Real artists are unmotivated by profits and only real artists are worth listening too. First of all, I'd rather make my own music choices thank you! If the "real artists" want to give their music away I'm certainly not going to stop them, nor is the law. But the non-real artists are still real people, and they have a right not to have their work stolen from them.
if people want to make copies of music, movies, books and software and give them away, then fine and good, but when you start selling it then you've crossed the line
Do play or know any one who plays Quake3? Pretty nifty game. If the people who wrote it didn't think they were going to get paid do you think they would have? Sure, there are good games out there for free, but if you want to play Quake3 you've got to pay for it. If you don't nobody's going to make Quake4. What it comes down to is what we all learned in kindegarden. Treat others as you want to be treated. If everyone stole Quake3 then everyone would loose. So its not ok for you to steal it.
but when you start selling it then you've crossed the line
A question (not an arguement). What counts as selling? Does getting money from banner adds? (and an arguement) Just because you are not making money does not mean you are turning a profit. You are gaining the benifit of the service. If you think that service is worth the cost of an $18 CD buy it. If you don't then don't buy it. It is no ok to steal it.
Music is not a product it is a service. Music lissening today is being degraded by the mass repitions that this product mentality implies. This creats those nasty one-hit-wonders and forces artists to force their fans to lissen to them sing the same song over and ver and over and over on CD. This is a really dumb way to sell music.
I agree
The truth is we would be better off lissening to less pollished, but more varied music. Artists *almost* produce a LOT of this less polished music in the form of practicing, jaming, goofing arround with the mixes, and live preformances. I'm talking about a whole wave of "disposable music" that could be produced allongside the more serious studio mixes.
Now, why would an artistgo to the extra work to prouce al lthis disposable music? One reason is that there will be too much of it to pirate. If people want this stuff they will need to pay for it because the pirates can not keep up (and a pirate who can keep up is big enough to sue). An even better reason is: it keeps people comming back for more!
Now, you are correct that if artists released all their music (jams, etc) at once that would be too much for a pirate site to keep up with. But why would a pirate site want to do so? The pirate site only needs to keep the 3 or 4 (or for a really good group say 10) tracks that are actually worth listening too. I don't care how much you love a band, except for a few special CDs, *no one* loves every track on a CD.
A good way to sell all this stuff is to put some of it up for free download for a limited period of time
I'm sure you realize once its free once its free forever on pirate sites.
, but allow fan club members to download any past song at anytime.. and charge like $20 for a yerly fan club membership. This is money directly into the artists pocket just for giving their true fans access to all this stuff.
So one fan pays the $20 and the rest copy it from him. Not to mention the problems of server security, the book keeping of running the club. The record companies will be running this fan club, this doesn't break their evil grasp.
The musicians don't just need to sell mp3s. Just look at the internet commics like sluggy.com. They appear to do fine by (a) making people come back to their site every day and (b) pushing merchandise on their viewers. An internet musician could do the same thing on a weakly basis. They could sell things like CDs, hats, shirts, etc. Actually, they could make a killing by selling lots of shorter production run CDs (say let people vote on the best of the disposable music) or mp3 CDs of a large amount of the disposable music.
Pete (author of sluggy freelance (worship the comic)) is a very unique individual. He's been workin' on that thing for two and a half years and is currently barely making a profit. And this is (acording to Web 100 (??? a listing of the most popular 100 foo. Sluggy's been number one more than any other comic on their list (User Friendly is the runner up))) Making a comic that appears daily is also a bit different from having new music on daily (as you sugest). The problem is that if piracy grows (which you've stated you want it to do) then there will be no need to buy any music made publicly avalible. It will all be on line for the taking.
We have all seen how crazy people get about some bands. I don't think there is any question the bands would make a killing off this shit. Especially, if they get things printed themselves.
You previously argued against the "one hit wonders" that the music industry creates but now you are infavor of hype bands. You can't have it both ways. The industry creates mass infatuation with artists.
The catch to all of this is you need to give away enough music to get people interested. There are all kinds of oppertunities for people to charge bands to upload the bands music to large numbers of pirate mp3s site as promotion.
Ok, I'm confused. A pirate site takes music with out asking. A site that is taking money from artists for their music is lawful (and a very natural progression of the free sites we have now). I am infavor of this. What I am against is third parties stealing from the artists and placing music on web sites with out the artist's permission.
There is one last opertunity for a band to make money by giving away music. Advertising! I would not be surprised to find equipment manufacturs giving good bands equipment just to say "mixed on a Sony BlaBla" at the end of the promotional songs.
If you really think abot the buisness oppertunities you will se that there is plenty of room for an internet savey artist to do MUCH better then an industry artist.
Consider the success of internet companies that have tried to duplicate pre-existing services. Even if they do it for free and use Adds for revenue, they generally are not very successful. I'm talking about the difference between Pete Abrams (Sluggy) and Scott Adams (Dilbert). Scott is making a heck of a lot more money from his profession, I can assure you. Main reason, because people buy dilbert books, its the only way to get a comilation. Sluggy is avalible online, there is no need to buy Pete's books.
The only real problem with the internet is that the small artists will need to know how to build a web site since web work could be very expencive. Especially, for someone who has no idea if they will make it or not. Conversly, an artist who is web savey could make themselves a big name with essentially no outlay of capitol.. just a lot of time.
see above.
note: I distinguish between promotional songs which are intended to float arround the internet and get people to visit the artists site and regular songs which are intended to be downloaded from the artists site.
With piracy there is no difference. In your previous post you talked about the community needing to work harder, "more piracy." If that is really what you want then there is no difference between a promotional song and a regular song. The artist's wishes are ignored.
While beating down big industry (in the persona of the music industry) is a good thing, keep in mind that there are artists who are hurt by piracy. Ignoring the short term losses (which as you say are negligable) in the long term if everyone is able to get all music for free, what is the incentive to make music. Sure, some people are going to keep doing it because they love it, but how many bands started in someones garage because people wanted to be rich and famous. Lets adress both those points.
Rich -- If an artist makes an MP3 and gives it away, or it is pirated, they loose profits from however many CDs that would have been sold. If everyone has internet access and pirated music is easy to get to (because funadmentally there is no way the government can really crack down) then guess what. Nobody buys CDs. Artists go hungry. Good, I supose, for all those starving artists, but bad in general.
Famous -- With out money who will pay for radio stations (the MP3 station brought up in another post would involve a lot of bandwidth and capital)? Or basically any coherent form of distribution. The internet money maker, adds, doesn't work as companies paying for addes leave paper trails and the government will kill any company it finds suporting piracy. So distribution becomes fractured. Think about looking up Quake at Yahoo. Lots of sites huh? Which one is best. Well, with some trial and error you wade through the crappy ones (90%) and find a decent one or two. Now imagine that in a month the government forces half the sites to go into hiding or change there addresses (because Quake is outlawed? you get my analogy). Becoming famous not a meaningful term as it relies on what site you are able to put your stuff on and how long it stays up etc. A lot of randomness in the proccess of achieving renown. Hey, that's a lot like it is now!
Ok, I'm finishing up, I just want to address what good can be done with MP3s. As the last post said, they are a great way for new artists to get there stuff out there. By releasing some of their tracks on to public boards volentarily they give people a chance to try them and then buy their music from the artist, not the music company. If you want to stick it to The Man, listen to indie music, don't pirate, that hurts everybody.
"Now all they have to do is figure out how patterns of pulsing neurons form thoughts, ideas and actions." This is, unfortunately, a rather dificult problem though. The macro working of the brain is understood pretty well. The micro working is only understood on a theoretical level. And the theory is that each brain develops fairly randomly (via a baesian network (a concept that I can't explain very well and am probably spelling wrong)).
I don't understand why the gaming industry (tm) doesn't focus on the female market more. Recently the comics industry (for comparison) has been working pretty hard to find female writers and write for women (as an example, check out Promethia (by Alan Moore, don't know who publishes)). The logic is simple, women make up 50% of our potential market share. They are currently 10% (or whatever). We could sell so many more comics! I don't see a similar trend in the gaming industry. Laura Croft (and the many other spin off FPS's with female protaganists (Dino Crisis for instance)) are pretty clearly made for the adolecent male set, despite their *potential* for being geared towards woman (the improbible anatomy kind of eliminates most feminist mesages). In short, I don't see the trend in gaming that I do in comics. Admitedly Danger Girl (and other... adolecent comics) are still being published, but I feel like comics are making an effort. And for economic reasons! Why not computer games?
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if people want to make copies of music, movies, books and software and give them away, then fine and good, but when you start selling it then you've crossed the line
Do play or know any one who plays Quake3? Pretty nifty game. If the people who wrote it didn't think they were going to get paid do you think they would have? Sure, there are good games out there for free, but if you want to play Quake3 you've got to pay for it. If you don't nobody's going to make Quake4. What it comes down to is what we all learned in kindegarden. Treat others as you want to be treated. If everyone stole Quake3 then everyone would loose. So its not ok for you to steal it.
but when you start selling it then you've crossed the line
A question (not an arguement). What counts as selling? Does getting money from banner adds? (and an arguement) Just because you are not making money does not mean you are turning a profit. You are gaining the benifit of the service. If you think that service is worth the cost of an $18 CD buy it. If you don't then don't buy it. It is no ok to steal it.
I agree
The truth is we would be better off lissening to less pollished, but more varied music. Artists *almost* produce a LOT of this less polished music in the form of practicing, jaming, goofing arround with the mixes, and live preformances. I'm talking about a whole wave of "disposable music" that could be produced allongside the more serious studio mixes.
Now, why would an artistgo to the extra work to prouce al lthis disposable music? One reason is that there will be too much of it to pirate. If people want this stuff they will need to pay for it because the pirates can not keep up (and a pirate who can keep up is big enough to sue). An even better reason is: it keeps people comming back for more!
Now, you are correct that if artists released all their music (jams, etc) at once that would be too much for a pirate site to keep up with. But why would a pirate site want to do so? The pirate site only needs to keep the 3 or 4 (or for a really good group say 10) tracks that are actually worth listening too. I don't care how much you love a band, except for a few special CDs, *no one* loves every track on a CD.
A good way to sell all this stuff is to put some of it up for free download for a limited period of time
I'm sure you realize once its free once its free forever on pirate sites.
, but allow fan club members to download any past song at anytime.. and charge like $20 for a yerly fan club membership. This is money directly into the artists pocket just for giving their true fans access to all this stuff.
So one fan pays the $20 and the rest copy it from him. Not to mention the problems of server security, the book keeping of running the club. The record companies will be running this fan club, this doesn't break their evil grasp.
The musicians don't just need to sell mp3s. Just look at the internet commics like sluggy.com. They appear to do fine by (a) making people come back to their site every day and (b) pushing merchandise on their viewers. An internet musician could do the same thing on a weakly basis. They could sell things like CDs, hats, shirts, etc. Actually, they could make a killing by selling lots of shorter production run CDs (say let people vote on the best of the disposable music) or mp3 CDs of a large amount of the disposable music.
Pete (author of sluggy freelance (worship the comic)) is a very unique individual. He's been workin' on that thing for two and a half years and is currently barely making a profit. And this is (acording to Web 100 (??? a listing of the most popular 100 foo. Sluggy's been number one more than any other comic on their list (User Friendly is the runner up))) Making a comic that appears daily is also a bit different from having new music on daily (as you sugest). The problem is that if piracy grows (which you've stated you want it to do) then there will be no need to buy any music made publicly avalible. It will all be on line for the taking.
We have all seen how crazy people get about some bands. I don't think there is any question the bands would make a killing off this shit. Especially, if they get things printed themselves.
You previously argued against the "one hit wonders" that the music industry creates but now you are infavor of hype bands. You can't have it both ways. The industry creates mass infatuation with artists.
The catch to all of this is you need to give away enough music to get people interested. There are all kinds of oppertunities for people to charge bands to upload the bands music to large numbers of pirate mp3s site as promotion.
Ok, I'm confused. A pirate site takes music with out asking. A site that is taking money from artists for their music is lawful (and a very natural progression of the free sites we have now). I am infavor of this. What I am against is third parties stealing from the artists and placing music on web sites with out the artist's permission.
There is one last opertunity for a band to make money by giving away music. Advertising! I would not be surprised to find equipment manufacturs giving good bands equipment just to say "mixed on a Sony BlaBla" at the end of the promotional songs.
If you really think abot the buisness oppertunities you will se that there is plenty of room for an internet savey artist to do MUCH better then an industry artist.
Consider the success of internet companies that have tried to duplicate pre-existing services. Even if they do it for free and use Adds for revenue, they generally are not very successful. I'm talking about the difference between Pete Abrams (Sluggy) and Scott Adams (Dilbert). Scott is making a heck of a lot more money from his profession, I can assure you. Main reason, because people buy dilbert books, its the only way to get a comilation. Sluggy is avalible online, there is no need to buy Pete's books.
The only real problem with the internet is that the small artists will need to know how to build a web site since web work could be very expencive. Especially, for someone who has no idea if they will make it or not. Conversly, an artist who is web savey could make themselves a big name with essentially no outlay of capitol.. just a lot of time.
see above.
note: I distinguish between promotional songs which are intended to float arround the internet and get people to visit the artists site and regular songs which are intended to be downloaded from the artists site.
With piracy there is no difference. In your previous post you talked about the community needing to work harder, "more piracy." If that is really what you want then there is no difference between a promotional song and a regular song. The artist's wishes are ignored.
Rich -- If an artist makes an MP3 and gives it away, or it is pirated, they loose profits from however many CDs that would have been sold. If everyone has internet access and pirated music is easy to get to (because funadmentally there is no way the government can really crack down) then guess what. Nobody buys CDs. Artists go hungry. Good, I supose, for all those starving artists, but bad in general.
Famous -- With out money who will pay for radio stations (the MP3 station brought up in another post would involve a lot of bandwidth and capital)? Or basically any coherent form of distribution. The internet money maker, adds, doesn't work as companies paying for addes leave paper trails and the government will kill any company it finds suporting piracy. So distribution becomes fractured. Think about looking up Quake at Yahoo. Lots of sites huh? Which one is best. Well, with some trial and error you wade through the crappy ones (90%) and find a decent one or two. Now imagine that in a month the government forces half the sites to go into hiding or change there addresses (because Quake is outlawed? you get my analogy). Becoming famous not a meaningful term as it relies on what site you are able to put your stuff on and how long it stays up etc. A lot of randomness in the proccess of achieving renown. Hey, that's a lot like it is now!
Ok, I'm finishing up, I just want to address what good can be done with MP3s. As the last post said, they are a great way for new artists to get there stuff out there. By releasing some of their tracks on to public boards volentarily they give people a chance to try them and then buy their music from the artist, not the music company. If you want to stick it to The Man, listen to indie music, don't pirate, that hurts everybody.
"Now all they have to do is figure out how patterns of pulsing neurons form thoughts, ideas and actions." This is, unfortunately, a rather dificult problem though. The macro working of the brain is understood pretty well. The micro working is only understood on a theoretical level. And the theory is that each brain develops fairly randomly (via a baesian network (a concept that I can't explain very well and am probably spelling wrong)).
I don't understand why the gaming industry (tm) doesn't focus on the female market more. Recently the comics industry (for comparison) has been working pretty hard to find female writers and write for women (as an example, check out Promethia (by Alan Moore, don't know who publishes)). The logic is simple, women make up 50% of our potential market share. They are currently 10% (or whatever). We could sell so many more comics! I don't see a similar trend in the gaming industry. Laura Croft (and the many other spin off FPS's with female protaganists (Dino Crisis for instance)) are pretty clearly made for the adolecent male set, despite their *potential* for being geared towards woman (the improbible anatomy kind of eliminates most feminist mesages). In short, I don't see the trend in gaming that I do in comics. Admitedly Danger Girl (and other... adolecent comics) are still being published, but I feel like comics are making an effort. And for economic reasons! Why not computer games?