Neil Young sez: "Piracy is the new radio."

[percussion boy]

+1 on all of this, unfortunately.

However, gotta say it's a relief to hear other people saying this stuff -- I usually feel like I'm shouting in the wilderness when trying to suggest that artists should be paid for their art, or that the overall quality of the art will suffer long-term if no one pays any more.

And let's admit it: The industry shot themselves in the foot when they went digital without thinking through copy protection. Vinyl had its problems, but the record, its sound and packaging were something people could get attached to as a possession, like a favorite item of clothing.

[chris harris]

The industry shot itself in the foot when it let the world go digital without them. The "free" paradigm was well established while the labels were still trying to sell CDs for $16.99 and suing grandmas.

Now it's up to individual bands and artists to create a connection with their fans and make them understand that the music that they download and "share" doesn't just suddenly exist. It's got to be made. And, it's difficult to make it for "free" between shifts at the local coffee shop.

[Bob Olhsson]

The industry shot itself in the foot when it let the world go digital without them. The "free" paradigm was well established while the labels were still trying to sell CDs for $16.99 and suing grandmas.

...

While that's the narrative spun by the Wall Street investment bankers behind the personal computer and internet IPOs, it isn't what actually happened.

The widespread looting of recordings was the direct result of the actions of huge corporate enablers. Recording artists are being held hostage while Wall Street has successfully lobbied to immunize the "tech industry" from being subject to co-operation with any part of copyright enforcement if it is related to entertainment. You can get a court order to block kiddy-porn in a heartbeat but everybody's "privacy and free speech rights" are being violated when it'is blocking the looting of entertainment.

Meanwhile there is still a huge push to create compulsory licenses for recordings with lobbyist-defined royalty rates. That way any artist who begins selling significant quantities of their own recordings will find themself in direct competition with Apple or whatever tech corporations purchase the carcasses of the historical record labels.

[AnalogousGumdropDecoder]

I think the black-and-white discussion of piracy being responsible for musicians not making money is grossly oversimplified. The entire industry has changed because of technology and other factors. It's not just the way people acquire music and how much (if anything) they're willing to pay for it. It's also not just about musicians. People are losing their homes and jobs, the climate is changing, and the government is behaving very eerily. Things are getting weird, and we're going to have to face it.

On the subject of music sales plummeting. Other factors... Besides the piracy thing, there's also 80 gajillion bands now, most of whom can make records at home on their laptops. People aren't that amazed anymore that some professional can make a recording, because they can do it themselves. Information also travels much faster, and thus so do musical trends/fads. There are "revivals" of sub-genres that are themselves less than two years old. You can imagine the effect this has on whether someone wants to invest in a new album. There are many more artists to choose from, much more awareness of this variety of options, and not enough spending money to buy every album put out by every artist one might want to listen to. This has caused a swing back toward a singles-oriented market (as opposed to the album-market), so some of the numbers you see about record sales plummeting also reflect this shift. Individual MP3 downloads (legitimate sales via iTunes, etc.) are steadily increasing.

Another thing contributing to musicians not making money is that because of the huge mass of musicians competing for shows, clubs are able to get away without paying bands - even when the club makes money off the show - because if you demand money, there's always somebody the club can book cheaper. It's nothing to do with downloads, although technology does play some role in why everybody on earth can be in a band these days.

Meanwhile... there's nothing being said about the evils of internet piracy that the entertainment industry didn't say about cassette recorders, VCRs, and CD-Rs. I think the industry failed to respond quickly enough to a major cultural paradigm shift caused by technological advancement, and has been floundering ever since.

I'm a musician. I want to get paid. That doesn't change the reality of the situation. The entire game has changed. Record stores are going out of business, people don't buy CDs anymore in favor of MP3s, some people don't buy music at all in favor of piracy and that will never go away, it's hard to get paid to play a show, and in case no one else noticed yet THERE'S A HUGE RECESSION GOING ON and people don't have as much disposable income as they did a few years ago. It's pretty unrealistic to think that our economy will always support a massive ever-expanding high-budget entertainment industry just because it has thusfar managed to do so since the mid-70s. Let's be honest with ourselves. How many artists were really making a living playing pop music before the era when the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac blew up, how many units were they actually shifting, and how long did their careers generally last?

Piracy isn't some evil thing that's single-handedly killing music. It's just one of many manifestations of a great big weirdness that's been creeping over America for the last few years. There's no use griping about it because it will never go away, only change forms. The key to survival is accepting the reality of the situation, analyzing the position you now find yourself in, and devising a new plan for moving forward. The status quo has shifted. And now for something completely different...

[percussion boy]

The widespread looting of recordings was the direct result of the actions of huge corporate enablers. Recording artists are being held hostage while Wall Street has successfully lobbied to immunize the "tech industry" from being subject to co-operation with any part of copyright enforcement if it is related to entertainment. You can get a court order to block kiddy-porn in a heartbeat but everybody's "privacy and free speech rights" are being violated when it'is blocking the looting of entertainment.

When you say this, I think of Apple basically profiting off pirate mp3s by selling hardware to listen to them (I-pod).

Is that what you're talking about, though?

[Scodiddly]

Just as a reminder - we've had this relatively short (as in "short in the history of music") period where technology appeared that made it possible to sell copies of performances. Now technology is here where anybody can make copies of copies.

We're back where we were in the sheet-music era, basically. In my mind that's not a bad thing, because folks *are* interested in learning how to play music themselves. Hence the glut of bands.

[Bob Olhsson]

...When you say this, I think of Apple basically profiting off pirate mp3s by selling hardware to listen to them (I-pod).

Is that what you're talking about, though?

I'm talking about what the personal computer industry called "convergence" which was to create a market for ever newer, more powerful technology as a compelling entertainment medium since nobody needed a more powerful word processor.

Software is what sells all hardware. Nobody would have bought an i-pod if they needed to then buy all of the music to listen to with it. The same had been true of computer software. It is an entire industry based upon a business model of playing fast and loose with other people's intellectual property. You need look no further than Jobs simply appropriating the Beatles' very clever corporate trademark and then flipping them off with "sue me if you don't like it" when the Beatles objected.

What is very unfortunate is that the music industry didn't recognize they were actually fighting Wall Street vulture capitalists and not student hackers before several laws critical to enforcement had slipped unnoticed through the Congress and some very important court battles had been lost. Contrary to all of the PR spin, the music business is and has very much been the David in this battle with a Wall Street Goliath.

[Int'l Feel]

My hope is that services like Spotify will bring people back to paying for music. And maybe that's naive of me to say, but that program has brought a lot of people I know away from pirating.

Personally, I signed up for premium because I thought it was worth it. And when I find an artist I really like, I go out and buy their record, because I want the physical thing in my hands, flipping through the liner notes once I've dropped the needle.

I don't know. That's just me.

[Bob Olhsson]

...I don't know. That's just me.

No that's the true music fan's experience of an album!

I think live DJs and live music performances are what could reinvigorate music as a business. Live broadcasts and amusement park dance pavilions are what built swing.
Live DJs playing the biggest selling records at the local stores is what built rock and roll. The folks who bought the records danced to them. Album sales were all about great quality and spectacular packaging at the beginning. Then too many people got greedy during the '80s and left the music fans behind with the LP.

Spotify by virtue of its automation and total lack of timely human engagement is still background music. I think we're at a strange combination of 1930 and 1950.

[Gregg Juke]

Bob, good to see you around here.

People, listen up!

GJ

[Jitters]

What GJ said!Thanks for joining the conversation here Bob.

[AnalogousGumdropDecoder]

...When you say this, I think of Apple basically profiting off pirate mp3s by selling hardware to listen to them (I-pod).

Is that what you're talking about, though?

I'm talking about what the personal computer industry called "convergence" which was to create a market for ever newer, more powerful technology as a compelling entertainment medium since nobody needed a more powerful word processor.

Software is what sells all hardware. Nobody would have bought an i-pod if they needed to then buy all of the music to listen to with it. The same had been true of computer software. It is an entire industry based upon a business model of playing fast and loose with other people's intellectual property. You need look no further than Jobs simply appropriating the Beatles' very clever corporate trademark and then flipping them off with "sue me if you don't like it" when the Beatles objected.

What is very unfortunate is that the music industry didn't recognize they were actually fighting Wall Street vulture capitalists and not student hackers before several laws critical to enforcement had slipped unnoticed through the Congress and some very important court battles had been lost. Contrary to all of the PR spin, the music business is and has very much been the David in this battle with a Wall Street Goliath.

The music industry for -the most part- is a subset of Goliath, and the parent companies of the major record labels/movie studios/comic publishers/video game manufacturers who are up in arms about piracy (Warner, Disney, Universal, Microsoft, CBS, etc.) played a huge hand in distributing file sharing software like (Limewire, Kazaa, Bit Torrent, etc.) and teaching people how to use it to pirate entertainment. Some of those companies even had their own branded versions of popular file sharing programs, sometimes via subsidiaries like AOL or CNET. iTunes and Spotify are steps in the right direction, but I was hearing the other day about Spotify paying very minuscule royalty rates.

[chris harris]

Spotify has helped me circumvent the same old payola bullshit that's always tainted the "arbiters", be they DJs or bloggers. I can find out what my friends and peers are actually listening to, rather than what we're all told by paid publicists that we should be listening to. It's a much more real human interaction.

[percussion boy]

...When you say this, I think of Apple basically profiting off pirate mp3s by selling hardware to listen to them (I-pod).

Is that what you're talking about, though?

I'm talking about what the personal computer industry called "convergence" which was to create a market for ever newer, more powerful technology as a compelling entertainment medium since nobody needed a more powerful word processor.

Software is what sells all hardware. Nobody would have bought an i-pod if they needed to then buy all of the music to listen to with it. The same had been true of computer software. It is an entire industry based upon a business model of playing fast and loose with other people's intellectual property. You need look no further than Jobs simply appropriating the Beatles' very clever corporate trademark and then flipping them off with "sue me if you don't like it" when the Beatles objected.

What is very unfortunate is that the music industry didn't recognize they were actually fighting Wall Street vulture capitalists and not student hackers before several laws critical to enforcement had slipped unnoticed through the Congress and some very important court battles had been lost. Contrary to all of the PR spin, the music business is and has very much been the David in this battle with a Wall Street Goliath.

Okay, understood.

And as others have said -- thanks for stopping by.

[xrt99]

Some good discussion. As a 28 year old musician/consumer I've become an adult in this climate and many people are correct when you say that the average person in my generation believes they are 'entitled' to entertainment.

The way to win us (using this term loosely) back is to provide a service that is WORTH it - we live in an era where comparing pricing and VALUE is available at our fingertips. Unfortunately so is an mp3. So what could pry the average user away from relentlessly downloading music?

Our generation places value on things that happen easily, cheaply, and efficiently (direct contrast to the last page of issue 87!) Access based services that can make things easier and quicker. Cheap? To anyone that bought a Pearl Jam album in the mid 90's, of course they are! But try telling that to a 20 year old kid.

I fully believe Spotify Premium is on the right track. For $10 a month I can get access to their entire library wherever I am. The challenge is getting the rest of my generation to realize that this is the best method to consume music, and that there is extreme value in relation to whatever else is out there.