Artists should be able to leverage their talents for money, if they're good enough.
That approach worked in the 70s, but musical ability is no longer required for success in the music business. Breasts and dancers seem to be in higher demand.
You missed my entire point about the 3 percent, so let me explain it more thoroughly.
You will never hear of more than 90 percent of the artists because they don't have a record deal. Of the ones that do get signed, according to the RIAA, 9 out of 10 will get dumped after they don't generate enough sales. So that three percent of the acts (which now seems rather generous, maybe it's closer to one percent) are the only ones you will hear of.
You were waiting for Zep and Floyd to do something because you know who they are. You hear their songs on the radio.
The other 97 percent of us are not on the radio. Oh, it used to be possible, back in the days when Loretta Lynn got started. As late as the erly 80s, you could still get some air time, but that was usually a one-shot deal; they weren't going to play your songs again. With Clear Channel and the other corporate monoliths, they're not going to play a single one of your songs even once.
So whether you're just starting out, or have been dragging gear back and forth across the country for a while, if you're part of that 97 percent, chances are that no one is looking for your music on LimeWire because they never heard of you. The possibility that they'll just type your name in at random seems a little remote.
Even if you want a record contract, they've never heard of you, either. It doesn't matter if you're the next William Hung or the next Beatles.
Did you buy your first Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd album before or after you heard the music on it?
The Internet has given the 97-percenters new ways to attract an audience. First, we need to get some tunes on your iPod playlist somehow, get you to listen to it a few times. Then we'll worry about getting the audience to fork over a few bucks each.
People are not expected to use their talents, whether that talent is carpentry, music, programming, or medicine, for free.
And yet, there are hundreds of thousands of us doing exactly that from the minute we figured out how to do it, while the industry has made every effort to give the impression that downloading music is somehow illegal.
Is it realistic to expect you to pay the same price for one of our tunes as you'd pay for a brand-new Zeppelin track? Not to me. If you're not in the 3 percent, you currently don't get paid anyway, so it's not like we're giving up anything.
The industry keeps saying that they can't compete with free, which is our on-ramp to your iPod and your ears, which are the only thing that may or may not convince you to part with a few dollars for a higher-quality version. Unless we get into your ears, the question of talent is irrelevant.
As a result, every effort by the industry to "protect" their content also serves the purpose of casting aspersions over our promotional vehicle. Their way is the highway but it is not the only way from point A to point B. We are the scenic route, now deemed quaint, unsafe, fraught with danger and kind of creepy because we let you listen for free. You can still get from A to B, but it's takes a lot longer.
We just want you to listen. That's why we play music. It is fun and allows self-expression. We aren't going to stop because no one pays us. In fact, we're going to keep playing, writing and distributing free tunes in spite the fact that no one will pay us.
If you think we're doing it wrong, well, you hear that a lot in rock and roll but you never take it to heart.
Anytime you end up with something you didn't pay for, it's theft.
That is such a sad, negative viewpoint. How much do you pay for air to breathe? Monthly bill for rain and sunshine? When wildflowers bloom spontaneously on your yard, or the birds sing a song, who do you send a check to? Free prize? Quantity discount? Traffic ticket? Christmas, birthday, wedding, going away, welcome back, happy anniversary or graduation gifts must all be out of the question, too.
Most musicians actually want people to hear their music because that tends to make it easier to get an audience at live performances, which is the only place we've ever made any money and probably always will be.
Most of us were also taught to share. Mysteriously, everyone only wants to listen to the three percent that didn't learn this lesson.
Whether or not the way the music/movie/book industry works is fair is a red herring in this argument.
Not if you're a musician. What the RIAA calls piracy is what I call promotion.
The fact remains you took something that someone else wants to receive compensation for. Period.
It's not that simple. The major record labels have a few thousand acts left, if that many. They want compensation every time you hear them. The other 3 million acts just want someone to listen to them.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or so I've heard, but for some reason everyone acts like the rest of us don't deserve any consideration in this debate at all. We would like some compensation for our music, too, but if you take some we don't consider it stealing.
The difference is that we don't feel entitled to it.
The artists who don't want people to listen to their tunes without being paid up front should simply stop making records. That would solve the problem, unlike the phony "creators vs. the public" propaganda we've been hearing for years now.
I'm looking at the comments on this page and I have to wonder if anyone remembers what file sharing is at its basic level.
Back in the late 80s, I was the editor of an entertainment supplement that ran in the newspaper in three mid-size towns. We had to use a modem to connect to each other and sometimes we could get a whole 1 kbps transfer rate to move text files. Within the office, file sharing was faster because we could swap floppy disks.
While I know you're all talking about swapping movies, music, games, etc., every corporate environment involves the sharing of information. A newspaper is a real good example of how you have to pull files in from your "peers" to collect and assemble them. Every day.
We spent so long looking for faster ways to move files around and now we've reached the point where this basic function is finally is working so well that we've gotta screw it up.
File sharing/information sharing is the purpose of the Internet. To even consider trying to stop it is ludicrous. You might as well just shut down the entire net because that's the only way file sharing stops. Then we'll just go back to faxes and snail mail.
Should it really be up to the guy that owns LimeWire to tell the government that maybe they shouldn't be using it at work? We have an Intelligence Department, but no one can figure out that, if they are going to use p2p, to do it from a machine with no sensitive information?
Probably not.
After all, most of the government still uses Windows, so security must not be that important to them.
ASCAP and BMI represent the songwriters and publishers. They do not represent "the artists" unless they wrote their own stuff.
SoundExchange -- The record labels get 50%; featured artists, 40% (or 45); the other (5 or) 10 percent goes to background singers and non-featured performers.
If you make the record-labels' ownership any less valid than that of the original creators
Never said anything about the validity of the record labels' copyrights....you'll simply rob the creators of their ability to sell... The creators sold their control -- willingly and for good money.
Two posts ago, the most important thing was the creators keeping control. Now it's their ability to sell.
I'm just saying not to sell it to people who will sue children for listening to it. Otherwise, before you know it, the hand-chopping begins.
That's not what they RIAA is suing "the children" for. You know it, I know it.
Then don't pretend that it's about copyright, either. The word "download" does not appear in the entire text of the U.S. Copyright laws.
This is about restoring the sanctity of the private club they turned radio into. The problem with the Internet is that it lets everyone in. Any logical plan to monetize it and put any accurate system in place to make sure everyone is paid fairly will run into the stumbling block that the few remaining club members will have to split the income with the 3 million bands posting their music at MySpace.
This is about defining new rules to re-establish their role as gatekeepers and making sure all available income from recorded music continues to pass through their hands so they can keep 85 percent of it. Like they did with webcasting.
It all boils down to whether or not the creators can control their creations.
That's what I keep saying and you keep ignoring. If the record label owns the rights, what the creators think is irrelevant. They gave up control before the ink was dry on the contract.
You are repeating this, as if it were always and automatically wrong to sue children.
And you act like we've always sued children for listening to pop music.
These are the people, RIAA (as well as MPAA and BSA) represents.
The RIAA doesn't represent people. It represents record labels. The MPAA represents studios. The people that actually created the music have no say in what the RIAA does because they don't own their work any longer, which leads me back to my original warning.
Whether or not they are "real" musicians (movie-makers, software authors) -- in your opinion -- is irrelevant.
As for your "sue children" -- please, stop the demagoguery.
I thought that's what the article was about in the first place. Let me check...
Once again the RIAA has dropped a case with prejudice, this time after concluding it was the defendant's daughter it should have sued in the first place.
They are still suing children. This is not some sort of political viewpoint. It's a fact which, apparently, some people are tired of hearing about, even as the practice continues unabated. Maybe because it's not their kid.
Some real musicians, such as Metallica and U2 think, "the vultures" aren't aggressive enough.
Sorry to hear that Lars and Bono have fallen on such hard times.
Ever seen a movie about the beginning of someone's career, when they are still working at the appliance store and happen to hear one of their songs on the radio for the first time? Ever seen one where the budding star is really pissed off about it?
Real musicians never cry because people are listening to their music. Or at least they didn't until Metallica came along. It is an unnatural response.
If you create music, each one of the "boring minor skirmishes" is an important reminder that you should never let ownership of your songs fall into the hands of these vultures, lest they use it to sue children.
Is the removal of restrictions from our media really that big a deal?
It is if you work at one of the corporations that's been making millions of dollars a year to develop "restrictions" that a trained chimp could bypass. Then there are the guys at the labels and studios that have been writing the checks and acting like DRM was going to save their asses by magically altering the basic laws of physics, not to mention rewriting the audio CD standard to require Windows.
They've operated under the delusion that effective DRM was possible for at least 9 years now. Sunk a lot of time and money into chasing that rainbow.
Their web guy wanted to make a backup, but when he produced a spindle of CD-Rs, someone yelled, "Pirate! He's stealing our stuff!" He was lucky to make it out of there alive, but they did jam two subpoenas up his ass before they threw him out the door.
If we're talking about music, the creators have traditionally been paid as little as possible. And then they steal half of that. Sony still owes the Bay City Rollers about $60 million. Their quarter million dollar advance from 1975 or 76 was the last check they ever saw. Five guys in the band. That's less than $2000 a year.
There are hundreds of examples.
No one ever gets paid. If we give our music away, it just eliminates the false hope.
If you are creating content, trying to deter people from accessing it is ludicrous. Why not just save everyone the time and aggravation by simply not producing works you don't want others to have, hear or read?
The RIAA can get away with saying that making a copy of a CD you already own is infringement in their eyes. This is their position. It's what they believe. It's not perjury.
Technically, it may actually be infringing activity.
The AHRA specifically does not even speculate on whether this non-commercial use is or is not infringing. It just says "No action may be brought..." (This is not the same as "fair use," btw).
Slashdot Mirror
The advantage is that now the LOC can join the class action suit for people who bought Vista.
Plus, how could anyone be so stupid that they put something that important into a super proprietary format?!
The copyright office's inability to understand technology is legendary and the sheer depth of its misunderstanding is awe-inspiring.
http://www.azoz.com/music
Artists should be able to leverage their talents for money, if they're good enough.
That approach worked in the 70s, but musical ability is no longer required for success in the music business. Breasts and dancers seem to be in higher demand.
You missed my entire point about the 3 percent, so let me explain it more thoroughly.
You will never hear of more than 90 percent of the artists because they don't have a record deal. Of the ones that do get signed, according to the RIAA, 9 out of 10 will get dumped after they don't generate enough sales. So that three percent of the acts (which now seems rather generous, maybe it's closer to one percent) are the only ones you will hear of.
You were waiting for Zep and Floyd to do something because you know who they are. You hear their songs on the radio.
The other 97 percent of us are not on the radio. Oh, it used to be possible, back in the days when Loretta Lynn got started. As late as the erly 80s, you could still get some air time, but that was usually a one-shot deal; they weren't going to play your songs again. With Clear Channel and the other corporate monoliths, they're not going to play a single one of your songs even once.
So whether you're just starting out, or have been dragging gear back and forth across the country for a while, if you're part of that 97 percent, chances are that no one is looking for your music on LimeWire because they never heard of you. The possibility that they'll just type your name in at random seems a little remote.
Even if you want a record contract, they've never heard of you, either. It doesn't matter if you're the next William Hung or the next Beatles.
Did you buy your first Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd album before or after you heard the music on it?
The Internet has given the 97-percenters new ways to attract an audience. First, we need to get some tunes on your iPod playlist somehow, get you to listen to it a few times. Then we'll worry about getting the audience to fork over a few bucks each.
People are not expected to use their talents, whether that talent is carpentry, music, programming, or medicine, for free.
And yet, there are hundreds of thousands of us doing exactly that from the minute we figured out how to do it, while the industry has made every effort to give the impression that downloading music is somehow illegal.
Is it realistic to expect you to pay the same price for one of our tunes as you'd pay for a brand-new Zeppelin track? Not to me. If you're not in the 3 percent, you currently don't get paid anyway, so it's not like we're giving up anything.
The industry keeps saying that they can't compete with free, which is our on-ramp to your iPod and your ears, which are the only thing that may or may not convince you to part with a few dollars for a higher-quality version. Unless we get into your ears, the question of talent is irrelevant.
As a result, every effort by the industry to "protect" their content also serves the purpose of casting aspersions over our promotional vehicle. Their way is the highway but it is not the only way from point A to point B. We are the scenic route, now deemed quaint, unsafe, fraught with danger and kind of creepy because we let you listen for free. You can still get from A to B, but it's takes a lot longer.
We just want you to listen. That's why we play music. It is fun and allows self-expression. We aren't going to stop because no one pays us. In fact, we're going to keep playing, writing and distributing free tunes in spite the fact that no one will pay us.
If you think we're doing it wrong, well, you hear that a lot in rock and roll but you never take it to heart.
Anytime you end up with something you didn't pay for, it's theft.
That is such a sad, negative viewpoint. How much do you pay for air to breathe? Monthly bill for rain and sunshine? When wildflowers bloom spontaneously on your yard, or the birds sing a song, who do you send a check to? Free prize? Quantity discount? Traffic ticket? Christmas, birthday, wedding, going away, welcome back, happy anniversary or graduation gifts must all be out of the question, too.
Most musicians actually want people to hear their music because that tends to make it easier to get an audience at live performances, which is the only place we've ever made any money and probably always will be.
Most of us were also taught to share. Mysteriously, everyone only wants to listen to the three percent that didn't learn this lesson.
Whether or not the way the music/movie/book industry works is fair is a red herring in this argument.
Not if you're a musician. What the RIAA calls piracy is what I call promotion.
The fact remains you took something that someone else wants to receive compensation for. Period.
It's not that simple. The major record labels have a few thousand acts left, if that many. They want compensation every time you hear them. The other 3 million acts just want someone to listen to them.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or so I've heard, but for some reason everyone acts like the rest of us don't deserve any consideration in this debate at all. We would like some compensation for our music, too, but if you take some we don't consider it stealing.
The difference is that we don't feel entitled to it.
The artists who don't want people to listen to their tunes without being paid up front should simply stop making records. That would solve the problem, unlike the phony "creators vs. the public" propaganda we've been hearing for years now.
In this case, however, it could turn out to be better for the consumer.
Yeah, because making a choice gives us a headache.
If it's new, the RIAA is obligated to sue it.
Currently only Windows is supported, but a Macintosh version is on the way.
Everybody always says that, then they get sued out of existence before they ever do.
I'm looking at the comments on this page and I have to wonder if anyone remembers what file sharing is at its basic level.
Back in the late 80s, I was the editor of an entertainment supplement that ran in the newspaper in three mid-size towns. We had to use a modem to connect to each other and sometimes we could get a whole 1 kbps transfer rate to move text files. Within the office, file sharing was faster because we could swap floppy disks.
While I know you're all talking about swapping movies, music, games, etc., every corporate environment involves the sharing of information. A newspaper is a real good example of how you have to pull files in from your "peers" to collect and assemble them. Every day.
We spent so long looking for faster ways to move files around and now we've reached the point where this basic function is finally is working so well that we've gotta screw it up.
File sharing/information sharing is the purpose of the Internet. To even consider trying to stop it is ludicrous. You might as well just shut down the entire net because that's the only way file sharing stops. Then we'll just go back to faxes and snail mail.
Should it really be up to the guy that owns LimeWire to tell the government that maybe they shouldn't be using it at work? We have an Intelligence Department, but no one can figure out that, if they are going to use p2p, to do it from a machine with no sensitive information?
Probably not.
After all, most of the government still uses Windows, so security must not be that important to them.
I live in the UK. How does this affect me?
Pretty much the same way it affects us. Not at all, because it's not gonna happen.
ASCAP and BMI represent the songwriters and publishers. They do not represent "the artists" unless they wrote their own stuff.
SoundExchange -- The record labels get 50%; featured artists, 40% (or 45); the other (5 or) 10 percent goes to background singers and non-featured performers.
On one hand you have the RIAA -- EMI, Sony/BMG, Warner, Universal.
Their adversary: the publishers -- EMI, Sony/BMG, Warner, Universal.
If you make the record-labels' ownership any less valid than that of the original creators
Never said anything about the validity of the record labels' copyrights.
Two posts ago, the most important thing was the creators keeping control. Now it's their ability to sell.
I'm just saying not to sell it to people who will sue children for listening to it. Otherwise, before you know it, the hand-chopping begins.
Kind of makes all those years spent drinking to forget seem like a waste of time.
That's not what they RIAA is suing "the children" for. You know it, I know it.
Then don't pretend that it's about copyright, either. The word "download" does not appear in the entire text of the U.S. Copyright laws.
This is about restoring the sanctity of the private club they turned radio into. The problem with the Internet is that it lets everyone in. Any logical plan to monetize it and put any accurate system in place to make sure everyone is paid fairly will run into the stumbling block that the few remaining club members will have to split the income with the 3 million bands posting their music at MySpace.
This is about defining new rules to re-establish their role as gatekeepers and making sure all available income from recorded music continues to pass through their hands so they can keep 85 percent of it. Like they did with webcasting.
It all boils down to whether or not the creators can control their creations.
That's what I keep saying and you keep ignoring. If the record label owns the rights, what the creators think is irrelevant. They gave up control before the ink was dry on the contract.
I just announced the title. It was that other guy singing...
You are repeating this, as if it were always and automatically wrong to sue children.
And you act like we've always sued children for listening to pop music.
These are the people, RIAA (as well as MPAA and BSA) represents.
The RIAA doesn't represent people. It represents record labels. The MPAA represents studios. The people that actually created the music have no say in what the RIAA does because they don't own their work any longer, which leads me back to my original warning.
Whether or not they are "real" musicians (movie-makers, software authors) -- in your opinion -- is irrelevant.
That's kinda what I thought when you said it.
As for your "sue children" -- please, stop the demagoguery.
I thought that's what the article was about in the first place. Let me check...
Once again the RIAA has dropped a case with prejudice, this time after concluding it was the defendant's daughter it should have sued in the first place.
They are still suing children. This is not some sort of political viewpoint. It's a fact which, apparently, some people are tired of hearing about, even as the practice continues unabated. Maybe because it's not their kid.
Some real musicians, such as Metallica and U2 think, "the vultures" aren't aggressive enough.
Sorry to hear that Lars and Bono have fallen on such hard times.
Ever seen a movie about the beginning of someone's career, when they are still working at the appliance store and happen to hear one of their songs on the radio for the first time? Ever seen one where the budding star is really pissed off about it?
Real musicians never cry because people are listening to their music. Or at least they didn't until Metallica came along. It is an unnatural response.
I heard somewhere that you can't always get what you want.
If you create music, each one of the "boring minor skirmishes" is an important reminder that you should never let ownership of your songs fall into the hands of these vultures, lest they use it to sue children.
Better to give it away for free. http://www.azoz.com/music
Is the removal of restrictions from our media really that big a deal?
It is if you work at one of the corporations that's been making millions of dollars a year to develop "restrictions" that a trained chimp could bypass. Then there are the guys at the labels and studios that have been writing the checks and acting like DRM was going to save their asses by magically altering the basic laws of physics, not to mention rewriting the audio CD standard to require Windows.
They've operated under the delusion that effective DRM was possible for at least 9 years now. Sunk a lot of time and money into chasing that rainbow.
It's going to take them a while to let go.
Their web guy wanted to make a backup, but when he produced a spindle of CD-Rs, someone yelled, "Pirate! He's stealing our stuff!" He was lucky to make it out of there alive, but they did jam two subpoenas up his ass before they threw him out the door.
I thought for sure that this was going to have something to do with Fox News.
Because then you don't make any money.
If we're talking about music, the creators have traditionally been paid as little as possible. And then they steal half of that. Sony still owes the Bay City Rollers about $60 million. Their quarter million dollar advance from 1975 or 76 was the last check they ever saw. Five guys in the band. That's less than $2000 a year.
There are hundreds of examples.
No one ever gets paid. If we give our music away, it just eliminates the false hope.
There is no such thing as a "good DRM scheme."
If you are creating content, trying to deter people from accessing it is ludicrous. Why not just save everyone the time and aggravation by simply not producing works you don't want others to have, hear or read?
The RIAA can get away with saying that making a copy of a CD you already own is infringement in their eyes. This is their position. It's what they believe. It's not perjury.
Technically, it may actually be infringing activity.
The AHRA specifically does not even speculate on whether this non-commercial use is or is not infringing. It just says "No action may be brought..." (This is not the same as "fair use," btw).