Copyright, Artists' Rights and other Digital Music Industry Things
Sometimes we talk about this type of thing, but I couldn't find any specific place so I made one.
Anyway, article/letter by David Lowery (Camper Van Beethoven/Cracker).
How messed up is it that my first thought was to check Guvera for Camper Van Beethoven albums?
Anyway, article/letter by David Lowery (Camper Van Beethoven/Cracker).
How messed up is it that my first thought was to check Guvera for Camper Van Beethoven albums?
Comments
- The health issues that Chestnutt (didn't realize they were actually neighbors - that's awful) and Linkous faced are one of the biggest problems with any kind of freelance-based industry. And, without getting too political, one of the main reasons why some form of single-payer healthcare is necessary. That is the biggest hurdle most people face when contemplating "self-employment".
- "First, you could legally buy music from artists. The best way to insure the money goes to artists? Buy it directly from their website or at their live shows. But if you cant do that, there is a wide range of services and sites that will allow you to do this conveniently." That is what has largely defined the change in my purchase habits over the past year - why I am more frequently ordering physical media directly from artists/indie labels and maintaining multiple drip.fm subscriptions.
Hopefully I can get back to this later tonight.
It's a bit too simple to pin this on the young as though their moral failing (and I do see it as a moral failing) were somehow generated only from their own peculiar generational inadequacies rather than the sense of self that the culture has very deliberately and intentionally fostered for commercial reasons (this is really what the Bell book that Dr. Mutex and I chatted about on the reading thread is about, if I read it aright so far). (And I don't think the article does this - it does point to larger interests pushing the changes - but quite a few of the comments do do this, lamenting the self-centered youth of today rather than the larger configurations the article points to.).
So maybe the issue is not to figure out how Emily can be made to pay $10 an album for 11,000 tracks, but how to make Emily content with owning 15 cds. Which apart from being a tall order does not actually bring the benefit to artists that is sought.
In other words, while I found myself nodding along with the article, the one counter-argument from the comments that nagged my mind a little was whether "if everyone paid for everything it would all be OK" works if in fact in a more ethically normative scenario many people would have ("own"?) *much* less music (this not intended as the whiny argument that crops up in the comments that stealing must be OK because otherwise I would have less music, but rather to wonder whether putting the ethics straight would have exactly the implied economic effect, since getting the ethics straight might involve not merely getting people to pay more for music, but also getting people to rein in their appetites for consumption, which have been deliberately and strategically cultivated to excess in the current culture).
I don't have enough economic math in my head to know the answer to my wondering.
Trying to assign any sort of blame for the tragic deaths of Linkous or Chesnutt to the intern is way misguided. They had problems way bigger than "not enough royalties."
I wonder if Emily, as an intern, was paid for her position. I wonder if her efforts in that unpaid internship ever went to the benefit of Lowry or his friends.
As far as "deserves" go, I sure don't want to hear any whiny pop rock band complaining about what they're not getting. I got a whole site of jazz musicians who are ten times as talented as Lowry's band going with far less income and public exposure. I like CVB well enough, but that any of their music is still getting played on the radio while the music of modern jazz musicians in not, or that old CVB albums get better promotion and product placement on retail sites and stores than those same jazz musicians (both new and old)... well, Lowry's benefited from the inequities of the music industry more than he's suffered from it.
That said, I like most of that letter.
[redacted in the interest of civility]
And I couldn't resist: some Sparklehorse too.
Only one song by a "Vic Chesnutt" though. Hey, Chesnutt, Chestnutt; I wonder if they're related?
Little rhetorical flourishes posing as facts always irritate the hell out of me:
"Recorded music revenue is down 64% since 1999."
Yeah? How does it compare to 1899?