Speaker: Copyright Must Change
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Or complain that people just didn't blow hard enough to keep the bubble expanding..
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the late 60s, early 70s boom was caused by, as I tried to imply, Sgt Pepper and it's heirs.
Thanks simon, I guess I didn't mis read you then. For me
that's more an observation of what happened but it doesn't define why it happened.
why did people decide to spend their money on music recordings instead of whatever they spent it on before hand?why was there a shift to having recorded music as a central cultural importance when before it had been less so?
there had been good albums before Sgt Peppers. plenty of them. what did Sgt Peppers change in people?
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It promoted the concept of "album" as something more than a just a collection of singles
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It promoted the concept of "album" as something more than a just a collection of singles
sure, but why would that matter, we've seen recently that the majority of people resent that concept and want to buy only the tracks they like, not the "filler". (I don't adhere to that philosophy but it seems many if not most buying people do).
Its probably not entirely relevant to the discussion anyway because I only drew attention to it to address the hometaping is booming music theory but that may well not have been said in so many words so I can drop that, unless someone wants to argue the affirmative on that.
I would put forward that the boom was caused by a cultural shift, when music actually mattered to peoples lives on an increased level to where it had been before as opposed to being merely pleasant back ground noise.
We had lots of bands making music with something to say.
can't say the same for the disco era though. -
It promoted the concept of "album" as something more than a just a collection of singles
Agreed. Music being marketed and consumed as singles, then albums, then singles with playlists are important shifts with their own commercial and social dynamics.
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Ah, but for the voices of dissent.
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Agreed. Music being marketed and consumed as singles, then albums, then singles with playlists are important shifts with their own commercial and social dynamics.
I agree too. The age of the album was a cultural thing from the late '60s through to the 1980's and I think there were cultural and social factors in why things developed that way. Between the mid-50s and 60s the single was important because society was moving away from post war austerity and becoming more prosperous, loosening up financially and socially and part of this was wanting a good night out. Cue Little Richard and later James Brown These guys were performers, not writers, they had pro's to do that sort of thing for them leaving them free to hone their performing art to the max and the tunes were designed to stand on their own, be played at parties and encourage people to see them performed live.
A lot of the move towards albums comes down to Dylan (damn his trainspotting soul). He was a poet/writer possibly more than a performer (initially) and the idea of a collection of songs went hand in hand with the ability to write them. Lennon & McCartney were blown away by him and immediately tried to emulate/better him. Brian Wilson did the same with them and this led to Sgt Peppers followed by Pet Sounds, the coolest things ever in popular culture at the time. This is what kicked off the age of the album, people follow cool culture and they were as cool as it got.
Happily, at least two things came along to wreck this, punk tried (but failed) whereas Dire Straits (boring and deeply uncool) and Michael Jackson (hosing tens of millions to create mediocre platters) started to turn away both the audience and the recording execs. Acid House probably had quite a bit to do with it as well. White platters by invisible artists made to played for one night or one week only was the antithesis of the album and the electronic concepts of versions, breaks and remixes moved it even further away.
I see it as a natural cultural thing, the album may yet return in some kind of form in the future, who knows. I think culturally the album may symbolise a more bourgeois aesthetic manifesting in times of plenty while the single is driven by austerity and the need to party hard to take your mind off your troubles. Look for some crazy good tunes coming out in the next few years then I guess!
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Ta, Giovanni. Interesting link. Sometimes doesn't take account of the really big shifts (dude needs some Shirky), but is coherent and the linked non-washer-upper article is good too.
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the album may yet return in some kind of form in the future
I'd be interested if anyone has links about the way playlists fit culturally now, as I suspect the album also embodies commercial factors that won't apply again with different distribution arrangements and cost structures.
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Ah, but for the voices of dissent.
The literary style of that Bomb Party post has brought me out in hives.
But, really, it's more straightforward, and much more commercial, than all that.
In 2007, PRS won its side of a Copyright Tribunal dispute on internet performance royalty rates with a group of internet companies (iTunes, Yahoo, etc). The principle is the same as that by which PRS and other societies derive rights revenue from commercial radio stations -- as a percentage of those stations' gross revenues.
YouTube was not part of that action, and says the rate confirmed by the tribunal, 6.5% of gross revenues, isn't viable and would see it lose money on every stream.
It may be right -- YouTube isn't exactly a profit centre for Google, and 6.5% may well be more than its margin -- or not.
But the proposed rate is about twice what APRA derives from commercial radio here.
PRS is one of the first collecting societies to do this kind of deal -- and by last year, YouTube rights fees were accounting for about 40% of its transactions -- hence the importance for all sides of this negotiation. It'll be easier once this is done.
I'm not really seeing good and bad guys. It's a hard-nosed commercial negotiation that is very like those that have taken place in the past with traditional broadcasters. As I noted earlier, a similar dispute took music videos off New Zealand TV for a couple of years in the 1980s. I'm guessing this one will be settled sooner.
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The bomb party post is an illuminating read debunking many common myths and misconceptions we see repeated over and over relating to other facets of the discussion outside of just the videos on youtube side of things.
the issue is presented as a clash between, on the one hand, the 'old' exploitative music industry, and, on the other, the brave new world of Web 2.0, offering direct unmediated access between 'artists' and 'fans'
There can be no opposition between the internet's principal software developers and the major multinational record companies, they are joined by ties of common ownership (Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, for instance, owns both MySpace and several recording and music publishing interests; Time-Warner-AOL owns, of course, both AOL and the Warner Music Group, as well as holding considerable shares - to the tune of $1 billion - in Google,
The move on the part of YouTube to present the debate in these terms then, lacking any positive content in reality, must be seen as purely tactical - a somewhat specious attempt on the part of a massive global corporation, with annual advertising revenue to the tune of $16.4 billion (in 2007) and close financial and personnel ties to an even bigger corporate behemoth (Time-Warner), to present itself as 'the little guy'.
There is a perception that there is this thing called 'the music industry' which intervenes in, and distorts, the relationship between two mythical entities called 'artists' (a term which elevates music's producers to the romantic status of geniuses starving in garrets, outside the social, and beyond the dirt and cynicism of circulation) and 'fans' (a term which reduces music's consumers to the hysteric victims of Beatlemania, blindly following the Pied Piper to their doom).
Although there is of course a grain of truth in this, it is certainly no more true than it is of the fashion industry, the potato industry, the furniture industry, the software industry, or the telecommunications industry.
heaps more good stuff in there too. thanks giovanni for linking it.
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He may be causing Russell all sorts of allergies, but I for one think Hatherley is one of the best bloggers, nay, writers on the market.
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Sorry, I realise though that he was talking about the nested link. I'm more partian to the one I linked to myself, it's the broad point I was trying to make a few pages ago and on another thread.
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Both a bit long on assumptions ("the old days were great", "Google bad") and short on analysis and facts for me
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Sorry, I realise though that he was talking about the nested link. I'm more partian to the one I linked to myself, it's the broad point I was trying to make a few pages ago and on another thread.
For sure, Hatherley's style is vastly better than the cluttered, posturing prose of the Bomb Party post he links to.
But the latter falls over somewhat when you read the actual YouTube communication being referred to. It contains virtually none of the claims attributed to it.
I do prefer to see it in terms of what's actually being negotiated than casting it as a culture war from either viewpoint. Neither the PRS or YouTube is evil, they merely have competing interests.
And the issue is not that Google thinks everything should be free -- it's paying considerable sums to PRS already -- it's about what number goes before the percentage sign.
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The move on the part of YouTube to present the debate in these terms then, lacking any positive content in reality, must be seen as purely tactical - a somewhat specious attempt on the part of a massive global corporation, with annual advertising revenue to the tune of $16.4 billion (in 2007) and close financial and personnel ties to an even bigger corporate behemoth (Time-Warner), to present itself as 'the little guy'.
I find this bit really interesting because as a record company I would seek to place myself between the public interest and the artists. My worst nightmare being that I only held rights over traditional media and that a new digital agreements required new negotiations with artists rather than extensions of existing ones.
Disclaimer: Apologies if this sits out of context didn't have time to read the full post.
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Neither the PRS or YouTube is evil, they merely have competing interests.
The whole point of his article was that media and commentators do cast parties in distinctly stereotyped terms, and those terms when investigated are misleading.
we see it here and in posts linked to here. evil apra, evil rianz, stupid old roger shepherd (when he says something we don't like) etc. go telstra clear standing up for the rights of the individual, the myth of the artist and the fan. it was a very illuminating read and its a shame the style of his writing was the main thing you noticed cos he presented some really interesting views of points of discussion.
Hatherley took that starting point and applied it to other stereotypes in the copyright debate.
I particularly liked
the notion that the internet is administered by 'little guys' as opposed to gigantic corporations. Hence, you have the absurd, but curiously successful, self-presentation of Google/YouTube as defenders of freedom against the Peforming Rights Society for Music, who are essentially an arm of a trade union; and linked to this, the idea that file-sharing is somehow anti-establishment, notwithstanding the intimate links between the likes of BitTorrent and the corporations they supposedly subvert.
and this one
the internet often serves to actually reinforce, rather than dismantle, the old boy networks, by making writing into a hobby rather than a job
tack in Bomb party's
The notion that the World Wide Web (or perhaps 'Web 2.0') offers the chance of unmediated, direct access between producers and consumers is, similarly, a myth that requires exploding. All web applications like MySpace, YouTube, etc. do is exchange one form of corporate mediation - that offered by a record company - for another - that offered by a telecommunications/software company.
........If the idea of a 'bad' major record label is one which gives producers little control over their labour power and what happens to the products thereof, and pays them little or no reward for their work, then MySpace and YouTube and so forth should be seen as the 'bad' mediators par excellence.
this is all about PR,
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Paidcontent continues to deliver the best reporting on the PRS-YouTube dispute. This story, Why YouTube’s PRS Spat Is Just One Battle In The Coming Online Music War is particularly useful. It explains the maths problem for everyone trying to deliver music streams and pay the rate PRS wants:
**No one’s making enough to pay for music:** Music licensing is a complex landscape that confuses even many whose livelihoods depend on it. In short, PRS’ online license asks services to pay whichever is greater—either up to eight percent of their gross revenue, a per-track fee of between 0.05 pence and 0.22 pence or a per-subscriber fee of between £0.20 and £0.60 a month, depending on the particular service. The license was mandated by the UK Copyright Tribunal in 2007 after being agreed to by PRS, the BPI, Yahoo, AOL, RealNetworks, Napster, Sony, iTunes, MusicNet and the mobile networks.
That would be fine for the many new online services that have launched and reached massive traffic since the license was created—except (and here’s the real story), most of them are finding it hard to earn the money PRS wants for these so-called “minimas”. “Fundamentally, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is not making enough money off YouTube,” Mulligan said. “Video advertising is nascent at best and YouTube is way behind the curve on that.” In other words, the license was inked before YouTube and others took off, before they’ve had a chance to find a workable business model, and before many of the original signatories went and changed their music initiatives.
Purdham: “If it was just eight percent of revenue, that wouldn’t be a problem, but the minimas kick in to scale. We’ve gotten to 500,000 users in just over 90 days and average visit time is 30 minutes—when you scale it up to the number of plays that YouTube and we have, the numbers become very significant. You’re talking about roughly a penny a stream for on-demand streaming. The question is, how do you make your money? Can you match that cost of playing to the revenue your business can make?”
To support that penny a stream, Purdham said We7 would need to sell ads consistently at £10 per thousand impressions, but it’s currently making between £1 and £12. Assuming Spotify, which has claimed 250,000 UK subscribers, is paying PRS’ on-demand streaming rate of £0.60 per subscriber per month, it could be billed £150,000 per month by PRS—but the per-track fees work out much higher. That’s why Purdham and others are trying targeted techniques to earn higher rates, but that, too, is in its infancy.
Emphasis as per the original.
In other words, the rights fee is derived from the income the stream generates, and that comes from the ad delivered along with it. The service providers' contention is that the rate per ad impression isn't viable alongside the fee PRS wants.
The "Comes With Music"-style deals for mobile phones have been much easier to negotiate because the phone companies sell a pricey piece of hardware, and can build an appropriate margin into the cost of the phone and their deals with mobile network operators.
PRS does have a bit of a rep, and in New Zealand APRA has been notably reasonable in establishing fixed rights fees for, say, internet radio.
Collecting societies will have to decide how much they value those online services, and whether they want to do without them. Interestingly, the same story notes that PRS is facing stern competition for the right to collect -- from other collecting agencies in Europe, from major labels themselves, and from new artist-owned collecting societies.
The risk for PRS, APRA and the others is that they start to lose business because copyright owners decide they want to do their own deals.
One interesting example of that is the way that an artist can't license some works as Creative Commons and remain an APRA member. It's one thing to say that APRA won't protect your CC content -- why should it? -- but APRA requires an exclusive licence on all an artist's works, so you can't CC a couple of songs even if you want to.
There' s a hostile and somewhat patronising summary of Creative Commons on the APRA website.
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why was there a shift to having recorded music as a central cultural importance when before it had been less so?
There wasn't. The form they bought it in changed because of the flows of fashion, and the 13 year olds who screamed at the Beatles went to Woodstock
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, for instance, owns both MySpace and several recording and music publishing interests; Time-Warner-AOL owns, of course, both AOL and the Warner Music Group
I'd be more comfortable with this guy if he knew his stuff...both the above are nonsense: Murdoch sold his record label in 2005 (FMR) and Time-Warner long ago (2004) divested themselves of WMG (owned largely by Edgar Bronfman, Jr)
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Regarding the APRA CC document. I got to the first sentence:
Surely, no-one in the world has felt the impact of the internet more than songwriters
and stopped reading. As an indication of how self indulgent and blinkered their approach has been one need go no further.
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Don, had you continued you might have felt a little less irritated (and seen past your own blinkers?)
eg:... APRA has long recognized the need for members to have flexibility and choice when it comes to the licensing of their works. To that end, we have ... offered members the choice of flexible licence-back and opt-out arrangements that enable members to self-licence certain works if that better suits their needs.
In particular members can licence the use of their own works on their websites.... Some online music services are building business models around the use of CC licences, ensuring that songwriters get to benefit from the value they create for these services.
APRA has been in discussion with CC Australia .... looking at ways APRA members can use CC licences to self-license the use of their work for non-commercial purposes, while retaining the advantage of their APRA membership to license, monitor and collect royalties for the commercial use of their works. Stay tuned for updates. -
There wasn't. The form they bought it in changed because of the flows of fashion, and the 13 year olds who screamed at the Beatles went to Woodstock
so they're buying elvis and beatles early albums
Please Please Me 1963, With The Beatles 1963, A Hard Day's Night 1964, Beatles for Sale 1964, Help! 1965, Rubber Soul 1965, Revolver 19661967 comes along, out pops sgt peppers,
where's the boom? what changed?
There were albums a plenty before that.
did it reflect in specific album sales ie multimillion sales of individual items - Sgt peppers shit loads but not anything else), or was it a market wide boom, in that all albums went up in sale.cos if its across the market it would seem like a change in attitude to the importance of owning recorded music in which case its a cultural change. no tie in to the advent of home taping though?
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I kinda sorta agree with robbery (!!!) on the 'Sgt Pepper was the first concept album' thing. I think Beatlemaniacs (I'm one, obviously) are often a bit ahistorical on this point. Frank Sinatra was doing concept albums in the 50s - Sings for Only the Lonely, for example.
Then again, it's certainly true that FM stations in the 70s were playing entire 12 inch sides pretty regularly. Do we blame stuff like Yes' Tales from Topographic Oceans for the long-player's true ascendance instead?
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Obama Sides With RIAA, Supports $150,000 Fine per Music Track
and apparently considers such fines not punitive enough to be considered a criminal penalty. If anyone wants to wade through and find out what it really says, feel free.
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Don, had you continued you might have felt a little less irritated (and seen past your own blinkers?)
He kind of had a point: that was quite a declaration to make in your first sentence, and one that hardly bears scrutiny.
My problem is more the way the way the document is written undermines the good faith in the "stay tuned, we're working on" part.
Apparently, a licence under CC is not a licence -- it's a "licence", in quotation marks as if it's not a real licence. This usage appears throughout the document, and it's irritating.
Also:
"Under a CC Licence, creators give up certain of their hard-won exclusive rights for free, forever. "
"Once a CC “licence” is applied to your work, it cannot be revoked."
"You sign away rights in that work, forever, for the whole
world, for free.""You cannot later change your mind."
You know, I think we got that part.
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