Posts by Simon Grigg
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I assume that acts that are happy for their works to be widely distributed, will continue to use the internet to put free versions of their work up.
Yeah but it offers so very much more. Many acts are postively using, and encourage remixes, tracks on mixtapes, grey dissemination of new bits and so on, as a very valuable way of increasing their profile, buzz, chit-chat and so on. It's not unheard of for acts to greet the number of hits they get on Limewire with a thrill..it shows people that like music value them as an act. P2P is your friend was an (non-major) industry catchphrase a year or two back
No one sells music/movies/etc except through them.
Fairly much the same response the new indies had in the late 70s. Rough Trade is still selling music, albeit after a bump or two, 30 years on..
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Your position is that nothing is broken and that to the extent that it might be, it's the industry's fault for not adapting
Hell, many indies and label-free acts I know will be extremely pissed off if ACTA or any other restraint succeeds in wiping out the P2P networks, Hype Machine and blogs as these are crucial to their marketing and very existence. They don't feel any need to go back to the long past pre-adapt or die days that the likes of RIAA or RIANZ would like to see a return to.
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I'll go to my grave with that belief, much as it might have been foisted on my by the evil industry.
And the continuing sales of the format show that we are not alone.
But, and this is an example, I love the track The Great Dominions by The Teardrop Explodes but am less than enthralled by some of the rest of the Wilder album. I do own a battered old vinyl copy, but wanted that track on my mobile player, in listenable quality. In analogue terms, I needed to buy the album and tape the track, which I'd be less than keen to do.
2009 allows me to buy that track, for $1.50, from ITMS, and I've done so. Julian Cope wins (assuming they ever recouped..doubtful) and I win, but Universal loses the $15 they would've got if I'd had to buy the album, assuming of course I gave in and bought it.
They're pissed off about that because that $15 multiplied by millions of units is quite handy, so they fight back, citing collapsing revues as evidence of piracy. But it's simply not that clear cut.
I don't buy into the argument that the corporations are evil for trying to maximise their profits to their shareholders (although lets not go into accounting practices and contractual stuff) but you have to expect a downside to the very lucrative upside if that's not exactly what the market wants.
[sorry a bit of a formless rant but there you go]
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Didn't you say (and this is a genuine question) that album sales and dollar value were way down? Unit sales hardly tell the whole story, surely.
Yes I did, but that's because, I and many others would argue, that many people simply don't want, and have never wanted, the format, which was largely forced on them by an industry eager to maximise its profits. There is nothing wrong with that but you need to be willing to accept the market biteback when it comes as it has.
Most people want the song they've heard on the radio. End of story. Forcing them to buy 11 other tracks to get it is just bullshit and opens the act and the label up to all sorts of things including illicit copies of that one track. The genius of iTunes was that it recognised this demand when the labels refused to.
And still refuse to....the recent LCD Soundsystem 45:33 Remix album would only let you buy the key remixes if you bought the whole $18 album on iTunes. Cheers EMI, but I know how I'd rather acquire it and you've just lost a sale...
I'm on a music industry board too and it never fails to amaze me how many buffoons from labels still think that this is a temporary aberration and ACTA in particular, plus another round of multi-million dollar RIAA law suits, will eventually return the world to a pre-Napster state. Seriously...there is an element of hopeful delusion in the corridors of the corporates.
[edit]
So it's a consequence of the internet, but not of piracy.
Snap
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I suspect younger people download and much of the purchasing comes from older customers.
Those track sales in the US for the likes of Lady Gaga and Black Eyed Peas would tend to argue otherwise. These acts are selling, as legal digital downloads, ten million plus tracks a year.
You need to think of these as singles because that's the way kids are buying them.
That's immense and beyond anything we've ever seen before. Even at their height the Fab 4, the biggest act in history by quite some margin, were only selling 6-7 million singles a year in the US.
And piracy is killing the music industry how?
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I have seen graphs showing a significant decline in sales revenues (both physical and online) since 2000.
Yes, so have I but these are determined mostly by the change in buying habits (multiple links to support this in the dreaded copyright thread..I ain't going there to drag them out). If somebody in the past spent $20 to buy an album but now spends $3 to buy two tracks by the same artist, which is more and more the case, then that is going to show the decline you mention. It really shows little more no matter how it's spun.
None of Simon's examples convinces me of the virtues of downloading.
Okay, try Arcade Fire...fuelled by the net and the P2p networks and now huge.
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Has anyone become successful without the help of a label and largely through a web presence?
Well, yes. I'm too lazy to find the link but go to Pitchfork and look through their best albums of the 2000s list and large numbers are label free. In NZ, few local acts are signed to majors these days. Some use them for physical distribution but many do not. Many are signed to essentially themselves or their managers' labels and handle digital via a friendly aggregator such as DRMNZ.
Fat Freddies are label free, and established an international presence through a combination of live and digital media.
There are a multitude of very powerful web sites that have the power to break acts..Pitchfork is one, Fact Magazine in the UK is another. Pitchfork, for better or worse, have huge power that exists outside the label system (although they have one foot in each camp). The electronic music industry largely exists outside the confines of the label system and does so with influential internet networks.
And many acts play the blogs and P2p networks rather deftly to build up their artistic currency. As Russell said, Ms. Allen's mixes are found on grey sites and much downloaded, all of which add to the brand that is Lilly Allen.
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But people often don't tend to think of what they do as theft.
last year a musician told me that he was approached in the street and given $10 by someone who said he'd downloaded an album and loved it. That truly touched me.
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The simple fact of the matter is that she is entitled to her royalties, which she is denied by people stealing her music.
Sure, or whichever multinational she's actually earning money for..in her case EMI. It's her choice to buy into whatever system she wishes to. But I was merely pointing out that there was a transparent sheen of hypocrisy in her writings. She also is very much a part of the system which, thankfully, the digital world (including the P2P networks whose impact is, despite the rants of RIAA and IFPI, at times very artist-positive) has allowed the artists to increasingly bypass. She's a part of a world that is disappearing, and disappearing to the benefit of recording artists and songwriters.
Reading through her blog post at the time, I felt more sorry for her than anything. She seems to be trapped into an old fashioned contractual structure that many of her contemporaries have managed to sidestep, as the power fulcrum in the recording industry has shifted. There seems some bitterness in that and she's lashed out rather wildly as this becomes increasingly obvious. Piracy seems to be an easy target when the cheques are not as large as you want them, or need them to be.
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As people's perceptions of the price of content falls towards zero, it becomes harder to make money from it.
Yes, but clearly that's not happening. People are buying music but buying it very different ways..the data is quite clear on that. They simply are not buying albums, nor is there any clear evidence, apart from the fact the the industry organisations say so, that they are stealing albums instead of buying them in the sort of quantities that we are told are destroying the industry or killing the careers of the hundreds of thousands of new acts who seem to be happily releasing music hourly.
Unit sales, and this is absolutely crucial, have risen several years running, which means that the mainstream has more or less reverted to the buying patterns of the 1900s-1970 when they bought songs they like rather than the album. The mainstream market was never happy with albums per se..hence the massive success of the TV advertised compilation album, which filled the hole of getting the tunes you saw on the TV or heard on the radio without having to buy the bloody album.
And returns from copyright performance (not to be confused with live performance just to clarify) have also grown hugely in recent years, although not in the US, where most of the noise over piracy comes from, because of their aberration in the remuneration system which allows radio to play music without paying for the right, as they do in more royalty advanced nations.
The way Lily Allen was treated for saying that filestealing hurts new artists was just awful.
But her arguments also didn't fly when you looked at them. Many of her assertions simply were untrue, and, Paul, you don't get a pass on that because of age or sex. And many of the most virulent critics of her blog were the same up and coming musicians who she was allegedly defending who railed against, not just her naivety, but her hypocrisy. There's much to disagree with in that clip but the sentiment swept across the industry at a grass roots level, not just pro-copyright/anti-filestealing advocates but more than a few musicians pissed of at the dishonesty of someone who'd built a career pretending to be the indie underdog on MySpace whilst all the time being very much funded and signed by EMI.
I actually think that having a price on music is a good thing.
Agreed, and mostly, people are still paying for the music they want, just not in the same way, and without the added fluff which was what allowed the labels, major and minor, to make the sorts of profits they were making pre-Napster.