Tired arguments. I've owned and run an Indie Label, and you're simply wrong. The reason Pirate Bay is easier to use than an Indie-Online store is because it doesn't require a credit card. What part of that don't you get? To sue a more extreme example to make a point: it's like blaming the girl who got assaulted by saying she shouldn't have worn such a short skirt, or telling the beaten man he shouldn't have been in that neighborhood at that time of the day.
Most indies would prefer to have good distribution into the big stores and catalogues, but of course that is what the majors purged first in an effort to control the market. So to say "they should have better distribution" is like telling a failed start-up "well, you should have had more capital." No duh!
But hey, I know piracy is cool and fashionable. I'll say it again, like lots of people before me: a new system will not come from indie labels, their job is to find and enable new talent. Nor will all artists suddenly start self-publishing, regardless of how easy it is.
In the mean time, please enjoy the new Miley Cyrus album. It's the only viable scalable musical product available until cool people realize downloading is called piracy for a reason.
Sean P. Aune
· 1 year ago
"The reason Pirate Bay is easier to use than an Indie-Online store is because it doesn't require a credit card."
I have a deep love for Amazon.com... except for their music store. It sucks, is frustrating, and I have yet to successfully download one thing from it. This has nothing to do with a credit card, or being a small indie company with no resources for a better store. Buying music downloads legally is actually fairly annoying, and it has nothing to do with credit cards.
It frustrates me to no end that the easiest way for me to legally get the new Flogging Molly album (Float, out March 4th!... end shameless plug for my favorite band) will be to buy the CD and rip the files myself.
Oh wait... the RIAA is frowning on me doing that now... which part of purchasing music legally was the easy part again?
Phil Clandillon
· 1 year ago
At the moment of writing this, in the UK, the only place I can conveniently shop for a wide range digital music online is the iTunes store, which sells (mostly) DRM protected tracks.
Sure - many individual labels sell music directly from their sites, but not enough sell tracks in the only useful format (mp3), without DRM and offering a good user experience.
When the Amazon music store opens it will change the game completely, offering a place where users can quickly, easily and legally download music for a reasonable price. It's always been convenient to shop for both major label and indie CDs on Amazon and when the same convenience is applied to digital music it will be a huge boost to sales.
Hopefully it will be the first serious alternative to piracy.
hemartin4interim
· 1 year ago
Go back to this site and your find the following statement ...
Update: We received a response from Dependent Records’ Lothar, who wrote us: “We never decided anything like that. The offer is completely illegal.The Person who create an account with the nickname Stefan_Herwig has absolutely nothing to do with our label owner of the same name.â€
Obviously the uploader did have access to the entire catalog of the label, interesting…
Sam I Am
· 1 year ago
Just as there will always be those who do not respect others, the law, private property, there will always be some degree of piracy. This is sad for the creator because it robs existing work and it stifles potential for new music as well. No real money will be invested in a product that is largely taken rather than purchased as intended, and so it is the new artist we'll never hear about who loses along with the general public. Now we see in the headlines that the gaming industry is being gutted out along with music and movies, so stop kidding yourself that "added value" and better quality will drive purchases. The better quality will just be pirated as well.
This was never about payback to a profitable industry, or punishment for placing revenue stream on par with the creation of art. This is a bunch of poorly raised individuals with little class and even less conscience who will take a product without paying that they know is properly for sale as long as technology facilitates them to do just that. The legacy of online pirates will be a very slowed and filtered network blanketed with regulation and law enforcement at the choke points. Pirates, in retrospect, will be responsible for ruining what was once a fast, clean and very cool network. Thanks, folks. "Music revolution" your ass.
Julian Bond
· 1 year ago
Another view. I know the business model wasn't playing by the rules but AllOfMp3.com worked while you could actually get money into it. One of the problems here is that the existing stores don't sell the product we actually want to buy at a price that we think the product is worth. Properly tagged and filenamed MP3s in LAME 192K VBR at $0.10 to $0.25 per track.
I believe there is a product that can compete with free, but it's not what ITunes and Amazon are giving us. Maybe the Indies should band together and rebuild an official AllOfMp3?
Jon Smirl
· 1 year ago
Record labels are missing the burden of archiving music that is purchased. End users are terrible at maintaining permanent archives of things they bought. How many people have effective backups of important pictures that they have taken with their digital cameras?
You buy music, load it into an iPod. Lose the iPod. Now what? Your hard disk crashes, you buy another PC, etc. It is very easy to lose the music you paid for. If you lose it you have to buy it again. The cost of the user maintaining the archival copy greatly raises the effective cost of buying the music.
Compare this to downloading. If you don't like something just delete it. You can always download it again later. If you lose your device, no big deal, just download again. No DRM issues when you switch MP3 players too.
k
DJ Hyjak
· 1 year ago
I just love this free music Utopia that valley types want us to live in. A world where Bands can buy equipment and get studio time for free, A world were every artist can and will have the money and venues to tour and every freedownloader will show up an buy a concert ticket. A world were tshirt sales will be enough to feed the families of a 5 member Band with a few hundred fans.
Look lets be honest it does hurt the small artist more then the big ones, I work in the hiphop industry and its a double edge sword i have seen downloading cripple the sales of some quality artist and its because those that seem to dig them tend to be a lil more web savvy and have bought into the hole they make money at shows thing. Well where do you think the money for those tours come from?
At the same time you get people like Solider Boy that gets huge because of youtube and does good numbers mostly due to ringtones. Downloading didn't help him and it didn't hurt him either.
thepete
· 1 year ago
In today's economy where money seems to be worth less and less every day, gas seems to cost more and more every day, more and more people can't afford to pay for things like movie tickets and music.
Humans seem to need (or at least be addicted to) art (even bad art). So if they can't afford to pay full price they make the smart business choice and go for the cheapest price they can find.
It's OK for record executives to make the most money they can, but it's not OK for the consumer to save as much money as they can. This seems unfair since, record company executives make more money than their acts and the CDs they put out mostly suck. Why are they rich off of generally sucking when they could and should just be scraping by?
The solution to me is obvious: the record companies need to make less money and offer more value.
If you want to continue charging $15 for a CD, then make it worth it. Make sure all the songs on it are good. Include cool premiums, like keychains, toys or other cool items. I disagree with Stan's suggestion to add more digital content since it will be pirated along with the music. The extra stuff has to be only available by buying it in stores.
I do agree that evolution is the key here--like it or not, the consumeristic environment is changing. Evolve or die, sadly.
Complaining that consumers are "greedy" or "selfish" or "disrespectful to the property of others" won't change the fact that consumers are reacting to their own environments and adapting. They don't want to go without so they're evolving, too.
I'm sure everyone wants their favorite bands to survive and feed their families. But don't blame "pirates" for not wanting to pay what, to many, are absurd prices for generally lackluster product. Wasn't it Radiohead, just last year, who made more money letting consumers pay what they wanted than they would have if they'd released their CD in stores?
Stop defending the old ways and let's all evolve together.
Sam I Am
· 1 year ago
thepete said:
"Wasn't it Radiohead, just last year, who made more money letting consumers pay what they wanted than they would have if they'd released their CD in stores? Stop defending the old ways and let's all evolve together."
Radioheads experiment, when viewed from the inside of the industry (I am) is as cruel and hypocritical as it gets. The industry invested millions and millions in Radiohead for well over eleven years to help make them a household name, and then they backstabbed the very company that helped make them who they are. Worse, it is only their name recognition from industry money and marketing that allowed them to do this in the first place, while they set a now impossible standard for any new musician to compete with. Fuck RadioHead. They hurt the hope of new music to make a few bucks for themselves. Their selfishness has made them part of the problem, now.
Music gets back on track when we all "evolve" back to basic morals and human decency, Pete. The industry can charge whatever they wish and we can elect to pay it or not, but while "not" is our free choice, it also means doing without just as it does in any other business or industry. No amount of your rationalization makes piracy right. This is a temporary moral aberration that will be corrected with legislation and heavy handed enforcement. No government on earth is going to allow the exciting promise of online commerce (and the taxes it will eventually bear) to evaporate because of a bunch of sticky fingered, shallow minded tightwads. Taking something you know is properly for sale but paying nothing because you can hide behind technology is cowardly and wrong.
This was never really all that complicated. Technology simply got out ahead of legislation and enforcement for awhile. They are rapidly catching up now and although geeks will always find a way, punishments will rise until they get insanely ugly as an effective deterrent. This is a ransacking of 50 years of recording artist's work, and the payback is going to be a bitch.
Sean P. Aune
· 1 year ago
So, by deciding to take control of their own destiny, they "backstabbed" the company? Were they to sit around and tow the company line until their end days because they owed a debt of gratitude to their label?
Couldn't the same argument be used against any band that changes labels for a better deal? It was their previous company who built their name, and the band went elsewhere, leaving the original company with nothing. Has every band that has ever changed labels been viewed with the same critical eye? What about when Prince decided to leave his label and take over his own distribution?
Under your view, once a band signs with a label, that's it, they are to bow to their record label masters and sing their praises endlessly. Too bad. Times change, business models change, and bands who started off as small acts grow up and get a head on their shoulders as to how business works.
The current record industry business model is outdated and broken, and if they don't find a way to fix it, and soon, all that is going to be a bunch of guys sitting around 55-gallon drums with a fire on it saying "We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for those hypocrites!"
Tomas
· 1 year ago
Does anyone have numbers on beatport.com? As an electronic music fan I find this site a great place to buy music from known artists and discover new talent. The top download list is a great example on how new and old talent are doing good. (if the list isn't fixed...)
Please guys! There's nothing healthier than piracy! In fact, piracy is not piracy. Intelectual property is just a myth. If you play music, you make money doing concerts, on tour. You move your ass. A disc is just a sample. And if my neighboor can gimme his disc so I can listen to it, or if I can tape a song on radio, I can share, upload and download any f*cking song/album/film I want on the web. Almost everybody under 30 thinks like that. Sharing has always been accepted in the past, and now that there's no more boundaries/limits in our modes of communication, the old industry (that's dying miserably) wants us to deny a PRINCIPLE OF FREEDOM because they can't make money anymore? That's laughable!
ThePete
· 1 year ago
Wow, Greg--nothing like coming into a conversation three months later with a pretentious and sarcastic argument.
So far, the only contrary argument that I think has any merit at all is Iron Flatline's--it's true a lot of the shmoes do lose out. But they too have to evolve. They can hire themselves out as the band's web designer or something else--bands still need advertisement. They're still needed, they just need to contact the band or their manager directly instead of getting hired by some rich record executive.
As for Iron's argument about the rich record executive cliche, I don't know what you've seen, but I've walked down Sunset and Hollywood boulevards and seen some hot convertibles driving by with well-dressed men and beautiful women in them. I suppose they *could* be just tourists.
;) But seriously, I worked in Hollywood for over 10 years, off and on, and the cliches are accurate. It's an industry rich with pretend gatekeepers who make more money than they should based on the amount of talent most actually have.
Meanwhile, Sam I Am makes this hilarious argument about how we need to "get back to human decency". Yeah, you let me know when that happens, man. Look around the world--from top-to-bottom, there are plenty of examples of a serious lack of human decency. The guy in the White House thinks it's cool to torture. All bootleggers do is copy media.
And have a look back at history, too, and see how prominent 'human decency" even is. Were we *ever* decent?
Am I saying that we should give up and just be a horrible species? Of course not--but don't blame the poor when they get tired of paying too much for things that are supposed to make their lives better. The rich are in a position to set a good example, yet we all know they don't.
I love it when people think making a buck is a god-given right and is so much a part of freedom that exploitation and borderline amoral behavior is OK. Most of all, I love how the "let's evolve together" comment I made was completely ignored by the defenders of the faith. OK, cool--let's keep things *exactly the same*.
I think I'll leave that little "Notify me" box unchecked this time 'round. This argument is oooold and, frankly, a little useless when the cons don't want to, you know, change...EVER.
Greg
· 1 year ago
Sarcastic? OK. Pretentious? Maybe yeah, but not in here man. Is it pretentious to say: "Stop trying to regulate people freedom"? Is it pretentious to stand for the people right to share art? Sharing is not stealing! Everybody can do what he pleases with the music he finds. When an album is released, the beauty is that it can be listened to anywhere at any moment in an instant. The fans feeling the fetish need will buy it, like me with the last Portishead album. Anybody is still able to download it, because sharing is a fundamental human process that can't be controled. This is how it works now, and it'll never change because whoever does it KNOWS he's NOT doing anything bad. The movement of information is not an end but an mean, and any imperishable message that is in possession of a human being is fundamentaly in possession of every human being. The regular music industry, based on events and concerts, and bringing the impermanent beauty of live music to people, is never gonna die. What's dying is the exploitation of the media. And today, the media is free, because everybody owns it. We leave in an interconected global world. Accept that.
Iron Flatline
· 1 year ago
When you've spent several years building a company together with a lot of dedicated hard-working employees, and you've developed a new software, technology, medication, video game or music, see if you want some youngster coming along and saying "Dude, it ought to be free, so I uploaded it to the Internet."
Lenoxus
· 1 year ago
I can't help but feel a pang of sort-of-regret that my generation didn't simply take the high road and refuse to rip off the artists in order to get some free music. Instead, we concocted and/or fell for an array of elaborate rationalizations, only one or two of which really hold up in the end. I'm not counting the "you can't steal a non-physical object" argument. I'm pretty much only counting the "artists should just make money touring" one. At least it's internally consistent. Of course, I think it's ridiculous as well, because it
Here's a different sort of question I might as well pose here if anywhere: If it's philosophically obvious that free recorded music is a given right to all, that the music business should be a live-only thing, why did no one pose the idea before mp3s made it easy? I mean, most countries treat healthcare as a given right, even though it can get pretty expensive for their governments. Why was there never a single activist going to record companies and demanding that they give away their albums? Is it just because of the cost of the physical records? If so, people have still been ripped off for ages, given that they've had to pay for all those non-physical attributes of a record, tape, or CD.
All that aside, it's true that the genie is out of the bottle at this point, and the best we can hope for is a gradual change in the social perspective on piracy, rather like the change in perspective on tobacco (in the US, anyway). Not that piracy is a bad as cancer, of course! Just giving the first example that came to mind.
And I think overall, that is what's happening. At least, it's become sufficiently hip to pay for your downloaded music that lots of people do it.
Lenoxus
· 1 year ago
Oh, I left a sentence hanging there. Let's see...
Of course, I think it's ridiculous as well, because it ultimately subtracts an entire form of art that, up to now, people have been willing to pay for. Should novelists only make money from live readings Exactly what other forms of art don't really deserve the compensation they get, being merely physical products and not the people themselves? Comic books? Films?
All Comments
Most indies would prefer to have good distribution into the big stores and catalogues, but of course that is what the majors purged first in an effort to control the market. So to say "they should have better distribution" is like telling a failed start-up "well, you should have had more capital." No duh!
But hey, I know piracy is cool and fashionable. I'll say it again, like lots of people before me: a new system will not come from indie labels, their job is to find and enable new talent. Nor will all artists suddenly start self-publishing, regardless of how easy it is.
In the mean time, please enjoy the new Miley Cyrus album. It's the only viable scalable musical product available until cool people realize downloading is called piracy for a reason.
I have a deep love for Amazon.com... except for their music store. It sucks, is frustrating, and I have yet to successfully download one thing from it. This has nothing to do with a credit card, or being a small indie company with no resources for a better store. Buying music downloads legally is actually fairly annoying, and it has nothing to do with credit cards.
It frustrates me to no end that the easiest way for me to legally get the new Flogging Molly album (Float, out March 4th!... end shameless plug for my favorite band) will be to buy the CD and rip the files myself.
Oh wait... the RIAA is frowning on me doing that now... which part of purchasing music legally was the easy part again?
Sure - many individual labels sell music directly from their sites, but not enough sell tracks in the only useful format (mp3), without DRM and offering a good user experience.
When the Amazon music store opens it will change the game completely, offering a place where users can quickly, easily and legally download music for a reasonable price. It's always been convenient to shop for both major label and indie CDs on Amazon and when the same convenience is applied to digital music it will be a huge boost to sales.
Hopefully it will be the first serious alternative to piracy.
Update:
We received a response from Dependent Records’ Lothar, who wrote us: “We never decided anything like that. The offer is completely illegal.The Person who create an account with the nickname Stefan_Herwig has absolutely nothing to do with our label owner of the same name.â€
Obviously the uploader did have access to the entire catalog of the label, interesting…
This was never about payback to a profitable industry, or punishment for placing revenue stream on par with the creation of art. This is a bunch of poorly raised individuals with little class and even less conscience who will take a product without paying that they know is properly for sale as long as technology facilitates them to do just that. The legacy of online pirates will be a very slowed and filtered network blanketed with regulation and law enforcement at the choke points. Pirates, in retrospect, will be responsible for ruining what was once a fast, clean and very cool network. Thanks, folks. "Music revolution" your ass.
I believe there is a product that can compete with free, but it's not what ITunes and Amazon are giving us. Maybe the Indies should band together and rebuild an official AllOfMp3?
You buy music, load it into an iPod. Lose the iPod. Now what? Your hard disk crashes, you buy another PC, etc. It is very easy to lose the music you paid for. If you lose it you have to buy it again. The cost of the user maintaining the archival copy greatly raises the effective cost of buying the music.
Compare this to downloading. If you don't like something just delete it. You can always download it again later. If you lose your device, no big deal, just download again. No DRM issues when you switch MP3 players too.
k
Look lets be honest it does hurt the small artist more then the big ones, I work in the hiphop industry and its a double edge sword i have seen downloading cripple the sales of some quality artist and its because those that seem to dig them tend to be a lil more web savvy and have bought into the hole they make money at shows thing. Well where do you think the money for those tours come from?
At the same time you get people like Solider Boy that gets huge because of youtube and does good numbers mostly due to ringtones. Downloading didn't help him and it didn't hurt him either.
Humans seem to need (or at least be addicted to) art (even bad art). So if they can't afford to pay full price they make the smart business choice and go for the cheapest price they can find.
It's OK for record executives to make the most money they can, but it's not OK for the consumer to save as much money as they can. This seems unfair since, record company executives make more money than their acts and the CDs they put out mostly suck. Why are they rich off of generally sucking when they could and should just be scraping by?
The solution to me is obvious: the record companies need to make less money and offer more value.
If you want to continue charging $15 for a CD, then make it worth it. Make sure all the songs on it are good. Include cool premiums, like keychains, toys or other cool items. I disagree with Stan's suggestion to add more digital content since it will be pirated along with the music. The extra stuff has to be only available by buying it in stores.
I do agree that evolution is the key here--like it or not, the consumeristic environment is changing. Evolve or die, sadly.
Complaining that consumers are "greedy" or "selfish" or "disrespectful to the property of others" won't change the fact that consumers are reacting to their own environments and adapting. They don't want to go without so they're evolving, too.
I'm sure everyone wants their favorite bands to survive and feed their families. But don't blame "pirates" for not wanting to pay what, to many, are absurd prices for generally lackluster product. Wasn't it Radiohead, just last year, who made more money letting consumers pay what they wanted than they would have if they'd released their CD in stores?
Stop defending the old ways and let's all evolve together.
"Wasn't it Radiohead, just last year, who made more money letting consumers pay what they wanted than they would have if they'd released their CD in stores? Stop defending the old ways and let's all evolve together."
Radioheads experiment, when viewed from the inside of the industry (I am) is as cruel and hypocritical as it gets. The industry invested millions and millions in Radiohead for well over eleven years to help make them a household name, and then they backstabbed the very company that helped make them who they are. Worse, it is only their name recognition from industry money and marketing that allowed them to do this in the first place, while they set a now impossible standard for any new musician to compete with. Fuck RadioHead. They hurt the hope of new music to make a few bucks for themselves. Their selfishness has made them part of the problem, now.
Music gets back on track when we all "evolve" back to basic morals and human decency, Pete. The industry can charge whatever they wish and we can elect to pay it or not, but while "not" is our free choice, it also means doing without just as it does in any other business or industry. No amount of your rationalization makes piracy right. This is a temporary moral aberration that will be corrected with legislation and heavy handed enforcement. No government on earth is going to allow the exciting promise of online commerce (and the taxes it will eventually bear) to evaporate because of a bunch of sticky fingered, shallow minded tightwads. Taking something you know is properly for sale but paying nothing because you can hide behind technology is cowardly and wrong.
This was never really all that complicated. Technology simply got out ahead of legislation and enforcement for awhile. They are rapidly catching up now and although geeks will always find a way, punishments will rise until they get insanely ugly as an effective deterrent. This is a ransacking of 50 years of recording artist's work, and the payback is going to be a bitch.
Couldn't the same argument be used against any band that changes labels for a better deal? It was their previous company who built their name, and the band went elsewhere, leaving the original company with nothing. Has every band that has ever changed labels been viewed with the same critical eye? What about when Prince decided to leave his label and take over his own distribution?
Under your view, once a band signs with a label, that's it, they are to bow to their record label masters and sing their praises endlessly. Too bad. Times change, business models change, and bands who started off as small acts grow up and get a head on their shoulders as to how business works.
The current record industry business model is outdated and broken, and if they don't find a way to fix it, and soon, all that is going to be a bunch of guys sitting around 55-gallon drums with a fire on it saying "We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for those hypocrites!"
As an electronic music fan I find this site a great place to buy music from known artists and discover new talent. The top download list is a great example on how new and old talent are doing good. (if the list isn't fixed...)
Now if they could change the green color... :)
So far, the only contrary argument that I think has any merit at all is Iron Flatline's--it's true a lot of the shmoes do lose out. But they too have to evolve. They can hire themselves out as the band's web designer or something else--bands still need advertisement. They're still needed, they just need to contact the band or their manager directly instead of getting hired by some rich record executive.
As for Iron's argument about the rich record executive cliche, I don't know what you've seen, but I've walked down Sunset and Hollywood boulevards and seen some hot convertibles driving by with well-dressed men and beautiful women in them. I suppose they *could* be just tourists.
;) But seriously, I worked in Hollywood for over 10 years, off and on, and the cliches are accurate. It's an industry rich with pretend gatekeepers who make more money than they should based on the amount of talent most actually have.
Meanwhile, Sam I Am makes this hilarious argument about how we need to "get back to human decency". Yeah, you let me know when that happens, man. Look around the world--from top-to-bottom, there are plenty of examples of a serious lack of human decency. The guy in the White House thinks it's cool to torture. All bootleggers do is copy media.
And have a look back at history, too, and see how prominent 'human decency" even is. Were we *ever* decent?
Am I saying that we should give up and just be a horrible species? Of course not--but don't blame the poor when they get tired of paying too much for things that are supposed to make their lives better. The rich are in a position to set a good example, yet we all know they don't.
I love it when people think making a buck is a god-given right and is so much a part of freedom that exploitation and borderline amoral behavior is OK. Most of all, I love how the "let's evolve together" comment I made was completely ignored by the defenders of the faith. OK, cool--let's keep things *exactly the same*.
I think I'll leave that little "Notify me" box unchecked this time 'round. This argument is oooold and, frankly, a little useless when the cons don't want to, you know, change...EVER.
Here's a different sort of question I might as well pose here if anywhere: If it's philosophically obvious that free recorded music is a given right to all, that the music business should be a live-only thing, why did no one pose the idea before mp3s made it easy? I mean, most countries treat healthcare as a given right, even though it can get pretty expensive for their governments. Why was there never a single activist going to record companies and demanding that they give away their albums? Is it just because of the cost of the physical records? If so, people have still been ripped off for ages, given that they've had to pay for all those non-physical attributes of a record, tape, or CD.
All that aside, it's true that the genie is out of the bottle at this point, and the best we can hope for is a gradual change in the social perspective on piracy, rather like the change in perspective on tobacco (in the US, anyway). Not that piracy is a bad as cancer, of course! Just giving the first example that came to mind.
And I think overall, that is what's happening. At least, it's become sufficiently hip to pay for your downloaded music that lots of people do it.
Of course, I think it's ridiculous as well, because it ultimately subtracts an entire form of art that, up to now, people have been willing to pay for. Should novelists only make money from live readings Exactly what other forms of art don't really deserve the compensation they get, being merely physical products and not the people themselves? Comic books? Films?
http://philosophical-literatu re.blogspot.com/ http://www.anarsist.org/felse fe/ http://www.bid-directory.net/ http://www.anarsist.org/