Quote:

“Less recorded music sold than any time in decades.”

Yep, vynil also sold less than in any time in decades what is your point?

Old tech goes down, the thing selling if you didn’t heard was digital and that a lot of labels are not making most of their profits from it and not CD’s.

Further artists keep getting more money how? according to you they are not selling anything, how they get more money every year?

Instead of calling it the “movie” industry, why don’t we call it the “video” industry?

How much video is uploaded to YouTube every second? Yeah, I’m sure that has no effect on the wider cultural ecosystem. Nope. Must be piracy.

Also, how many people find it easier to rent from Redbox and watch it on their large screen televisions? While eating anything they want, while drinking anything they want? Being able to pause it in the comfort of their own homes? Nope. Gotta be piracy.

I could literally go on all day long but you don’t care. Because piracy.

Fewer movie tickets sold… fewer than any point in a decade.

Highest movie ticket prices… higher than any point in history.

Which leads to…

More movie revenue… more than any point in history.

Maybe if it wasn’t so expensive, they would sell more tickets? But that might lower their revenue, because they’ve already figured out the amount to charge to maximize revenue.

Looks like the movie studios just know more about economics than you.

Ok, so make art, not profits. All your arguments are crying for the middleman and not the artist.

Nix the middle man and put your art out for the world to see.
We have developed the greatest information sharing system every devised by humanity. You, or anyone else with a modicum of talent can get their message out and really say something to the entire world.

> Fewer movie tickets sold…
>
> Less recorded music sold than any time in decades.
> …

And I am sure you would have claimed the transportation industry was failing when buggy-whip sales dropped right?

The Alyona Show

It’s not without it’s biases (but then who isn’t) but I find it kind of sad that a program produced by Russian television seems to be a lot more balanced than most of the news shows I see on conventional TV.

Read this response, it’s really well written.

It’s like the guy reads TechDirt or something, but he doesn’t mention “reason to buy” and does only hint at connecting with fans.

Rocinante [Moderator] 5 days ago
Real name: Mark

Hi Duff: I’ve been around Seattle a long time, since I was born according to my mother. I was in bands starting at the age of 14, hung around the U-District, Capitol Hill my whole life. I went to school in Ballard. I moved around, but for most of the ’90s lived on Capitol Hill, ran a label to self-release records, then cd’s, the ubiquitous van tours, the general struggle to pay for shit and not get much back. I met my wife because she worked for a music publisher in NYC. When it was just me, that was all good, I never once minded the low rate of return on my investment. I was happy to play for money, for drink tickets most times, have a beer with friends at the practice space, try and hustle some cd’s here and there. As long as I could pay my rent, it was all good. At the same time you were going back to SU, I was going to Seattle Central, just because that previous life was eventually a bit much to bear, didn’t want to be an old guy hanging out at the bar, especially not looking old, I had quit drinking and I had kids, and it seemed like every year went by, another old friend had died. I still prefer being around my kids to any club I’ve ever been in, and I miss my friends whose choices or diseases didn’t let them see another kind of life. I didn’t grow up, but I changed. But, I actually had found your story inspiring, and it was something I identified with. I eventually leaned towards academic work, then studied mass media law at the UW, and gravitated to the highest paying day jobs I could find just so I could afford to buy a house in the same neighborhood I grew up in. Okay, enough of the bona fides.

I don’t think this is an argument about who has what on the line, or what kind of perspective each of us bring, mainly because I doubt our voices will influence any final legislation. Its sad, but we dont get to speak to power when you have two multi-billion dollar industries arguing with each other. Anytime legislation is passed on the level this one would be, there are going to be unintended consequences. That has a macro-level effect. So, the macro’s get to decide. And, while I did read up on things, I doubt the site for HR3261 had 4 million hits that day. You are most certainly correct about that.

Now, above, you mention the holes in the legislation. After the UW, I worked for the House Democratic caucus. We would work with any number of constituents on drafting legislation. Any time you deal with billion dollar industries, they come to you with the legislation already written, and not a single word is included or excluded out of happenstance. Even when they write stupid, fucked up laws, its because they wanted a stupid fucked up law they could disavow later. In the case of SOPA and PIPA, these ‘holes’ are intended by the firms that drafted them to allow one party or another in a copyright claim a greater level of control over another. Law itself is an adversarial system, but what these bills often end up is in the thousands of pages. Especially in tech cases because, what you are doing with a law like PIPA, is trying to craft a law that suits a business model which runs at odds to the very technology platform that the business runs on. [for instance, consider if the law simply says reproducing a copyrighted file is infringement, and you are on a site, and a copyrighted image is downloaded, which is actually reproduction, onto your temp int folder in Windows. now, try and write legislation that makes that instance legal, since its an unintentional act that happens because you browsed a web page, versus actually clicking on and downloading a higher resolution image. Actually sorting that out could take hundreds of pages of legalese, and keep people in houses in Ballard, so, in a way, it creates jobs 🙂

As you can imagine, some of us are fans of yours, support you, have never downloaded illegal music, never will, yet disagree with copyright law itself. We also disagree with the assessment that the massive protest was the result of people blindly following each other off a cliff. Some of are very familiar not only with this legislation, but the history of copyright.

I would just throw this out there: a- I think copyright law itself has been abused by the large corporations, their banks and shareholders and hedge funds that own them. I don’t think you should be allowed to hold a copyright as long as is currently allowed by law. I think our culture, the music, the film, the plays, the arts, are all healthier the sooner these privately held rights to creative works pass into the public domain. I think the greater level of currency that this type of information can contribute to the public domain makes for a healthier and more creative society.
b- I don’t think any large media company is capable, by its very nature, of allowing or seeing how a free exchange of their products increases the overall value of the product. In fact, other than a good will accounting at time of future sale, its almost impossible to look at that value. But, our society makes a great deal of investment in infrastructure that supports the growth in value of these products. For instance, lets say Guns and Roses reunites for the RaR HOF, and that is simulcast on the internet for a mere $10. That is some coin coming your way. But it can happen because we as a society via our government and public research universities have supported and grown a system that reaches into nearly every home in the US. In every way, those who do commerce on the internet and the public investment in the internet are interrelated. The public interest in the products you create, then, is a valid interest. We have invested in you, your business, and, in addition to taxes, at some point we ask that you contribute that work itself to the public body of works. In short that it become a very part of the American culture from which the music initially grew. The very name I adopted for these responses is Rocinante, the name of Don Quixote’s horse. A ‘nag’ whose disagree-ability highlights some sort of truth. But, what’s more important, that work is considered one of the touchstones, lodestones, pre-eminent works in human history. It is to Spanish what Shakespeare is to English. It is known today because it was pirated so much after initial publication, which was very minimal. Its an example how people demanded access to content because it contributed to their lives in some deep and meaningful way. That is part of the conversation that is lost here: There’s all this demand this system cant meet. That’s as much of an issue as anything. The system has shown it has a much greater capacity to distribute product, yet there is this prohibition on the manner in which the distribution occurs. Instead of solving that problem, the approach has been to try and put this ‘evil’ back in Pandora’s Box. (Evil is what was in the box in the myth, not saying music or whatever is evil)
c- You have a right to make money. You have the right to make a lot of money. As much as people want to give you. People were complaining about $50 concert tickets, well, folks, if you want to live in a community where everyone has a good paying job, then shit costs more. Nobody is ever ripping anyone else off, we make exchanges based on our choices. But, you have the right to make money. The only question is, how much, how long? That’s a valid thing to disagree about.
d- I think we need to get ahold of ourselves about the music industry. Its always been changins. The music industry that you write of above only existed for about 35 years. I’m thinking about 1970 or so, just post all the 60s music festivals and the start of the way Led Zeppelin and Peter Grant and Apple and Allen Klein basically altered the way bands handled their business. Not to mention the Stones and the introduction of sponsored tours. But that’s really big level stuff. The important part is that since 1915, the music business, the media business has always undergone serious disruptions. The introduction of records was feared by a lot of music groups because they were afraid their tunes would get ripped off. And, its always been corporate, since RCA was formed by ATT, GE, Westinghouse, and the United Fruit Company to control radio patents. (thats the same UFC that funded US interventions in Central America). In the 70s and 80s, I don’t know how many times people were accosted a show for having a recording device, maybe 238. For anyone not old enough, the bootlegging business was approached by the record companies with the same zeal downloading is today. Of course, downloading has an impact that dwarf’s bootlegging. And, as we know now, bootlegging really was a fan based activity and often did not impact overall sales too much. But, go to NYC, and you can walk up the street and still buy bootlegged stuff. Nonetheless, this point is that disruption is a natural occurrence in the media industry. That is to be expected, because its a business based on technology, which is by ITS nature, in constant flux. But, that creates the conundrum: Media businesses need a constant influx of new material, they need to be able to make money off of that material to reinvest and create more material, that material then needs to pass into the public domain, if anything to create room for more privately held material, as well as to complete the implied social agreement of the copyright grant.

So, the media is in transition, I think you are right, in five years, there will be no company that looks like a record company once looked in 5 years. But just like Chaplin Studios became A and M records and is now Muppet Labs, that space will be occupied by something. I sincerely hope that its a model that provides support to artists, while at the same time giving the freedom to engage with content that music fans clearly want. I mean, if you’re creating a fan made video you are a fan. You are engaged. That’s loyalty no marketing campaign can buy. Its also copyright infringement. Unless the artists have a way to allow for it while still making a living.

e- There is no point e.
f- relative to point d, this is now the saddest of all keys.
g- I think its wrong to throw dwarves, but I like the Dwarves, however, only in small doses.
h- I am totally onto another tangent now: typing random sentences in a list.