Posts by Simon Grigg
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@Rob. What I'm trying to say is it ain't as glum as some would have you believe. Sure it's not pretty in some corners of the recording industry but to suggest it's killing the creation of music is simply a smokescreen to cover the fact that the market is rather quickly adjusting, as it always was going to. A lot of things are being redefined in the digital world and copyright is inevitably one of them. That doesn't mean that, as far as I'm concerned, robust copyright laws are not required (and I'm not at all comfortable with a reduction in term) but I think that edges need fine tuning if you will, and not just to protect those who are finding that they are unable to clip the ticket as they have done in the past decades.
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What's your favoured model for content creation to be funded- if not by the sale of copies?
I know you are putting questions towards Mark re: his copyright flow but I think once you step outside the realm of the devil's advocate, its a non point as quite clearly music is being funded, created and returning an income. To suggest anything else is really simply sidestepping the evidence.
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RIAA and IFPI figures analysed here.
key paragraph (and it relates to the US):
Consumers are switching from CDs, which offer the highest per-unit trade revenue, for digital albums and track downloads. The number of unique transactions is greater but the resulting revenue is lower.
It's worth noting too that:
According to the RIAA, a 36% increase in mobile downloads and an 18% rise in ringback tones was more than offset by a 17% decrease in ringtones.
but avoids the much discussed notion that ringtones were bound to collapse because the pricing was, uhhhh, akin to piracy. They were a happy scam that provided short term income but would never last.
All of which goes toward the argument that people (kids if you look at mobile downloads) don't really seem to have to lost the buying habit. It's just more that the habits have changed and changed forever.
It's a new world out there and too many parties are still fighting wars in the old one.
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I appreciate Simon's first hand experience but he's pretty explicit about the limits of what he can apprehend also.
It's a tough call. If I was managing or recording a new artist I'd rather my acts music was downloaded free 10,000 times than bought legitimately 100 times, simply because I'd rather my act's music was in the hands of that many more people. I'm not sure if a p2p2ed track equates to a potential sale but it does equate to increased currency for the artist. And even Radiohead realised that with their one off. It didn't matter how many people didn't pay for it, or torrented it, because it Radioheaded it, boosted Yorke Corp hugely.
A similar thing could be pointed to in the 70s. The iconic images pasted on every school bag of Che and Hendrix breached copyright but both played a part in iconizing the subjects. In Jimi's case it played a huge part in Hendrix Inc being the money churning monster it is now.
As the manager of an established act I'd not necessarily be as keen on having my music taken off torrent or p2p sites (and yes, I agree, music is downloaded in the quantities you suggest Giovanni..can I prove it though..no, but I accept it as a given) unless it was a calculated marketing tool as per Radiohead, but if I'd done my job I'd argue that a large percentage of those who would've bought it in the good old days, before this nasty internet thing, would want the real thing, although often just the hit tracks rather than the whole album as before, and that copies lifted off off the net are often more musical tourism...look there it is, I'll grab a copy. What I'd really like to know is now many tracks pinched off the net are actually listened to, even once.
Kinda like the DVD shops here...you really gonna watch those 500 DVDs you are taking back to Perth?
The key thing to remember is that unit sales of music and revenue from non retail exploitation of music copyrights are both growth areas. We get both of these things heavily clouded by the misinformation that the music industry is dying and the collapse in album sales and dollar value, mostly from the big content providers. And that this is due to, forgive my term, 'theft'.
In NZ this is particularly interesting as album sales and dollar returns from retail sales of our acts have collapsed across the board but nobody yet, that I've seen can point to any substantial piracy of NZ acts.
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who is growing up thinking (and we have some evidence for that) that you don't have to pay for music.
How many billion downloaded and paid for tracks on iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, Beatport, Boomkat and 20,000 other sites do I need to point to to prove that ain't true. You have to make the fairly wild assumption that people are downloading instead of paying when they take from soulseek or wherever, and I just don't think that's mostly the case. In a percentage of course but I'd argue that overwhelmingly music taken from p2p sites does not replace sales.
The big issue here is the cash return to labels and the fact that people now only take the songs they like..unit sales have gone from a $30 album to a $1.80 track. It's funny to read in the industry forums I'm a member of, the number of old school record label folks asking why customers have a right to expect an album of reasonable quality...surely hunting through 8 tracks of average or dross to find the gems is part of the 'joy' of discovering an artist. They're serious ...
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Where we differ, it seems, is that I still don't believe it's "piracy" that has caused the record companies so much woe.
The woes of the recording industry are real and are severe, but the causes of these are complex...far more so than the industry bodies will have you believe, and, I'd argue, far more so than casual observers, and those who often are advocates of their case both here and elsewhere grasp.
I'll argue that piracy is an element but I temper that with a) the causes of piracy are also complex and often come back to things that have been either caused or aggravated by the actions of the labels...not always but often, b) I don't think that piracy as such has had as negative effect on the industry as a whole, or at least a wholly negative effect..there are many acts who've used the grayer regions of the net to some advantage (as have the movie studios with torrents) c) I think piracy's cost to the labels is grossly overstated and the removal of piracy tomorrow would likely not really help them at all as the world has moved, it's axis has permanently shifted, typesetters and typewriter manufacturers also found themselves out in the cold..redundant. They're gonna have to wipe out iTunes, Amazon, eMusic and the others who don't support the old way of doing things either.
The slow grinding death of the big record labels to little more than catalogue repositories and subsidiaries of music publishers is inevitable. It's tough and I feel for the people at the coalface but I'm also excited by the freedom this offers, and clearly, since music is being created in volume still, others are too and it's demise is wilfully and grossly overstated by those who are finding their world disappearing forever.
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I have no argument with the assertion that CD sales have been on the decline for other reasons, that people are shifting to buying single tracks, that on-line sales are inherently cheaper and the 'middle-men' of the music industry are fighting a rear-guard action to protect a dying business model.
There is also an unreasonable assumption and equivalence being made between the slow grinding death of the CD format (which still has a way to go BTW) and the inevitable downgrading of the importance of the major record companies to the music industry and some alleged loss of return to creators (I'm talking the music industry which is my area of expertise). It's a fairly tough and, to date, despite loud and often quite ludicrous claims, line to draw. There is, to date, little evidence that music creators have suffered greatly from piracy directly. Record companies on the other hand, I accept and would argue, have and there is a flow through in their reluctance to invest in acts. That, however, internationally, was happening before the decline and indeed one of the arguments for the decline in CD sales comes from the reluctance, in the post corporationisation of the recording era, of labels to invest or take risks. It's hard to overstate how negative an effect the consolidation of the record labels in recent years had on the industry, and the likely flow through to sales, is...but that's something industry bodies would never accept.
The biggest loss to creators has been the return from music publishing income from sales..so called mechanical royalties. And yet music publishers and performing rights bodies (which, for over a century, has been where the real money in the recording industry is) are doing very well and you could make a pretty strong argument that the market has re-aligned itself here to compensate for the drop in mechanicals.
I'm not going to argue that vast numbers of tracks are being taken from p2p sites, and I have a real issue with the likes of Pirate Bay, no matter what a mess the IPFI's legal assault on them has mutated into, but I am going top argue with the logic that says that such has necessarily hurt the creation of music or the return to the creators as we are repeatedly told it has.
But in a funny sort of way there already has been an adjustment. Creators are being compensated but one grouping, the old school big labels, is increasingly finding itself out of that loop, or at least their recording arms are.
Copyright and it's enforcement remains fundamental to our society..I think we all agree on that, and I think we all agree on the fact that there needs to be a fair return to those creators. This argument isn't about that, it's more about how we distribute and who gets to clip the ticket...and one party that clipped said ticket over the past decades is being slowly cut out of the loop by the most radical machine mankind has invented since the wheel.
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Yup. And as you say, will they never learn?
More thoughts along those lines from the Irish Times, which ends with these paragraphs, which takes me back to the whole Shaun Fanning / Napster debacle.
There are hundreds of Pirate Bays out there. Close them down and hundreds more will appear. You can put every person who has ever hosted an illegal file or downloaded one into jail tomorrow and it won’t make a bit of difference.
Here’s what should be done with the Pirate Bay Four: instead of throwing them in prison, give each a job with one of the four major record labels. They know about copyright law, its infringement and how illegal file-sharing works. Working with rather than against them might mean that the music industry has a fighting chance of surviving and getting to grips with a problem that won’t go away. There is no alternative
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Pirate Bay Judge Accused of Bias, Calls for a Retrial
The way I see this is:
a) The Pirate Bay trio (not sure about the 4th) were probably correctly found guilty, and were always going to be found guilty as any other verdict would've been disastrous with huge implications
b) But it's questionable whether taking this to trial was ever a very clever thing to do as any victory was always going to be pyrrhic. These guys are now folk heroes for a whole generation and there were likely better ways of handling Pirate Bay. This gets filed in the same box as the Napster / Metallica / RIAA lawsuits 'will-they-never-learn' litany.
c) the judge must be a frigging idiot if he didn't think that his board membership of, in particular, The Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, which is a lobby group not just a 'pro-copyright' group, with a currently out of the mainstream agenda, wasn't going to cause problems and be seen as a likely source of bias.
d) looking through the press, not just Torrent Bay, today, there seems to be an increasing call for the verdict to be set aside, or at least, extraordinarily strong grounds to have it overturned on appeal
e) which means that whichever way it goes Pirate Bay and it's supporters now have a massive cause celebre / rallying point / grassy knoll and the alleged victors in this case are back trying to find the path to square one again.Peter Sunde's tweets this morning included:
Oh how I love the smell of victory in the morning
And whether they win or lose in the next round of court, he's right, this is a nightmare for those that forced the prosecution.
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People get Creative New Zealand grants to record albums. You'd be unlikely to get $50 000, though.
Phase Four does exactly that. Or it would if it didn't have this archaic tagline on the conditions:
and have a release deal in place (meaning a release deal with a "major" label).
Fortunately the term 'major' label is fairly loosely defined as most major releases by NZ acts in 2009 go through the larger indies