IMHO (universal disclaimer, I'm ranting about ideas, not individuals or their worth as human beings. All ideas are not created equal, they live or fail on their ability to spread and become accepted, based on the funding to spread them, the acceptance by the majority of the media, or the integrated self replicating memes embedded within (read God given truth or two or 100). )
The fact is that the music industry lied and used illegal monopolistic practices when the music CD was introduced. They claimed that the music CD would only have a high price for the initial 2-5 years, until the 'research and development costs were recovered', then CDs would drop in price and be cheaper than vinyl. They also claimed that CDs were virtually indestructible compared to vinyl. You can find magazine ads from the early 80s when they were trying to get CDs off the ground with exactly this kind of wording. Then the major distributors started refusing to accept returned vinyl for cost and began heavily discounting returned vinyl, even customer returned defective vinyl, refunds to the retailers. All the while, it appeared (to myself and several friends) that they were going out of their way to produce vinyl in poorer quality, like ABC/Dunhill, Avista, and other companies. This gave a brief niche market to high quality producers of vinyl, half speed mastered disks, limited pressings, etc., while forcing retail outlets to switch to CDs.
Have you noticed how many of these companies also produce the playback and recording devices, or have a major stake in the manufacture's that do, or vice-versa? Used to be that any klutz with modest amount of mechanical skill could put together a decent turntable, align a cartridge and isolate the platform from vibration. When was the last time you replace a read head on a DVD player?
They got greedy when they saw how much they made when they replaced 8 tracks with cassettes for the mobile market.
I have over 800 vinyl titles. It wasn't a problem if I made a tape for my own use, or even to give to a friend, that usually amounted to two copies at the most. And it was of music that I had already paid for. The same applies to TV and radio broadcasts. For special events, the stations used to even provide cues for commercial breaks so that you could record the show for your own use. I also paid for duplicates of about 50 titles on cassette and then again on CD. Why did I have to pay for the same product 3 times in some instances?
Have the prices of CDs dropped?
Why can I buy a DVD of a great movie, two or more years after its release, for 1/3 the price of a CD? Is the music industry that much greedier than the movie industry? Aren't their production costs higher? Why do the majority of the albums released today contain only 2 or 3 decent tracks with the rest garbage? And why do the same retail outlets sell CD media storage products that damage CDs? I haven't heard more than a few 'quality' albums of new music a year. In popular music, Ozomatli's Street Signs contained an amazing collection of cross genre music, all well written and produced, and a couple of dozen other artists, in their respective genres, have done the same. Look at the crap that established bands have put out. The Clapton/JJ Cale CD was mostly crap. Any of JJ Cale's previous albums were better. The Eagles lastest? Mostly mediocre.
Taste is personal. The desire to be able to listen to a variety of music, old favorites and something new, used to be more prevalent. The time was that, if you decided that you needed to collect music, many radio stations would rotate lots of different material. If you collected, you would get excited about 2 to 12 new releases a week. You'd go out and buy about half of them. College stations, guys in the military around the world, would
play a wide variety of old and new music, regional favorites, and samples of music outside of their market genre. I remember hearing bluegrass, bebop, acid rock, reggae, country, swing, folk rock, blues, pop classics from the 40s and 50s, kool jazz, fusion, and even classical music, all on one radio station during the weekend. I went nuts exploring the different styles, buying a bit of everything.
Corporate greed took over. The corporate takeover and merger of radio stations was part of a coordinated marketing and restraint of trade action combined with the release of the CD format.
In the local market where I live, when a small company tries to start a new radio station, with a more creative format for music, the corporate giants coordinate 2 to 4 of their local stations with format changes and expanded play lists to try and squash the new station. If, or when they succeed, they return to their bland boardroom dictated format. The same corporations that control 40-80% of the broadcast market, now control more than 50% of the live venue production market.
The music industry was healthier before corporate consolidation and greed.
I'm hoping the internet can change that. And P2P sharing is part of it.
As far the artists go. Take a look at an old editorial article that the old American Society for Quality Control published in their magazine about the Grateful Dead.
Number one in quality for customer service in the music industry. They invited fans to bring recording equipment to their concerts and set up a separate engineering board that they could hook into. They negotiated all of their record deals to force the record company to release albums at the lowest possible price. They did the same with ticket prices for concerts. They were even cited for how they treated their employees. In the mid-80s the average low end salary for their roadies, technicians, etc was $50k/year. After a year with the band, college trust funds were set up for all of the employee's children. They also guaranteed set periods of inactivity from the road so that employees could have time with their families. They created the first band controlled 800 line for ticket sales, then internet sales, without the added service fees of Ticketmaster. Their merchandising was always highest quality. Bootleg recordings circulate all over the place, but their fans also pay for the product enough that they have a comfortable living, as do their employees.
And speaking of keeping ticket prices lower. Lets all burn any media content with Barbara Streisand and the Eagles. World class ticket prices for concerts were $35-$45 a seat before Babs decided her fans would pay $125 a seat. (and the idiots did) The Eagles followed suit as the first major rock and roll act to ask over $70 a seat. Boom. Now I only attend concerts for 'cult' bands, up and coming bands, or nostalgia tours by bands who've lost their mass appeal. The average college student could afford a dinner and a concert date once. Not any more, unless mommy and daddy are footing the bill, along with their Porsche.
File sharing is NOT an artist issue. Its an issue of controlling the corporate distribution channel. Is that what the copyright laws were intended to protect? Hell no, they were set up to protect the individual creative forces.
I NEED TO HEAR IT BEFORE I BUY IT. RADIO IS NOT FULFILLING ITS FUNCTION 99% of the time.
In the past, radio got caught flat footed a few times. In college, we were listening to the revamped Fleetwood Mac, a la Buckingham and Nicks, six months before we heard a single cut played on the radio.
Bit Torrent and other P2P file sharing as a form of distribution is a direct result of the music, movie and software industries shutting down bulletin boards, usenet binary sites, and pirate sites.
I don't care what some giant corporation tries to tell me about what is a copyright violation. If it were really true, the entire system of public libraries would be shut down tomorrow. And, as a completely different topic, it looks like the techbook and certification industries have found their own methods to cripple libraries, if you've looked at trying on-line library ebooks to prepare for a certification test.
I believe anyone is completely justified in today's corporate environment to download an album. 90% of whats available for download is compressed and not a hi-fidelity sample. I won't pay for that. If I like it, I go out and buy it. And for all those who believe that most people who love music would not do that, you're idiots with tin ears that don't really love music. And the music industry actually agrees with me. Look at the attempts to introduce higher quality formats. Yeah, MP3s are great for the gym, jogging in the city, etc. They suck at home, in the car, on the road in a hotel room, or in a club. I would never offer anyone a gift that was an MP3 recording.
Notice I didn't say a song, or a track. Track based marketing is step backwards for the music industry. A return to the 45 single and artists putting out one or two samples of quality work along with a bunch of mediocre examples of their 'sound'.
Album sales fueled one of the most profitable eras in the music industry, along with out of control DJs and people swapping tapes.
Another side issue. The perversion of the copyright laws by corporations with software and even hardware.
Patents were the tools used to protect corporate manufacturing. And they are time limited. Then competition can come in and try to sell a better mousetrap.
How the hell can a giant corporation claim copyright for a product that the original programming team created and was then laid off? How does this protect the true creative individuals intellectual property?
You want me to honor a copyright? Introduce me to the individual programmers who wrote the first revision AND the user manual, and nursed it to release. Prove to me that they, or their direct descendants, are still collecting royalties on the sales.
Outside of small programming companies, corporate copyright is a lie. Show me any code produced by Bill Gates in the last 20 years. Hell, for over twenty years now, hardware manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon. They've been circumventing the patent laws by using copyrights for chip layouts, printed circuit board layouts, wiring diagrams and enclosure layouts.
Look at some of your peripherals and 'service', like your camera, cable TV or cell phone.
I'm on my fifth cell phone, my third digital camera. My first two cell phones contained simple games. they were great if I had to stand in line and forgot something to read. Now I have to subscribe to a service and also pay a download for a game that's been in existence for 20 years, like tetris? And if I stop the subscription to the service they strip the game off the phone? How the hell is this protecting the intellectual property of someone? How is this a service worth paying for? Pay attention Verizon.
Every digital camera I had till the most recent, formatted the memory chip so that I could buy a card reader and see the card and its contents as removable media in my computer file manager. Now Kodak has 'Easy Share'. I couldn't believe it when I hooked the camera up to the PC and I couldn't get my pictures without firing up the 'Easy share' software. Then couldn't believe it when even that wouldn't work if I put the memory chip in a card reader. I have to buy an Easy Share card reader from Kodak for that. I will discourage everyone I know from ever buying a Kodak camera for the rest of my life.
The cable company. FCC rules state that ALL local broadcasts (more or less) must be carried on basic cable. We have 6 stations broadcasting a hi def signal. Our new TV can detect digital signals. It detects and shows ONLY the local hi def broadcasts. We cannot see any content that is only shown on a higher level of service. But the cable company wants to define any hi def as a higher level of service. So what do they do? They won't publish the location of these signals, they move the local hi def signals every two months to different channels, they broadcast software codes to lock up the TV. Meanwhile we get a preview of the all digital basic cable line up (once again, no content of a higher level of service). Guess what their spending their research dollars on? Down converting local hi-def broadcasts to 480i.
Look at the Hollywood writers strike. Who's at the beginning of the creative process in the first place?
Now the last point. The law is the law.
Benjamin Franklin funded his printing house by violating copyrights of European authors. Almost all print shops in the US did. You have to have government authority to brew beer and ale, make wine, or distill spirits.
The FDA has to oversee the entire process from design conception to individual failures of medical devices, this evolved from a law that protected poppy growers in Connecticut and Massachusetts from foreign imports of opium?
1984 has been here since about 1860. Black is white. Peace in our time. Drug addicts steal and commit crimes (please show me records of all the drug addicts committing crimes before 1903, when it was a medical and not a legal issue).
You claim to be so upstanding on this point of 'morality'. That means that you've never violated a traffic law- never speed, never do a rolling stop, never yield the right of way on the highway and force merge into traffic, never have a glass of wine or beer with a meal and then get behind the wheel, never cut someone off in traffic, never tailgated, never drove in the left lane without passing, never took a colleagues idea and incorporated with your own, never lusted after someone other than your spouse, never took advantage of someone in a business deal, never payed a Congressman a $1500 campaign contribution to have breakfast or lunch with them, never sued someone needlessly, never hired a lawyer to protect you from a justified law suit, never reverse engineered a product, never inhaled, and you did not have sex with that woman?
The facts are that this country was founded to protect the rights of the individual businessman, whether he was a farmer, a printer, a shop owner or a lawyer, before the concept of the modern corporation was invented. It was to protect us from the worst of government tyranny and business - the East India Company and their like. The constitution could NOT be ratified without the Bill of Rights. And the government and corporations have been trying to nullify the Bill of Rights from day one.
The only people who have a moral complaint on P2P are the writers, musicians, and programmers who live on royalties, not corporate salaries.
The music industry is NOT losing money, this is a lie. Its not growing profits as fast and as big as it would like. Just like the arguments about cuts in government funding. 99% never happened. Either got shuffled around, or cut the scheduled increase in spending.
Its miracle the open software foundation exists, its one of the few things balancing things out in the intellectual property mess. Otherwise we might soon discover that our private thoughts are violating some corporation's copyright. We need the equivalent for the music industry, and the 'service' industry.
If we live in an information society, how is continually restricting, controlling and charging for information any different than the company store taking our entire paycheck for the company house, food and clothing from the company store, and bills from the company clinic, doctor and pharmacist? Are we going to have National Guard militia machine gunning down people who've had enough of the abuse?
See what a toothache can do for a forum rant?
