As a sometimes musician, I really want someone to get a little more creative about the future of the music industry than just "make all of your money from live concerts." If the only musicians that can make money from recordings are ones who are so widely known and liked that people stealing their music online is irrelevant, the gap between "unknown" and "world famous" is basically impossible to cross.
I've been curious about this... do cafe/restaurants play a type of commercial satellite or digital radio intended to be played in stores? Or do they license the music themselves?
Those publishing organizations. If you're not a songwriter and/or don't own at least part of your publishing, you don't get royalties that way. A lot of major label artists don't write their own songs and it's not just the pop/r&b singers. A lot of rock bands hire songwriters as well. Overall, the entire industry is shady and the majors are grasping for the last bit of CD revenue that they can find.
You're going to see a lot more 360 deals like the one Jay-Z just did, although they'll be doing them for much smaller amounts from much smaller artists and they will be TERRIBLE deals for the artists. Jay-Z got so much because he has the power, influence, and track record to justify it. The majors want to own the entire vertical but won't create any sort of deal that is going to be fair for new projects.
pandora pays royalties to soundexchange, the same way internet radio does. they in theory pay artists. although, i'd be interested in hearing how many artists actually get paid by sx and how much.
I'd say as things change, volume will be a big issue. At the moment, an artist might bring out a new album each year. Which is kinda lazy. They make an album, and that makes them millions.
How about they knuckle down and bring out a new album each month?
Well, for one, the argument was based on Amazon sales numbers that have since been discredited. For another, even if it applied to books, that doesn't mean that it would apply to everything. It's quite possible that a few things (like books) have been limited largely by real world constraints and were waiting for someone like Amazon to come by and free them from the 80/20 rule, but that most things were not.
People bandy about "the long tail" as if it's some sort of conclusive proof that conventional economics is in the process of being shaken up by these new distribution methods, when in reality that's just conjecture and doesn't yet seem to be the case.
I'm a percussionist mostly. I've played basically every genre, though I'm tending towards jazz lately.
I've been chewing on a long response for you here, but I think I'll save it for my blog. Instead, the short one: Touring only works at the superstar end of the scale, while recorded music revenue scales with the popularity of the artist. If the price of recorded music falls to zero, the labels don't have so much incentive to sign groups that aren't already at the touring-huge scale, since they're guaranteed to lose money on them...
Also, if just giving away your music made you popular, MTV Cribs would feature a lot more unsigned artists than it does now (namely, zero). Since labels are the only ones in the music industry with the money to do the marketing that's essentially a prerequisite to getting huge, it's in the best interest of the artists for the labels to have the freedom to sign groups that are promising, but not yet big. That freedom comes from CD sales.
That's an example of a long opinion piece with no point. Yes, Matt thinks that Copyright is actually useful, but what's your point? What's the action you want me to take? Why did I just read that - I know some people think copyright is okay, and some think that it's not okay, I did not have to read a long article with absolutely no new conclusions or any clear purpose.
You basically took a two sentence argument and stretched it to waste 3 minutes of my time.
I thought it had a lot of points. Defending the usefulness of copyright is a rare position on the internet, and he does give some actual reasons as to why copyright is useful (which is why his article is pointful rather than pointless)--it protects movies and books and other forms of creative content that are difficult to produce. He also takes some common defenses of copyright infringement (though he seems to reconstruct a couple as strawmen) and debunks them.
Defending copyright is not a rare opinion in my world. The opinions he talks about there are like the most basic opinions that anyone trying to defend copyright would come up with. Nothing new at all.
It's as if he suddenly decided to think contrarian, then quickly wrote down the first thoughts he could think of.
I used to work in the development division of a very major recording company. Reading his article would be like a competent C++ programmer reading an article about why classes are useful - sure, the article may be correct, but it's pointless reading, except for people who have never even entertained that thought.
Then the problem is not that it was pointless, but that it was not novel. The article in question for your C++ programmer has a point; the programmer just doesn't care.
As a college student, defending copyright is rare in MY world, and people look at me funny when I tell them I buy CDs, and my brother laughs at me when I say I'm going to support Obsidian by buying their next game full price as soon as it comes out. I liked Matt's article; it was pretty basic analysis, but it was reasonable.
Yo Matt, there's something I wanted to mention to you: I don't like your internet personality. I'm sure you're a very nice guy in person, but the way you brand yourself on the internet may not be giving quite the right impression you want to give. When I go on your site, your picture already gives an arrogant impression. Then your long articles are always perfect, not personal and discussing some issues in detail. Your internet personality comes across as very cold and somewhat arrogant, very little emotion, but without really conveying a strong sense of competence (which is what cold blogs are supposed to do).
So unless the effect I described is actually part of your personal branding strategy, you may want to rethink it. Because your brand has so many strong factors (name, picture, writings), that people who meet you will already be influenced by your projection of yourself, and this will color their perception of you.
All I'm saying is this: brand yourself a little bit warmer. People will like the impression better.
"Your internet personality comes across as very cold and somewhat arrogant, very little emotion, but without really conveying a strong sense of competence"
So does your's.
I've read four or five of your comments on this item only to find that you believe you respresent a vast majority of those reading this article. It's more likely that you don't, as is evidenced by the quite engaging discussions this site is historically known for; discussions being engaging precisely because people don't agree by default. Perhaps instead of steering the conversation you should take part in it. For instance, you could render your opinions about copyright law instead of your opinions about people that write about copyright law.
I know that mine does. It's part of my freedom to say what I want philosophy. You are right, I should probably have contributed to the actual article content or kept my mouth shut, but its the Author or his persona that makes me want to reply to this in a negative manner.
Well, I'm not really concerned about personal branding. I get that sort of thing a lot. I don't see myself ever seeking political office or even employment again, and I don't have any hopes of making money from my personal blog. I just write what interests me.
I'll take the always perfect as a compliment though. Also, do you only read the entries posted here?
Yes, I only read the occasional piece that floats to the top of this site. But the few times I've been to your site, I looked over a few other entries, I believe.
You don't see yourself ever seeking employment again? That's a bit... arrogant, isn't it?
For someone with the whole Internet as their resource, I would consider it beyond lazy. It is ignorant to treat them the same.
Copyright infringement has been responsible in increases for 'victim', both in exposure and revenues. Theft has never (that I am aware of) benefited the victim.
Copyright infringement has been responsible in increases for 'victim...
Good example, but I think it's more important to point out where copyright and property law come from - that property is accepted in our society as a fundamental right, while copyright is monopoly power which our government may grant "for a limited time" "to promote the progress of useful arts".
Precisely! It's supposed to be a compromise between "no IP" (where IP is copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc...) and some sort of permanent and ironclad possession of works and ideas. I believe the balance has tilted too far in favor of the producers of IP, and that it should be shifted back the other way, but not eliminated.
In a more general sense, the problem is "provisioning of public goods":
Matt hasn't realized just how awesome piracy of music is if you are a member of a site like waffles.fm. It is much better than any legal music service. How could the RIAA compete with a mainstream waffles.fm?
Um... I think his point was that the RIAA wouldn't be able to compete. They would go out of business, likely taking a large portion of the music industry with them. Copyright laws prevent this from happening by preventing waffles.fm from going mainstream.
I don't think the record labels as we know them now will survive even with copyright protection. As I said in an earlier post, funding will be provided by LiveNation and other live event promoters, who will use them as advertisements for the live shows.
Laws only have so much power... Oink was close to breaking into the mainstream before Interpol hit. Problem was that Oink was hosted in the UK. Waffles is hosted at the PRQ, so given sufficient server capacity they can dabble in the mainstream.
Darknet fiber is the way to go. But I don't know enough about internet backbones.
I do know that the side benefits of starting your own country could easily finance it. Surprisingly, this is somewhat relevant to Tipjoy if you go out on a long enough timeline.
If you ever have billions of dollars it becomes extremely economical and even moral to stage a takeover of Equatorial Guinea (a real, wealthy country with an evil dictator that CIA/MI6 wants deposed). Just to keep in the back of your mind.
I think of population of a new country a lot like hiring. You want only the best if you're really trying something new.
Most countries ripe for revolution probably wouldn't be stable enough for the goals. It's like Woody Allen quipped "I just don't want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member"
Perhaps more realistic would be terrestrial broadcast on illegal reserved frequencies. That really might bring military intervention, since the military owns a lot of those frequencies... but it sure would be nice for the people to take back our airwaves.
1. Get all your music for free. 2. log your usage. 3. Use a micropayments engine to slice out support.
You could dial the support up or down, maybe giving a disproportional amount to a certain band.
I think you're totally right: unlimited and immediate access to music is just better.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't directly support the artists.
The RIAA can't compete because they are fundamentally no longer part of the exchange. They add nothing. They continue through momentum, and will die soon.
Free content is often free because people understand the the increased eyes and ears on content will make up for it being free. Only a fraction of your audience will pay, but your audience is probably orders of magnitude larger if free vs. gated by a pay wall.
Doesn't this assume the profit you gain from kN users donating X/k price on average, given free content, equals or exceeds N users paying X price, or something like that? Of course this is a gross simplification, but how else does it justify making something free and expecting increased exposure to make the operation sustainable? IIRC Wikipedia is not looking good financially, and there is probably nothing with more eyeballs at the moment.
I'm guessing you have thought though this situation much more thoroughly, and maybe have data on it too; otherwise, I'd be very surprised if things work out so ideally.
Those eyes and ears were supposed to be looking at ads, where more impressions equals a happier advertiser. It isn't obvious how that extends to donation-ware, when everyone can just move on to the next free source of music.
I support that model in general, but I'd much rather spend my money supporting live performance.
My favorite band is Radiohead. I didn't pay for their most recent album, because it didn't seem worth it. But I have paid over $200 to get 3 tickets to see them in concert this summer.
Getting money for digital content distribution is an excellent value proposition for music makers. You need to show up at each, err, show. You only need to upload files into a distribution engine once, then every person on the planet can buy them.
Of course, it just remains to be seen if this can be accomplished. Studies have clearly shown in many occasions that humans will generally not pay for something they can get for free. In fact, we'll incur a ridiculous amount of cost just to get something for "free".
A few weeks ago, Papa Johns locations in north east Ohio gave away free pizzas worth about $5. People stood outside in the 45 degree weather, with rain, for 2 hours to get that pizza.
Yeah, people like free too much, irrationally so. Chipotle in Cambridge gave away free burritos (worth $6), and the line was over an hour long.
That said, I don't think this spells doom for micropayments. A successful "donations" model is Ben & Jerry's Free Cone day - a not-insignificant fraction of people donate to help various causes. I'd be interested to see statistics on this.
You mean like Pearl Jam's distribution and sale of their concert recordings? It's a great idea. I wish Radiohead would do the same thing. I'm actually surprised they haven't, since they definitely like extra opportunities to make money. Probably they haven't thought about it.
It's much different for established bands. But yeah, that is awesome. Pearl Jam has been very innovative ever since they took on Ticketmaster in the 90's.
Often they phrase it as intellectual property that needs to be abandoned...
This is very silly ... such a position would only be taken by someone who doesn't understand the extent of IP.
IP is a huge blanket term, legally speaking. Patent law, copyright law, and trademark law have very little in common, but are all "IP". I haven't met anyone who seriously argued that we should get rid of patents...
As far as copyright goes, in my experience, most intelligent, impartial, and well-informed individuals tend to converge on the constitutional opinion: "Congress should promote the progress of useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors the exclusive right to their respective writings" (this is almost a direct quote from article 1, section 8).
The point of copyright law should be to promote progress of useful arts - I think this is the basis on which we should all agree. The term "intellectual property" muddies the discussion because one's right to property is a fundamental right, whereas one's power to restrict other's copying of your work is a power that congress can grant you for a limited time.
Matt didn't get the viacom / youtube thing right. The DMCA provides a certain copyright-related safe harbor to online service providers, not just ISPs as he states. It is far from clear that youtube violated copyrights (that is the point of the litigation after all).
I've read in a number of places (and this may be incorrect) that YouTube loses safe harbor by converting the videos from one format to another. Mark Cuban said that for one, and he has paid entertainment lawyers on staff.
Regardless of what the law says, this doesn't make sense.
An automated process blindly converts video from one format into another, and the company hosting the video suddenly has a duty to examine each and every video to look for potential infringements? I don't see how that follows at all.
Of course much of this law is untested, so any lawyer who makes claims about this is most likely just telling you what he thinks he can make a court believe.
It could make sense, depending on the analogy that someone picks. For example, I have a coffee shop with a community message board. Someone posts copyrighted information there - someone tells me about it and I take it down right away. That sounds pretty fair.
But what if I make a whole operation out of it - like if there are pictures, then I take those, clean them up, copy them, frame them, and put them on the wall of my shop. Now it seems like I have a lot more responsibility for what is going on. Is it fair for me to just blindly frame every single picture I find, even if some of the pictures are obviously copyrighted? Anyway that is my logical argument (as opposed to a legal one...)
Matt, you're confusing IP with copyrights. I've dealt with IP lawyers in the past, and those two terms mean very different things. Copyright law is actually a very murky water and certain kind of fish (lawyers) feel pretty comfortable swimming in there. Early YouTube investors clearly knew what's coming and they're prepared, they've get their fishies ready.
But those are boring technicalities. What matters is the fundamental question if one can proclaim things like music, literature and images as his property. Technically I can repeat one of your sentences and you can accuse me of stealing.
That's all huge bullshit in my opinion. A song or a movie by itself shouldn't be copyrightable simply because it's not fair: it takes a lot of money to enforce such laws, this is why there are only a few privileged "customers" of this system. I can copy and distribute your blog posts all I want and there is nothing you'll (likely) do about it. This "copyright club" doesn't treat outsiders nicely, this is why Google (clearly and outsider) has been bit so often by those assholes, even something as awesome as their "Street View" is facing idiotic copyright complaints.
And, personally, I believe they will all fail and technology will overtake. We will not be paying for songs and movies, we'll be paying for comfortable theaters with nice sound and live concert performances. And someone with a law degree will have to find a real job.
What matters is the fundamental question if one can proclaim things like music, literature and images as his property.
I believe the founders of the USA had this argument exactly, and this is what they came up with:
The Congress shall have power [...] to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
>Without IP protection, the industries that have made our media our chief cultural export would be economically unfeasible.
I guess the 'our' is supposed to be Americans. No chance that someone outside the US might read the article or have views on the issue. There are actually those who would argue that this 'chief cultural export' hasn't entirely been a good thing but I guess they don't really count according to this article's viewpoint.
"I don’t think our current copyright system is failing. I think that right now it’s working incredibly well. iTunes is proof of that. Despite the fact that anyone with an iPod could, with just a little effort, fill it with stolen music, millions of people are paying to do so. Without the laws we have in place, that would not happen."
Since you assert that people need not pay attention to the copyright laws which are in place, how does it follow that they'd stop buying music if the laws didn't exist? I would suggest that the success of the iTunes Store in the face of various well-known sharing methods suggests that it can compete without needing copyright law.
The historical evidence contradicts Matt Maroon's assertion, conventionally held by corporate intellectual monopolists, that copyrights "incent" [sic] creativity. See Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly for a detailed discussion.
I didn't actually know that. I know incent was just put there because people started using it widely, even before it was a word, but for some reason I like that and not irregardless.
Maybe we should go one step further and start saying irregardlessly?
A word is a word before it gets put in the dictionary. A dictionary is a subset of the language. You cannot prove something isn't a word by showing that it is not in the dictionary, but if its in the dictionary, then it is definitely a word (unless it's a lexicographical error).
I'm a big fan of saying whatever you want as long as people understand you. Shakespeare made up stuff all the time, and people got it. Meanwhile, I can't understand Steve Gillmor, even when he's using all one syllable words.
The good thing is that even if, starting tomorrow, no one makes any more money from recordings of music, music recordings will still exist. It may even thrive -- music creators, the ones still doing it for fun, suddenly feel a lifting of pressure to maximize or even create profit, and creativity shoots through the roof. A diversity of aural culture previously unknown, spread entirely by word of mouth and recommendation engines, dances mainstream, and everyone is the better for it.
