since we are talking music....
i just wanted to mount my soap box and encourage everyone to BUY their music. i can say that over my past 9 years in "the biz" i have seen the impact of people stealing music.... from mass firings, slumping sales, and directly on my profession.
i know there are all those wonderfully gray nuances and the "i listen and then if i like it i buy" arguments, but at the end of the day, you know when you bought something, were given something and when you stole it. so do the right thing! i have a family of four now.
thank you and that is all.
10 comments:
Ok Don, I'm about to send you a disc full of files, but thanks to Varnish Studio you now have to purchase it. So that will be $733.
With all sympathies to your livelihood & family, The world is changing and I don't think it's going to change back. What became of the horse saddle industry? Gas stations in 50 years(hopefully)? The world changes around technology, I can't think of an occasion where technology has allowed us to do something and then the world stopped doing it because someone lost their job, cold but true. I'm not saying people shouldn't be rewarded for their creativity, but it seems it going to end up involving GarageBand & blogs or something rather than how the industry was run in the 20th century, dude this a new millenium! How's that for a soap box?
i just want to clarify. i am not looking for people to buy cd's so i can buy my kids some diapers..or even consider someone like me in the equation. it is really about the artists and their music. the family of four thing was a bit of hyperbole.
my main take away is this... the justification that gabino, and many others, offer up utilizes morally and legally flawed logic. just because there is an ability to easily do something, is not grounds enough to just do it.
it is really quite basic. the material is copyrighted, and has proctections against just freewheeling distribution and copying. it has been that way in the 18th, 19th, 20th and, oh yes dude, the 21st century.
i, of course, am not asking the "world to stop" and regress from technology. i am simply trying to make a point, in this forum of individuals who love and appreciate music, to reconsider their stance on what is acceptable, fair and, like it or not, legal.
there have been many wonderful legitimate responses to said technology, itunes being the most succesful. smart artists like radiohead and nine inch nails have also figured out ways to take this issue head on and be extremely profitable. for sure, these types of business models will overtake the older major label approach, and i think we all can welcome that. that, to me, is the appropriate 21st century response.
people like us respect and hold high the music we love and listen to. we owe that same respect to those who write, produce, engineer, perform and distribute this music. by respecting what they have created for us, we do them a great service that financially allows the process to continue.
i feel passionately about this. i hope some of you may reconsider your stance on this issue. either way, i have said my piece.
let's get back to what we are listening to...
My stance is.... burning a DVD for my homies in 2008 is the equivalent to dubbing a tape for a homie in 1987. I feel like the moral precedent for that was set for me in my youth and that's what I'm ok with. I see a distinction between burning a disc for a friend and offering up my entire collection anonymously to 1,000,000 people on the internet.
Also, can't even tell you how many times I have gotten a disc from any of the guys on this Blog, and then I go out and buy the band's first album, or I go see them live (or drop $100's on all their vinyl shit on eBay, but that's not neither here nor there). I think trading DVDs/CDs is a great promo for labels.
Although I feel Gabe as well... should we all go out and buy beepers to help the failing beeper industry? Things change and markets need to adapt, but the music industry has been dragging it's heels.
I'm down with iTunes (vs. Soulseek) because the shit you get form those sites are all glitchy and i don't want some dude riffing through my collection. It's worth $1.00 for me to buy a song legit.
Let the discourse begin.
A noble soap box for sure, I'm not making any moral or legal argument, just saying it's not going to stop and the industry needs to apapt or die and it seems like a big parts of it have been out of touch. It is all a big beautiful fascinating grey area, ever borrow a book?
I'm a music pirate, straight up, I download music all the time. DC can rationalize with his mixtape philosophy, but the bottom-line is that he gets a fair amount of music illegally this way. And you can wind up spending $100 on the same record on vinyl (which is a ridonkulous move if you ask me), but I don't think this makes you any less culpable in what you might perceive as something illegal and immoral.
I don't think there is anyone who will post on this blog that would disagree that musicians should be compensated for their work. Shit, I want musicians to be extremely well compensated for their work: I grew up idolizing rock-star excess, and while some of that is out of hand, I don't want to see the era of decadence totally come to an end.
But we're living through an evolution of the industry, one that I think will overall be healthy, but painful at times. I know musicians in NYC who are struggling against the new and shifting paradigm, and others that adapting pretty well. We already have access to so much more music via the internet and that’s a great thing for music, musicians, and society.
You can't expect consumers to be altruistic, it's against our nature. Why pay for something that you can get free (and DC is exaggerating that files are corrupted, and his worries about people looking through his files are paranoid)? I go to shows and will pay to see musicians play, and that is the future of how musicians will make money, along with other ancillary means (products, endorsements, etc.). There is too much ambiguity to take a truly contrarian stand and not be undercut by reality. I paid for the last Radiohead album and am open to buying music if it is very cheap and easy. But I definitely can’t afford to pay for all the music that I want to check out—can any of you?
As final point, consider this: Is it different to download a John Coltrane album and thus deprive his heirs royalty checks than it is to download a new band just starting out? How about an already successful band (say, Aerosmith)? Don’t they have enough money? Don’t you see how this is a slippery slope?
Well the Artists don't get much per album /track anyway do they? And doesn't it all just go back to repaying advances unless your Jacko or GnR or somebody of that stature? Isn't touring & endorsements & licensing the real bread and butter? I know that's all moronically simplistic to anyone here in the biz but to a layman consumer it seems very much about BUSINE$$ and not the artist. And truthfully the business was looking awful greedy and petty until they started getting with the program. Hmm, I can pay $18 or I can have it for free? sorry Elton, I'm fucking taking it!
How about this... is it ok to record a track off of Myspace onto a cassette tape?
Because I do that sometimes...
You're almost there, you just need to cut that cassette on to vinyl and then sell it to yourself on ebay for $100, but not before sending us all files. Can you put that picture of Scarlett on the cover?
People have been dubbing tapes for a long time, this aint new. The tech makes it faster, easier to share though. At age 12 I got tapes from the kid across the street; he had hi- speed dubbing. It is stealing, but I'm not sure how the genie can be put back in the bottle?
I think I laid this example on DC a couple of weeks ago; it's a little far afield, but...
Monsanto develops a strain of corn, and they patent the genetic code. So their modified corn is growing somewhere, the wind carries seed, and corn with that genetic code ends up growing on other farmers' land. Monsanto can then, if they find that corn, make these other farmers destroy their entire crops, and destroy any seed stocks they may have saved. They've done this to entire villages in Central and South America.
My point being, what's legal ain't the same thing as what's right.
There is a huge music industry that has been hurt by the new technology. That's clear. I think it's equally clear that musicians ( a small sector of that industry) have done nothing but benefit from the new technology. I imagine we all know musicians who have gained a level of exposure that would have been impossible 15 or 20 years ago.
The "industry" still has an important role in producing and distributing music. The fact is, the "industry" dragged its feet, and preferred suing 12 year olds using Napster to evaluating and redefining that role. Now they're behind the eight ball, and I have very little sympathy.
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