Posts by Simon Grigg
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Richie Unterberger
Is a terrible writer, a hack who shouldn't get the space he gets. His reviews across the AMG's site are uninformed drivel. Space Waltz was very much a Roxy post thing (before they went bad). The band's line up was pure Eno era Roxy and their one album owed a huge debt to Ferry and Co. The glam thing as it mutated in NZ was a unique mashing of that and prog, with literary pretensions thrown in for good measure (witness the first, and best, Enz album)
Space Walltz and Dragon...Auckland Town Hall, 1974..now that was a show.
-
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.
First album to sell a million copies was With The Beatles. Throughout the 60s mostly the only albums to hit that figure were Beatles albums. In the 1970s almost every album in the US album top 10 hit a million (OMC's album did and only reached 39 in the US) and the charts were full of albums selling multiple millions. Album sales in 70s and beyond multiplied by a factor of many times, way beyond any population increase. It was simply that people bought increasingly more albums in the post Sgt Pepper period, in preference to the singles they'd bought earlier and the increase snowballed.
And the same explosion happened, country by country (nothing to do with new markets or any other such thing) all over the world.
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
Uhhh...where did I or anyone else ever say either of those things. I said there was no sustainable loss from home taping because there was no real loss.
or maybe they viewed hits packages as loss leaders to albums by artists, kinda like radio.
Who mentioned greatest hits? I'm talking albums by artists they were trying to break. But you get it in the second part of that sentence....exactly...as Russell says:
The viral aspects of how we become stakeholders in popular music should not be underrated.
Pretty much the most important statement made in this thread.
Worth reading is this, from Wired, which underlines how the record labels still rather miss that point.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Still, every cassette I ever bought was used for home taping right up until I used em for manufacturing, and then I got wholesale rates.
and every copy taped was a sale lost, right????
From experience, the European labels have, in years gone by, usually pocketed 100% of the performance side of any tape / cd levy without mentioning it to artists unless pushed fairly hard.
-
performers=performers on the records
-
no one ever got prosecuted for home taping
But they did penalised for it. A variety of nations instigated an, at times heavy, levy on blank cassettes, paid to the major labels and rarely willingly passed on to artists, on the largely bogus grounds that home taping was killing recorded music.
The bullshit is on a generational loop.
-
but I think you have his intentions in reverse.
I think you're right and I typed in some haste (that happens when one is trying to teach oneself touch typing after 40 odd years of two fingers), so yes I owe Arthur an apology and for that I'll subject myself to ten repeated listenings to his Neville Purvis single as penance.
-
are you having a problem with the grammar or the sentiment?
The illogicality of the sentiment, and the implication that those who argue against the proposition have some evil motive. To be honest I didn't read the piece...it was in Antenna right? It's something I didn't get around to reading. But I expect much more of Arthur.
It's getting increasingly hard to defend people who I actually respect when they are coming out with this sort of stuff.