Speaker: Copyright Must Change
2201 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 … 45 46 47 48 49 … 89 Newer→ Last
-
Home taping was an sustainable loss.
Rob, seriously, that argument has been so thoroughly dismantled and rejected that I don't think even the record companies accept it. None your examples above provide any evidence of a 'sustainable loss', especially when one considers that the recording industry enjoyed a massive boom during the 'home taping' era.
-
seriously, that argument has been so thoroughly dismantled and rejected that I don't think even the record companies accept it
you bored, please go on.
it must have been sustainable cos the industry didn't die.
did I give any examples other than my own personal perspective?in my case it was a loss cos I would have had to have bought it if I couldn't tape it and still wanted to impress said tape recipient with my striking good taste.
take it back to pre tape days. vinyl. how do I give someone music to impress them? I have to buy another copy don't I. I have no other option open to me.You've obviously got a point you want to push so I'll leave you to it and check back when you've got it done. can we have flashy graphics, we don't get enough of them on here, a cartoon would do.
-
it must have been sustainable cos the industry didn't die.
So, breaking my rule twice in one week, let me just say, QED.
I think we can close this thread now.
-
I read Simon's point as being about the "loss" portion of the statement rather than the "sustainable" portion, as evidenced by him following it up with "especially when one considers that the recording industry enjoyed a massive boom during the 'home taping' era."
-
I'd just like to say that home taping -- both from the radio and from my mate's big bro's collection -- got me hooked on popular music, and led me to go on and spend tens of thousands of dollars with the music industry.
I am unable to shake this habit and spend money with this industry every single week.
Do I get a slice 'o them fees?
-
I read Simon's point as being about the "loss" portion of the statement
well without the benefit of a parallel universe to compare it to the point is moot.
saying "they made money in a boom" doesn't prove the point that copying media doesn't have a negative impact in income. The boom was there, it doesn't mean home taping caused that boom.It doesn't prove that the net income wouldn't have been greater if people hadn't been doing it. ie we don't have a world under the same conditions as the 70's and 80's who didn't have tape recorders to compare it to.
I object to the argument being used to justify free for all downloads cos it just isn't provable, and one to one copying isn't comparable to 1 to many millions copying.
-
that home taping -- both from the radio and from my mate's big bro's collection -- got me hooked on popular music,
you're conclusively saying that the fact you could copy it for free was the main factor you liked music and that if you couldn't have done that you'd be an accountant with a gardening fetish with no liking for music at all?
if you take it back to our parents time of vinyl only my mum couldn't copy music but she had a huge record collection, she wasn't rich but she found the money to feed her addiction. being able to tape it meant nothing simply cos it wasn't an option. I don't know why one would argue that being able to grab something for free necessarily promotes an industry.
There were plenty of avenues to sample without owning (radio, live, friends)
I don't think it necessarily follows that home taping makes faithful addicts.
Do I get a slice 'o them fees?
perhaps a sickness subsidy if you can get a doctor to diagnose music purchase addiction as valid and recognised illness
-
perhaps a sickness subsidy if you can get a doctor to diagnose music purchase addiction as valid and recognised illness
For chrissakes, rob.
I really need to stop checking this thread.
-
For chrissakes, rob.
dude, joke,
I have the same uncontrollable urge to buy this stuff, shelves full of the stuff. Some times it does almost feel uncontrollable, and you know there are more important things to spend the cash on but still, it ain't no sickness.
Its not like being a shop-a-holic is in the same league as gambling addiction.back off on the sensitivity. there was no insult intended.
-
before cassette tapes, their were two main ways to access more recorded music than you could afford to buy at the retail price.
1. borrowing records from friends/family, etc.
2. buying and selling records at secondhand shops, school playgrounds, etc.a lot of that went on. did it benefit the artists in the long term? any more or less than taping?
-
a lot of that went on. did it benefit the artists in the long term? any more or less than taping?
that's a good question Stephen.
I think 1 is promo, which could indeed lead to another sale because the original disc would we assume be returned at some stage, and if the borrower wished to continue having access to said music then the option is to borrow again or buy.2 does nothing for the owner of the copyright.
-
saying "they made money in a boom" doesn't prove the point that copying media doesn't have a negative impact in income. The boom was there, it doesn't mean home taping caused that boom.
So why does the reverse of a boom mean that downloading caused that?
-
So why does the reverse of a boom mean that downloading caused that?
in itself it doesn't but you would have to prove your point that something else is causing it.
I don't think there are conclusive official studies yet that identify the real effect of downloading but there are plenty of personal examples (everyone around me does it and doesn't buy music etc) some studies that allude to it (which you've said you think are too small a sample field), and the rest is speculation, like we do on here. put our best guess forward. -
Cassette tapes never lasted, so the home taping thing was not as much of a threat to musicians as digital copying - in my opinion.
But it certainly introduced me to a lot of music which I subsequently bought on CD..and the CD with extra live version or the outtake... and the boxed set so I could get the DVD of rare footage.
I don't think there are conclusive official studies
I suspect getting honest answers for such a study would be difficult and who would fund the research?
-
-
You've obviously got a point you want to push so I'll leave you to it and check back when you've got it done.
Nope, I'm not going to get into one of these endless spirals Rob. That home taping was a non-event, perhaps even a positive for the recording industry is pretty much accepted. Argue the fine non-points all you like but the world didn't cave in, people were exposed to and bought more music and, as in point 2 you dismiss above as incorrectly doing nothing for the copyright owner, artists and catalogues were often given more currency.
Hell, it got to the stage where some labels were giving away a blank cassette with each vinyl copy to encourage taping. They got it.
I read Simon's point as being about the "loss" portion of the statement rather than the "sustainable" portion, as evidenced by him following it up with "especially when one considers that the recording industry enjoyed a massive boom during the 'home taping' era."
Uh, yes, exactly. There was no real loss to sustain. It was largely a myth and I'm rather surprised to see it flogged again all these years later. The 'home taping is killing music' and all that implies is one of those statements that raises a bit of an embarrassed smile, a little like the claims that oil would run out in the late 1970s (yes we were told that too).
Cassette tapes never lasted, so the home taping thing was not as much of a threat to musicians as digital copying - in my opinion.
They've lasted pretty well in much of the third world. Here in Indonesia a cassette deck is standard in a new car and CD player is rare. They're a dominant means of delivery still. Even in the first world the cassette was a major format from about 1970 thru to the early 2000s. CDs are fading fast after a similar span, which is not an unusual term for a format.
-
I'm not going to get into one of these endless spirals
excellent, that'd be sweet if you didn't...
....That home taping was a non-event,
oh, right, so you are going to .. so I was right about that after all
non-event,
sustainable
perhaps
well that's my point. where's your parallel universe to prove your perhaps. you don't have one do you so you're guessing.
I clearly proved that in a previous time (the age of vinyl without tape) you had different courses of action available to you to share music ie buying (or as pointed out by stephen loaning). Music was pretty big then too. Sure numbers went up in the 70's and 80's but so did population and music as a cultural force. Of course you're going to get an increase in total sales purely cos there are more people each year buying into music culture. that doesn't prove that home taping caused that at all, just that they happened at the same time.
Where are the figures that project what would have been expected to sell taking into account population increase and music becoming a bigger cultural factor, but estimating that with and without home taping? I haven't seen those stats yet, and those are the ones you need to prove your point.pretty much accepted
not quite the same as irrefutable is it. You're arguing in absolutes about things that aren't. Yes there were poeple who shared mix tapes and went out and bought albums from tracks their mates gave them, but for every one of those there were people who got whole albums of stuff that they never went out and bought and who played those tapes in the same way that they played new tapes, only they never paid new retail prices for them. Are you trying to say that didn't happen too? I get your theory but it just isn't the blanket case for how home taping worked that you want us to believe it is.
How do I know that?
Well me for instance, I didn't buy copies of damned or buzzcocks albums, but I had em on cassette,
Would I have bought them?, yes,
why didn't I?
Cos a mate taped their copy for me.
Did it lead to more sales of Damned or Buzzcocks? Nope, never bought their stuff. Didn't need to, my mate taped em for me.
Did I buy music? Yes, shit loads but mostly stuff I couldn't get from taping.
Are you trying to tell me I was the only one who acted like that? That's a lost argument cos I new hundreds of people doing it exactly like that.artists and catalogues were often given more currency.
Really? As much currency as they would have got if the same person had bought it new? (yes I know I'm playing off your meaning of the word currency in a different way than you used it). I think not. A second hand disc produces no revenue to an artist, a new one does. That's a pretty simple concept. given the option an artist would rather sell a copy that delivers money back to them. And lets face it for years there second hand discs weren't that much cheaper than new ones, and that's still the case with real groovy's over inflated prices. It's places like penny lane records that have bought the price of second hand down. Loving their dollar vinyl bins etc.
Hell, it got to the stage where some labels were giving away a blank cassette with each vinyl copy to encourage taping. They got it.
Did it come with instructions to "tape this album and give it to your friends", or was it perhaps a gimmick and intended to encourage formatshifting? (something no one ever got prosecuted for even though it was technically illegal). "Tape this and play it in your car, we're hip with that, we're cool like you, buy more product".
I can't actually say I remember the free tape deal much if at all. Maybe you could illuminate us on how often and give us examples or actual artists that had it on their products.'home taping is killing music' and all that implies is one of those statements that raises a bit of an embarrassed smile
difference between killing and killed.
Its a catchier phrase than "home taping is taking sales away from us and we'd really rather you bought your friend a copy as opposed to dubbing one off for him from vinyl, please".
You simply can't argue that the difference between 2 sales of an album and one sale and one dub is the same income. Its ridiculous.Your point is that some people did in fact use this as a means of radio, promotion, they shared their finds to friends and friends went out and bought it. Agreed, this did happen in some cases, but it did not happen in all cases, and like Mark and his hankering for actual studies and facts you're going to have to do a lot better than hypothesize and use terms like "perhaps", and "pretty much" if you want to seriously disregard some pretty obvious math.
How bout this. You can be partly right, and I can be partly right, and we can have a grey area in the middle too. Would that keep us out of the endless spiral. Cos I'm not saying your point never happened or is ridiculous, but you are saying that about mine.
I know full well it did, cos I did it. It didn't kill it, it just damaged a higher possible income, a sustainable thing as I said and you argued against. -
They've lasted pretty well in much of the third world
he means they wear out, and they do if you play em enough. oxide coated plastic tape rubbing over metal heads etc.
Funnily enough with my restoration work I actually had less trouble getting good results off cassette than off vinyl and master reel.
Many mastertapes were badly made and the oxide started shedding and the adhesive that bonded it to the tape did some weird chemical thing where it would stick to the heads making tapes unplayable. I hit that on almost all late 70's to nineties masters. they had to be baked in an oven to re bond them to get one last play. Cassettes didn't do this and most played as good as the last time they were played.
vinyl while a cleaner sound was a real prick to deal with, with crackling and pops which come out of nowhere even in a well stored and near mint item.Even in the first world the cassette was a major format from about 1970 thru to the early 2000s
in NZ as a label the last cassette I sold was last decade.
I can't remember the last one I actually bought.CDs have longevity problems too. Early cd pressings were prone to cd rot. I've got a batch of the first cd I ever pressed in 91 that is unplayable now, not cos I damaged them but cos they sat in a cupboard and did it to themselves.
-
Cassette tapes never lasted, so the home taping thing was not as much of a threat to musicians as digital copying - in my opinion.
Sorry, I was vague and unclear.
I meant that the cassettes themselves were unreliable - although I still have and play some that were bought in the early 80s.
Maybe it was the player that damaged them, but I have vivid memories of pulling metres of tape out the cassette player and carefully splicing the good parts back together.
Not fond memories.
-
Sorry Bruce..yes, I misread. I've got a couple of tapes from the early eighties I played in a car here last year which actually were fine..I used to make mixtapes for friends over the years and always kept a copy. I kept the first couple and they sound fine..unlike the early CDs, as Rob says. But yep, mostly they didn't last. You could argue too thought that burnt CDs are discarded pretty easily too. People tend not to keep or value such things.
Rob....CBS gave away blank tapes with hit albums and explicitly encouraged you to tape a copy for someone. I guess they, unlike their modern counterparts, understood, long term. They got the idea from Island who also did it, with, amongst other acts, The Damned , when they distributed Stiff.
As for the rest, apart from the fact you seem to be looping a few arguments that no-one bought the first or the second time you touted them (record sales boomed because of population increase..seriously? Music increased as a cultural force in the 70s? Ever heard of those pre 70s acts Elvis or The Beatles?), I'm really not going to go there, to fight long forgotten battles.
Sorry.
-
CBS gave away blank tapes with hit albums and explicitly encouraged you to tape a copy for someone. I guess they, unlike their modern counterparts, understood, long term.
or maybe they viewed hits packages as loss leaders to albums by artists, kinda like radio. that's a little different to the industry on mass saying "hey here's a tape, copy all our stuff, we don't care".
amongst other acts, The Damned
wouldn't know, I never bought their albums :)
this should be page 60 or the 600th post
-
bugger, in lots of 20. 8 till the 1200 post
(record sales boomed because of population increase..seriously?
try this math
if the population is 100 and 50 percent of the population buys a cd in one year thats 50 cds
if the population takes off (baby boom anyone?) and is 200 and 50% of the population buys a cd in one year thats 100 cds sold.
there is no boom in music consumption, its still only 50% of the population. The population just got bigger so one would expect your sales to keep increasing every year to reflect that increase and it wouldn't mean an increase (boom) in music.in 1960 the world population was just over 3 billion
1974 = 4 billion.
in 2987 it hit 5 billion.music doesn't have to become more popular as a past time to sell more units, it just has to ride the wave of population increase.
Also accessing new markets can have a massive effect on a "boom"
China embracing western culture for example. If events like that happened at the time home taping hit would you still hold to the view that home taping cause the boom? Just cos it happened at the same time as an increase in sales doesn't mean its the cause, just like downloading happening in the same time span as a decline is necessarily the cause. it could be as mark says, maybe music just sucked in that period.as for charting the cultural aspects of music and its relevance to the buying public, I have no idea on how that has changed over time, you feel comfortable in discounting it completely in order to explain your 'boom' completely via home taping.
I don't view it so simplistically.There's hardly a battle going on here though, I'm questioning your argument that hometaping was good for the industry on the grounds that that theory can them be used to argue that un controlled filesharing is good for it too.
apart from these things being an order of magnitude different it just doesn't necessarily follow and it isn't backed up by statistics and studies that I've seen. Did anyone even address this concept in surveys? Maybe you've got access to data to prove it that will fit in with the high standards mark has set for us.
-
That home taping was a non-event, perhaps even a positive for the recording industry is pretty much accepted.
I think someone else mentioned Casey Kasem's American Top 40 upthread. I used to sit there on Sunday afternoons with my finger on the record button of the radiocassette machine.
I missed Patti Smith's 'Because the Night' one week -- the first time I'd heard her, and pretty much a mindfuck -- and prayed it would still be Top 40 the next. (No worries -- it peaked at #13.) And I played it and played it. I was 15.
Of course, I also played and played 'Dust in the Wind' by Kansas, and to be honest, a lot of the music I had on tape in my early and mid teens I'd regard as a form of torture now. Supertramp? Uriah Heep? The Eagles?
But I think it was all part of becoming a music listener. When punk rock turned up and we finally had a little money, me and my mates were primed.
We did have a good music retail environment to come into. Being able to go and order records on import from Tony Peek at the University Bookshop made things seem special. We generally wouldn't buy the same records -- we weren't flush enough to double-up.
I've observed to local record company people that if they did somehow attain an undefeatable anti-copying technology they'd have to start giving away music the following morning. The viral aspects of how we become stakeholders in popular music should not be underrated.
So you don't want to lose that, ever. But you also want to lay a path to people who use music making good on the benefit it gives them. It might not lead exclusively to retail sales, but it should be there.
PS: Having set a torch to my music cool, I should point out that the first record I ever bought with my own money (actually, with a record token from my dad's work's Christmas party in Greymouth) was 'Out on the Street' by Space Waltz. That's got to count for something ...
-
they'd have to start giving away music the following morning
that's the big difference though isn't it. you giving it away at your discretion is very different from having someone else do it at theirs.
its an interesting concept but one you can very easily lose control of.I got my copies of Screaming Mee Mees and Blam Blam Blam albums as promo copies from Simon for review purposes. I never did buy them, but I did give them good reviews. Still got them too.
Simon was in control of my copies though, he chose to give them to me.
-
Having set a torch to my music cool, I should point out that the first record I ever bought with my own money (actually, with a record token from my dad's work's Christmas party in Greymouth) was 'Out on the Street' by Space Waltz. That's got to count for something ...
I remember seeing them on New Faces or something and my brother (7 years older than me and therefore the epitome of cool, of course) and I just went WTF to each other. 'Twas awesome. I was 12 and in New Plymouth. Went to see the Sweet play at Brooklands Bowl that year.
And I remember taping Rick Wakeman's "No Earthly Connection" from the radio from 2ZM on a Sunday night (I'm thinking John Hood? Mid 70's?) - I don't know if I've ever seen it on sale here.
Never really got punk, I have to say, except for the odd individual act. Mostly I saw it as "no talent required, make as much noise as you can and swear at your audience" - which in hindsight was a little over the top ;-) Though one of my prize possessions for a while was the first Ultravox album "__My sex, waits for me/like a mongrel dog/on the end of a tightrope leash__ " -magic!
Used to listen to the Mockers at the Terminus in Wellington (even when they were still the Ambitious Vegetables) but that was because they played in our pub, rather than because I wanted to see them. The Terminus had one of the early Ghostmuncher/Galaxian table units and we owned it on a Friday night. What they didn't have was proper 3 phase and so Fagan had to come and ask us to turn off the game as a) it was too noisy and b) it was tripping the circuit breaker.
Never taped them, but ;-)
Post your response…
This topic is closed.