag lines, colors and in Apple's or Coke's case the look of your product package. You can't trademark it unless you're using it in business. If you want to go the next step you can spend the money to register your trademark and you then get to change your little TM to an R. Copyright is about protecting a creative work, not a business identity. It can be a written work, a drawing, or a song - or a recording of a song which gets a (p) instead of a (c). Technically anything you create is instantly copyrighted the second you create it, but of course you probably still want to take better measures than that. Patent is about protecting inventions/innovations and has already been explained to death here. Suffice it to say it performs a different purpose and getting a patent is a different process with different results.
Douglas Hofstader's "Metamagical Themas" has a good essay on Turing and England's ugly treatment of one of it's war heros. If I remember Scientific American (the original publisher of the essays) was none too pleased with this and a few other of Hofstader's columns due to what the editors felt was a political slant in them...