While some people complain that the market is pulling value down, I’d say there’s a bit of truth to that. However, that’s the point. The label fails seemingly willfully, in “pulling” the value back up.

This is indeed what Mike points out time and time again– that instead of trying to remove an infinte good from circulation, some artists can take an alternative approach by adding value to their brand. In doing so, artists can differentiate themselves from being merely a performer, back to being an owner in their business, their brand, and exert control over personal destiny. This seems to be absent from the major label paradigm, where contractually, derivative works are looked down upon.

Hooray for the artists that buck the label paradigm, distribute digitally, and do things to engage their audience in new ways like Nine Inch Nails.

You don’t know anything about the music business if you think artists ever get paid what they should in the industry. All the so-called business models I see you guys post are a joke… if they are all so great more people would use them. Put your money where your mouth is, if you really believe in these alternative business models, put your money up to support artists in this regard and see what happens to your time and money.

Weird Harold…someone needs to learn math you say?

Care to explain to us how the 200% of Publishers and writers shares works on a song…?

I’m less concerned with my “rights”, and entitlements as an artist vs. fans and more concerned with my royalty streams and the multinationals and government lobby monoliths that collect that money actually giving it to me.

Blame the fans is fail.

And your article has one major flaw…there definitely IS a group talking about musicians not getting paid, Major Labels…But they’ve been carrying on that conversation for decades so I don’t understand why all the fuss now?

“musicians have the right to get paid” is code for all the middle man groups need to lamprey the royalty streams so they don’t have to go work in a rest home.

brendan b brown
wheatus.com

people are born with different talents, and the idea that only the business men should be fat cats, while musicians have to struggle in a profession nobody respects is not pleasant. in a band of 5 people, if one person buys a song we’ve split equally, i get 3p.

everyone loves to employ musicians for nothing because we’re desperate, and our job seems to lack the respect that those in a day job, slaves to money are given

“When the bands stop making music (because they can’t afford to / don’t have the time / have to work Mcjobs to pay the rent) then we might end up back at that place where you have no more music to consider. At least, you may end up with less choices of good music and plenty more choices of garage band stuff. It’s good if you like garage bands, sort of sucky if you prefer a higher quality product.”

Wow…just, wow. You REALLY have no sense of history, do you? You DO realize that mankind has been making music since there was a mankind, right? And that not all of those people had copyright protection and/or got paid very much for doing it, right? The idea that NO ONE will ever make music unless there is HUGE amounts of money to be made is ludicrous at best, and disingenuous at worst.

But that is Harold. Stick your head in the sand and ignore reality. Yes, it might be garage bands, but SOMEONE will make music. And you ignore the salient point: If EVERYONE is doing that, then that is the only kind of music to listen to. That is all that will be available. People will still listen to music as well. So, you can either listen to what is available, or, you can not, and go back to reading and stealing pictures and stories from other websites like you do now.

Music isnt a RIGHT. You arent ENTITLED to it, THEY arent entitled to get paid just because they created some piece of music. Like anything in life (and like you choose to ignore repeatedly) if you make something people LIKE, you can find ways to get paid for it. It used to be big record labels and shiny discs. Now, and in the future, it will be something else. Maybe iTunes. Maybe self-produced. Maybe some other form of record business. But what we have now is going away whether you and your industry butt-buddies like it or not.

Just because he put his work on the internet for me to see, like artists on the radio and such, does not mean I owe them money. Just like I don’t owe adobe any money for photoshop, because I don’t want it, I don’t owe artists money if I don’t want their music. THEY DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE PAYED WITHOUT EARNING IT! I think WH has it confused, not everyone he is fighting with. Music is a product, not a service. An mp3 is no different from photoshop or MS office, it is a product.
A better example is this: A guy digs a trench for my lawn sprinkler system, he has a right to be paid for that. Another guy builds a ditch digging machine, I don’t want it, therefore I don’t have to go out an buy one. Music is the same way, a concert is a service (artist deserves to be paid) and an mp3 is a product (I owe artist nothing if I don’t want it).

WH you clearly don’t understand the way the world is GOING to work soon. I am 24, meaning I am the first wave of the post Napster generation if you will. In middle school everyone was righteously pissed that downloading free music was deemed illegal, and had the general attitude of music not being worth money. We didn’t pay for it on the radio, we hadn’t paid for mp3s, and no one was going to. Do you understand, the next few waves of adults will not think music has any value, it is free or it will be made free. My music collection consists of cd’s I was given as gifts, and nothing else, it’s all radio after that. If music cost 5 cents per song I MIGHT be willing to buy music, otherwise they can all get me my fries while they work on the next LP. And if you think people like me are bad, you have no idea, I actually pay for movies, my brothers will not go see them (they are all younger). They actually get mad at content producers for not making the content free. Before posting a damn straw man argument try wrapping your mind around that.

The problem with Weird Harold is that he is an “opiate of the masses” type, dedicated to the idea that wage-slaves are supposed to fantasize about being rock-star rich, as noted by 1369ic (# 22), instead of taking concrete action to improve their condition, like going to night school, learning a trade, etc. You know, the peasant girl digging up turnips or whatever, and the prince is supposed to come and carry her off, da, da, da… One realizes that for Weird Harold, music is simply incidental to the fantasy of wealth and fame. In another time and place, he would be fantasizing about buried treasure maps (one is reminded of Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo).

Now, of course you can’t sell electronically reproducible goods very well, and it makes more sense to sell services. The most important service is teaching. People commonly do pay thousands of dollars for tuition, at the rate of so much per lesson. The catch is that you have to convince them that whatever you teach is worth learning. That usually means worth learning without reference to economic prospects.

If an art form is intrinsically worthwhile, it attracts amateurs, people who are willing to pursue the art form seriously without any expectation of becoming professionals, and who have other remunerative occupations. There are lawyers who paint, for example, even though a painter would have to be extremely successful in order to make as much as the average run-of-the-mill lawyer, the kind who handles wills and house sales, or chases ambulances. A good lawyer can make much more, of course, if money is what he’s after (*). One even odder avocational painter was Yutaki Katayama, Datsun-Nissan’s man in California in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and one of the major architects of the Japanese automakers’ arrival in the United States. Katayama painted western scenes, and sent out his favorite work as Christmas cards to his entire contact list, which ultimately ran to 10,000 names. The whole point was that Katayama was a samurai, a hereditary aristocrat descended from the landlord class, and water-color painting is the kind of civilized thing that samurai do as a matter of course. It is what separates them form mere barbarians, the whole “silk and steel” business. Katayama went into Datsun-Nissan’s export business in very much the same spirit that a certain type of noble Virginian or Boston Brahman would join the State Department. Katayama was a kind of mirror image of the finest American diplomats, the “China Hands,” who were sent to China in the early twentieth century. (David Halberstam, _The Reckoning_, 1986)

(*) Anecdote: sometime in the 1950’s, the dean of Harvard Law School is supposed to have addressed his students as follows: “The A-students among you will become law school professors. The B-students will become judges. The C-students will merely become very rich.”

Some years ago, riding on a city bus in the Pacific Northwest, I heard an interesting story. There was a beautiful little girl, perhaps seven or eight years old, telling the entire bus (after the manner of Eloise of the Plaza) all about her ballet teacher. It seemed that the ballet teacher was dancing The Firebird with the local semi-professional dance company. Semi-professional means of course that the permanent soloists (principal dancers) get a small salary, and everyone else gets nothing. Most dancers make their livings by teaching heroine-worshiping little girls to dance, and the tuition is naturally paid by the parents. A successful ballet teacher, who can keep her class filled up, would make more than a waitress, salesgirl, etc., but less than a public school teacher. Why do parents pay for dancing lessons? The stated reasons turned up by a Google search run along the lines of: “make her less clumsy, more feminine, less shy.”

In the late nineteenth century, the great age of the symphony orchestra, every nicely brought-up little girl was expected to learn to play the piano. Every middle-class home had a piano, and the daughter of the house customarily performed for company. As for boys of a certain social standing, they went to religiously-oriented secondary schools or colleges. Such schools had daily chapel, in which the entire school sang hymns as a matter of course. The daughter of the house’s boyfriend would be singing something suitably uplifting in the parlor while she accompanied him. The audience for the symphony orchestra was an audience of amateur musicians. The lowest strata of professional musicians were therefore people who made their living giving music lessons to all the amateurs. Similarly, for a schoolmaster, being able to function as an organist/choirmaster was as useful as being able to teach an additional subject, coach sports, etc.

Times change, of course. Music is much less a part of our lives, notwithstanding the abundance of recorded music. One hardly ever sees harmonicas anymore. A harmonica is a simple, inexpensive little instrument, fairly easy to learn, that you can carry around in your pocket and play anywhere. But no one plays the harmonica informally. There are partial exceptions to the rule of few people actually being involved in music. There is a fairly active Classical MIDI scene on the internet. The major composers are of course in the public domain, but people sequence them (the MIDI equivalent of performing), and post MIDI files in much the same way as any other writings. They also compose their own music, and sequence that too. Classical MIDI involves music students, of course, but it also involves a new kind of amateur, one who cannot play any instrument, at least not well enough for public performance. In Classical MIDI, music has returned to being a living art, at the cost of dropping the performance aspect, becoming a kind of “sound painting.” The better living classical composers tend to teach in music schools, or they produce theme music for movies and television, so they don’t get too uncontrollably upset about gray areas. They are more likely to be interested in cost-of-living increases at the state university than they are to be about highly conjectural royalty revenue.

Alternatively, you can do custom work. For example, an artist can paint a picture of the client’s children, the way a lot of the artists sponsored by the Art Renewal Center do (Allan R. Banks comes to mind). Such a painting is uniquely valuable to the parents, and does not compete with all the other possible paintings of other children. Here’s another possibility: a lot of organizations feel compelled to have a row of formal portraits of their successive presidents, more or less in the same style as the various portraits of George Washington. The organization needs to feel that it is eternal, hence the full treatment is required every couple of years, every time someone’s term of office expires.

A lot of this discussion seems to involve rock musicians who aren’t musicians, who don’t have any of the skills one would expect a musician to have. They don’t play instruments, at least not to the level of being able to play straight instrumental music. They can perform only one style of music, hard rock, if that, screaming to the accompaniment of pounding drums. They simply don’t have the musical background to be high-school bandmasters. I don’t have exact figures, but there must be tens of thousands of high school marching bands. The high school football team absolutely insists on having its own band. Even if the bands don’t all have full-time bandmaster appointments, and you have to teach English or History as well, it’s a civil service job, with semi-tenure and a pension, and that is a lot better than working at McDonalds.

Yes. At least as fair as having a gov’t-backed monopoly has been for a long, long time. What is not fair is what has been going on to this point.

Ryan, I can understand your point until you get here.

There is no monopoly. Don’t confuse copyright rules with a monopoly. That isn’t the case. Nobody stops any band or musician from making music (at least not in the free world), nobody stops them from getting paid, and so on.

In the end, it isn’t a monopoly, but plenty of people have spewed that story over and over as justification for “infringing” music, movies, and software. At the end of the day, it’s just a way of saying “I want a license to steal / take / infringe and I want to be able to hide behind a mod while doing it”.

I was a professional songwriter for thirty years and I lost my job last year because my music publisher decided that there was no money in writing songs for recordings any more because everyone steals the songs. So now I am out of work thanks to you free-tards… But at least I don’t have to slave my life away writing the inane crap that the public,
meaning you, appreciates. Now I spend my days playing jazz and laughing my ass off at how horrible the music is getting now that all the pros have been put out of business.

When you get your music for free you get what you pay for.
Your generation will NEWVER have the great music mine did.
Serves you right you cowardly little anonymous sneak thieves.

Now, go play ‘Guitar Hero’ and dream about a life you will NEVER know.

*Grin*