I saw this argument made in a gathering of professional sound engineers and while (they're on the payroll) Napster got well trashed, the justification I was given for the cartel pricing was _quite_ unexpected.
It seems that actual manufacturing costs are almost meaningless, because it is _promotion_ that costs all the money.
This is a little startling, but bears up to examination- even in the 80s, independent promotion was something like 60% of the labels' expenditures. It might be more well known as payola- the more things change the more they stay the same. If I remember correctly, CBS (the biggest label in the business at the time) attempted to break the back of the independent promotion network using Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' as a weapon: Floyd was touring and were launching the tour in California, and had a killer single, "Another Brick In The Wall pt. 2". CBS tried to get radio play on top 40 stations in LA for the track without paying off the independent promoters- and were frozen out completely, no airplay at ALL for Floyd. Eventually the band was made aware of what was happening and asked why they weren't getting radio play, and on being told, kicked up a stink and told the label, "So pay them already!" CBS did, and within 6 hours Floyd was being played on the radio...
This is not to justify the state of affairs- the independent promoters were linked with organised crime and if you want a _real_ cartel, try organised crime- but it is important information on where the money _really_ goes. I believe it is quite true that not all that money goes to RIAA execs' pockets. They have to pay off a staggering number of sleazy operators- in fact, even the rack jobbers have been consolidating into a power structure so now the labels have to spend money selling their CDs into stores like Wal-Mart! They entertain the reps from rack jobbers, have bands give command performances for them, and all this also costs money. It's revenge of the middleman, taken to the most incomprehensible extreme.
I think the RIAA are probably doomed _because_ so many middlemen (promoters, radio, rack jobbers) can and will take a big chunk out of them as the brick and mortar scene gradually, slowly fades... it's easy to get all haughty about fat RIAA execs slurping drinks in Ibiza but the reality seems to be that they're struggling to hang onto _moderately_ wealthy status- they're pulled too many different directions and have to pay off way too many middlemen, who cannot be made to go away.
Average would be averaging out the money, and would be some small figure which I won't try to calculate.
Median is a lot simpler: that would be the amount of money made by the median artist, 'halfway successful', and the money earned by Metallica doesn't enter into it at all. It's _very_ simple.
Median = $0
This is widely known and accepted in the industry, and the reason it's $0 is essentially because of recoupment. If you included advances (which are effectively a _loan_ and not a gift), then the median would probably be on the order of $10,000 (not less than $1000 or more than $100,000). Per month? Year? No- over the artist's entire career. And again this is a loan, not a gift, so I hesitate even to mention it.
So, the amount of that 14 billion that goes to the median artist is $0 and approval on a single $10,000 loan to cut an album, on terms that are substantially worse than a bank would extend. Is that what you wanted to know?
mp3.com's artist agreement is _lousy_ and their charts are worthless and filled with cynical manipulations. They were _once_ a lot better than that.
On the other hand, ampcast.com is in the final stages of going live with a CD program that features CDs that you can buy burned from CD audio rather than burned from 128K mp3s like mp3.com. Yes, the mp3.com DAM CDs are just what you'd get if you burned them yourself from mp3 downloads, only with a better case. Ampcast's taking steps to allow artists to have an even _more_ professional presentation, including artistic control of the _whole_ CD package including tray insert and CD media print, and will be able to burn CDs to order that are clones of professionally done Red Book Audio CD masters- meaning that if you get an Ampcast CD it will be _equivalent_ to the major label product as uncompressed audio, not simply a CD burn of mp3 files.
Mind you, for inexperienced artists without a lot of resources, they'll still allow minimal album graphics and CDs burned from mp3s, just like mp3.com. But for the heavy hitters out there in the indie world, ampcast is in the final stages of giving them _unprecedented_ ability to put out a fantastic, professional quality product.
Fine- YOU write the Mac versions, and while you're at it, see to it that the encoder has:
ability to set low and high cutoff points
ability to set slope of said rolloffs
ability to ditch or moderate the psy model or replace it with ATH suppression
ability to set that ATH point DYNAMICALLY
I'm not going to get _into_ mass ability to play the resulting file- THAT can be fixed in the long haul! I'm saying that AS A MUSICIAN I _need_ more than just consumergrade lossy audio encoding. Each of my songs reacts differently to encoding, I know what I'm trying to get out of each, and treat it as a mastering situation. How? I use LAME and specify custom settings in detail to lock in a consistent, believable soundstage despite the coarsening of texture from the lossy compression. What if LAME didn't offer those controls? The version I use didn't! It's free software, I was able to _add_ them working from a version that compiled without issues and a drag-and-drop helper app (DropMP3)!
Let's not even get into the way there is _still_ no Mac 'hacks' downloadable. How many months, years has it been? There was some sort of quick-and-dirty hack written at MacHack- where is it? Let's see that. Let's see MPW tools, _anything_, because right now your attitude is very much like saying 'no soup for YOU!'. It's morally indefensible to not get behind Vorbis, but it's not _your_ problem to make that possible, is it?
I am increasingly of the opinion that backing Vorbis is a detour, and what people should _really_ be doing is mounting legal challenges against Thomson's obscene over-reaching regarding the mp3 format. It's not especially relevant that mp3 is established- that could change. What's relevant is that Vorbis is playing a defensive game, and I'm seeing multiple reports that the avoiding of obvious, optimal algorithms that Thomson considers 'theirs' has led to Vorbis sounding less good- which does _not_ please me, way to compete guys:P Given that Vorbis will do this in efforts to not challenge the Thomson claims of intellectual property, just what are you gonna do when Thomson, unopposed, proceeds to make MORE CLAIMS and further eat away at the permissible techniques for encoding audio?
There are people out there who are preferring to go ahead _assuming_ the Thomson claims are unenforceable, ridiculous and obscene, who are simply proceeding to use mp3 _without_ paying tribute, and I don't mean consumers, either. I'm increasingly of the opinion that we're better off doing that and getting ready to directly contest Thomson's right to charge content producers and distributors for USE of the format. Ogg Vorbis legitimises what they are doing by playing keep-away with them and conceding every claim to property they make. I'm not okay with conceding these claims they make.
Full time artists in the current system have, on the average, maybe two years worth of career. Two years of full-time versus a life-time of 'hobby time' isn't as big a difference as you might think. Mind you, this could also be fixed by getting the labels to respect artists more (in theory...) but I thought it was a relevant point. It's possible that allowing artists to grow at their own pace and contribute art over their _whole_ lifetimes is a better way...
It doesn't stop there. Art can easily lead to craft- and craft is something people can and will pay for, depending on how good it is.
I make music- but I've also had a lifelong fascination with audio gear, and that is craft. When I compose music part of it is art and part is craft... I'm expecting to begin a massive remixing of all my work soon, because again the _craft_ level of my work will take a quantum leap.
Specifically, I got into an argument with other audio techies. I'd been doing very high-end mixing through custom gear to straight 16-bit sampling, and getting very good results, too, but I was convinced through this argument that sampling at a higher resolution and dithering down to 16 bit could well deliver far superior results. And so I am getting a soundcard that has S/PDIF inputs, and will be recording through the outboard A/D converter in my Lexicon MPX-100 which can be used as a dedicated converter. In addition, I'm picking out high end audio caps to upgrade the Lexi (which is already heavily modded) seeing as it's going to be _the_ top performance A/D converter I've got.
Now, all that is craft- there's art in the choices, but mostly it's craft. And along with that, I'm paying money to Alesis, to Lexicon, to Midiman for their CO2 converter, to some vendor for whichever cap I settle on- commerce happens, driven by my needs. As a result of this, I end up with gear that can drastically outperform what most people have- and can sell that ability as a service to many artists who want to get a competitive sound with the recordings they've made.
That's how art can become craft can become income- it's not hypothetical, I'm doing exactly this, and will be able to offer mastering services in the near future, which will also extend to mastering mp3s of the music as well and having those, too, sound better than what you get off preset consumer encoders.
Yet in a sense it's all still art- because I'd be doing it anyhow, even if it wasn't laying the foundation for good honest work. Maybe that's the key- art is wonderful, important, but as you increasingly put good honest work into it, it increasingly becomes capable of bringing a return. How much? That depends on who you are and exactly what you're expecting to get a return from. I put work into _mastering_ mp3s, but it would be insane to say that distributing them was good honest work, because I just sit there and my ISP, or besonic, or ampcast, or Napster does all the work.
I must say that I respect the viewpoint that "art is not an endeavor in which one should expect to 'earn a living'". I think the operative word there is 'expect' and the second most important is 'living'. I personally live on about $600 a month. I know many people who would consider that absolutely intolerable, impossible. But for me a 'living' is not a very complicated thing. As for expectations- I expect what I'm doing to translate into a 'living' in the long run, but not because of any particular event or thing- because of my _mode_ of work, of continuing to put constant, tireless work into what I do. The purely-musician version of what I do would translate to gigging 360 days a year, no vacations, no weekends off. James Brown did basically that, and he did quite well for himself. I don't think anyone who simply sang like James Brown and wouldn't WORK like James Brown could expect the same...
where was the RIAA when I was copying songs off the radio when I was 8 years old?
Passing legislation that gave them a cut of every blank tape sold, in exchange for which _you_ theoretically got permission to make copies of stuff for your own use.
It's called the Audio Home Recording Act. I'm not surprised you're not familiar with it, because it took only a minor change in recording media for them to completely forget _their_ part of the bargain and start acting like you have no right to copy anything.
Of course, they still get paid a cut of every blank tape and 'audio' CDR!:P I think next they should lobby for getting 1% of the price of every _car_, because people listen to pirated music while driving down the street.
For anyone that does, please use any or all of my tracks at besonic.com/chrisj for your purposes- or get the tracks off Napster, I don't care.
I'm currently in arguments^H^H^H^H^Hnegotiations;) with Ampcast, to get the ability to produce CDs through their soon-coming CD burning service using my own usage restriction, which is 'all commercial rights reserved, noncommercial copying OKAY'. If you got into legal trouble (as you'd like to do- sounds like a good experiment) I can't speak for other artists but I would happily send you _written_ permission to host my stuff- in fact I would make helping you a priority, and would rush you whatever you needed for the court case, anything that I could do. If logistics permitted I'd even participate as a witness or something.
If anybody is in this situation and needs my help let me know, I consider it supremely important...
Oy, you couldn't be more wrong. None of those people hold copyright. The people he named are _synthetic_ popstars: hell, man, even the grunge guys had to sign over their copyright to the record labels to get a deal!! Do you seriously think that manufactured popstars do better than that? I would literally bet every penny I have that they are not the copyright holders: there is just no way, not a _chance_, not one of them.
The 'work for hire' thing is related but different. The _popstar's_ performance is routinely considered work for hire by the label, whenever they can get away with it. Now, if it's not, that doesn't mean the popstar ends up holding copyright, they have to sign that away. BUT, if they simply sign it away, the term expires in something like 40 years, so the popstar's _grandchildren_ might benefit from earnings from the hit record when, many years from now, the copyright returns to the artist and the artist's estate. (We'll not get into whether _they_ are entitled to profit from it- this time!) However, if it was 'work for hire', the term NEVER ends, and the artist will NEVER, EVER, EVER get their material back. Not in 40 years, not in 400, not in 40,000,000.
The record labels managed to get a rider on some bill that _changed_ the status of many recordings _to_ work for hire, basically taking a large number of existing works and changing the rules under them to give the record industry permanent ownership rather than 40-year-ownership, but major label artists were rightly _so_ upset that they actually organised, lobbied, and got the new legislation overturned by publicising just how bad the record labels were in doing this, and exactly what they were doing. So currently the only artists who will NEVER own their songs are, well, pretty much every new act being offered a contract _today_, including every one in which you don't need the artist's consent to revise the contract.
This very likely includes Britney and the others, so odds are they not only don't own copyright, but they can't and will _never_ own it. However, I can only be _absolutely_ certain that they don't own it _now_. It is just possible that one of the ones mentioned is not work for hire, in which case maybe in 40 years they or their heirs _might_ own copyright to their material.
Did you know that nearly all of the musicians you hear on the radio are technically hired laborers?
That's a damn good point actually- we don't want Red Book Audio CD to be 'deprecated'. But the thing is, this isn't entirely down to the music industry. Anyone can burn Red Book on a CDR without too much trouble- so boycotting the majors (as I am doing- sorry, can't accept the idea of _paying_ them to do what they're doing) will not necessarily diminish the amount of CD Audio out there, it'll just shift the balance. (Also, burn-to-order mp3 hosting services have long sold Audio CDs and the latest development is Ampcast.com planning to sell Audio CDs duped from _red_ _book_ masters- not compressed masters. They'll be keeping a lot of artist-sent CDRs on file.)
The fact is, the music industry does not supply Audio CD technology- just the content. If you want Audio CD to remain- buy a CD _player_. Send Sony, Hitachi or whoever the message, and forget the RIAA: they are NOT the ones supplying the hardware. Just insist on Audio CD support in everything, and if something comes around that won't play the CDs, don't buy it...
Already being done. www.ampcast.com. Contract is as fair or fairer as mp3.com's _used_ to be, Jim the guy behind it is accessible and talks to musicians and _listens_, and they're gearing up to begin burn-to-order from _uncompressed_ Red Book audio CDs you supply, sometime in March. I am currently talking with Jim about getting a way to use _my_ usage restriction statement instead of his default one- he's automatically gone with a 'no duplication' one, and I need my CDs to say 'all commercial rights reserved- noncommercial copying OKAY'. I believe Jim will be able to find a way to keep me happy even on that issue. I've thrown every bit of technical expertise I can behind him to make his project more of a success, and am even hyping him on slashdot!;)
That said- now GO READ THE STUFF the nice fellow posted for you about why the record industry must die! He's probably referring to the famous rant by the great Steve Albini. Read it! Just because people are doing something positive does not excuse you from educating yourself about how totally unacceptable the music business is and how little alternative there seems to be. I hope guys like Jim at Ampcast can make an alternative, but if he gets his kneecaps broken for it I'd hope some people were paying attention to the fact that the traditional music business is a bunch of _criminals_, and that defying them is a good way to get blacklisted, locked out of pressing plants like Negativland, or even getting beat up. Did you really think it was like the computer industry? The music business has a dark, dark past. Even superstars like Bob Marley had record company thugs threatening DJs to get their records played. The record industry DOES need to be destroyed, stopped, replaced. Merely supplanting it is not enough.
Yes, how about musicians having to continue to play and compose and sequence and gig and PRACTICE their craft, in order to keep people interested enough in what they do that the consumers send away for the latest CD, or pay to attend a concert, rather than sitting around waiting for someone to put up mp3s of it and then having to burn them to a CD sans art and liner notes and everything?
How about musicians having to _create_ and _produce_ and _work_ so that they can develop enough of a reputation that people will say 'hey, that guy's pretty good at music!' and opportunities will arise such as playing on someone else's session, mixing somebody's home-recorded album, or gigging at a private party of rich dotcommers?
I know at least two people who've gone and checked out my music when I mentioned it on Slashdot and took the trouble to write to me and say 'hey, that's pretty good!'. You give me ONE REASON why I should deserve that if I chose to just sit back and not do anything. My next recordings will _blow_ _people's_ _minds_ because I _work_ on the craft. I don't ever anticipate not working on it.
Besides which, the approach of 'internet-based penny-earning' for musicians (as opposed to label-based being-promised-millions) will work for a _lifetime_. It'll only get better as you continue to work and practice your art and craft. By contrast, the system you're defending has an average career length of _two_ _years_! It's completely screwed. Anything would be an improvement.
No they don't. _All_ the recording studio costs are recoupable and come out of the artist's pocket- an advance is a loan not a gift. In addition, a good 50% of the costs of marketing and distribution ALSO come out of the artist's side through a series of customary charges against royalties, which I actually spelled out item by item in another thread, resulting in a '16%' (ya right!) royalty actually being 16% of 90% of 65% of 85% of 80% of 75% of net sales. (I'm not making that up, wish I were). That's about 4.7% _real_ royalty which must completely recoup recording costs and tour costs before the artist sees a f**king penny.
I suggest that you post, "whoops, I was talking out my butt about record companies taking on the burden of studios/advertising/distribution" unless you prefer to argue that artists should never be paid anything in the first place. The whole burden lands on the artists, which is why platinum sellers are found declaring bankruptcy- they slip up and act like they're being paid 16% of net, without realising that they are paying the entire burden of studios and about half of distribution.
My God! That's _hundreds_ of times what major label artists make! If you haven't really done your homework you wouldn't _believe_ how many deductions there are, and how twisted the reckoning is.
How about this as an alternate proposal? An alternative minimum royalty of ONE PERCENT...
of gross sales, not net
going directly to the artist, no recouping allowed
the full amount, not 75% on CDs (yes, artists get less of a royalty on CDs than they do on analog tapes)
on actual retail price, not 130% uplift of wholesale (call that 80% off retail) of 75% (yes, this further eats away artist royalties and is a normal procedure)
on all records sold, not 85% omitting 'free goods' (a contractual fiction) of 80% of 75%
without withholding reserves for returned unsold records, rather than withholding a reserve of 35%, otherwise known as 65% of 85% of 80% of 75%
not 90% of net, an old charge still being taken out of royalties in addition to all the others, which dates from when records were made of _shellac_ and 10% broke in shipping, or (gasp...) 90% of 65% of 85% of 80% of 75%.
Let's not even get into cross-collateralization, also known as 'your earnings have to recoup the expenses of _all_ _your_ _records_ before you see a f**king penny'... I bet a lot of you think I am making all this up. I wish I were. Sounds crazy, doesn't it? The numbers were not made up- they're straight out of Donald S. Passman's book, "All You Need To Know About The Music Business". Passman is a music business _lawyer_ and the back sleeve has praise and recommendations from Mo Ostin, Randy Newman, Michael Eisner, David Geffen, Don Henley, Quincy Jones and Tom Waits... after that royalty mess he comments on how no label will give up the number of percentages taken away because artists like to royalty-drop- "oh I'm getting a 16% royalty!" (16% of 90% of 65% of 85% of 80% of 75%- do the math, I get _really 4.7736%, which the artist will never see unless they recoup all recording and tour costs _first_ _out_ of that four point seven percent)
The vast majority of _signed_ _major_ _label_ artists would be making lots more money on 1% of gross. What they get is more like 0% unless they not only recoup but land a '16%!!' royalty, in which case they're really getting 4%. Interesting, no?
No, for 99.999% of the people we are talking about, recorded music belongs to these record companies. NOT the artists. Read a record label artist's contract sometime (wear hip boots). Recorded music does not belong to the artists. The cases where it does are pretty much exclusively the indie musicians who stand to gain from an uncontrolled distribution media, and you are dreaming if you think the record labels' copyrights are anything but a legal phantasm INVENTED BY THE GOVERNMENT. It is a completely artificial concept controlled by a cartel more dominant than Microsoft, that fights _much_ dirtier, and there is every reason to re-evaluate it.
I don't think compulsory licensing is the answer either: I think it will be used to pay off the record companies only, and they don't need more money and more unavoidable consumer taxes going directly to them. However, I gotta give the pols credit for at least trying! At least it would break the back of the CD cartel, which is maintaining prices at as much as three times the actual value of the product by ruthlessly controlling the entire chain of distribution from top to bottom, and will literally tell pressing plants not to do business with potential competition (for instance, Negativland).
So compulsory licensing might not do _me_ as a musician any good, but it might at least do consumers some good.
Oh goody. So in the beginning they had to print and press vinyl records and transport them around the country, which was costly. So then they came up with CDs and charged even more while their costs were halved. And now you want them to be given as much money as they're getting from their CD cartel, in exchange for manufacturing NOTHING?
As an artist and someone who works with community radio (just _today_ I went out to help the local community station adjust their peak-to-peak output levels), I wish Bill Joy would shut up about things he does not know about!
He does software, and doesn't see free software as a problem. What with his argument you'd expect him to want to stop free software on the grounds that it hurts the ecosystem! But software, the guy's familiar with, so he doesn't step in it on that issue.
He tells Tim O'Reilly that books are a problem, whereupon Tim (who's done great things with making O'Reilly books _competitive_ with free information by making them easy to handle, attractive, lie open to the proper page etc) rightly responds, "No, I don't think that's a problem and _I_ am the publisher".
And he tells the _world_ that free music is a problem, and who is there to say, "No, I am a musician and I don't think that is a problem"? Who, that has a CLUE about how the industry freaking works and where artists can reasonably expect to earn money! Does he _want_ to permanently establish a situation where consumer money is paid directly to record industry suits? Is he that naive and uninformed that he feels they are basically good people and their statements should be taken at face value? BAD mistake. Someone ask him if he trusts the Mafia too- the links are well, well established.
Then to top it off he uses radio as the example of happy fine control and regulation! Reality check- the FCC is _in_ _the_ _pocket_ of the media industry by now. You don't have choice, you don't have a market, you have Big Media locking out everyone else, and the only response to this has been the _thriving_ community radio movement, delivering programming that actually relates to the needs and interests of the community. You may be more familiar with it as 'pirate radio'... God knows what Bill thinks of that. Maybe he wants all the pirate radio people thrown in jail too, or at least to smash up their transmitters and 'clean up the airwaves' for the big corporate boys.
God, does this guy make me angry at times. The government people at least have this merit- they know what criminals act like, because half of them are corrupt or on the take themselves. Bill Joy behaves like he _believes_ what he's saying, and this is arguably worse. Scoundrels can be bribed or bought, but Bill Joy's liable to try and ruin my own personal career prospects just for my own good, liable to turn complete control of media over to the same _scumbags_ who run it today, even though the 'ecosystem' is TRYING TO REJECT THAT POISON. The 'ecosystem' is trying to _reject_ the Big Three record labels, the tightly controlled Top 40 Radio market, it is trying to develop choice and mobility and its own ways to work out what's good.
I think what upsets me most about Bill Joy right now is that he sees nothing wrong with viewing the _companies_ as the ecosystem, and totally ignoring the content creators and the content consumers. Maybe working for a server maker has left him unable to focus on anything but middleware! But his point of view is simply inexcusable. I could see _including_ the companies and taking some interest in looking after them (in addition to- surprise- new companies that might actually- surprise- compete with the old ones!), but to completely leave out the creators and the consumers is totally intolerable...
At least Orrin Hatch is fumbling towards a clue...
You touched on a very good point- 'community property'. Microsoft doesn't consider its users to have rights to computer property. If you read the Register you'll have noticed recent articles on how Microsoft XP will not only encrypt your data on your computer to keep you away from it, but will be designed to destroy your data if it's learned by a central authority that you've been sharing it.
I'm not making this up. Stranger than fiction...
So when they say they are determined to protect intellectual property, they're not just blowing hot air, but you NEED to do the homework and realise they're saying 'we are going to protect intellectual property by OWNING all of it and being the sole arbitrators and gatekeepers of it by controlling the access methods the music industry people stupidly want. They said they wanted control, and they seem happy to trust US to administer it. *chuckle...*'
I can't consider this unexpected. After all, Microsoft needs to grow geometrically and that's not possible in just computers anymore, so this is what they look like deciding they want to make a strategic move to be the chokehold on all world communications and intellectual property: it will all have to be in a Microsoft format on Microsoft systems running Microsoft-specified hardware, or you'll be unable to communicate. That's the goal, and they're quite right that it's the only way for them to keep growing geometrically with an eye to the future.
Unfortunately they have no sense of how this looks to outsiders, such as governments. Any government- ANY government has to look at this and do a doubletake, thinking 'hey, they're acting like another government! Or one of those 'zaibatsus' in William Gibson novels'. Which of course they are, being the sole controller for information the world over would put them in a position _over_ most governments, and of course another things governments understand is expansionism- they can't stop there, they _must_ continue to expand even past that, to unthinkable levels of control.
In 1996 would you have said, "In 2001 Microsoft will be building stuff into their OS to remotely destroy your data if they decide you are illegally sharing it with others"? And yet they are.
It becomes a political problem, and will be treated as such, to the great shock and confusion of Microsoft, which is pretty psychotic by this point.
Again, if they mean that, let them stop placing a surcharge on blank media- since such a tax/fee is plainly encouragement of illegal activity.
Let them sell blank media _without_ any kickback to the RIAA and _then_ start bitching about commercial infringement. I'm happy to let them have it either way, since I don't listen to mainstream music: I just won't let them have it both ways. As long as I have to pay tribute to the RIAA on blank media, I will justifiably consider that a fee, that entitles me to copy and to listen to people's copies.
First stop charging me for the activity, then I'll consider the notion that it's a crime.
No, you have a point: I used to distribute through mp3.com so I've _seen_ crap artists:)
However- what's wrong with 100,000 bands each selling 10 cds? That's my entire point- it establishes a market where one didn't exist before. Spudly with the big hair can sell 10 CDs, and there's nothing wrong with that. 'Bassic' (a very competent, likeable mp3.com musician) can sell thousands of CDs, and has- just through the natural sorting process. More importantly, it becomes possible to tread waaaaaay outside the mainstream and get away with it- I've sold (while I was at mp3.com) a DAM CD (meaning, nothing but 128K mp3s burned to CDR in a pretty package!) consisting of entirely raw NOISE music: you can hear the tracks at besonic, above, it's the 'Hard Vacuum' album. It was entirely done manipulating EQ and compression on raw shortwave radio interference and 'circuit bending' the compressor. I have never heard, or made, ANYTHING with less commercial potential, or less claim to be considered music. But I discovered there was a community out there which liked Noise, read some rants about what Real Noise was, and went for it- and that's one of the CDs that I _sold_ a copy, even without being able to offer a proper audio CD of it! I felt the experience was educational...
I hope I can wind up recording, mixing, mastering other musicians who don't have it together technically- that's what I'd like most to do. And you're absolutely right that people shouldn't be trying to get 1000 CDs pressed and then try to place them in stores- too many people get 'million cellars' (a million records in boxes in your cellar;) ). But my whole point is, you don't have to do that anymore! Don't even burn the things yourself- set up with Ampcast, set up shirts etc. with CafePress, if they drop the ball then hook up with other services, but _decentralise_ it. Because it may be kind of unnatural to sell 5 million records- but what is wrong with selling 5, or 500? From where I'm sitting I could reach over and touch a modified Kurzweil Micropiano, a nice little synth module that I bought from an mp3.com royalty check. You can say that I don't have the fucking talent, if you want- maybe you're right, from some perspectives! But if I can pick up a few hundred dollars just from my music alone, I gotta wonder how well someone would do who _was_ really 'pop', without those nefarious Zappa influences that plague me and make my melodies dissonant:)
And it's not even about the idea that someone can be earning tens of thousands of dollars off their music- that's always going to happen for a few- the important thing is that I can get a couple hundred without any trouble, and that other people can get, say, $50 simply because, in all the world, there were some people out there who liked what they did.
To be accurate, currently I don't get a penny from my mp3s- I'd like to keep it that way but probably will switch over to ampcast completely on the basis of the CD program, and ampcast pays some sort of micropayment for downloads. They don't charge _listeners_ and if they did I'd find somewhere else to put mp3s. But my point is, I don't have to be the next Ricky Martin in order to earn a few bucks on my music. This is 2001- it's not all or nothing anymore. When I get rolling with the Ampcast CD program, I'll sell a couple to people who like the music- a couple to audiophiles or people who want to test stereos with it- here and there, it adds up, and doing order fulfilment is not MY problem. I get to focus on the music, and by doing so it will get better. What's not to like?
Noncommercial copying _is_ authorised use. It is the government that authorised it, and you are already paying fees to do such copying every time you buy a blank tape or 'music' CDR. So far from your copying being commercial piracy, you have in fact already paid for your cheesy little mp3 copy. So enjoy it.
If they want to argue that noncommercial copying isn't authorised, how about FIRST they stop charging me money over it every time I buy certain types of blank media? I am a working musician- I am sure that with the fees charged me for blank media, I've already paid for a couple mp3s for you, against my will. But no biggie- I feel generous. So again, enjoy your mp3s- you can use some of the fees I have paid over the years on blank media to pay for it. You're taken care of.
One hit wonders are a factor of current music industry practices. I'm not talking about hype and promotion, either, except indirectly. Here's how it works:
Bob gets signed to a major label. (yay!:P )
Bob gets $50,000 advance on a six album contract. (yay? o_O )
Bob gets label support on his debut album, and has a hit. He manages to even recoup the $50,000 advance, tours, and the label provides some tour support, too.
Bob goes back into the studio with the money he made, and begins work on the second album.
Surprise! When the second album comes out, the label doesn't support it at all. They're busy with someone else's first album, which they think might have a hit on it.
Unless Bob can singlehandedly back his second album with the level of support and publicity that the first album so easily got, the second album stiffs, meaning that the label needn't worry about putting out a third album- or if Bob's money holds out that long, they can put it out and watch it sink.
If Bob is really amazingly sharp, he might be savvy enough to have put all his earnings toward hiring business teams and publicity teams, and be able to seamlessly take over from the label when the label drops the support. Unfortunately, not everybody who's that business-smart is a truly wonderful musician...
...And that is how one-hit-wonders happen. The industry is geared to offering six-CD contracts but only supporting the first one- after that, you gotta scratch for yourself, against the new first CDs of other people from your own label.
It's also very important to remember that musician careers are (under the current regime) about as longlasting as second-string star athletes. You have maybe two years. Period. The idea of a second album, or God forbid a lifelong career, no longer makes sense in the current industry.
This is why all forms of music underground are really starting to rev up. Good musicians _continue_ to do good work. If they can't do it through the biz, they will find other ways to do it, but they _will_ keep on doing it: it's like asking a programmer when he's going to outgrow hacking on software. You get a confused look, because that's something that doesn't stop being interesting.
Why would any sane person want to take a 'go RIAA' stance? They boast no virtues but power, they don't even do a very good job, they rip off consumers horribly, they rip off artists worse, they've been tied to organised crime for _decades_ and now you want to see people rooting for them?
Some of us consider them more harmful than any sort of IP-stealing, and justifiably see the whole Napster thing as verging on civil disobedience, or even guerrila warfare, hitting these titanic organisations which control people's lives and careers in the only way they CAN be hit- short-circuiting them, rendering them unnecessary.
The only reason... the ONLY reason that you see OK music coming out of the RIAA and comparably little worthwhile stuff coming out of the grassroots and indies and net musicians, is because the RIAA people have been clinging to complete and total dominance and control for _decades_! It's like saying nobody can make a web browser as good as Microsoft 'because look what's out there'. The fact is, existing media like radio, music stores etc. are so totally controlled by the RIAA that it is effectively a complete lockout- you can't get in unless you sign with the RIAA on their terms.
That's no form of capitalism, no form of free market, and nothing defensible. I would ask you to reconsider your desire to find defensible things about the RIAA. I feel it is very misguided, and really a stretch. The fact is, it is justifiable to try and act against the RIAA's interests, particularly by such nonviolent means as simply copying music- and more people should be acting against the RIAA's interests. The more you learn about how the business really works, the more you will probably agree with that...
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that actual manufacturing costs are almost meaningless, because it is _promotion_ that costs all the money.
This is a little startling, but bears up to examination- even in the 80s, independent promotion was something like 60% of the labels' expenditures. It might be more well known as payola- the more things change the more they stay the same. If I remember correctly, CBS (the biggest label in the business at the time) attempted to break the back of the independent promotion network using Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' as a weapon: Floyd was touring and were launching the tour in California, and had a killer single, "Another Brick In The Wall pt. 2". CBS tried to get radio play on top 40 stations in LA for the track without paying off the independent promoters- and were frozen out completely, no airplay at ALL for Floyd. Eventually the band was made aware of what was happening and asked why they weren't getting radio play, and on being told, kicked up a stink and told the label, "So pay them already!" CBS did, and within 6 hours Floyd was being played on the radio...
This is not to justify the state of affairs- the independent promoters were linked with organised crime and if you want a _real_ cartel, try organised crime- but it is important information on where the money _really_ goes. I believe it is quite true that not all that money goes to RIAA execs' pockets. They have to pay off a staggering number of sleazy operators- in fact, even the rack jobbers have been consolidating into a power structure so now the labels have to spend money selling their CDs into stores like Wal-Mart! They entertain the reps from rack jobbers, have bands give command performances for them, and all this also costs money. It's revenge of the middleman, taken to the most incomprehensible extreme.
I think the RIAA are probably doomed _because_ so many middlemen (promoters, radio, rack jobbers) can and will take a big chunk out of them as the brick and mortar scene gradually, slowly fades... it's easy to get all haughty about fat RIAA execs slurping drinks in Ibiza but the reality seems to be that they're struggling to hang onto _moderately_ wealthy status- they're pulled too many different directions and have to pay off way too many middlemen, who cannot be made to go away.
I could almost be sympathetic. Almost.
Average would be averaging out the money, and would be some small figure which I won't try to calculate.
Median is a lot simpler: that would be the amount of money made by the median artist, 'halfway successful', and the money earned by Metallica doesn't enter into it at all. It's _very_ simple.
Median = $0
This is widely known and accepted in the industry, and the reason it's $0 is essentially because of recoupment. If you included advances (which are effectively a _loan_ and not a gift), then the median would probably be on the order of $10,000 (not less than $1000 or more than $100,000). Per month? Year? No- over the artist's entire career. And again this is a loan, not a gift, so I hesitate even to mention it.
So, the amount of that 14 billion that goes to the median artist is $0 and approval on a single $10,000 loan to cut an album, on terms that are substantially worse than a bank would extend. Is that what you wanted to know?
On the other hand, ampcast.com is in the final stages of going live with a CD program that features CDs that you can buy burned from CD audio rather than burned from 128K mp3s like mp3.com. Yes, the mp3.com DAM CDs are just what you'd get if you burned them yourself from mp3 downloads, only with a better case. Ampcast's taking steps to allow artists to have an even _more_ professional presentation, including artistic control of the _whole_ CD package including tray insert and CD media print, and will be able to burn CDs to order that are clones of professionally done Red Book Audio CD masters- meaning that if you get an Ampcast CD it will be _equivalent_ to the major label product as uncompressed audio, not simply a CD burn of mp3 files.
Mind you, for inexperienced artists without a lot of resources, they'll still allow minimal album graphics and CDs burned from mp3s, just like mp3.com. But for the heavy hitters out there in the indie world, ampcast is in the final stages of giving them _unprecedented_ ability to put out a fantastic, professional quality product.
I'm not going to get _into_ mass ability to play the resulting file- THAT can be fixed in the long haul! I'm saying that AS A MUSICIAN I _need_ more than just consumergrade lossy audio encoding. Each of my songs reacts differently to encoding, I know what I'm trying to get out of each, and treat it as a mastering situation. How? I use LAME and specify custom settings in detail to lock in a consistent, believable soundstage despite the coarsening of texture from the lossy compression. What if LAME didn't offer those controls? The version I use didn't! It's free software, I was able to _add_ them working from a version that compiled without issues and a drag-and-drop helper app (DropMP3)!
Let's not even get into the way there is _still_ no Mac 'hacks' downloadable. How many months, years has it been? There was some sort of quick-and-dirty hack written at MacHack- where is it? Let's see that. Let's see MPW tools, _anything_, because right now your attitude is very much like saying 'no soup for YOU!'. It's morally indefensible to not get behind Vorbis, but it's not _your_ problem to make that possible, is it?
I am increasingly of the opinion that backing Vorbis is a detour, and what people should _really_ be doing is mounting legal challenges against Thomson's obscene over-reaching regarding the mp3 format. It's not especially relevant that mp3 is established- that could change. What's relevant is that Vorbis is playing a defensive game, and I'm seeing multiple reports that the avoiding of obvious, optimal algorithms that Thomson considers 'theirs' has led to Vorbis sounding less good- which does _not_ please me, way to compete guys :P Given that Vorbis will do this in efforts to not challenge the Thomson claims of intellectual property, just what are you gonna do when Thomson, unopposed, proceeds to make MORE CLAIMS and further eat away at the permissible techniques for encoding audio?
There are people out there who are preferring to go ahead _assuming_ the Thomson claims are unenforceable, ridiculous and obscene, who are simply proceeding to use mp3 _without_ paying tribute, and I don't mean consumers, either. I'm increasingly of the opinion that we're better off doing that and getting ready to directly contest Thomson's right to charge content producers and distributors for USE of the format. Ogg Vorbis legitimises what they are doing by playing keep-away with them and conceding every claim to property they make. I'm not okay with conceding these claims they make.
Full time artists in the current system have, on the average, maybe two years worth of career. Two years of full-time versus a life-time of 'hobby time' isn't as big a difference as you might think. Mind you, this could also be fixed by getting the labels to respect artists more (in theory...) but I thought it was a relevant point. It's possible that allowing artists to grow at their own pace and contribute art over their _whole_ lifetimes is a better way...
I make music- but I've also had a lifelong fascination with audio gear, and that is craft. When I compose music part of it is art and part is craft... I'm expecting to begin a massive remixing of all my work soon, because again the _craft_ level of my work will take a quantum leap.
Specifically, I got into an argument with other audio techies. I'd been doing very high-end mixing through custom gear to straight 16-bit sampling, and getting very good results, too, but I was convinced through this argument that sampling at a higher resolution and dithering down to 16 bit could well deliver far superior results. And so I am getting a soundcard that has S/PDIF inputs, and will be recording through the outboard A/D converter in my Lexicon MPX-100 which can be used as a dedicated converter. In addition, I'm picking out high end audio caps to upgrade the Lexi (which is already heavily modded) seeing as it's going to be _the_ top performance A/D converter I've got.
Now, all that is craft- there's art in the choices, but mostly it's craft. And along with that, I'm paying money to Alesis, to Lexicon, to Midiman for their CO2 converter, to some vendor for whichever cap I settle on- commerce happens, driven by my needs. As a result of this, I end up with gear that can drastically outperform what most people have- and can sell that ability as a service to many artists who want to get a competitive sound with the recordings they've made.
That's how art can become craft can become income- it's not hypothetical, I'm doing exactly this, and will be able to offer mastering services in the near future, which will also extend to mastering mp3s of the music as well and having those, too, sound better than what you get off preset consumer encoders.
Yet in a sense it's all still art- because I'd be doing it anyhow, even if it wasn't laying the foundation for good honest work. Maybe that's the key- art is wonderful, important, but as you increasingly put good honest work into it, it increasingly becomes capable of bringing a return. How much? That depends on who you are and exactly what you're expecting to get a return from. I put work into _mastering_ mp3s, but it would be insane to say that distributing them was good honest work, because I just sit there and my ISP, or besonic, or ampcast, or Napster does all the work.
I must say that I respect the viewpoint that "art is not an endeavor in which one should expect to 'earn a living'". I think the operative word there is 'expect' and the second most important is 'living'. I personally live on about $600 a month. I know many people who would consider that absolutely intolerable, impossible. But for me a 'living' is not a very complicated thing. As for expectations- I expect what I'm doing to translate into a 'living' in the long run, but not because of any particular event or thing- because of my _mode_ of work, of continuing to put constant, tireless work into what I do. The purely-musician version of what I do would translate to gigging 360 days a year, no vacations, no weekends off. James Brown did basically that, and he did quite well for himself. I don't think anyone who simply sang like James Brown and wouldn't WORK like James Brown could expect the same...
Passing legislation that gave them a cut of every blank tape sold, in exchange for which _you_ theoretically got permission to make copies of stuff for your own use.
It's called the Audio Home Recording Act. I'm not surprised you're not familiar with it, because it took only a minor change in recording media for them to completely forget _their_ part of the bargain and start acting like you have no right to copy anything.
Of course, they still get paid a cut of every blank tape and 'audio' CDR! :P I think next they should lobby for getting 1% of the price of every _car_, because people listen to pirated music while driving down the street.
I'm currently in arguments^H^H^H^H^Hnegotiations ;) with Ampcast, to get the ability to produce CDs through their soon-coming CD burning service using my own usage restriction, which is 'all commercial rights reserved, noncommercial copying OKAY'. If you got into legal trouble (as you'd like to do- sounds like a good experiment) I can't speak for other artists but I would happily send you _written_ permission to host my stuff- in fact I would make helping you a priority, and would rush you whatever you needed for the court case, anything that I could do. If logistics permitted I'd even participate as a witness or something.
If anybody is in this situation and needs my help let me know, I consider it supremely important...
Fun happens >:)
The 'work for hire' thing is related but different. The _popstar's_ performance is routinely considered work for hire by the label, whenever they can get away with it. Now, if it's not, that doesn't mean the popstar ends up holding copyright, they have to sign that away. BUT, if they simply sign it away, the term expires in something like 40 years, so the popstar's _grandchildren_ might benefit from earnings from the hit record when, many years from now, the copyright returns to the artist and the artist's estate. (We'll not get into whether _they_ are entitled to profit from it- this time!) However, if it was 'work for hire', the term NEVER ends, and the artist will NEVER, EVER, EVER get their material back. Not in 40 years, not in 400, not in 40,000,000.
The record labels managed to get a rider on some bill that _changed_ the status of many recordings _to_ work for hire, basically taking a large number of existing works and changing the rules under them to give the record industry permanent ownership rather than 40-year-ownership, but major label artists were rightly _so_ upset that they actually organised, lobbied, and got the new legislation overturned by publicising just how bad the record labels were in doing this, and exactly what they were doing. So currently the only artists who will NEVER own their songs are, well, pretty much every new act being offered a contract _today_, including every one in which you don't need the artist's consent to revise the contract.
This very likely includes Britney and the others, so odds are they not only don't own copyright, but they can't and will _never_ own it. However, I can only be _absolutely_ certain that they don't own it _now_. It is just possible that one of the ones mentioned is not work for hire, in which case maybe in 40 years they or their heirs _might_ own copyright to their material.
Did you know that nearly all of the musicians you hear on the radio are technically hired laborers?
The fact is, the music industry does not supply Audio CD technology- just the content. If you want Audio CD to remain- buy a CD _player_. Send Sony, Hitachi or whoever the message, and forget the RIAA: they are NOT the ones supplying the hardware. Just insist on Audio CD support in everything, and if something comes around that won't play the CDs, don't buy it...
SMASH your radio!
That said- now GO READ THE STUFF the nice fellow posted for you about why the record industry must die! He's probably referring to the famous rant by the great Steve Albini. Read it! Just because people are doing something positive does not excuse you from educating yourself about how totally unacceptable the music business is and how little alternative there seems to be. I hope guys like Jim at Ampcast can make an alternative, but if he gets his kneecaps broken for it I'd hope some people were paying attention to the fact that the traditional music business is a bunch of _criminals_, and that defying them is a good way to get blacklisted, locked out of pressing plants like Negativland, or even getting beat up. Did you really think it was like the computer industry? The music business has a dark, dark past. Even superstars like Bob Marley had record company thugs threatening DJs to get their records played. The record industry DOES need to be destroyed, stopped, replaced. Merely supplanting it is not enough.
How about musicians having to _create_ and _produce_ and _work_ so that they can develop enough of a reputation that people will say 'hey, that guy's pretty good at music!' and opportunities will arise such as playing on someone else's session, mixing somebody's home-recorded album, or gigging at a private party of rich dotcommers?
I know at least two people who've gone and checked out my music when I mentioned it on Slashdot and took the trouble to write to me and say 'hey, that's pretty good!'. You give me ONE REASON why I should deserve that if I chose to just sit back and not do anything. My next recordings will _blow_ _people's_ _minds_ because I _work_ on the craft. I don't ever anticipate not working on it.
Besides which, the approach of 'internet-based penny-earning' for musicians (as opposed to label-based being-promised-millions) will work for a _lifetime_. It'll only get better as you continue to work and practice your art and craft. By contrast, the system you're defending has an average career length of _two_ _years_! It's completely screwed. Anything would be an improvement.
I suggest that you post, "whoops, I was talking out my butt about record companies taking on the burden of studios/advertising/distribution" unless you prefer to argue that artists should never be paid anything in the first place. The whole burden lands on the artists, which is why platinum sellers are found declaring bankruptcy- they slip up and act like they're being paid 16% of net, without realising that they are paying the entire burden of studios and about half of distribution.
My God! That's _hundreds_ of times what major label artists make! If you haven't really done your homework you wouldn't _believe_ how many deductions there are, and how twisted the reckoning is.
How about this as an alternate proposal? An alternative minimum royalty of ONE PERCENT...
Let's not even get into cross-collateralization, also known as 'your earnings have to recoup the expenses of _all_ _your_ _records_ before you see a f**king penny'... I bet a lot of you think I am making all this up. I wish I were. Sounds crazy, doesn't it? The numbers were not made up- they're straight out of Donald S. Passman's book, "All You Need To Know About The Music Business". Passman is a music business _lawyer_ and the back sleeve has praise and recommendations from Mo Ostin, Randy Newman, Michael Eisner, David Geffen, Don Henley, Quincy Jones and Tom Waits... after that royalty mess he comments on how no label will give up the number of percentages taken away because artists like to royalty-drop- "oh I'm getting a 16% royalty!" (16% of 90% of 65% of 85% of 80% of 75%- do the math, I get _really 4.7736%, which the artist will never see unless they recoup all recording and tour costs _first_ _out_ of that four point seven percent)
The vast majority of _signed_ _major_ _label_ artists would be making lots more money on 1% of gross. What they get is more like 0% unless they not only recoup but land a '16%!!' royalty, in which case they're really getting 4%. Interesting, no?
I don't think compulsory licensing is the answer either: I think it will be used to pay off the record companies only, and they don't need more money and more unavoidable consumer taxes going directly to them. However, I gotta give the pols credit for at least trying! At least it would break the back of the CD cartel, which is maintaining prices at as much as three times the actual value of the product by ruthlessly controlling the entire chain of distribution from top to bottom, and will literally tell pressing plants not to do business with potential competition (for instance, Negativland).
So compulsory licensing might not do _me_ as a musician any good, but it might at least do consumers some good.
One question. **WHY???***
He does software, and doesn't see free software as a problem. What with his argument you'd expect him to want to stop free software on the grounds that it hurts the ecosystem! But software, the guy's familiar with, so he doesn't step in it on that issue.
He tells Tim O'Reilly that books are a problem, whereupon Tim (who's done great things with making O'Reilly books _competitive_ with free information by making them easy to handle, attractive, lie open to the proper page etc) rightly responds, "No, I don't think that's a problem and _I_ am the publisher".
And he tells the _world_ that free music is a problem, and who is there to say, "No, I am a musician and I don't think that is a problem"? Who, that has a CLUE about how the industry freaking works and where artists can reasonably expect to earn money! Does he _want_ to permanently establish a situation where consumer money is paid directly to record industry suits? Is he that naive and uninformed that he feels they are basically good people and their statements should be taken at face value? BAD mistake. Someone ask him if he trusts the Mafia too- the links are well, well established.
Then to top it off he uses radio as the example of happy fine control and regulation! Reality check- the FCC is _in_ _the_ _pocket_ of the media industry by now. You don't have choice, you don't have a market, you have Big Media locking out everyone else, and the only response to this has been the _thriving_ community radio movement, delivering programming that actually relates to the needs and interests of the community. You may be more familiar with it as 'pirate radio'... God knows what Bill thinks of that. Maybe he wants all the pirate radio people thrown in jail too, or at least to smash up their transmitters and 'clean up the airwaves' for the big corporate boys.
God, does this guy make me angry at times. The government people at least have this merit- they know what criminals act like, because half of them are corrupt or on the take themselves. Bill Joy behaves like he _believes_ what he's saying, and this is arguably worse. Scoundrels can be bribed or bought, but Bill Joy's liable to try and ruin my own personal career prospects just for my own good, liable to turn complete control of media over to the same _scumbags_ who run it today, even though the 'ecosystem' is TRYING TO REJECT THAT POISON. The 'ecosystem' is trying to _reject_ the Big Three record labels, the tightly controlled Top 40 Radio market, it is trying to develop choice and mobility and its own ways to work out what's good.
I think what upsets me most about Bill Joy right now is that he sees nothing wrong with viewing the _companies_ as the ecosystem, and totally ignoring the content creators and the content consumers. Maybe working for a server maker has left him unable to focus on anything but middleware! But his point of view is simply inexcusable. I could see _including_ the companies and taking some interest in looking after them (in addition to- surprise- new companies that might actually- surprise- compete with the old ones!), but to completely leave out the creators and the consumers is totally intolerable...
At least Orrin Hatch is fumbling towards a clue...
I'm not making this up. Stranger than fiction...
So when they say they are determined to protect intellectual property, they're not just blowing hot air, but you NEED to do the homework and realise they're saying 'we are going to protect intellectual property by OWNING all of it and being the sole arbitrators and gatekeepers of it by controlling the access methods the music industry people stupidly want. They said they wanted control, and they seem happy to trust US to administer it. *chuckle...*'
I can't consider this unexpected. After all, Microsoft needs to grow geometrically and that's not possible in just computers anymore, so this is what they look like deciding they want to make a strategic move to be the chokehold on all world communications and intellectual property: it will all have to be in a Microsoft format on Microsoft systems running Microsoft-specified hardware, or you'll be unable to communicate. That's the goal, and they're quite right that it's the only way for them to keep growing geometrically with an eye to the future.
Unfortunately they have no sense of how this looks to outsiders, such as governments. Any government- ANY government has to look at this and do a doubletake, thinking 'hey, they're acting like another government! Or one of those 'zaibatsus' in William Gibson novels'. Which of course they are, being the sole controller for information the world over would put them in a position _over_ most governments, and of course another things governments understand is expansionism- they can't stop there, they _must_ continue to expand even past that, to unthinkable levels of control.
In 1996 would you have said, "In 2001 Microsoft will be building stuff into their OS to remotely destroy your data if they decide you are illegally sharing it with others"? And yet they are.
It becomes a political problem, and will be treated as such, to the great shock and confusion of Microsoft, which is pretty psychotic by this point.
Let them sell blank media _without_ any kickback to the RIAA and _then_ start bitching about commercial infringement. I'm happy to let them have it either way, since I don't listen to mainstream music: I just won't let them have it both ways. As long as I have to pay tribute to the RIAA on blank media, I will justifiably consider that a fee, that entitles me to copy and to listen to people's copies.
First stop charging me for the activity, then I'll consider the notion that it's a crime.
However- what's wrong with 100,000 bands each selling 10 cds? That's my entire point- it establishes a market where one didn't exist before. Spudly with the big hair can sell 10 CDs, and there's nothing wrong with that. 'Bassic' (a very competent, likeable mp3.com musician) can sell thousands of CDs, and has- just through the natural sorting process. More importantly, it becomes possible to tread waaaaaay outside the mainstream and get away with it- I've sold (while I was at mp3.com) a DAM CD (meaning, nothing but 128K mp3s burned to CDR in a pretty package!) consisting of entirely raw NOISE music: you can hear the tracks at besonic, above, it's the 'Hard Vacuum' album. It was entirely done manipulating EQ and compression on raw shortwave radio interference and 'circuit bending' the compressor. I have never heard, or made, ANYTHING with less commercial potential, or less claim to be considered music. But I discovered there was a community out there which liked Noise, read some rants about what Real Noise was, and went for it- and that's one of the CDs that I _sold_ a copy, even without being able to offer a proper audio CD of it! I felt the experience was educational...
I hope I can wind up recording, mixing, mastering other musicians who don't have it together technically- that's what I'd like most to do. And you're absolutely right that people shouldn't be trying to get 1000 CDs pressed and then try to place them in stores- too many people get 'million cellars' (a million records in boxes in your cellar ;) ). But my whole point is, you don't have to do that anymore! Don't even burn the things yourself- set up with Ampcast, set up shirts etc. with CafePress, if they drop the ball then hook up with other services, but _decentralise_ it. Because it may be kind of unnatural to sell 5 million records- but what is wrong with selling 5, or 500? From where I'm sitting I could reach over and touch a modified Kurzweil Micropiano, a nice little synth module that I bought from an mp3.com royalty check. You can say that I don't have the fucking talent, if you want- maybe you're right, from some perspectives! But if I can pick up a few hundred dollars just from my music alone, I gotta wonder how well someone would do who _was_ really 'pop', without those nefarious Zappa influences that plague me and make my melodies dissonant :)
And it's not even about the idea that someone can be earning tens of thousands of dollars off their music- that's always going to happen for a few- the important thing is that I can get a couple hundred without any trouble, and that other people can get, say, $50 simply because, in all the world, there were some people out there who liked what they did.
To be accurate, currently I don't get a penny from my mp3s- I'd like to keep it that way but probably will switch over to ampcast completely on the basis of the CD program, and ampcast pays some sort of micropayment for downloads. They don't charge _listeners_ and if they did I'd find somewhere else to put mp3s. But my point is, I don't have to be the next Ricky Martin in order to earn a few bucks on my music. This is 2001- it's not all or nothing anymore. When I get rolling with the Ampcast CD program, I'll sell a couple to people who like the music- a couple to audiophiles or people who want to test stereos with it- here and there, it adds up, and doing order fulfilment is not MY problem. I get to focus on the music, and by doing so it will get better. What's not to like?
If they want to argue that noncommercial copying isn't authorised, how about FIRST they stop charging me money over it every time I buy certain types of blank media? I am a working musician- I am sure that with the fees charged me for blank media, I've already paid for a couple mp3s for you, against my will. But no biggie- I feel generous. So again, enjoy your mp3s- you can use some of the fees I have paid over the years on blank media to pay for it. You're taken care of.
It's also very important to remember that musician careers are (under the current regime) about as longlasting as second-string star athletes. You have maybe two years. Period. The idea of a second album, or God forbid a lifelong career, no longer makes sense in the current industry.
This is why all forms of music underground are really starting to rev up. Good musicians _continue_ to do good work. If they can't do it through the biz, they will find other ways to do it, but they _will_ keep on doing it: it's like asking a programmer when he's going to outgrow hacking on software. You get a confused look, because that's something that doesn't stop being interesting.
Some of us consider them more harmful than any sort of IP-stealing, and justifiably see the whole Napster thing as verging on civil disobedience, or even guerrila warfare, hitting these titanic organisations which control people's lives and careers in the only way they CAN be hit- short-circuiting them, rendering them unnecessary.
The only reason... the ONLY reason that you see OK music coming out of the RIAA and comparably little worthwhile stuff coming out of the grassroots and indies and net musicians, is because the RIAA people have been clinging to complete and total dominance and control for _decades_! It's like saying nobody can make a web browser as good as Microsoft 'because look what's out there'. The fact is, existing media like radio, music stores etc. are so totally controlled by the RIAA that it is effectively a complete lockout- you can't get in unless you sign with the RIAA on their terms.
That's no form of capitalism, no form of free market, and nothing defensible. I would ask you to reconsider your desire to find defensible things about the RIAA. I feel it is very misguided, and really a stretch. The fact is, it is justifiable to try and act against the RIAA's interests, particularly by such nonviolent means as simply copying music- and more people should be acting against the RIAA's interests. The more you learn about how the business really works, the more you will probably agree with that...