Mike,

Please post the list of artists “doing quite well”, along with their contact info so we can determine for ourselves if they feel they are better off with file stealing than without.

Also, while your at it, please post your site’s income from advertising that supports your ability to take this position on this issue. What these file stealing peeps don’t understand is that you are making money on the backs of musicians as well, by drawing file thieves to your site and then selling advertising to companies who know exactly what is going on. You are part of the problem, not the solution. If you were not able to use this “issue” to sell advertising, you would not be here.

Okay, I got a better scenario: would you be comfortable with any one of us pretending to be you on other messageboards, talking varying degrees of offensive and controversial comments? We should all be entitled to use the name “Mike Masnick” right?

Or would you suddenly say, “whoa, hey…..i’m not okay with you using my likeness?”.

I’m betting you’re in the former, and i’d call you an out and out fucking hypocrite.

I now dub this article “plot twist”: take Mike Masnick’s name and pretend to be him. All over the net. Make sure that the whole world is reading, too. After all, he doesn’t own his own name, and it is perfectly fine to create smear campaigns on his behalf.

Would this be a better or worse plot twist than, say, your plot twist in Richard’s day of sharing?

HYPOCRITE!

As for the one guy up there who claims it’s ok to pretend to be “Mike Masnick” I already addressed that. You really ought to try reading. I have already said I’m against any thing where someone PRETENDS to be something they’re not, because that confuses customers. So that’s not true at all. It’s like trademark protection. I explained that. You chose not to read it and assumed (incorrectly) that it was just like copyright. It’s not.

Baloney. The average fan thinks that they can do whatever they want with an artist’s music, including masquerading/ pretending to be a new sort of distro. If they called up the band and asked them if it’s okay, that’s one thing. Pretending it’s alright by the band or assuming that it’s in the band’s best interests is a totally different thing. On top of that, if he/ she’s trying to be Robin Hood, i’d like to see where that money they’re saving on paying for artist’s recordings is going. I bet they don’t even see it as a savings!

I have no problem with people copying the content from this site and I’ve explained why. All it does is help spread the word about this site. That’s great. If you want to promote that, I encourage it. But that does not mean you get to LIE and pretend to be me. My identity is a scarce good. My content is not. You can copy the infinite goods. Copying the scarce good is quite different.

I knew you were going to say this. You don’t own your name, and i’m betting there could be more than one Mike Masnick in this world.

Here’s something you don’t have a clue about and that I will continue to hand you back your ass in front of your readers (which seem to be suspiciously absent right now)–when digital file sharing started, record companies started getting heat from their distributors and retailers, because if the record companies started making recordings, say, 5 bucks online, they would start to undercut their retailers.

This is a basic law of most businesses. In my day job, we cannot sell directly to the public, because we would undercut our retailers, and we have to give our retailers a special price, so that they can allow for markup and make a living, as well. If we suddenly started demanding that they compete with the prices that we sell our product to them at, they’d never clear a profit.

When people started distributing files all across the internet, what this started doing was undercutting the distro and retailers–retailers didn’t know if it was the bands or the label. It didn’t help that there was lots of acts saying, “steal whatever you want, we’re fine” (some of these artists are now regretting this; the only way that the major artists can make money now is through licencing and exclusivity–ie: AC/DC “Black Ice” at WalMart, Eagles/ Paul McCartney/ Starbucks, Madonna/ Live Nation).

What does this have to do with the “let’s pretend to be Mike Masnick day”? Everything. When someone starts doing something behind your back that doesn’t represent you or your best wishes, people don’t know that someone else is actually representing you or that you’re knifing their business in the back. Whether that’s someone pretending to be you or voicing opinions on any number of political events or world views starts to represent you negatively in a way that you do not like, it is the same thing.

If you don’t like someone assuming that they can do whatever they like with someone’s likeness (a recording is a band’s likeness and reputation, otherwise what are they selling?), you cannot on one hand say that it’s okay in one instance, and then get personal and then say that there’s certain instances that it doesn’t pertain to. That is selective rationale, and that’s better known as “hypocrisy”.

Let’s get into ownership of a brand or intellectual content:

The same thing applies to an actor in a film–while you may think that stealing their films only represents the “artist” portion (“shut up and make films”), it is not- if you steal an alice Alice Cooper album, well, the likeness Alice Cooper is no different a likeness than, say, Batman or James Bond, whether it is an actual person or a persona.

The end results of stealing someone’s intellectual copyright and therefore stealing money from them that they would have otherwise received, and then in this case, creating a false Mike Masnick alias– in which it is only perceived reputational appropriation– is the same. Alice Cooper’s music represents him. Mike Masnick’s articles represent him. This is perfectly clear, since you have followed up on what you have written–if you do not care what we think of you and your articles, clearly you would have no continued input into what we think about you or your writing style. There is an invested interest, much like how a musician’s output starts to represent them, as well. Music is about as personal and reflective as you can get.

Let’s use another example: if Daniel Craig says that he’s against people downloading James Bond movies–whether it is due to financial reasons or just copyright infringement on behalf of the movie studio that he is getting paid from, he is just technically a “character” either way. But without that character, he has nothing to sell in that instance anyways, he has no paycheque without James Bond in that scenario. Just like you would have nothing to sell, for example, to an audience, without an article. At the very least, Mike Masnick, i’m sure, is always at least trying to sell the brand of “Mike Masnick” at any given time, whether it is an article, or just talking to someone in regular, ordinary everyday life conversation.

But let’s get into “content” versus “creator”: did Mike Masnick not write this article? Or am I missing something here in that the article just phantomly appear out of nowhere? Out of thin air?

If we don’t like what Mike Masnick writes, then surely we have some stake in not liking Mike Masnick, himself. It starts affecting the brand of what Mike Masnick has worked so hard to create. And if you don’t think that has a cost, then I strongly do, as I say, advise you to continue writing and digging yourself deeper in an instance in which you are clearly out of your league to those that have done their homework. Or as they’d say in internet speak, “pwned”.

But it is safe to say that you have made your living off of yourself and whatever cache your name has (and as I suspected), getting quite uppity when someone decides to equate “Mike Masnick” with “naive article in which it starts to represent Mike Masnick”, much like how the average file sharer starts to equate the artist with the material as representing the artist. If you, as the content creator, weren’t benefitting from this, then there would be no one to direct these complaints at.

When the average audience starts creating the opportunity for other fans to steal the artist’s intellectual property without the artist’s permission, ask yourself what the illusion of “free” starts to do for things. If someone gave you a car for free, how long would it be until you started realizing, “what’s the catch?” and wondering what’s wrong with it, and/ or “well, why can’t EVERY car be for free???”.

There is a societal cost to the devaluing in music and if you are too naive to understand what that is, maybe you really are as stupid as your article would suggest. I however, believe in the power of music to influence massive world change through individual effect; communizing music (as I will explain much further below) has a DRASTICALLY negative influence on this factor. But it is safe to say that most audiences at least want the illusion of grandeur.

Most music is a tax writeoff, and that’s all the “grandeur” that remains from the old model of the music industry. But when you take away the fantasy and the expectation that the person onstage or on that recording is doing something that you cannot do, you deprive yourself of the real experience of why you pay money for things–you are trading someone for something that you cannot do, yourself.

There has to be some merit in the trading of money or one thing for another, otherwise what you are receiving in return starts to take on a less vibrant hue. You start to believe that YOU are in the position of power, and as i’ve said, music doesn’t work effectively on reality or “being like the next guy”, because Warner tried to do this in the 90’s with SubPop and tried to break various otherwise independent or smaller artists, and realized that audiences…and lost a SHITLOAD of money in the process. There was also a reason why Matador switched from Warner to EMI distro—and it wasn’t because Warner was swimming in so many piles of cash that they felt the need to keep their Matador affiliation.

On the ground level, I see numerous record stores and producers and small labels all being put out of business, and if this current comparison holds, consider this:

-Sun records sold infinite amounts of music in the 50’s (Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Elvis, Johnny Cash, etc) and they were an independent label
-in the 60’s, there were bands starting up every week, every day, every month…..and selling lots of records on both the major AND smaller upstart labels

When you say something like you said to the effect of “it will take time”, how much time do we need to warm up the new model of the music industry’s economy, Mike? To me, this is a devolution. People don’t pay for music because they can get it for free, and when people say that “music is crap”, well, do they waste their time listening to “crap music”? What you seem to fail to realize is that the demand for music has never been higher, YET, the paid sales have never been lower. I attribute this largely to the basic human nature in what people will do when they can get away with something. You’d be surprised at what people deem as proper, when they’re the ones in control of policing their own morality.

Look at the Louisiana Hurricanes–stores were looted and ransacked. This is what happens when people are allowed to police themselves. So why did they not loot it when people were around to protect their property (security, camera monitoring)? Like I say, never rule out the basic criminal nature of some people that needs to be policed into a civiized society. There are many who don’t need laws and governing and policing….but there are many who do, and the inherent destruction that something small and vile can do, can corrupt an entire system. Ask yourself why a virus so small as HIV or any number of viruses can take down the whole body’s system and break it down into a much larger conglomerate of micro organisms that subsidize growth in sub-sub-sub human environments (namely flies and mice and rodents).

It’s always protecting yourself and your survival against someone or something else that claims it’s their right of survival to take what is yours that you need to survive. Right now, that would be the labels, producers, engineers, bands, stores (both big and small), etc…..when you take away that right for their prosperity, you take away a larger groups’ right to prosperity. And right now, it’s the bullshit excuse that “fans” have things that they have “better” things to spend money on. If you can’t pony up at least ten bucks for something that you like in this world, I don’t know how much more fucking useless that you could possibly be; a leach, possibly no better or worse than people that sit on welfare, expecting someone else to subsidize their existence. Because really, file sharing is “welfare for music audiences”. Let’s call it exactly what it is with no bullshit candy coated excuses. If people could steal cars, TV’s, refrigerators online, they’d be doing it. And if you want to get technical, all the credit card scams and all of that, that’s also stealing from people online. They do this because they’re anonymous. Comparatively fewer have the courage to physically pickpocket your wallet.

On top of that, when there are no rewards for bands and the results are socialized among the consumer (such as “fans” sharing/ stealing files), that reeks of socialism, and while that may work for Cuba (if you like driving 50’s cars, that is…stuck in an economic timewarp in which there is no new growth), it sunk the USSR and there was a reason why they got rid of that system. When you distribute the wealth among everyone equally (bands making less or next to nothing–remember that after production/ recording/ promo/ etc, most bands are in DEBT until they finally recoup enough down the road), you’re telling bands that hard work doesn’t pay off.

When there’s no reason to go above and beyond, bands will work hard at first, until they realize that there’s no actual rewards other than money losses, or–in a best case scenario of most bands–breaking even. And in this current environment, for brand new bands (ie: started up last year, last month, last week), I estimate that you’ll see one album, maybe two, MAYBE three, rarely anything after that. And what does persist will be often of such reduced quality compared to the heyday of the classic bands, that most audiences will long have stopped even caring about what new acts are out there.

Well, the average listener “breaks even” when they don’t pay for a recording. Well, what is the price on promotions, and being aware that a release exists? This is free? This all has to be spent often before a band even releases a recording–they’ve got to have promotional channels lined up to get the music out there to people. If people assume this, I sincerely hope that what truly moves them musically, gets harder and harder and harder to find. The great stuff was never particularly popular even in the heyday of the record industry. Sure there’s the Nirvanas, the Hendrixes, the Zeppelins, Joplins–but they’re the exception to the rule. If you look at the charts for any year, you’ll largely find alot of really generic, pedestrian, lowest common denominator music.

Are the Jonas Brothers any better than The Backstreet Boys, New Kids on the Block or Menudo? Who the hell pines for the “glory days” of “rampant artistry” of Menudo? If mainstream music is any better or any shittier than it ever has been, I must have missed the memo. But i’m sure that people would have downloaded that allegedly “shitty” music back then, too. Did millions of fans think that “99 Luftballoons” was the apex of creativity when they bought it? No. Or maybe. But the point is that no one says “hey, I buy shitty music” and then play air guitar to “shitty music”.

If people claim that they were duped into believing it was good, then they deserve what they get. If someone told them the sky is falling, they’d believe it, and if people are herd mentality, they will get herd mentality in the quality and content of their music.

Again, another parallel that we could draw is that AC/DC were generally hated by most audiences as a joke, until they proved that they weren’t going to go away without a fight. “Dirty Deeds…” wasn’t released in America until Bon Scott was dead. But if you read enough and immersed yourself in enough of the required work to seek out great music, you would have heard “Dirty Deeds…” before it was “new” in 1981 (ironically, Bon Scott received a “best new vocalist” award AFTER he was dead). If you want to talk about bands not needing the support of labels, even though the American division of Atlantic had hated AC/DC, they had enough believers in their Australian version–ATCO–to get them through to “Let There Be Rock”, “Highway To Hell” and “Back In Black”, which are arguably an apex in rock n’ roll. If it isn’t, it’s damn close, but I can’t think of one, and i’m a fan of pretty much every influential act since the late 1930’s.

That band had to fight tooth and nail then, and it’s easy to look at them as an institution, but Bon Scott was perceived as a thug (he had to cover up his tattoos in previous bands), and between that and Angus’ schoolboy outfit, it was perceived as a gimmick. Vile. A threat to morality. But if they didn’t have enough LABEL SUPPORT, there would have been no Mutt Lange for “Highway To Hell” and “Back In Black”, which took them out of clubs (in which they were almost destined to remain), and vaulted them into. There’s a reason why AC/DC sells well through every bullshit trend that has sought out to make them irrelevant. (“Back In Black”, ironically still outsells most NEW or recent recordings in PAID sales, 29 years after it’s release).

Until your “new industry model of free until if and when someone is kind enough to drop a couple of pennies into the guitar case” sells that well 29 years after it’s inception–with the integrity, passion, conviction, electrifying but real production values, and flat out absolute desire to do anything LESS than impress– you don’t have any legitimate argument to stand on.

If you think i’m wrong on this and that bands and labels are in the position to make OUTSTANDING albums instead of albums that are “decent” or “good enough”, you name me the modern day equivalent of “Quadrophenia”, “The Slider”, “Dark Side of the Moon”, “Tommy”, “Sticky Fingers”, “Exile On Main Street”, “Nevermind”, “SuperUnknown”, “Highway To Hell/ Back In Black” etc. Or the underground equivalent in influence as “Daydream Nation”.

I’ll also go so far to say as that the majority of music out there these days, even on a smaller level, is pretty good. The production values on an independent and DIY level have increased exponentially. However, terms like “good enough”, “decent”, “okay”, “alright” would describe most of that output. Most of it is stuck at a mid hump level, where it’s not bad…..but it’s not great, either. It’s stuck at getting a C plus or a B type of mark….you’re not failing, but you’re not going above and beyond what people expect you to do.

Butch Vig got an incredible performance out of Nirvana on “Nevermind”. It does not matter whether you like them or not, Butch took Nirvana and tapped into Kurt’s genius. He didn’t settle for “good enough”, he wanted “genius”, “brilliance”, “trancendence”. And he got it. He had to drag Kurt uphill to do more guitar overdubs (one tactic on “Drain You” was telling Kurt that the track was out of tune, and that they needed to track it again). Good coaches get better results out of even the most undisciplined and unwilling of participants. “In Utero”, while still a very good album, does not match the level of “Nevermind”. Not at all. Kurt had his way, but the challenge to get more out of him was gone.

Will you find that in today’s climate? Or is it just “good enough”? How much to you expect to pay to beat the current mid level of “good enough”?

Like I say dude, you don’t want to out-logic me, because you will lose. You’re talking to a music historian, a music lover, and someone who refuses to sit idly by, while their friends in the industry (producers, engineers, small record labels, small record stores), all get put out of business for a bullshit lie propagated by people who live in an ivory tower in a fantasy world.

On top of that, i’m a cognizant observer of people and basic human nature and morality, and someone that has read enough on the destruction of enough economies through supposed “growth” scams. If you’d read Richard Douthewaite’s “The Growth Illusion”, you’d realize that in that scenario, that the new big greedy evil bad guy is the file sharing outlets that sell people’s hard earned content and get filthy rich off of it while paying those providers NOTHING or next to nothing. Seriously, it is no different than any business that hires sweatshop labourers, or invests in slave labour. Next, I will hear the argument that not paying workers or investing in slavery is “heroic”. There will always be these types of hierarchies that pop up to destroy anything good as we know it. That could be the massive outsourcing of goods, assembly lines and huge corporations killing off craft and skill for enabled, dumbed down labour, etc (which was a good way that the automakers are in deep shit, but that’s only part of it, and an entirely different ten million word essay).

I’ve said this before, but need to say it again: YOUR demand (and by this, I mean any audience that is reading this where the “shoe fits”, as they say) is making the file sharing companies a multimillion dollar industry. That’s from advertising. All while some people claim to be liberating people from the clutches of the “big bad industry”, look who’s popped up to capitalize on the demand that YOU create for their “heroic” enterprise.

You’ve been sold a lie, and they’ve slowly and inadvertently bought your interest on the back of artists and content creators and millions of illegal dollars. They’re pretending to be Robin Hood, when they’re really the Sheriff of Nottingham by putting content creators and the whole infrastructure that supports artists and those that support and defend artistry as we know it, out of business in a financial jail, left to rot.

You wanna talk about bankrupt? Well, that’s about as morally bankrupt as you can get. And if you want to talk passion and conviction, I just spent a couple of hours WRITING this, in the hopes that a few people read it and wake up. It may even be in vain, who knows. Do you see that happening that much these days? Or do you see more and more people willing to roll over and accept the fate that someone else has determined for them?