Ideas for a Recording Industry Alternative? 497
icewalker asks: "There has been a lot of news (here, here, and here) lately about music, copy protection, and other related issues. What I find interesting is that there are literally thousands of free bands out there that are more than worthy of listening too. Free as in they have not sold their souls (not to mention music rights) away to the devils of the music industry. But how does one get to listen to these pioneers of music? The solution could be sites like mp3.com (until the mp3 royalties are forced). But what people want is a locals only site that streams, guess what, the music from free local bands only. Not just for your community but local bands from all over the US (and the world). We need a site that collects these bands and we need a streamer that plays them. No CARP royalty problems since these bands are unsigned and own the music themselves. Make it so that the artists can hopefully sell their own CD's or single songs from the same site. Anyway, mix and bake at multiple bit rates and you have a solution to the copy protected CD (I haven't bought one yet from an Indie Band). The big guys go down because they can't compete with free, better than great music on the web with a low cost distribution. So, where is this utopia? Oh! And dump the necessary registration required to listen (are you listening mp3.com?)."
What a great idea (Score:3, Insightful)
What are you talking about? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't have it both ways. Local bands, or somewhere else's local band? Every band is local somewhere.
At any rate, mp3.com had for years - and I presume they still have - charts and artist lists sorted by region, so that you can just listen to "local" bands. They already tried exactly what you're talking about.
We need a site that collects these bands and we need a streamer that plays them. No CARP royalty problems since these bands are unsigned and own the music themselves. Make it so that the artists can hopefully sell their own CD's or single songs from the same site.
Um, mp3.com for years. Have you even looked at it?
The big guys go down because they can't compete with free, better than great music on the web with a low cost distribution. So, where is this utopia?
Um, did you cut and paste that from mp3.com's prospectus from a few years back? It's all been said (and done) before. And look where it got them, and their share price.
Oh! And dump the necessary registration required to listen (are you listening mp3.com?).
Sheesh, just make up a fake email address and you're done in 10 seconds.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see how this ill-informed "idea" made it to slashdot.
All this is payed for...how? (Score:5, Insightful)
There were a bunch of dot-bombs with this idea, and they all burned through their funding without ever having a hope of turning a profit.
How am I going to know if I like a band's music enough to buy the whole CD? I gotta download the songs and listen them to a while before I'm gonna be willing to plunk down my hard earned cash and buy their product. If they're gonna give their music away, they just need to use the existing P2P networks, not create a new one.
Re:What a great idea (Score:3, Insightful)
If only there weren't as many bad indie bands as there are bad mainstream bands.
Sturgeon's Law strikes again.
Myopia and costs make this silly (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just too damn funny. Two points: One, you are suffering from intellectural myopia. Just because that's what YOU want doesn't mean that's "what people want". If people wanted local bands they would go to their shows and buy their records more.
Point two, just how would a free (my assumption) site that streamed "local" music to the global masses pay for all the hardware, bandwidth, software, etc. necessary to do so effectively? Some possible answers are:
Advertising? The primary target advertisers would be media firms who would obviouslly not want to help such an effort. Kil that idea.
Share of CD sales? When a band gets popular, guess what, they'll jump to a major label with a semi-reasonable contract (reasonable because the band has already proven they can sell albums). Thus we're starved of revenues again.
Share of promo item sales? Potentially lucritive, but you've got to deal with a whole raft of fullfilment and billing problems. In short, costs will rise dramatically and you need a real company to do this.
Donations? Bwhahahaha
Finally, you do know this was exactly mp3.com's dream, don't you?
Cheers,
Rob
How about getting out? (Score:2, Insightful)
You can find the most wonderful music, plus you can normally buy a tape or cd from the band directly and completely cut out the middle man......
Memorabilia and Concerts (Score:3, Insightful)
Be creative. Brand the bands name. Sell the name not the music. Kids pay for what they think is cool fashion.
Good Lord! Music as... as... BLOGS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, while I appreciate all the nobility and elegance inherent in the "Bring the Music to the People" movement, I've got, like, zero interest in hearing the local bands from Podunk. When they're good enough to get booked in and play the clubs in NYC and LA, they'll have my attention.
A recording industry contract was certainly no guarantee of quality, but I do want to see the bar raised a little higher than a band's mere capacity to digitize a song and get it onto a website.
Or, if all this local music DOES get on the web, maybe there's an opening for some kind of meta-filter site that will keep me from having to sift my way through the latest from NeedleDick & the Buttfuckers in search of a musical nugget worth my time.
Sorry. You actively collect music for over 30 years, you get a little cynical...
Re:sounds nice, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Independent artists tend to be extremely lo-fi, very unpolished, and more often than not, just plain unoriginal.
Meshuggah, Throwing Muses/Kristin Hersh, King Crimson, Ornette Coleman, Ani Difranco, Dead Kennedys...
Re:Anti PC campaigns (Score:2, Insightful)
compared to that, ogg is quite popular, and getting more popular all the time
It just won't work (Score:1, Insightful)
We need some cover boys & girls (Score:2, Insightful)
Where's the stream? (Score:2, Insightful)
Checking mylocalbands.com, I couldn't find a link to a stream.
I have to say, a streaming high-bandwidth ogg/mp3 stream is something I'm really looking for as an alternative to the shit playing on the big stations. I've been listening to a lot of college radio stations online that fulfill this purpose, but I'd like to see a bank of "free" and open music.
Mp3.com is nice for grabbing music to burn on CDs for long trips and stuff, but their registration system is a pain in the ass and pretty much makes them too much of a hassle to bother with regularly.
The other thing, which has been said, but I think could be further talked about, is that a good portion of unsigned bands SUCK. What may be needed is some kind of moderation system to promote good unsigned bands, in order to minimize the signal to crap ratio for the casual listener.
Also, it would be cool to have a GPL-type license for releasing music that insures the music will always be free. (Does such a thing exist?) That way, good bands that do turn to the dark side will not snatch their music out of the hands of the fans that helped get them to the enviable position of being fucked by the recording industry.
The agency problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course media companies, as agents, try to extract as much rent as possible from their principals -- the consumers. They try to shape our tastes to easily, cheaply copied versions of artists they know consumers already like. They try to extract as much as possible out of their existing set of artists and invest as little as possible in discovering new talent. This is just the typical kind of agency cost you have in any principal-agent relationship.
If the market were properly competitive, with a sufficient number of media companies all competing hard with each other for the attention/money of the consumers, then we'd have an optimal balance of filtering and discovering done by the media companies, and consumers would have good, reasonably priced music from interesting artists satisfying all kinds of tastes without having to invest in discovery for themselves. The problem is that I think we have a few media companies that are too large, so that the agency problem is a big deal. The media companies can afford to shirk and persist in being complacent and feed us recycled garbage over and over again simply because there are so few of them and they dominate distribution.
If we really want to solve the problem, a site offering lots of free indie music will not do the job. We need to find agents as alternatives to the media companies who can perform this filtering function and discover good talent for the consumers who can't afford to do the search themselves. That requires a trust relationship to be built up between the agents and the consumers (so we'll respect their choices), and a pay structure to provide incentive, and sufficient competition to keep the agents honest. I think that's a much harder problem and one that may not be solved by technological means alone.
Re:sounds nice, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
P2P is better than Sites. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with sites is that sites have to be paid for. Worse, the more effective a site is at getting its message out, the more expensive it is to maintain. More hits generally means more headaches.
Peer-to-peer networks have proven their ability to share popular music efficiently. They've also proven that they generate sales by encouraging people to download and listen to bands whose songs they otherwise might not have heard.
The one element that's missing in a P2P network, that's a big part of what makes a site like MP3.com valuable, is the ability for listeners to rank and categorize music they've heard, to allow others to get recommendations.
This would be the application that would benefit artists the most, because -- for one thing -- you wouldn't have to just be limited to your own local talent. You could listen to ANYONE's unsigned talent. You could get peer recommendations. And the like. And there's no centralized server to be bought out and controlled by the RIAA. Rankings can remove the effect of poorly-encoded MP3's, and falsely made MP3's.
I hate to answer the question with another question, but I'm finished with monolithic sites; even my friend who is one of the Top 50 bands on MP3.com doesn't make nearly enough money to even quit his day job; if a site can't help the successful musicians, how can it help lesser-known bands?
So the question is -- can P2P file-sharing be a better way, and if so, how?
Why it happened... (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with mp3.com (one of them anyway) is that they host the music, so they have to make some money somehow to offset the bandwidth costs. A site that linked to the bands' websites could be cheap and simple and maybe offset the hosting costs through ad or membership revenue (like
What would make this perfect though is some kind of rating system, maybe like Amazon's. Listeners could rate albums (or songs), so someone just visiting the site would have a better chance of finding something they really liked.
Well, hell. I'm not one to sit around whining. Send me (jcsehakatyahoodotcom), or reply to this post with, links of bands you like that let people download at least one complete album of theirs for free. It's gotta be at least a complete album because averyone and their mother gives away sample songs; look how many free downloads there are on Amazon. Include a short description of their style. I'll make a page that lists it all (in addition to open-source bands), and I'll see what I can do about making a rating system. Any help on that would be appreciated. Or just respond to this post saying it's a bad idea or someone else is already doing it and I shouldn't bother.
Re:Anti PC campaigns (Score:3, Insightful)
You get the picture.
Shortly Linux/ogg will be one of the few platforms on which you will be able to play 'free' music.
Good luck trying to play an 'untrusted' mp3 on a palladium-enabled windows computer.
MyAss (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where's the stream? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gift economy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a statement for you: In my humble opinion micropayments are the way forward.
Why? Firstly, music is now effectively a post-scarcity commodity. That means it has a replication cost of zero, which also means it's effectively impossible to charge for it. Oops, that's the RIAAs business model down the tubes, hence the fact that they are trying to reintroduce scarcity back into music with DRM.
If we assume they fail however (and economics says they will) then what comes next? I say the ability to send small amounts of money easily and quickly to artists. I hear new music all the time, mostly off the radio. When I hear a track, I don't want to have to track down the album or (more often, for trance) single and buy it on CD, wait for the CD to arrive and then rip it, when I can just press a button and have it available right there and then. I want to be able to do this, but I also want those artists to be rewarded so they continue to make kickass tracks.
If I can send a few euros to my favourite artists, I'm happy. But it's got to be easy. Let's address a few common complaints against this system:
1) Nobody will pay. - there will be a balance between people who pay and people who don't. The system itself will find this equilibrium. At first yeah, I expect some artists will croak because it's new and people don't understand that "you, yes YOU" have to pay up to let them continue. Once there have been a few high profile failures, people would get the idea. We pay with gifts to street performers because it's traditional and a part of our culture - hopefully music tipping would become the same.
2) Artists could not make a living from it. I think they could. It depends on how long the system takes to scale up of course. To start with, perhaps artists could not make a living from it. It might take years, decades even! Look at free software. I think people, the majority of people, could be supported writing free software, by doing contract work (you want this feature, pay me and i'll write it for you) and variations. But Linux is not yet at the point where the market for that is big enough. It would be the same for music.
3) It's not technically possible. No, not yet, that's why I'm working on Genio/PingID/SourceID/whatever-the-hell-it-is-toda y: at pingid.org - digital identity is necessary to allow for low overhead financial transactions imho. It's the first step. Bandwidth is fairly simple, you can use p2p techniques or IP Multicast when it finally arrives to allieviate those issues. And of course such an economy would be decentralised anyway.
4) Who will filter out the dross. As one poster (rightly) pointed out above, quite a lot of unsigned music is rubbish. The record companies do one thing, and that's choose the best of the independant artists. Yes, they manufacture artists as well, but my point is that we need a way of filtering the wheat from the chaff. My solution to this is the reviewer heirarchy - people review tracks that enter the system in their particular musical taste. Reviewers on the next tier up read those reviews, choose the most promising tracks, and choose them, then reviewers above them do the same etc, and you end up with the top 40 of the gift economy.
I think it can work. But I don't have time to start, and it would take years to build it up. But now surely must be the right moment in history to attempt it.
It's the business model, stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
I would pay good money for a service that consistently recommended decent new music. I'm willing to set the bar fairly low too. It seems like all the services (remember firefly? the original musicnet that mailed out CDs? I can't even find links for these people anymore) that purported to do this went out of business before I could even try to give them money. Contrast this with the MP3.com experience which, although you may find great stuff, it's a ton of work to do. This is an inherently personal service and trust has a lot to do with it.
There are a few record companies out there, such as Aware Records [awarerecords.com] (John Mayer, Train), and Windham Hill [windham.com] that consistently produce good new music I like, such that I'm willing bet on their compilation CDs. There are a few radio stations (like 105.9 the X [wxdx.com]) that have decent new music shows I'm willing to listen to.
The bottom line is that something like this has got to happen but it's a tricky problem and no one has yet found the right business model. Please, come up with one, I'll line up to send you money.
How about a more fully developed idea... (Score:2, Insightful)
Web sites alone are not going to cut it. PressPlay and numerous others have proved that. P2P can help, but its still only part of the answer. Once a band has had some exposure, they need a distribution channel, something that the current economics make next to impossible without the RIAA.
You want to change the economics of the music business, then come up with an easy to use station (something about the size of an arcade game) that will let a user insert there credit card, brows and sample music from its catalog, pick the album or song compilation they want, burn the CD, PROFESSIONALLY print the CD's label on the CD, print the insert and CD case, assemble it all and shrink wrap it, handing it to the customer in just a few minutes.
Now, if you ever make it this far, you still have to convince the music stores to give up floor space for this thing, get them to replenish the parts (CD's, ink, cases, inserts, CD covers, etc), the list goes on and on. Oh, and make sure you make it VERY easy for the end user AND for the store's $6 and hour stock boy to fix the 'minor problems' that will come up.
Now, you've gotten this far. You have built this widget, you spent the money to get it into stores. You signed up a large number of bands to put out music through this thing, hey, maybe you even sign a few big names, and by some miracle you have kept the price per CD down to under $10 while still making a profit for every one. You were smart enough to have built in a technical method of in-store advertising, removing much of the ongoing costs, and are now a minor force in the music business. If you get this far, you may have shot of changing the music world, but then, how long before investors start putting pressure on you to join the RIAA and become just like they are?
Re:sounds nice, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I listen to a couple good college stations in my area (college stations vary, of course-- some are horrible): KFJC 89.7 and KZSU 90.1 in the Bay Area. The DJs are passionate about the music they listen to, and most of them tend to play really, really good music that you'll never hear on a mainstream station.
Can't dance to it? Bullshit-- local DJs come down and spin all sorts of supremely danceable tracks several times a week. Extremely lo-fi? Unpolished? Hardly-- lots of these bands have been around for a while, and use some pretty solid studios to record in. This isn't the straight-ahead indie garage rock your pappy used to listen to.
The truth of the matter is that mainstream radio today is so narrow, there's a huge range of artists that don't get any major play (and many not on major labels) that have talent, experience, and dedication. In addition to the totally indie artists, there's all the other great music that doesn't get much play here-- international stuff, old stuff, etc.. Since those types don't get any mainstream radio play, the owners might be willing to allow free webcast of it just to get interest back. Hell, when's the last time you heard your local station playing Sun Ra?
Existing indie web radio stations (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The agency problem (Score:3, Insightful)
This idea is right on, imho. Gnutella and its progeny [slashdot.org] need to do a lot more to enable collaborative filtering and ratings - of media and nodes, as well as groups and producers.
P2P could be so much more than efficient ''pr0n & britney'' distribution... more even than the ''universal digital library'' that first Napster and now Kazaa have promised... but it has to get much smarter before that will happen. I feel like Freenet [freenetproject.org], by tackling the much more difficult problem of anonymous p2p, has been confronting these issues for longer, and by implementing such "smarter network" features may gain a leg up on the competition (and the last shall be first)... I don't know why the commercial Gnutella folks [limewire.com] aren't setting the pace in this area (instead of bulking up on, no kidding, their chat and music capabilities), but really, they're not.
-renard
Why not do it HERE? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not use what we have here: 250,000 readers, 2 or 3 posters ;) and many countries and genres represented.
We don't need to serve the mp3s themselves, just link to an exciting artist that isn't signed. (No new Madonna songs, IOW. She's already got enough exposure.)
Perhaps have an artist interview once a month or more), music software reviews(mp3 and recording), some sort of voting on a /. top ten, whatever.
As long as we don't have any mp3s here, there shouldn't be any bandwidth/legal problems.
Of course - the flag icon still isn't fixed (even after I sent one in) so maybe this will fall on deaf ears. (Pun intended.)
Re:Who pays the bills? (Score:3, Insightful)
That gives all of the control to the artist, who could jump record companies at any time, despite the "90 days notice" thing.
A necessary qualifier would be "You agree not to compete with us in any markets that we are actively pursuing."
Plus, it'd be a good idea if albums give a mass-product discount, allowing the artist to make and sell songs that don't have pop appeal, but satisfy their creativity. Locking songs to albums isn't good, but making the album useless isn't either.
Why the current model is hard to kill (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the other half of the business that often gets overlooked, and yet it's the toughest nut to crack. The record companies have a stanglehold on the radio industry, with the exception of college or publicly funded stations. No one will buy your album if they don't even know you exist - this argument is one of the more powerful that the record execs will use against you, citing hundreds of thousands of dollars spent in advertising, promotional materials, and incentives to the broadcasting industry and record stores which litter our malls and plazas.
The vast majority of music buying Americans (I can't speak for the rest of the world but I'll assume it's the same) only learn or hear of new music and new bands via the radio. Sure, those of us
I'm not trying to say that the internet distribution model is without hope, I'm only trying to point out that it's going to be difficult to move away from the traditional one.
One other reason the traditional model persists: a number of musicians still have their heads full of rockstar dreams. The visions of limosines, partying, girls, booze, drugs, and cash fuel their greed and they'll wind up selling their souls every time. Curious ethical question this poses, for who is truly to blame when someone sells their soul to the Devil for personal gain ? The Devil, or the seller ? I'd say both. For the few that actually hit the very top, the financial rewards are currently unmatched by any other music business model.
Being a musician myself, my only goals are to finish the construction of my little home recording studio, master my DAW, burn a couple CDs of my original material, put 'em up on a website, and keep the publishing rights to myself. If I don't sell a thing, I don't really care - I just want to get my songs done before I die someday.
As a Musician (Score:3, Insightful)
If you were a musicain you generally accepted the notion that in order to have both a quality of product and any hope of national exposure that you (and your band) had to get "signed" by a major label. The major labels would "front" the band the money to do such things as buy descent equipment, pay for a modicum of living expenses, and most importantly -- pay to have the studio time, the technicians, and master work produced (and remember that most major labels had all of this and more in-house). If it was donned by the Reps that the product had at least some potential then it went to press and a more lucrative contract was drawn up (but not necessarily). Mind you that most common contracts gave the band (or single musicain) about 2 to 3 points (as in percentage) for every thing that made a profit. This was common for new bands (if you became popular you of course were in a position to barter the percentage, especially at renewal time). Well, say your album goes gold and you sell 100K+ albums, this is where you profits are made, and the tours are made to pay back the expense of the studio, etc.. (e.g. I remember RUSH during the G under P tour - Dallas/Fortworth put them over the top at the tour halfway point= lots of extra profit). So, in order to get anywhere you absolutely needed the "major labels" to really get the push (though many small labels were a starting point - the big guys made it happen). Therefore, It was the RIAA's way or the highway.
Fast foward to today. Technology such as can be bought at any descent music store and a descent computer with the right software and "who needs the major labels to produce a quality of product"? You've just save yourself a step and reduced you costs. But you still need marketing/advertising, distribution, and air time. Oops, back to the major label? Not anymore! Gee, this thing called the internet is great for people to get exposure. And hey I know a guy that builds "rad" websites! And the local recording studio will master and print/press CDs of about 1000 for X amount of money (which is considerably less then anything the Labels would offer you or lead you to believe even existed). So, now there's these web sites like MP3.com, and this.com and that.com that will let us post/upload some of your stuff. And, they include a link to our website which tell's them how to get a (professional quality) CD of your music. Ya, sum slug will buy the CD and then copy the tracks to his/her download directory and then we possibly loss potential revenue. But alot of people are buying the CD as well and were making money --- Without The Need For the RIAA Machine! Now take into account some of the ideas posted in this forum and perhaps you might, just might come to the conclusion that I see. The RIAA is most definately worried about piracy, but more over they're really worried about being cut out, circumvented, displaced, blah, blah...
So, how to cope with this? Make it impossible to play any media that doesn't have the right code/authorization embedding in it and then put this on the hardware side of all those devices that play any sort of media. Therefore any cdrom, DVD, etc... won't play if the authorization stuff isn't on the disk -- it's not authenticated and just spins down. Ya. this stuff prevents pirated ware but also forces the RIAA's "it's our way or the highway" paradigm on everyone. The musician, the consumer, the OEM's etc...
This is to me what DRM is all about. Not protecting my rights as a musician or a music listener. But forcing me to adhere to a source and product that some corporation or conglomurate has decided is the only one I'm allowed to use.
If my band sucks then the RIAA will decide, not the consumer, because the RIAA has everything figured out,... what I'll wear, what my personal bio will read like, how my hair looks, and the type of music I play. If I suck but have the right look the RIAA's machine will take care of that and I'm still a star. So much good music is obscured because the RIAA and it's label can't quite figure out which market category it fits into and I have had a few excellent musicains friends get signed and shelved (which is a way to get a band out of circulation - sign them and then do nothing - they die on the vine). I'm tired of the RIAA decide what I do and don't like, and the internet and all the present day technology makes it possible for the musician to connect directly with any potential audience -- which is exactly what the RIAA and the Major Labels don't want, otherwise they'll become obsolete and they know it!
Re:Where's the stream? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would see this as putting in a one time payment of maybe $20 for a share in a non-profit corporation devoted to establishing permanent free bandwidth services. The majority of votes would determine whose 'free' service would see the light of day first. This would only take you approx. 50,000 participants to get your first free service. That seems difficult but not impossible. Surely there are more than 50,000 people who want to ensure that there is no RIAA hegemony? But beyond that, money that is donated before reaching 50k will accumulate interest and reduce the ultimate number of members needed.
Then again, with bandwidth prices likely to be on a long-term slide, as time goes on, the same money is likely to give greater and greater bandwidth.
So what are you waiting for? (Score:2, Insightful)
No reg?! (Score:1, Insightful)
> listen
Don't like the reg, don't go to the site. Wankers.
Ok, but what now? (Score:2, Insightful)
The best way to compete is not to compete... (Score:3, Insightful)
1) If you write music NEVER sell your publishing (the typial deal is 50%)
2) If your goal is to be a "Rock Star" then forget it. You're playing music for the wrong reasons.(try acting, at least you get paid)
3) Remember that music is a business too, treat it as such.(or at least get an attorney and an accountant)
4) Concentrate on each sale rather than selling a million or two and gold records. There are many people with gold records pushing brooms in Las Vegas.
5) If you're good, you will come to the attention of labels, get a lawyer who is NOT an entertainemt attorney (Not beholding to anyone) to look at the contracts. Boilerplate contracts amount to virtually indentured servitude. If they think you are worth persuing don't let them have publishing (a common practice these days)change your look or the music you want to play. (artistic control)Take a look at this contract critique [futureofmusic.org].
6) Get your music out there. There are plenty of free websites like DMusic.Com [dmusic.com] that offer artists a free page to let people discover your music, link to your website, sell your cd, etc. I recently ran across an artist who has their music on over 100 free websites and has TURNED DOWN a major label contract.(and is happy she did, all the money she earns is hers)
7) When not everyone else is taking their cut before you get yours, you don't need to sell millions of CDs to make a damned decent living.
Another point about math (Score:3, Insightful)
The solution is evolving now (Score:3, Insightful)
The watershed moment will come when somebody hits the bigtime through web exposure alone, and is playing huge venues and making tons of money without a recording contract. Of course, hardly any musicians will ever get there, just like hardly any do now. But the moment it becomes reality, the music industry will no longer have a monopoly on the fame-and-fortune carrot on a stick.
It's not as though every undiscovered band is a great band. Let's face it, most of them are worse than typical top 40 bands. But as the online community becomes more significant and people are able to find the good stuff on their own, the market for CDs will shrink. Paid music will become a minor distribution channel, and the record companies will probably claw each other to bits fighting over the scraps.
Popcorn anyone?
Re:Where's the stream? (Score:4, Insightful)
Musicians Associations (Score:3, Insightful)
The Strength of the Wolf is the Pack;
and the Strength of the Pack is the Wolf.
(Rudyard Kipling)
- copyright exists to ensure musicians get paid.
- the other side is that once an artist produces something,
it goes beyond them and many benefit.
- between consumers and producers now stands record companies
- but paying artists is only a step on the way to gaining profit.
in practice, many musicians (who play instruments) starve, while
marketing bimbos (spice girls) thrive - this is wrong.
- a fundemental qualitative difference between physical and
electronic goods is - if i have an apple and give you an apple,
i no longer have an apple; but if i have an idea and give you an idea,
we BOTH have an idea. therefore you cannot treat electronic things as
if they were actually physical goods, because they aren't!
- still, you must compensate producers of the original bits.
so what to do?
> MUSICIANS ASSOCIATIONS:
- the physical distributors and merchandisers pay into the musician's
pool that pays and feeds the musicians.
- the musicians pool distributes it equitably among its active producers.
- from the pool comes more new music. which is given away for free.
unlimited digital copies for everyone, never again a dime paid for
anything that's just DATA.
- distributors get fresh music, and sell and package more STUFF.
- distributors pay back a percentage of sales back into the pool.
- so it comes back and feeds itelf (the most important part).
> RESULTS:
- so all software is free - you get mindshare from it.
- but if you make a physical whose value lies on the free music on it,
then a percentage goes back.
- but the artist is not paid direct - it goes to the musician's pool,
which doles out shares each month by percentage of overall downloads
from a service such as Napster.
> SOME QUESTIONS ANSWERED:
Q: won't physical distribution go away
when we move to total digital distribution?
A: i do not believe the vision that sales of physical goods will diminish
towards zero and be replaced entirely by digital distribution.
as digital distribution goes up, the value-added of merchandising
of 'physical' stuff based around the content will go up. SOMETHING
THAT IS PHYSICAL IS SCARCE, and its value (unlike digital) lies in
that not everyone can have it. thus, collectors will pay a premium
to have something TANGIBLE and official from the band over just a
download of the song.
when anyone can get a copy of a song downloaded for free,
then the merchandisers will 'add value' to the product through
unique packaging, and by inventing desirable things to provide
in addition to 'just the data'. for example:
- you get a printed booklet and poster with your CD - looks nicer
than if you burn it yourself.
- you have all sorts of merchandise: books, fanzines, t-shirts,
it is up to the ingenuity of the merchandisers to make money
off of this stuff - and when they do - a percentage (like a sales tax)
goes back to the musician's pool, and gets divided up by percentage of
P2P (or insert your service here) downloads that month.
- i can download a copy of any of shakespeare's works TODAY FOR FREE
from PROJECT GUTENBURG - but i still go out to amazon to order a
copy. why? i COULD download it and print it myself on my inkjet
printer, but it would cost me more to download and print then to buy
a copy that's already nicely packaged by a bookseller. in essence:
the 'data' of the book is free, but i'm paying for more than just
the content, i'm also paying for the convenience (over printing on
my own inkjet), and the PRESENTATION.
> Economic Basis for Musician's Associations:
see: http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner/Articles/S
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