Full disclosure: I am actually an employee of a fairly prominent record label, and one that belongs to the RIAA.
I've been loving Janis Ian's campaign against the recording industry-- in my opinion, her micro-distribution technique is one of a very few viable new options for artists to pursue, and it's a great thing besides. I just thing she's a little bit early in declaring the end of labels' useful lives.
Let's look for a minute at why labels exist. Not every artist needs a label, either now or fifteen years ago. Performers ONLY "need" a record deal when what they need to do takes more time, money, and expertise than they and their friends/agents/managers/assistants can give them. If you have a record that's doing well locally, you can sell out the Iota, the Mercury Lounge, the Corn Exchange, or Viper Room, and you are happy at that level, you probably don't need a record deal. Doing it Janis' way is perfect, and in fact waaay preferable to having a deal with a large label.
Where labels are handy--still-- is when you start to grow beyond your borders. Do you want national distribution? International distribution? Has your record done well on local radio, and you feel like it could have a nice run nationally? Are you spending more time putting together mail-order packages than you are writing songs? You could probably use a label to help you with these tasks. Labels are better at marketing on a large scale, better at getting traditional radio play (and NOT NECESSARILY POP RADIO), better at getting press, and better at setting up and managing distribution on a large scale-- not to mention labels can help you get your music licensed into films/tv-- many artists make most their money that way rather than through traditional album-sales channels. This is what they're FOR-- they have the bankroll and the contacts-- the shady business practices of certain elements notwithstanding.
It's a rough time for the music industry, and things are going to change rapidly. I just want to make sure that I speak my piece to my fellow slashdotters. Labels are not, and have never been, for everybody, and they probably shouldn't go away altogether (not least because I like what I do, and I work with great, GREAT music). I sincerely hope that more musicians are successful with Janis Ian-styled strategies, because it will have the very beneficial side effect of killing off those parts of the music industry who are least able to adapt.
The way it's organized actually helps me dig deeper more easily on stories that grab me... I can scan for bias across several sources much more readily that way. AND it's a clearinghouse!! Kind of like the Drudge Report, without the disadvantage of having Matt Drudge in charge.
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Duke University Medical Center discovered a gene called "callipyge," (pronounced cal - ah - PEEJ) meaning "beautiful buttocks" in Greek, because the sheep have large, muscular bottoms with very little fat.
As one of the people who does hiring for a small firm, we look for well-roundedness in all employees. Someone who has been exposed to, say, history courses, music appreciation courses, or even--gasp-- sports management or courses of that ilk-- in addition to whatever their main concentration is-- denote a well-rounded person who will be able to write, speak, interact, show up on time, and in general act more like a well-rounded human being than most.
Of course, this is mostly perception, but it's perception via your resume and interview that will get you hired. We look at hundreds of similar candidates for every position, and anyone who can both demonstrate excellence in their profession/main field, and the well-roundedness that is a good indicator of creativity, are immediately at the top of the stack.
As long as you're not sacrificing any crucial courses to get this extra breadth of knowledge, by all means go for it. And drink lots of beer. You'll be a senior.
You and the other replies are almost right, but not quite. The reason you only hear about 'this month's big names' is because, to get a record to sound good enough for radio to play it, costs at least $100K and I have seen it rise to as much as $500,000 (HALF A MILLION) for an album that ended up shipping 15000 units. Most labels can't afford this and therefore can't saturate the national media.
Next point. The costs are not vicious to record an album. $100,000 is not too bad. What kills you is the half a million it takes to work a record at rock radio (yes, $500,000-- some of which goes to listener giveaways, etc etc etc but most of which lines various pockets in the Clear Channel hierarchy and in the independent promotion worlds (independent promoters are the people who make the phone calls that you don't have time to, or can get people on the phone that you can't. They cost.)). If you want a hit, you pay. If you can't afford it, you don't, and try to get exposure through non-comm radio, touring, and word-of-mouth.
What also kills you is the $4 to $15 in advertising costs PER UNIT-- PER UNIT-- that it can take to get sufficient visibility to break a band. This includes print advertising, price & positioning at retailers, co-op advertising (where you split the cost with a retailer), etc. It costs $20-30,000 to get a full page ad in the New York Times sunday magazine. Rolling Stone STARTS at $50,000 for a little ad. Even the smaller magazines like CMJ, Mother Jones, Magnet, cost something, usually between $1000 and $10000 per ad.
It's these costs that add up. As mentioned, costs run away. I've seen an album come out, ship 30,000 units, and then 20,000 of those come back 90 days later as returns, all the while supported by $30 per unit-- PER UNIT--- in advertising. To a point, this is a cost labels are willing to absorb because eventually, on the 2nd or 3rd or 4th album, all these costs will amortize when an album breaks, but this is an example of costs getting horribly out of control. Which can happen easily, and does happen often. This is where labels lose money.
One final note. Artists retain labels to do the work they can't-- get marketing, provide tour support, front the money for recording, secure visas for international travel, set up press junkets, get radio play. The label uses their money to do this with. Therefore, it's only natural that the label make their money back before the artist gets their cut (with the exception of certain things like sync licenses which go straight to the artist- a good thing). It's why labels exist-- to expose themselves to risk in the expectation of furthering an artist's career. I am in it to make great music famous, and so are a heap of other people. Just because a label pays its "union dues" to the RIAA does not make them evil. It makes them just like an auto worker who is in the UAW or a teacher in the NEA. Buy independent, forget the majors, and remember, music is everything.
OK. I actually work for one of the larger independent labels, and I can say with great certainty that it's not downloading alone that's hurting sales, but the drop is larger than some people think.
First, the most important hard number that matters: 13%. This is the percentage by which record sales (as measured by SoundScan) are down this year over the same time last year. That's a HUNK. Study after study has failed to demonstrate that downloading either is or is not responsible for this dip. It ain't the only thing, IMHO.
Among other things, this bust comes at the end of a decades-long boom period for the record industry, and like so many other businesses, labels have spent the last few years riding a bubble. Unsurprisingly, the bubble has burst. We all know that selling records is a low-margin business that usually loses money (SERIOUSLY. NOT KIDDING.). If a larger label makes a killing it is probably on a runaway hit that sells hundreds of thousands, or millions, not ten thousand or less like the vast majority of releases do. Most labels lose money most of the time, and the ones that steadily make money generally do so on a scale that doesn't even register on the radar of the major-label wonks.
So what do we have? We have: four major labels, owned by conglomerates who wish to use the Beatles/Dylan/Zeppelin/Stooges/Clash catalogs to cross-promote their products, and to finance other ventures. These conglomerates have little patience or interest in sinking money into new artists who will lose money for years at a time.
We have Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. selling discs for LESS than WHOLESALE, to the point where small record stores are buying their stock on the sly FROM THESE STORES instead of from the labels themselves.
We have an environment where, in the last year, TWO of the largest distributors have gone out of business (That's like WB Films and Paramount going tits-up), and TWO of the largest retailers-- Virgin and the Musicland family of stores.
We have radio AND touring in the hands of basically ONE company.
We have declining fan interest in the lastest dead horse trotted out by U2, Britney Spears, String, and the N'Backstreet Boys.
All this adds up, not to downloading killing the industry, but the industry starting to feel the effects of too many boardroom ultimatums and short-term decisions.
13% of sales have gone PFFT. It's a market correction, and a lamentable one, that the conglomerates that own the majors have precipitated themselves. Janis Ian is right-- the future is with people selling their own records out of the backs of cars, and this just might be the real start of that.
Everything I've heard here--especially about migrating data off of hard drives onto a redundant file server, and changing where applications look for/save data-- is good advice, in a normal setting.
Unfortunately, i have already been told that "moving people's data off their hard drives is bad." So much for the easy way out.
GAAAH.
My new strategy, since these are all Windows machines, is to put some of the responsibility in the hands of the user, but painlessly. I have written an MS-DOS script that will copy the full contents of everyone's "My Documents" to their area on the server, and then do the same for all database and email files. All they need to do is click a widget.
The best part of this is, if they don't do it after I've asked them to, it's not my ass. I have already made sure of that in writing (and I'm suuuuuure that won't come back to bite me in the butt).
After the user data is on the server, it should be no problem to cook it down to a tape drive periodically, filtering out crap like video clips and mp3's that are't work-related.
Anybody care to comment on this approach as a start?
"unless the music industry is willing to take some risks... "
Now, I work in the music industry, and I can assure you that a viable internet-based distribution model is pretty far off.
Two short reasons why:
1) Cost and Exposure. For all the carping that goes on about how labels pocket about $15 of a $17 sticker price on new cd's, it's not true. Once you take out mechanical royalties, publishing fees, licensing fees, distribution fees, songwriter percentages, producer percentages, miscellaneous finders fees, manufacturing costs (which typically run between $1.50 and $3 per unit depending on configuration), there just isn't that much money left over for labels to play with.
Don't get me wrong, a million-seller still rakes in the cash, but it's not like we're Saudi oil magnates.
Also, please remember that less than 10% of all releases sell more than 10,000 copies. When it costs tens of thousands of dollars to market an album, get it in stores, get a profile, that is usually a dismal failure.
And now my point... labels, generally speaking, profit on one out of ten releases or so. That's a pretty poor margin.
Rather than drive labels to try to find more efficient ways to get music into people's hands (and money into artists' and our pockets), it makes them more conservative with their money, and ties them to traditional distribution channels.
2) Most/many labels are still run by boards of directors who don't know ANYTHING about music at all. They are interested in the health of the quarterly balance sheet, and are reluctant for their company to be the first one over the cliff into new, unproven business models. Also, remember, many of the major players in the music business- the rich guys, the guys with the cash to make digital distribution happen-- made their bones in the 1950's and 1960's. Even rich younger guys (...ermm...David Geffen??... Strauss Zelnick?...) learned at the feet of the codgers and adopted their ways.
Don't forget... if a label head tries some crazy new digital distribution scheme, and it goes horribly wrong, it's his or her butt on the line.
Dn't look for a really good digital distribution model from within the music industry any time soon.
And remember... all labels are not evil, and music is everything.
Yeah, Pinkerton's got its own legacy to contend with, though. After being created as a private spy company during the Civil War, they went West. Some as Indian killers, others as stagecoach security.
Then there was a bad patch. Pinkertons' was a strikebusting organization for decades around the turn of the century-- cracked heads during the 1895 Pullman Strike, during the Homestead strikes, and basically all the coal, steel and railroad strikes that plagued corporations at that time. Dale Carnegie and Andrew Mellon loved these guys as "security."
Granted, this is true. I am not the "real" lux interior, but I too grew up in Akron and have a propensity for taking drugs and getting naked at parties.
I agree that major-label record contracts are exploitation in the extreme. This is precisely why I don't care for napster-style piracy. Provided that I ever get a big-league contract (not likely), I will want to retain every scrap of rights and revenue I can. Music is a business, as poorly as that fits with the artistic nature it has at the core. I WANT those mechanical royalties, I want the checks rolling in.
Right now I can't afford to buy a bed, so it may just me feeling the keen itch of poverty that makes me react like this to massive downloading of music, but I really think it's just that I have an ego and some greed. If I did it, I want the credit and the ducats.
Considering that the internet is sure to become more global and hence more polyglot, content will (as others have pointed out) become more difficult to regulate. I have a question on this point for the here and now.
Say you have a document that contains "questionable" material and is therefore blocked from your sight, due to a cromulent school administration or parent etc. Would it be possible to, through a mirrorsite or something, to e.g. babelfish the offending document and download it in translation, and then return it to its original language?
This seems like a way to thwart censorware and pr0n blockers. Is there something I'm missing or is this a possible home remedy to censorware?
As translation programs get better you're sure to have less lexicon errors and idiomatic strangeness, and you could get documents from english to german to english mit nur ein bischen of error. Purple monkey farmhouse.
The US Patent office is currently under massive Congressional investigation for charges of corruption, graft, and gross mismanagement. The terse statement cited in the letter is a slick, cromulent example of the generally crapulous way the Patent Office has been run. This brings me to two points. 1) The PO has bigger fish to fry right now than spend its time on this issue. 2) The lawyers and software investors will be the ones to take advantage of this lapse in oversight to guide the reform or block it altogether.
Although IANAL, I play one on TV (actually, I am an historian and have studied Constitutional law a fair amount and patent law a little), and I feel that the dialogue currently happening will be subceptible to public opinion if expressed maturely (no fl@m3rz) through forums like Slashdot, Salon, Slate, and direct mailings to Congress. Check out Slashdot's protocols, as always, before mailing Congress on an issue, though.
Hope this made sense. I'm all hopped up on fruit juice.
Phish and the dead are anomolies and have no business in this discussion. Phish in no small way inherited the Dead's legacy and audience, a following which has its roots in one, specific historical moment. Therefore, to say that any artist could do the same thing is not quite correct.
The thrust of the article was not to indict record companies for overcharging for CD's (they do (duh)), or to showcase artists complaining that they're underpaid by the record companies, but to make this very important point--
To cast the Napster debate as a free-speech issue is misleading and beside the point, like making the right to shoot someone a second-amendment issue.
Artists (and unfortunately their labels) own what they produce-- that's why we have copyright laws. Napster is, as cool as it is (I love it), it is nevertheless pretty much illegal, and unless you are talking about Phish, or Britney, or some other artist who no longer has to live in a van and shower in bus stations while on tour, Napster screws musicians right in the ol' cornhole.
YES, it's true that the distro structure of the music industry needs to change. YES it's true that record companies pocket most of the $18 sticker price for CD's. YES it's true that it's much more fun to get music for free on a large scale. That's why tape trading is such big business for Dead- and Phish-heads, fans of Medeski Martin & Wood, Zappa, etc.
However, avoiding the traditional distro and payment structure entirely hurts artists who are not yet top-shelf successful.
Copyrighted music is a commodity just like anything else, and the producers deserve compensation. I'd think that lots of people on Slashdot, being overworked and underpaid IT folks, can definitely sympathize with this situation. The open-source metaphor only allies ot music int he public domain. It not yet apply to copyrighted musicans unless they want it to.
I apologize for coming off so strident, but I'm one of the very-lowest-echelon struggling-musician-types, and I'll be damned if I'm giving away all the rights to my music for free.
1)Jurisprudence moves slowly, which is why these laws are getting passed-- they're the first post -type precedents in this new territory. Grassroots movements have notorious difficulty fighting laws like this that claim whole swaths of legal authority. Hell, it has taken the women's rights movement 150 years to nearly achieve equality, and they were fighting already-obsolete laws from the 17th century!!
Besides, EVEN IF it can be fairly maintained that digital music is a first amendment issue, don't forget that the actual rights to the music are owned by record companies, rendering it more a commerce and copyright issue if the courts so decide.( This wouldn't be the first time an anti-free-speech law went on the books in the US, either (1798, repeatedly in the 1890s and during the Red Scare)).
And that's another problem-- the fact that these new laws, CDA, UCITA, DMCA, span so many legal categories, makes them hard to grok fully, much less fight. Your average legislature hasn't the time to parse 80 pages of text when they have 800 bills on the docket and an expert testimony in front of them that says it's okay. Of course that testimony was written by. . .
2) Do you know where staffers from Capitol Hill go when they burn out?? Across the Potomac to the Northern VA/Maryland tech corridor, where they get jobs as "legislative consultants." That's fancy talk for lobbyists. The tech companies are not stupid, they're mining the very source for legislative talent. See # 1 above, and marvel at the collusion going down.
This is yet another case, examples of which show up every day on slashdot, of the ways in which the law is unable to compensate for technology. You've got two conflicting tendencies here. On one hand, jurisprudence, which is by definition conservative, based on precedent, tradition, and common sense. It literally presumes to exist as the very basis of legal discussion of how reality works. On the other, you have the ever-increasing pace of technological innovation, which is as even my grandma knows, is changing the nature of communication, property, and privacy (the reality that the law supposedly defines) faster than ever before.
Just look at the library filter flap, UCITA, Microsoft being brought up on antitrust laws (a relic from the days of railroad), internet pr0n, and internet taxation. These are all crucial areas of law that the internet has changed the rules on.
What's the solution? I dunno. Legislators have to give some serious time to the the implications of their actions before they totally fxxk up the First Amendment, property law, search-and-seizure, and all the rest of it. Maryland is currently reviewing UCITA in this way (Thank GOD), and hopefully other states (those outdated geography-based domain names) will follow suit.
As it would stand if it becomes law, UCITA would not be usable to prosecute Non-Virginians. However, it is a bill regulating (hence "uniform") interstate trade. The very title means it's drafted with the intent of making it simple for other states to adopt, and, since sooooo many software companies are based here in Northern VA, the law would immediately apply to all transactions with those companies. Yeesh. Please correct if my interpretation of interstate commerce law is messy.
I have already emailed my Va state senator about UCITA, and am encouraging others to do the same. Personally, I don't see much hope for us opponents. HOWEVER, in the long run, we should be okay. Let's presume for a sec that a challenge to the law once passed makes it to the US Supreme Court. The supreme court, as it stands now, is a very cautious body. They are not inclined to use their decisions to set sweeping precendents. Even better, they are not inclined to accept sweeping legislation that is challenged as unconstitutional. Rememeber they struck down the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and the Communications Decency Act as well (same thing?? memory foggy). So, when UCITA inevitably comes before the supreme court, If the Court keeps to the same path, UCITA doesn't stand a chance. This Court has been tough on first-amendment infringements and is conservative in the best sense of the word. The fear is of course that the next president will get to appoint up to five new Justices, which could change everything. UCITA must be fought now if we are to be successful later in striking it down. (Clearly, I'm pretty sure it's gonna become law. The remarks earlier about lobbyists (AOfxxinL)are right on the mark.
I'm not as big a Katz hater as the seeming majority of/.ers, but this is senseless twaddle on a par with "Reefer Madness." Distinct categories? Please./. as Tech Head Central? Umm. . . click [here] to buy foo.
Know what would be a fun game? JKatz is riding a wave now, due to his new book-- he's pundit du jour. Why not let's spread this article far and wide, get it into the digest pages of Time, Newsweek and Readers' Digest, and solicit further commentary from JK himself? It's harmless, it's innocuous, and it might be fun to watch this golden stream of misinformation become the current 'wisdom' about the 'infobahn'.
Actually, it seems entirely plausible that this is the case. Consider: AOL and UUNet are based in Northern VA, as are various branches of the Federal Government, including the FBI and the Pentagon. The CIA and NSA are just across the border in Maryland. Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County is a center of world satellite surveillance.
NoVA is a little silicon valley of the internet revolution, as much as we love to hate its most famous beneficiaries.
BTW, this is EXACTLY why the Va. and Md. legislatures are so hot and horny over this new li'l bill. They're courting the fastest-growing sectors of their economies, and Maryland is verrry anxious to steal some of Virginia's tech industry for itself. What we have here are two states falling all over themselves to court industry-- the comparison of this law to anti-union laws is apt indeed.
1)To draw a loose analogy. . . You know how your average Windows-running box goes a little loopy if left running continuously for a couple days? Glitches, system noise, the system freezes, etc. It strikes me that this behavior is something like sleep deprivation in humans. "Increased brain activity" may result, sure, but I would maintain that primarily system noise that sleep normally clears up.
2)Of course, it's possible that not sleeping lets you dig past your normal rational filters and plugs you into your subconscious in some way-- I know many of you out there have had marathon sleepless coding/writing/music sessions that produced unearthly good results.
3)I once stayed up for eleven days in college, napping every morning around sunrise. After the third day, I was a tool. After eleven days I was sick and incoherent. I ended up beating on a copier with its own paper tray because I couldn't figure out how to get it back in.
You can't tell me that sleep-deprivation is always a positive thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been loving Janis Ian's campaign against the recording industry-- in my opinion, her micro-distribution technique is one of a very few viable new options for artists to pursue, and it's a great thing besides. I just thing she's a little bit early in declaring the end of labels' useful lives.
Let's look for a minute at why labels exist. Not every artist needs a label, either now or fifteen years ago. Performers ONLY "need" a record deal when what they need to do takes more time, money, and expertise than they and their friends/agents/managers/assistants can give them. If you have a record that's doing well locally, you can sell out the Iota, the Mercury Lounge, the Corn Exchange, or Viper Room, and you are happy at that level, you probably don't need a record deal. Doing it Janis' way is perfect, and in fact waaay preferable to having a deal with a large label.
Where labels are handy--still-- is when you start to grow beyond your borders. Do you want national distribution? International distribution? Has your record done well on local radio, and you feel like it could have a nice run nationally? Are you spending more time putting together mail-order packages than you are writing songs? You could probably use a label to help you with these tasks. Labels are better at marketing on a large scale, better at getting traditional radio play (and NOT NECESSARILY POP RADIO), better at getting press, and better at setting up and managing distribution on a large scale-- not to mention labels can help you get your music licensed into films/tv-- many artists make most their money that way rather than through traditional album-sales channels. This is what they're FOR-- they have the bankroll and the contacts-- the shady business practices of certain elements notwithstanding.
It's a rough time for the music industry, and things are going to change rapidly. I just want to make sure that I speak my piece to my fellow slashdotters. Labels are not, and have never been, for everybody, and they probably shouldn't go away altogether (not least because I like what I do, and I work with great, GREAT music). I sincerely hope that more musicians are successful with Janis Ian-styled strategies, because it will have the very beneficial side effect of killing off those parts of the music industry who are least able to adapt.
The way it's organized actually helps me dig deeper more easily on stories that grab me... I can scan for bias across several sources much more readily that way. AND it's a clearinghouse!! Kind of like the Drudge Report, without the disadvantage of having Matt Drudge in charge.
Sorry... so easy... couldn't resist..*guffaw*
Of course, this is mostly perception, but it's perception via your resume and interview that will get you hired. We look at hundreds of similar candidates for every position, and anyone who can both demonstrate excellence in their profession/main field, and the well-roundedness that is a good indicator of creativity, are immediately at the top of the stack.
As long as you're not sacrificing any crucial courses to get this extra breadth of knowledge, by all means go for it. And drink lots of beer. You'll be a senior.
Next point. The costs are not vicious to record an album. $100,000 is not too bad. What kills you is the half a million it takes to work a record at rock radio (yes, $500,000-- some of which goes to listener giveaways, etc etc etc but most of which lines various pockets in the Clear Channel hierarchy and in the independent promotion worlds (independent promoters are the people who make the phone calls that you don't have time to, or can get people on the phone that you can't. They cost.)). If you want a hit, you pay. If you can't afford it, you don't, and try to get exposure through non-comm radio, touring, and word-of-mouth.
What also kills you is the $4 to $15 in advertising costs PER UNIT-- PER UNIT-- that it can take to get sufficient visibility to break a band. This includes print advertising, price & positioning at retailers, co-op advertising (where you split the cost with a retailer), etc. It costs $20-30,000 to get a full page ad in the New York Times sunday magazine. Rolling Stone STARTS at $50,000 for a little ad. Even the smaller magazines like CMJ, Mother Jones, Magnet, cost something, usually between $1000 and $10000 per ad.
It's these costs that add up. As mentioned, costs run away. I've seen an album come out, ship 30,000 units, and then 20,000 of those come back 90 days later as returns, all the while supported by $30 per unit-- PER UNIT--- in advertising. To a point, this is a cost labels are willing to absorb because eventually, on the 2nd or 3rd or 4th album, all these costs will amortize when an album breaks, but this is an example of costs getting horribly out of control. Which can happen easily, and does happen often. This is where labels lose money.
One final note. Artists retain labels to do the work they can't-- get marketing, provide tour support, front the money for recording, secure visas for international travel, set up press junkets, get radio play. The label uses their money to do this with. Therefore, it's only natural that the label make their money back before the artist gets their cut (with the exception of certain things like sync licenses which go straight to the artist- a good thing). It's why labels exist-- to expose themselves to risk in the expectation of furthering an artist's career. I am in it to make great music famous, and so are a heap of other people. Just because a label pays its "union dues" to the RIAA does not make them evil. It makes them just like an auto worker who is in the UAW or a teacher in the NEA. Buy independent, forget the majors, and remember, music is everything.
First, the most important hard number that matters: 13%. This is the percentage by which record sales (as measured by SoundScan) are down this year over the same time last year. That's a HUNK. Study after study has failed to demonstrate that downloading either is or is not responsible for this dip. It ain't the only thing, IMHO.
Among other things, this bust comes at the end of a decades-long boom period for the record industry, and like so many other businesses, labels have spent the last few years riding a bubble. Unsurprisingly, the bubble has burst. We all know that selling records is a low-margin business that usually loses money (SERIOUSLY. NOT KIDDING.). If a larger label makes a killing it is probably on a runaway hit that sells hundreds of thousands, or millions, not ten thousand or less like the vast majority of releases do. Most labels lose money most of the time, and the ones that steadily make money generally do so on a scale that doesn't even register on the radar of the major-label wonks.
So what do we have? We have: four major labels, owned by conglomerates who wish to use the Beatles/Dylan/Zeppelin/Stooges/Clash catalogs to cross-promote their products, and to finance other ventures. These conglomerates have little patience or interest in sinking money into new artists who will lose money for years at a time.
We have Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. selling discs for LESS than WHOLESALE, to the point where small record stores are buying their stock on the sly FROM THESE STORES instead of from the labels themselves.
We have an environment where, in the last year, TWO of the largest distributors have gone out of business (That's like WB Films and Paramount going tits-up), and TWO of the largest retailers-- Virgin and the Musicland family of stores.
We have radio AND touring in the hands of basically ONE company.
We have declining fan interest in the lastest dead horse trotted out by U2, Britney Spears, String, and the N'Backstreet Boys.
All this adds up, not to downloading killing the industry, but the industry starting to feel the effects of too many boardroom ultimatums and short-term decisions.
13% of sales have gone PFFT. It's a market correction, and a lamentable one, that the conglomerates that own the majors have precipitated themselves. Janis Ian is right-- the future is with people selling their own records out of the backs of cars, and this just might be the real start of that.
but when will this be ported to PC's?
Actually, it's the Harry Fox Agency, and they are not associated with the RIAA formally. They're good, and very, very powerful.
Research beyond the realm of what's currently possible is the only way to expand the realm of the possible, not to mention practical!
Everything I've heard here--especially about migrating data off of hard drives onto a redundant file server, and changing where applications look for/save data-- is good advice, in a normal setting.
Unfortunately, i have already been told that "moving people's data off their hard drives is bad." So much for the easy way out.
GAAAH.
My new strategy, since these are all Windows machines, is to put some of the responsibility in the hands of the user, but painlessly. I have written an MS-DOS script that will copy the full contents of everyone's "My Documents" to their area on the server, and then do the same for all database and email files. All they need to do is click a widget.
The best part of this is, if they don't do it after I've asked them to, it's not my ass. I have already made sure of that in writing (and I'm suuuuuure that won't come back to bite me in the butt).
After the user data is on the server, it should be no problem to cook it down to a tape drive periodically, filtering out crap like video clips and mp3's that are't work-related.
Anybody care to comment on this approach as a start?
Now, I work in the music industry, and I can assure you that a viable internet-based distribution model is pretty far off.
Two short reasons why:
1) Cost and Exposure. For all the carping that goes on about how labels pocket about $15 of a $17 sticker price on new cd's, it's not true. Once you take out mechanical royalties, publishing fees, licensing fees, distribution fees, songwriter percentages, producer percentages, miscellaneous finders fees, manufacturing costs (which typically run between $1.50 and $3 per unit depending on configuration), there just isn't that much money left over for labels to play with.
Don't get me wrong, a million-seller still rakes in the cash, but it's not like we're Saudi oil magnates.
Also, please remember that less than 10% of all releases sell more than 10,000 copies. When it costs tens of thousands of dollars to market an album, get it in stores, get a profile, that is usually a dismal failure. And now my point... labels, generally speaking, profit on one out of ten releases or so. That's a pretty poor margin.
Rather than drive labels to try to find more efficient ways to get music into people's hands (and money into artists' and our pockets), it makes them more conservative with their money, and ties them to traditional distribution channels.
2) Most/many labels are still run by boards of directors who don't know ANYTHING about music at all. They are interested in the health of the quarterly balance sheet, and are reluctant for their company to be the first one over the cliff into new, unproven business models. Also, remember, many of the major players in the music business- the rich guys, the guys with the cash to make digital distribution happen-- made their bones in the 1950's and 1960's. Even rich younger guys (...ermm...David Geffen??... Strauss Zelnick?...) learned at the feet of the codgers and adopted their ways.
Don't forget... if a label head tries some crazy new digital distribution scheme, and it goes horribly wrong, it's his or her butt on the line.
Dn't look for a really good digital distribution model from within the music industry any time soon.
And remember... all labels are not evil, and music is everything.
Then there was a bad patch. Pinkertons' was a strikebusting organization for decades around the turn of the century-- cracked heads during the 1895 Pullman Strike, during the Homestead strikes, and basically all the coal, steel and railroad strikes that plagued corporations at that time. Dale Carnegie and Andrew Mellon loved these guys as "security."
Looks like the old ways are the best ways.
just fyi.
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I agree that major-label record contracts are exploitation in the extreme. This is precisely why I don't care for napster-style piracy. Provided that I ever get a big-league contract (not likely), I will want to retain every scrap of rights and revenue I can. Music is a business, as poorly as that fits with the artistic nature it has at the core. I WANT those mechanical royalties, I want the checks rolling in.
Right now I can't afford to buy a bed, so it may just me feeling the keen itch of poverty that makes me react like this to massive downloading of music, but I really think it's just that I have an ego and some greed. If I did it, I want the credit and the ducats.
But that's just IMHO.
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Say you have a document that contains "questionable" material and is therefore blocked from your sight, due to a cromulent school administration or parent etc. Would it be possible to, through a mirrorsite or something, to e.g. babelfish the offending document and download it in translation, and then return it to its original language?
This seems like a way to thwart censorware and pr0n blockers. Is there something I'm missing or is this a possible home remedy to censorware?
As translation programs get better you're sure to have less lexicon errors and idiomatic strangeness, and you could get documents from english to german to english mit nur ein bischen of error. Purple monkey farmhouse.
Just wondering. Flame away.
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Although IANAL, I play one on TV (actually, I am an historian and have studied Constitutional law a fair amount and patent law a little), and I feel that the dialogue currently happening will be subceptible to public opinion if expressed maturely (no fl@m3rz) through forums like Slashdot, Salon, Slate, and direct mailings to Congress. Check out Slashdot's protocols, as always, before mailing Congress on an issue, though.
Hope this made sense. I'm all hopped up on fruit juice.
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The thrust of the article was not to indict record companies for overcharging for CD's (they do (duh)), or to showcase artists complaining that they're underpaid by the record companies, but to make this very important point--
To cast the Napster debate as a free-speech issue is misleading and beside the point, like making the right to shoot someone a second-amendment issue.
Artists (and unfortunately their labels) own what they produce-- that's why we have copyright laws. Napster is, as cool as it is (I love it), it is nevertheless pretty much illegal, and unless you are talking about Phish, or Britney, or some other artist who no longer has to live in a van and shower in bus stations while on tour, Napster screws musicians right in the ol' cornhole.
YES, it's true that the distro structure of the music industry needs to change.
YES it's true that record companies pocket most of the $18 sticker price for CD's.
YES it's true that it's much more fun to get music for free on a large scale. That's why tape trading is such big business for Dead- and Phish-heads, fans of Medeski Martin & Wood, Zappa, etc.
However, avoiding the traditional distro and payment structure entirely hurts artists who are not yet top-shelf successful.
Copyrighted music is a commodity just like anything else, and the producers deserve compensation. I'd think that lots of people on Slashdot, being overworked and underpaid IT folks, can definitely sympathize with this situation. The open-source metaphor only allies ot music int he public domain. It not yet apply to copyrighted musicans unless they want it to.
I apologize for coming off so strident, but I'm one of the very-lowest-echelon struggling-musician-types, and I'll be damned if I'm giving away all the rights to my music for free.
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Besides, EVEN IF it can be fairly maintained that digital music is a first amendment issue, don't forget that the actual rights to the music are owned by record companies, rendering it more a commerce and copyright issue if the courts so decide.( This wouldn't be the first time an anti-free-speech law went on the books in the US, either (1798, repeatedly in the 1890s and during the Red Scare)).
And that's another problem-- the fact that these new laws, CDA, UCITA, DMCA, span so many legal categories, makes them hard to grok fully, much less fight. Your average legislature hasn't the time to parse 80 pages of text when they have 800 bills on the docket and an expert testimony in front of them that says it's okay. Of course that testimony was written by. . .
2) Do you know where staffers from Capitol Hill go when they burn out?? Across the Potomac to the Northern VA/Maryland tech corridor, where they get jobs as "legislative consultants." That's fancy talk for lobbyists. The tech companies are not stupid, they're mining the very source for legislative talent. See # 1 above, and marvel at the collusion going down.
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Just look at the library filter flap, UCITA, Microsoft being brought up on antitrust laws (a relic from the days of railroad), internet pr0n, and internet taxation. These are all crucial areas of law that the internet has changed the rules on.
What's the solution? I dunno. Legislators have to give some serious time to the the implications of their actions before they totally fxxk up the First Amendment, property law, search-and-seizure, and all the rest of it. Maryland is currently reviewing UCITA in this way (Thank GOD), and hopefully other states (those outdated geography-based domain names) will follow suit.
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As it would stand if it becomes law, UCITA would not be usable to prosecute Non-Virginians. However, it is a bill regulating (hence "uniform") interstate trade. The very title means it's drafted with the intent of making it simple for other states to adopt, and, since sooooo many software companies are based here in Northern VA, the law would immediately apply to all transactions with those companies. Yeesh. Please correct if my interpretation of interstate commerce law is messy.
I have already emailed my Va state senator about UCITA, and am encouraging others to do the same. Personally, I don't see much hope for us opponents. HOWEVER, in the long run, we should be okay. Let's presume for a sec that a challenge to the law once passed makes it to the US Supreme Court. The supreme court, as it stands now, is a very cautious body. They are not inclined to use their decisions to set sweeping precendents. Even better, they are not inclined to accept sweeping legislation that is challenged as unconstitutional. Rememeber they struck down the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and the Communications Decency Act as well (same thing?? memory foggy). So, when UCITA inevitably comes before the supreme court, If the Court keeps to the same path, UCITA doesn't stand a chance. This Court has been tough on first-amendment infringements and is conservative in the best sense of the word. The fear is of course that the next president will get to appoint up to five new Justices, which could change everything. UCITA must be fought now if we are to be successful later in striking it down. (Clearly, I'm pretty sure it's gonna become law. The remarks earlier about lobbyists (AOfxxinL)are right on the mark.
I'm not as big a Katz hater as the seeming majority of /.ers, but this is senseless twaddle on a par with "Reefer Madness." Distinct categories? Please. /. as Tech Head Central? Umm. . . click [here] to buy foo.
Know what would be a fun game? JKatz is riding a wave now, due to his new book-- he's pundit du jour. Why not let's spread this article far and wide, get it into the digest pages of Time, Newsweek and Readers' Digest, and solicit further commentary from JK himself? It's harmless, it's innocuous, and it might be fun to watch this golden stream of misinformation become the current 'wisdom' about the 'infobahn'.
Actually, it seems entirely plausible that this is the case. Consider: AOL and UUNet are based in Northern VA, as are various branches of the Federal Government, including the FBI and the Pentagon. The CIA and NSA are just across the border in Maryland. Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County is a center of world satellite surveillance.
NoVA is a little silicon valley of the internet revolution, as much as we love to hate its most famous beneficiaries.
BTW, this is EXACTLY why the Va. and Md. legislatures are so hot and horny over this new li'l bill. They're courting the fastest-growing sectors of their economies, and Maryland is verrry anxious to steal some of Virginia's tech industry for itself. What we have here are two states falling all over themselves to court industry-- the comparison of this law to anti-union laws is apt indeed.
1)To draw a loose analogy. . . You know how your average Windows-running box goes a little loopy if left running continuously for a couple days? Glitches, system noise, the system freezes, etc. It strikes me that this behavior is something like sleep deprivation in humans. "Increased brain activity" may result, sure, but I would maintain that primarily system noise that sleep normally clears up.
2)Of course, it's possible that not sleeping lets you dig past your normal rational filters and plugs you into your subconscious in some way-- I know many of you out there have had marathon sleepless coding/writing/music sessions that produced unearthly good results.
3)I once stayed up for eleven days in college, napping every morning around sunrise. After the third day, I was a tool. After eleven days I was sick and incoherent. I ended up beating on a copier with its own paper tray because I couldn't figure out how to get it back in.
You can't tell me that sleep-deprivation is always a positive thing.