Music Industry Cocksuckers

[eldaec]

Also someone needs to explain to me how the hell selling corrupt CDs will prevent mass piracy.

If there's money in it, then it is logically impossible to prevent someone copying information that they have read access to.

The only way to stop mass piracy is the old fashioned method of finding the people who do it and arresting them. Note to RIAA, the people in question don't live in student dorms.

ALSO, as an aside, the reason I stopped buying corrupt CDs for myself is that when you put them on a decent player, there is a significant audible negative effect on sound quality.

[Sky]

The customer is supposed to vote with his money.

I agree. But part of the deal is you don't take the music anyway and just not pay for it. That's what I'm talking about here. If you like the music enough to download it, you really should pay for it. Even sending the artist a check directly wouldn't pay the engineers or other support staff that helped record it. Buying the cd is still the best way to reward everyone involved for their effort. If you're not willing to do that, but take the music anyway, and don't see the problem with that, I am sorry for the sad state of your moral code.

I used to be an avid concert-goer, I'd catch every artist I was remotely interested in because I love live music. But with ticket prices around $45 or higher at most local venues, I've also taken to catching mostly bar shows. We used to get all the great metal bands at a local bar (the Lost Horizon in Syracuse), seeing them in a bar is the best damn thing imo.

I'm also paying an average of $12 for most cds I buy, plus free shipping. I buy 5-10 cds a month. Being a member of allmusic.com (it's free) and using fye.com, I get previews of every cd I buy, I haven't bought a crappy cd in 5 years.

[HaemishM]

We don't get many concerts around here, and when we do, the prices are sometimes reasonable. But then I hear about Rolling Stones concerts selling tickets for $50+, and I just shake my head. And I'd love to see the Stones, but I'm not paying that much money to go see aging cronies wiggle their desiccated bodies to music that damages my hearing even from the 783rd row that was the best seat I can manage to get.

ClearChannel can rot in fucking hell for the blasphemy to American radio they continue to perpetrate. I'm lucky in that we finally have one non-CC radio station in town that plays decent heavy music. As it is, I've taken to either listening to AM Sports radio or CD's in the car because I can't stand the shit CC and MTV are forcing me to listen to.

If you ever want to see a perfect picture of what's wrong with the music industry, watch the VMA's. There is a perfect target for an airplane if ever there was one.

[WayAbvPar]

Rolling Stones concerts selling tickets for $50+

That is about average for big shows around here. Things like the Eagles, The Stones, etc go for about 3 times that.

[Paelos]

Metallica is coming here for $75, and that's just to hear the new shit they called an "album". They officially can kiss my ass.

[Arcadian Del Sol]

It's music. People don't want to pay a king's ransom to listen to it. Its not like they're selling life saving anti-venom. Its songs, and for the most part, bad ones at that. I like music as much as the next guy - thats why all the cars I've owned have radios.

I guess the way I see it, if people are going to such efforts to obtain something for free, then the cost of it is too high. Maybe if albums were four bucks, people would find it easier to just shell out four dollars than cruise the web, install spyware, and share mp3s with digital criminals in Peking.

If the problem is that four bucks per albums won't pay the rent on 3 malibu beach-front mansions and seven Humvees - well, maybe some of these artists could survive on just two beach-front mansions and three humvees. I dunno - just a thought.

[Alluvian]

I looked into getting some tickets for my wife for a Sting/Annie Lennox concert that was going to be playing near Tampa.  Outdoor concert, furthest back STANDING sections...  $77 per ticket not including the $15 parking.  Fuck you very much.

[Ralence]

If the problem is that four bucks per albums won't pay the rent on 3 malibu beach-front mansions and seven Humvees - well, maybe some of these artists could survive on just two beach-front mansions and three humvees. I dunno - just a thought.

  The problem being, a lot of artists aren't making that much money, only the mainstream ones that sell a million albums.  There's a great metal band from Canada called "Into Eternity", they recently lost their singer and drummer because they couldn't afford to leave their jobs and tour.

  And as far as the money thing goes, CD profits often never ever EVER make it to the band.  That's where the recoupable expenses are deducted by the label.  There's also merchandising, which some bands don't even own the rights to, meaning for every $30 shirt they sell, they get $1, the label takes the rest ($9-$10 per shirt is probably average profit margin).  Then there's the venues in the US which charge up to 30% for merchandise sold at their locales, which is why you can buy the shirt direct from the band for $15, but it costs $25 at the show.  Then there's the fact that some bands have to PAY to perform.  All of the Ozzfest second stage bands are charged for each show they play, and gets 0 cut of the ticket sales.

  It's really a bad situation to be in as a musician.  Isn't it everyone's dream to get paid to do what they love?  I think that's where the blurring is, I don't think a lot of musicians care about the money, as long as they can continue to play music for a living, it's a dream come true.  A lot of them are actually all for the internet piracy situation, because to them, having their music heard is what it's all about.

  Obviously these are the tribulations of the smaller acts, the larger ones who can sell out stadiums are able to negotiate much more profitable contracts, if not take on all of the burden themselves and create their own label.

  So for instance, Van Halen, who averages around $750,000-$1 million gross, per concert, compares to Slipknot, which pays Ozzfest for the rights to play.  Obviously I'm not going to argue the quality of either of their music, but it shows how exceedingly skewed the situation can be.

  I'm not saying that stealing CD's is a good thing, but the record industry as a whole is a huge steaming pile of shit.

EDIT: Found a pretty nifty breakdown of "Joe Average Band" from the guy who produced Nirvana's "In Utero" album.  It looks something like this;
The Balance Sheet: This is how much each player got paid at the end of the game.
 
Record company:  $ 710,000  
Producer:  $ 90,000  
Manager:  $ 51,000  
Studio:  $ 52,500  
Previous label:  $ 50,000  
Agent:  $ 7,500  
Lawyer:  $ 12,000  
Band member net income each:  $ 4,031.25  

The entire breakdown is here.

[Merusk]

Metallica is coming here for $75, and that's just to hear the new shit they called an "album". They officially can kiss my ass.

I went to the concert when the tour came to Cincy. They only played 2 songs off of that piece of shit.  If you check out livemetallica.com you can see the playlists for the euro and recent leg of the tour.  Just ignore the whole "buy .mp3 of our concerts!" goal of the website.

-- > amusing

*due to the extremely high fees charged by the venue for us to record our own show, unfortunately the Paris show will not be available for download.

"Those damn French. Wanting to make money off of our attempt to make money!"

And Haemish, at least you can avoid CC on some level.  Jcor was bought out by CC here, and they owned ALL the stations except the classical and some of the ignorant ass urban music shit stations. (including the AM talk stations.)   I listen to the radio in the mornings because the DJs are pretty damn funny, then it goes away.

 Hell, one of my co-workers commented "Shit, must be 7:20" when I asked why he said "They're playing Danzig's 'Mother' it's always around that time when they play it." I hadden't realized that until he pointed it out. I wonder if XM radio is any better for playing new stuff/ more varieity.

[stray]

EDIT: Found a pretty nifty breakdown of "Joe Average Band" from the guy who produced Nirvana's "In Utero" album.

His name is Steve Albini.

I find it amusing though, that he likes to demonstrate a bad example himself by charging any band with major label status (like Nirvana or Bush) the most extreme prices for engineering one of their albums. Rougly in the million dollar range. He's the most expensive producer around as far as they're concerned.

Good thing is that he's recorded and continues recording countless albums from no-names and indies without any payment whatsoever.

Anyways, what I'm wondering is: Would some of you still pay $15 and deal with anti-piracy schemes for artists who put out the albums themselves (ie. indies)? What's the argument with here? The big bad music industry, or the idea of IP?

[naum]

It is not up to the consumer to decide that it's okay to steal a CD because the music company is ripping off the artist any more than it is okay to steal a car because the car manufacturer is ripping off its designers or the dealers are ripping off the manufacturers, or whatever.

Copying != stealing.

Stealing involves the physical displacement of tangible property and consequently denies the owner usage of the physical object that was taken.

Copying does not dispossess property. Only a claim of potential loss of revenue due to illicit copy in lieu of purchase. A preposition that has been called into question, and the case can be made that the converse is true – that so called copyright infringement leads to an increase in revenue. History is replete with such vivid examples.

The PR campaign to equate copying music (or other media) with wanton piracy is disingenuous – to draw correlation between thugs that pillage, rape and plunder with a pimply faced, pencil mustached, pre-pubescent adolescent filling his HD is a gross affront to freedom and justice.

[SirBruce]

Copying != stealing.

Reading comprehension != You.

Bruce

[Shockeye]

Music is overpriced. That's all there is to it. It holds with concerts and it holds with compact discs. Reduce the price and I'll buy more as long as I find something I like.

[Shockeye]

Microsoft's online music store was launched a day early today. I caught the story over at Ars. It's nice that Microsoft is offering 160kbps encodes, but I really refuse to purchase music online unless 256k/320k is offered. Lossless would be best, but I doubt that'll ever happen. $10 an album online is too much for crappy quality (to my ears).

[TripleDES]

These antipiracy attempts are just fun. There are even ripper tools in the works, that bypass all firmware logic incl. error correction on the drive, and just use it to move the laser under the right positions. All ECC, TOC decoding, data readout and what-not is done completely by the software, thus allowing complete control over the ripping behaviour, without having the drive/firmware go apeshit over all these hacks implemented on the disc. I don't recall the name, but I'm sure it exists, even tools like EAC are already bypassing some hardware behaviours.

[ArtificialKid]

If the problem is that four bucks per albums won't pay the rent on 3 malibu beach-front mansions and seven Humvees - well, maybe some of these artists could survive on just two beach-front mansions and three humvees. I dunno - just a thought.

So you'll be releasing your novel for free on the internet then?

[Sky]

Oh, there's no hypocrites in this crowd! :P

[eldaec]

These antipiracy attempts are just fun. There are even ripper tools in the works, that bypass all firmware logic incl. error correction on the drive, and just use it to move the laser under the right positions.

Fun for actual priates I'm sure - less fun for people who want to make legal copies for things like playing in the car but really can't be arsed with this crap. eg. me.

Also less fun for people with a decent CD player in the living room who therefore get audible artifacts from the CD corruption. Again, eg. me.

Selling faulty CDs does not prevent piracy, it just makes legal copying a pain in the ass and reduces sound quality.

[HaemishM]

If the problem is that four bucks per albums won't pay the rent on 3 malibu beach-front mansions and seven Humvees - well, maybe some of these artists could survive on just two beach-front mansions and three humvees. I dunno - just a thought.

So you'll be releasing your novel for free on the internet then?

He won't, and neither will I. But given the choice by my future publisher, I would prefer to release digital versions over the Internet without assinine copy protection schemes that make it harder to read (or print) for actual paying readers while simultaneously NOT stopping pirates and freeloaders from getting what they want for free.

There are better solutions to the "piracy" problem than giving honest customers BROKEN FUCKING PRODUCTS.

[toma levine]

Best analogy I can think of bookwise would be: You buy a book in which the text appears to be completely garbled. In order to read it, you have to use one of those "red filter decoders" you get in cereal boxes.

Nobody wants to read a book like that.

[Nebu]

I think that you guys are missing a fundamental issue:  In about every type of commodity that I can envision prices are adjusted to accomodate for loss.

In retail, prices on goods are raised to cover losses that incur to shoplifting and damage.  I would assume that the music industry also "adjusts" their prices to account for people downloading/cd burning/taping music from primary sources.  

The solution that seems most logical to me would be to create a method by which copying copyrighted music would be very difficult and, at the same time, lower music prices to the point that it's cheaper (from a time perspective) to purchase the music than to copy it.  As technology advances, download access to music may be one vehicle that drives the price of popular music down.  

The people at the top will always steal from the artists... that's capitalism.

[SirBruce]

Best analogy I can think of bookwise would be: You buy a book in which the text appears to be completely garbled. In order to read it, you have to use one of those "red filter decoders" you get in cereal boxes.

Nobody wants to read a book like that.

But does it make it therefore moral to read ungardbled photocopies of said book, having never bought it?  And we're not talking in a library or from a friend; we're talking about someone running off, effectively, an unlimited number of printings of the ungarbled text and letting you have one for free.

Bruce

[toma levine]

Who said anything about photocopying? I don't want to read a book like that, so I don't buy it. End of story. It's up to the book publisher to figure out why I don't want to buy his book. I don't know why you're reading piracy into my post.

[SirBruce]

I'm not reading piracy into your post.  I'm asking if you think that justifies piracy.  It seems like you don't, which is fine; you agree with me and disagree with some of the previous ethically-challenged posters in this thread.

Bruce

[toma levine]

My point is that I'm not really worrying about the piracy angle; that's going to go on whether anyone likes it or not.
The question is, do they realize they are making the "bad sales" situation even worse with a really bad idea?

[HaemishM]

Piracy is a straw man. Any fucking idiot can photocopy a book and then give it to his friend. Or let his friend borrow the book and read it without paying for it. This is the way it has always been. Is the borrower somehow stealing the book? He hasn't paid for his use of the copyright.

Music sales didn't die when everybody and their brother had a tape recorder. I know as a teenager, I copied MANY cassette tapes, as well as movies on VCR. I wasn't a lost sale, since I wasn't buying the tape anyway. It isn't theft, and it didn't ruin the industry. The rich got richer, and the artist is still getting screwed.

The people just downloading songs off the Internet are NOT THE CRIMINALS. The people making MONEY off of downloading pirated songs, selling bootlegged CD's on street corners, THOSE are the people who are stealing. They are taking money from the artist, the distributor and everyone else.

But as someone earlier said, you don't find them in college dorms. They aren't 12-year olds.

This is not some overblown issue of "morality" of stealing or not stealing.

In the case of the aforementioned theoretical novel of mine: Am I going to get my tits out of whack because some guy sends a copy of his book to his buddy? No. Will I get my nose bent ouf of shape and sic lawyers on a motherfucker selling knockoff copies of my book without permission? You goddamned right I am.

Stop seeing it as a black and white issue and maybe your solutions won't be so polarizing.

[SirBruce]

Piracy is a straw man. Any fucking idiot can photocopy a book and then give it to his friend. Or let his friend borrow the book and read it without paying for it. This is the way it has always been. Is the borrower somehow stealing the book? He hasn't paid for his use of the copyright.

Yes, he is.  Although what he's "stealing" isn't a book; it's the author's and publisher's IP, and it's not so much "stealing" as violating their rights.  He should be punished to the full extent of the law.

Bruce

[ArtificialKid]

In the case of the aforementioned theoretical novel of mine: Am I going to get my tits out of whack because some guy sends a copy of his book to his buddy? No. Will I get my nose bent ouf of shape and sic lawyers on a motherfucker selling knockoff copies of my book without permission? You goddamned right I am.

What about someone getting ahold of a copy of your book in Word format and putting it out on Overnet/gnutella/whatever?  You're cool with that?

[Sky]

In the case of the aforementioned theoretical novel of mine: Am I going to get my tits out of whack because some guy sends a copy of his book to his buddy? No. Will I get my nose bent ouf of shape and sic lawyers on a motherfucker selling knockoff copies of my book without permission? You goddamned right I am.

We aren't talking about making a tape of an album, a singular copy of a purchased work. Thus the photocopy example is a bad one.

It's more like people not buying your book because they can freely download the entire text from the internet.

Not a copy here and there, a copy that anyone in the world can access for free, despite the fact that you count on sales of that product to make your livelihood. Thousands, millions of free copies.

That's why the RIAA is pissed, it's not a myth, it's the reality. Anyone can go online and find just about any album you can think of and download it, for free, and most people don't see any problem with that. Except those who are trying to make a living from it.

Thus we have to deal with crappy copy protection attempts and legal attacks. Like I said, I don't like the RIAA, but at least they pay the musicians (or pay for their recording, manufacturing and distribution, if the album doesn't sell enough to make profits after everyone has their finger in the pie). It's shitty, but it's the way it is, and not buying cds and still taking the music is not going to help the situation, it's going to make it continually worse. Musicians will never work for free, nor should they. If you don't want to reward the artist, you don't get to take the music. It doesn't work that way. Musicians aren't doing it for charity.

[Krakrok]

Welcome to the New Prohibition.

Making money off of shared culture isn't an unalienable human right.

[HaemishM]

In the case of the aforementioned theoretical novel of mine: Am I going to get my tits out of whack because some guy sends a copy of his book to his buddy? No. Will I get my nose bent ouf of shape and sic lawyers on a motherfucker selling knockoff copies of my book without permission? You goddamned right I am.

What about someone getting ahold of a copy of your book in Word format and putting it out on Overnet/gnutella/whatever?  You're cool with that?

It ain't like I can stop it, now is it?

Besides, a Word format book will not print or read as well as a paperback/hardback in the hand. If some mutton chops feel such a need to get my book out there, so long as they aren't making money off of it, I might be a bit irritated but otherwise unconcerned.

[Shockeye]

so long as they aren't making money off of it, I might be a bit irritated but otherwise unconcerned.

Which is why we aren't locking up librarians.

[Nebu]

I'm surprised this thread hasn't spawned the "sampling vs. stealing" debate as well.  

It's about blame and liability.  If I'm a recording artist (see also author, playright, etc.) and the stuff I created is making someone else more money than I am, it's going to provoke a response.  When people pour their life into a piece of work, they get pissed when some 3rd party with business savvy can get rich from their sweat.  I'd say this is a pretty fundamental human response.  

So what happens? They look for someone to blame.

Ethically, I think that people ought to support those artists that inspire them.  Sadly, this also supports the money-grubbers that also benefit from the artist.  It's a viscious cycle.  Are people burning CD's, bootlegging, and getting music without charge to blame?  Not really.  But I don't think that anyone can argue that copying a cd does decrease the revenue to the artist... no matter how small.

[Train Wreck]

I'm surprised this thread hasn't spawned the "sampling vs. stealing" debate as well.

It's very easy to sample music at most music stores and bands' own websites.  It's saved me from spending a fortune on crap.

[Nebu]

I must be having clarity problems today.  

By sampling I meant things like the use of VH's Jamie's Crying by Ton Loc or Vanillia Ice using Queen/Bowie Under Pressure.

There are millions of better examples I'm sure, but I mostly listen to Classical/Jazz/early rock and proclaim ignorance.