Record companies going too far?

[silentpaul]

Here we go again... (http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/3588642.html)

[classicgrrl]

They sue dead people. [/whispered]

[joebob]

chockablock

[Patas]

chockablock
yeah, seriously.

[Dirk]

I really have no problem with this. Everyone knows if you download music from the RIAA via P2P service, you are doing so illegally and can be sued for it. It's th chance you take when you do it, and if you do it you should be prepared to accept the consequences. He downloaded music he didn't own and then distributed the music to other people, so the RIAA has every right to go after him.

[george]

I really have no problem with this. Everyone knows if you download music from the RIAA via P2P service, you are doing so illegally and can be sued for it. It's th chance you take when you do it, and if you do it you should be prepared to accept the consequences. He downloaded music he didn't own and then distributed the music to other people, so the RIAA has every right to go after him.


Hear hear.

[Duemellon]

Downloading intellectual property without authority is a crime.

Violating the intent of copyright/patent laws by amending the word of the law is a violation of the average civilians' freedom.

The big problems with all this began when businesses trumped the laws regarding patent/intellectual right holdings by extending them, using the gray-areas, & outright ignoring them. Disney's Bambi should have been public domain years ago, but still, they own it. From lifesaving drugs to Louie Louie, the length of exclusivity for intellectual property is interminable. Furthermore, the breadth to which it covers is disheartening.

When someone in the US "patents" a beat, the world will have to stop using drums.

[Dirk]

You're confusing patents and copyrights. Drugs are patented. This is for a specific length of time (7 years I believe) and then they can be copied (ie generics).

Copyright is what applies to music. Currently it is the life of the author plus 70 years. While I certainly believe this is too long, they aren't as much too blame as the congress. There is nothing businesses can do except ask congress too extend it, which they have done. I can't blame the companies, as it is in their best interest to extend it, I blame the congress-critters who pass the laws extending it everytime Mickey Mouse comes up.

[classicgrrl]

They still sue dead people.

[Duemellon]

You're confusing patents and copyrights. Drugs are patented. This is for a specific length of time (7 years I believe) and then they can be copied (ie generics).From what I understand the type of item being protected dictates the length of the protection, and the main focus of my point is that nothing is supposed to be protected indefinitely.I can't blame the companies, as it is in their best interest to extend it,...Yet, I still can without much hesitation or thought I'm pointing the finger at the wrong person.

All in all, congress is to blame by patronizing the companies' wishes, but if the companies didn't ask, they wouldn't've gotten it.

[Chespo]

This whole issue seems akin to the people who choose to smoke despite knowing the health risks. (Granted, Big Tobacco hid the truth about the risks for decades, so it's not entirely apples to apples.)
Monday, he wondered: "Why choose me?"Why not you? Who ever told you that's it's perfectly legal and acceptable to download tracks from someplace other than an online music store? Sure, you're being made an example of, but don't act like there's no reason or way you couldn't have legally obtained all those mainstream chart hits. $4.95 spent at the iTunes store would have saved you a lot of trouble.
"Every single person has done this," he saidFar from true in terms of illegal downloading, but probably more or less true on a broader scale. Use the internet at work to Mapquest directions to a party and then use the company's color printer to print out those directions? It's still theft, but we tend to justify it in terms of scale and relative lack of harm.

[classicgrrl]

My problem is while downloading may be morally wrong and illegal, a whole freakin' lot of people are doing it.

you can spend your time and money chasing down dead people alienating and pissing off your once customers and eventually letting your business go into the toilet in a losing fight....or you can spend your time and money working with the software and attempting to find a business model using it to make it work for you.

now take yer pick dammit...

philosophical arguements will not turn you a profit - be pragmatic.

[Duemellon]

or you can spend your time and money working with the software and attempting to find a business model using it to make it work for you.exactly.

People are stealing your stuff? right? What can you do to prevent that?

You can attempt to instill the fear of reprisal (ie: jail them), you can find a way to make your product inoperable without your express permission, or you can develop a positive way to make the theives want to legally own your product instead.

Now there may be different solutions than what I expressed, but still, it's like the movie industry complaining about cell phones. They said, at one point, the reason movie sales have gone down is because people now have cell phones & when they see a movie they think is bad they can instantly tell others on their way to see it not to go.

That's the mentality I heard them use. Instead of making a quality product at a lesser price, they're distraught because more people can find out quickly how bad their product is. As if their best asset was ignorance of how bad their product was.

That's what the recording-copy industry has become. No longer interested in developing a good product at an enticing price to convince consumers they have to go out of their way to enjoy the intended product.

[The Sheck]

If you're downloading stuff from DMB and Norah Jones, you deserve to be caught. :p

There were a couple lawsuits up here a week or so ago and the people being charged were downloading all the hot top 40 stuff. Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani, Nelly Furtado, etc. I'd love to see something about how many people get caught downloading that vs the ones who download Sleater-Kinney, Decemberists, or Elliott Smith. There's obviously a trend there.

I bet most of these people are on PCs, too. Not to make this a Mac/PC thing, but there's more tendency for spyware, etc. to monitor computer usage on PCs at the moment, due to the market size.

The bigger issue IS illegal downloading, yes, but I don't see it ever going away unless you unplug the Internet. Now, the RIAA is targeting overseas users due to all the bad publicity this has generated for them stateside.

I'm not sure if 'quality of music' is the major point as to why people are illegally downloading. That's all relevant to who's listening. I think it's more people can't resist something that's free and easy to use. And like the article says, they fall into this 'everyone else is doing it, so why can't I?' argument that only serves to appease their sense of morality over the issue.

Due is spot-on when he talks about Congress bowing to these giant entertainment corps. Limiting copyright to a specific point of time I think would only encourage creativity.

I read somewhere that James Brown made something like $10 million a year just off rap artists sampling him. So technically, beats are copyrighted already, but just in the larger frame of a song.

[classicgrrl]

There's two ways to look at this actually. Forest and trees. On the tree side, I think everyone knows that it's wrong to steal. As Bill Maher, has said, it's there are only two of the ten commandments that actually translate to a law of some sort and that's one of them. From the perspective of the moral absolutist, someone who downloads music off a peer to peer network is in the wrong.

But then I consider the forest side of this. The suit in question cites what, like 4 songs. Now if you buy those online you are looking at between 79 cents and a dollar per song. So when you examine the damages they are asking, if I were a judge I think I'd be asking whether you can prove enough people acquired that material and passed it to others to bring up that 79 cents up to the thousands they want. It's kind of the equivalent of catching a kid shoplifting a candy bar and then taking his parents' house. I'm sure this is probably even legal/possible in some municipalities but it doesn't necessarily make it right. In the middle ages you used to get hung for stealing food. Maybe we could bring that back. Then they could put it on TV and possibly get some of their money back.

And let's stand back for a second and see who these cries of outrage and loss are coming from. Not even record companies. We used to have record companies, and they were bad enough. Now we have media conglomerates. Look at any record company and they are owned by another company who are owned by another parent company who just merged with another. In the WOXY universe the Indie/Boutique labels are a bit more the norm, but I'm not so sure they take the same kind of downloading hits as the mass marketed stuff. Whenever you see them trot a rep out there to make their pitch for these prosecutions, they always bring up the poor artists. Oh, it's not for us, we're just looking out for our artists. Right. Go back through the history of the recording industry and you will find a trail of people with gold and platinum records who not only didn't make anything, but actually owed their record company money on paper. Which brings us to another type of theft that doesn't get prosecuted so often...

It's called accounting. Ask the guys from Arthur Anderson.

And it's going to get worse because sales are falling off. When sales of something drop like that, you can say it's because of illegal downloads, but let's face it. Only a certain small percentage of the population has the capacity/expertise/time/lack of conscience to do it to any great degree. Sales are off because of that time old capitalist, market driven principle. When the price of a paticular commodity exceeds it's value people will do one of two things. They will refrain from buying it if it is hard to steal and take it if it isn't.

This is not new behavior. Or even unusual behavior. And not even one just displayed by kids. I worked at a place where they used to have a coffee pot. They had an honor system where you were expected to pay for the coffee you took. Supposedly the HR guy took the profit from the coffee and at the end of the month bought donuts with it. Now it wasn't hard to see that for what he wanted for a cup of that paticular type of coffee, and the quantity/quality of the donuts that he was coming up with at the end of the month that there was some serious extra geld left over. So people quit paying. He got pretty upset about this and took out the coffee pot, but you noticed that at the same time he stopped going out to these real expensive lunch spots he had been frequenting.

All human morals are relative, no matter what people will tell you. I'll make an exception for some, like the Amish. They seem to be pretty solid. But for everyone else, the right and wrong tends to get more nebulous as it gets closer to home. Ask any politician. Especially Republicans.

So punish them, but let's keep it in perspective. Maybe we could just get white boards and make them stand in crowded public places writing, "Stealing music is wrong and I won't do it any more," five thousand times with a dunce cap on or something. And leave the multi-thousand dollar fines and jail time for people who do things that really hurt people in a more damaging and immediate way.

Like accountants.


God damn mother fucking brilliant.

get thee a blog...

[DaHood]

God damn mother fucking brilliant.

get thee a blog...
No shit. He's a good read.

[Duemellon]

I'm not sure if 'quality of music' is the major point as to why people are illegally downloading.It's not really clear if this was a direct response to my point, but I wanted to reiterate that I suggest the record companies rethink their product & what they're defending.

Even though visual artists can copyright/protect their work, there is an unreasonable mystique about owning the "original", hand-signed, or limited edition, of one of their works. This means there's less of a concern of theft because those who own an illegal copy will end up wanting something closer to the original anyway.

Heck, someone walking around with a stolen image of your painting on their chest is considered "advertisement"!

But for some reason the paradigm about movies & music are different. I'm sure most people will react with a "WTF mate? u crazy? It's like oranges > apples" but I'm confident there's a creative solution in there which could easily inspire a change in mentality.

That's why I despise the copy industry so much (copy industry: Business models who make most of their money on sales of duplicates, regardless of accuracy or concern of artistic intent). They haven't changed their focus or their means of income, or even want to. They want to maintain their monopoly of dissemination instead of getting into something else.

They're dying. Gonna die. Countdown the years.

[the happy prole]

I'm not sure the mystique about owning an original and paying $200000 for it instead of a print is such a healthy thing for culture. If an artist craps on a canvas and signs it, and people buy it just because the famous artist signed it, is that a good thing?

The thing is, we're not talking about someone copyrighting the concept for a song, or people downloading 50 year old tunes that should be in the public domain. We'r talking about outright, not-even-close-to-the-borderline theft.

It's like Due-- you paint a picture and someone immediately copies it and starts distributing it on t-shirts. Or classic, you right a book and someone immediately steals your ideas. It's not even about the money. In fact, maybe it's because you DON'T want money. You created those works for a purpose, and if you don't have control of it people can corrupt them.

There's really not a easy solution for outright theft. It's not like it's just Hoobastank or Nickelbag getting their stuff stolen. It's the Beatles and the Beach Boys, too. You can't say "You should have just put out better product" because I mean, it's pretty hard for them to do that. You can't say "You need to think creatively and figure out how to not get your stuff stolen" because like Brian Wilson has enough issues as it is. Do you really want him focusing on theft protection instead of music? Sure, they could sign their CD's or draw a little picture but does that really improve the quality of the music?

So the thing is, the record companies ARE responding about the only way they can. If someone's going to steal your stuff, you put better locks on your house (DRM) or you sue the guy that did it. And if that doesn't work, you move. Which is why the only companies that own labels now are entertainment companies and they (and the artists) are increasingly leveraging artist popularity into movies and tv.

If there's a problem with the industry, it's mostly that the labels rip off the artists. If you want the artists to be able to put out their own stuff, you'll probably need even STRONGER protection against copying because they don't have the resources to sue everyone and lobby Congress. The RIAA are sucky hypocrites but the solution to this is not letting intellectual property rights whither. You really have to look past the messenger and see that the actual message is dead on target.

My heart doesn't exactly bleed for the RIAA and their ilk, but if everyone is going to steal stuff and expect the labels to figure out how to get around it, we're all going to get what we deserve.

[yoshomon]

I have nothing against people who steal and generally think stealing, looting, etc are pretty healthy and reasonable responses to living in a world where everything has a price tag on it.

I guess you could argue against stealing and say that it's more "moral" for one to have their life stolen by shitty jobs so that one can pay for things, but something is getting stolen either way.

Also, every single diy band I've ever known is 100% for people downloading their music and oftentimes have a bunch, if not all, of their songs available to download free on their website. If you can't get played on the radio, how else will people hear your music and thus come out to your shows?

[twentyshots]

I have nothing against people who steal and generally think stealing, looting, etc are pretty healthy and reasonable responses to living in a world where everything has a price tag on it.


don't you have any friends who own small businesses?

[yoshomon]

don't you have any friends who own small businesses?

Not that I know of. All of my friends are either unemployed, students, or work retail and service industry jobs.

I'll say this about small businesses: they lack the sophisticated anti-theft technology and techniques of chain stores. A business is a business, and it annoys the fuck out of me that in the minds of some "local businesses" are somehow about critique or expropriation.

[the happy prole]

It's kind of a lame way of stealing even from an anti-capitalist standpoint. You should just make music yourself, or at least support a DIY band that plays shows in your city and gives away their stuff for free. So there's really no need to steal.

From a situationist standpoint, there's a distinction between detournement and theft. If you take a someone's work and sample it, then you've subverted it. But mp3 pirates for the most part aren't any philosophically or artistically different than other consumers of mass culture. It's not even like the act of theft itself is a statement. They're using tools that have been supplied to them.
People are still passive and demanding their fix from the mass media Gods. The fact that they don't pay for it is of little importance.

I'll grant you that in the big picture, any theft is a blow against capitalism and commidityism. Still, the money that's being saved on CD's is just going to get plowed into something equally lame and capitalistic. There's a lot better things people could be doing if we want to free ourselves from capitalism (which most downloaders don't want to do, anyway).

[akip]

i think "record" companies have to continue to try to be more creative in what they're offering with a physical cd---i think there has to be an additional benefit besides just the cover art, which is often uninspired. i did cough up for the libertines s/t 'cause it came with the live dvd (plus it does has a great cover photo). they have to do a better job with packaging, cds as art editions or something.

but i also think that the record companies---and the artists themselves---are dreaming when they think people are suddenly going to purchase large numbers of cds if piracy is eliminated. there's an ongoing flood of new releases, which is great for music junkies, but the downside is it devalues each individual effort. how many physical cds can most people afford? the industry has to go back to understanding that once in a while somebody breaks through and makes a fortune, but most good music is going to a very limited audience. that's usually been the way it's been but somehow expectations of vast riches got inflated. artistic quality's generally a labor of love.

[the happy prole]

The RIAA doesn't understand that, but the music industry does.

Look at the vast amounts of indie music being released nowadays. In the old days, you needed a big label for airplay, distribution, and production facilities. Now it's easier than ever to put out your CD. Plus, I think there's been a simultaneous shift in some people saying "Look, I don't need ten thousand dollar guitars and awesome production. It's okay if there's a few duds on an album. And it's okay if the singer isn't perfect." I think the music industry is actually very healthy right now for those reasons, and what I worry about is that mp3 pirating may undo that.

If you want the artist to have more power vis a vis their record label, they need to have something to negotiate with. And that thing is their rights to their work. You gotta buy them and if you don't cut them a good deal then maybe they'll just sell them independently. If people aren't going to buy the work regardless, then the artist just lost their only weapon.

There's some merit to what you and Nemonster are saying, but it's predicated on the fact that people would actually under some circumstances pay. I think most of us here try to support artists we like, but we're in the minority. I'm not sure the average person feels the same way.

I just think it's weird that people are arguing for packaging for God's sake. It's like "I want an album of 15 perfect songs and some great bonus videos and maybe a little game I can play on my computer, or I don't buy." Isn't that sort of attitude a large part of why most of us don't like mainstream music?

[1979]

Let's consider how the price of a CD has gone over the years. Initially they were pretty expensive - justified by the newness of the format, the need to build up new infrastructure to support it, and a reliance on some holdovers from the old record/tape model. Which was that you priced in a particular fashion because you knew that upwards of 50% of your product was going to be defective, with the cost being eaten between the retailer and the recording company. Your average CD costs about the same now as did back then, for the most part. Now you could see that as a glass half full - no inflation over 20 years. Except when you look at most things technology related and see that either the price went down, or what you got for that price went up considerably.

In addition, most of the cost of a recording, if you ask your average record exec to justify the cost, is tied up in the process leading up to the actual manufacturing. Paying the producer, supporting the band while they make the record, studio costs, promotion, etc. Except all these costs went down as well. Big artists still get to blow big bucks for the latest and greatest studio equipment, but as a lot of artists have shown, the advent of digital technology has leveled out the differences between high and low tier studios considerably. Promotion has scaled back to pretty much angling for placement on TV, getting the artist on TRL, or knocking a dollar off at Target. Wow. Large outlay. And let us not forget that groups like the Beach Boys and the Beatles recouped those costs many times over before the digital revolution even hit. So for acts like that, the cost structure is essentially nil. So why is this stuff still going for a premium price at the same time price on everything else is getting pressured into oblivion? The online services aren't really that great a deal either. Because they are basically just a similar model designed to perpetuate the same system in a different distrubution medium. And one that forces even more of the cost on to the consumer.


My only disagreement with your entire post is the idea that we are paying for the technology. When you buy a CD, you are buying the music, not the fact that it is a disc that can be read by a laser. The technology has gotten better - it's cheaper and faster to mass produce CDs now than it ever has been. That is why we can now buy hundreds of blank CDs to burn on our own computer for $10. But prices don't drop on everything. Food, art, real estate, etc. - these things are increasing due to inflation all the time. If CDs aren't any more expensive now than before, it is probably due to the fact that while the technical aspects of the manufacturing of CDs has dropped, the non-technical aspects such as wages, promotions, etc. have gone up due to inflation.

[akip]

The RIAA doesn't understand that, but the music industry does.

Look at the vast amounts of indie music being released nowadays. In the old days, you needed a big label for airplay, distribution, and production facilities. Now it's easier than ever to put out your CD. Plus, I think there's been a simultaneous shift in some people saying "Look, I don't need ten thousand dollar guitars and awesome production. It's okay if there's a few duds on an album. And it's okay if the singer isn't perfect." I think the music industry is actually very healthy right now for those reasons, and what I worry about is that mp3 pirating may undo that.

If you want the artist to have more power vis a vis their record label, they need to have something to negotiate with. And that thing is their rights to their work. You gotta buy them and if you don't cut them a good deal then maybe they'll just sell them independently. If people aren't going to buy the work regardless, then the artist just lost their only weapon.

There's some merit to what you and Nemonster are saying, but it's predicated on the fact that people would actually under some circumstances pay. I think most of us here try to support artists we like, but we're in the minority. I'm not sure the average person feels the same way.

I just think it's weird that people are arguing for packaging for God's sake. It's like "I want an album of 15 perfect songs and some great bonus videos and maybe a little game I can play on my computer, or I don't buy." Isn't that sort of attitude a large part of why most of us don't like mainstream music?


i just think you can't put the piracy cat back in the bag. i don't steal music, so i'm not trying to come up with any justification really, but the technology is there, the whole means of distribution opens it up. it's the downside of actually being able to access more music and broaden the market. so it seems to me like it's better to come up with a reason why someone would actually buy something as pitiful as a cd (not musically, but physically). they're just not very desirable as objects the way records used to be.

i'm very pro-artist, which is why i buy music. i want them to get their cut. unfortunately, that seems to be a left over sentiment from the olden days and just dates me.

[akip]

the spouse mentioned something at a dinner conversation about the art market and credibility, and it seems relevant. he said that it was more prevalent in the past for a gallery to build its reputation around a stable of artists----they had credibility not only for their ability to pick genuine talents but to keep and nuture that stable so that those artists were empowered to do their best work. now, he said, it's more likely for a gallery to pick up artists for just a show or two and dump them. the market is hot, there's a frenzy of buying, and it's undermined loyalty and career building in favor of just selling whatever.

i wonder if that's the way it is in the frenzy of releasing a flood of albums, like throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks, as opposed to committing to a smaller roster of stronger talents. maybe that's the way some indie labels work, i don't know. maybe the old passion to nurture talent just doesn't hold up these days.

[The Sheck]

i wonder if that's the way it is in the frenzy of releasing a flood of albums, like throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks, as opposed to committing to a smaller roster of stronger talents. maybe that's the way some indie labels work, i don't know. maybe the old passion to nurture talent just doesn't hold up these days.

There's so much pressure from these parent companies who own the record labels to be profitable, that there's less time/energy to develop an artist's career. In fact, it's not so much a question anymore of making the label money, it's really are you making the label ENOUGH money? (We're all familiar with the Wilco/Warner Bros. story.) Because if you're not profitable to a certain degree, then you can be dropped, too.

It's always been about this with the record Industry, but never to the degree we're seeing.

[yoshomon]

The RIAA doesn't understand that, but the music industry does.

Look at the vast amounts of indie music being released nowadays. In the old days, you needed a big label for airplay, distribution, and production facilities. Now it's easier than ever to put out your CD. Plus, I think there's been a simultaneous shift in some people saying "Look, I don't need ten thousand dollar guitars and awesome production. It's okay if there's a few duds on an album. And it's okay if the singer isn't perfect." I think the music industry is actually very healthy right now for those reasons, and what I worry about is that mp3 pirating may undo that.

If you want the artist to have more power vis a vis their record label, they need to have something to negotiate with. And that thing is their rights to their work. You gotta buy them and if you don't cut them a good deal then maybe they'll just sell them independently. If people aren't going to buy the work regardless, then the artist just lost their only weapon.

There's some merit to what you and Nemonster are saying, but it's predicated on the fact that people would actually under some circumstances pay. I think most of us here try to support artists we like, but we're in the minority. I'm not sure the average person feels the same way.

I just think it's weird that people are arguing for packaging for God's sake. It's like "I want an album of 15 perfect songs and some great bonus videos and maybe a little game I can play on my computer, or I don't buy." Isn't that sort of attitude a large part of why most of us don't like mainstream music?

I don't think stealing needs some fancy theoretical justification. Shoplifters can be just as consumerist as people who pay. I have no illusions about "boycotting the system away" or some stupid shit like that. I think that stealing is often a survival tactic, sometimes it's a fun game, sometime it's an addiction like shopping (see Winona Ryder), and sometimes it can be part of collective struggle (ie. "proletarian shopping" in Italy, looting during riots, etc).

Downloading music for free is a free way to get music. I think it's ridiculous to raise moral objections against it, especially in a world where driving a car, talking on a cellphone, shopping, etc are moral activities. I don't think morality is a very interesting way of looking at the world, but if you were to morally compare driving a car to downloading a Mariah Carey album, I think the latter would definitely come out on top.

[The Sheck]

It's not really clear if this was a direct response to my point, but I wanted to reiterate that I suggest the record companies rethink their product & what they're defending...

They're dying. Gonna die. Countdown the years.

It's a Catch-22 of sorts. The labels are going to say that 'we're giving the kids what they want,' yet they offer no alternatives to see if that's really the case.

I think we're overlooking a major point to this discussion: Music doesn't mean as much to this generation as it did in the past. It's not some cultural signifier, there's no hot city or 'scene' to rally around, people don't identify themselves by the types of music they listen to. Some would say that's a good thing because it's limiting, inaccurate to a degree, and shallow, but it also helped the music become something more than MUSIC.

The labels have their own culpability here. They took all the fruit from the tree and forgot to water it. Plus, they swooped down into every city which had a scene bubbling under the surface, scouted it out, signed anyone with the potential of mass consumption, and squashed it before it had a chance to develop, unlike places like Athens, or Seattle.

Are they going to die? I don't know...I think there's too much power and money behind the big four to say they'll go the way of the dinosaurs, plus there will need to be a better, easier solution in place for people to make the transition. Hundreds of millions of CDs are still sold every year.

If you can't get played on the radio, how else will people hear your music and thus come out to your shows?

Myspace has worked well for a number of UK acts. But they're now owned by FOX, and have a record deal set up with Interscope, so...

[Duemellon]

...and people buy it just because the famous artist signed it, is that a good thing?I bought the 2nd Apollo Sunshine CD because it was them. Yes, it happens. If that's what the person wants, that's what they got.We'r talking about outright, not-even-close-to-the-borderline theft.It is "theft" because someone at some point declared it to be theft. No one stole the 1st campfire song sung by Oogha and Grunt. There was no concept of theft. Just arguing the arbitrary nature of laws, not necessarily relevent to this overall situ really[/quote]It's like Due-- you paint a picture and someone immediately copies it and starts distributing it on t-shirts.[/quote]I really don't mind. It happened to me once already. Got no credit 'tho, & that's the part I didn't like. He made a few hundred off of it. Now, I know there's a mystique about owning originals so for me it's fine if copies are made, I'll consider it advertisement.You can't say "You should have just put out better product"...Nah, I never said that. Having seen some craptacular art sold for more money than I ask for my best stuff, I recognize that art is in the eye of the beholder... the casholder.You can't say "You need to think creatively and figure out how to not get your stuff stolen"...Well, therein is the thing. That's actually what I think. Just because the thought is challenging doesn't mean it's not possible. And btw, Brian Wilson, all by himself, wouldn't've been able to print up a million CDs. He has other people do it for him, just as he would have other people think of ways.Sure, they could sign their CD's or draw a little picture but does that really improve the quality of the music?Interesting. No it doesn't, but it gives incentives for legit purchases. I mean, does my sig in a painting really affect the quality of the existant strokes? Nope, but it's proof.And the ones who have to make this right ARE the recording companies. When you have a business model that is not working, you have to come up with something that turns it around.That's my overall point.

[classicgrrl]

And btw, Brian Wilson.

you rang?

456

[Duemellon]

And considering recent developments on this board I'm wondering if that is indeed "tHP" posting. He has several spelling mistakes in his big post, which is incredibly unlike him.

tHP, I demand you post a pic of you holding a fish on your head in a blue shirt laying on a couch. Or we'll never believe you again!

[epeolatry]

And considering recent developments on this board I'm wondering if that is indeed "tHP" posting. He has several spelling mistakes in his big post, which is incredibly unlike him.

tHP, I demand you post a pic of you holding a fish on your head in a blue shirt laying on a couch. Or we'll never believe you again!

whoa, i noticed the spelling mistakes too and thought "that seems uncharacteristic..."

[candy4140]

Why was this never an issue when I made "mix tapes" in the 10th grade? Seriously? I don't get it.

[the happy prole]

I think we're overlooking a major point to this discussion: Music doesn't mean as much to this generation as it did in the past. It's not some cultural signifier, there's no hot city or 'scene' to rally around, people don't identify themselves by the types of music they listen to. Some would say that's a good thing because it's limiting, inaccurate to a degree, and shallow, but it also helped the music become something more than MUSIC.

Exactly. That's the point I've been trying to make. It's not that file sharers are evil people, but that all this file sharing means people just don't care enough about music to pay $9.99 for it. I look at the prices for CD's from major retailers, major labels, indie stores and indie artists and I really don't think they can cut their prices much.

Brian Wilson or Radiohead (or whoever) releases an album and no one cares. How do you solve that? Yes, Brian Wilson's people can figure out a way to turn a profit but it's going to be like advertising jingles or godforbid a reality show. There's nothing more they can do to enhance the musical product.

People go and load up their iPods with every song they ever wanted for free. After that they have little need to listen to the radio or buy new albums. Even those that are into new music treat it more disposably. DL the album, give it a few spins. If it's not good immediately move on to the next thing.