Look, i've never said if there is money involved you shouldn't pay to the creators.
There are some places where 15 dollars, like in my country, is a looooot of money. That's where the line becomes blurry. And when I said I paid 100 dollars to watch Radiohead live, is more than a month's salary for some people over here.
What would you do? You can't buy every album you want to listen to, so should you turn on the radio and wait for the song to be broadcasted, therefore be exposed to a lot of marketing of the labels, or maybe there could be a way to get the music for free. I mean, the artists should be open to this, and maybe MUST be open.
There was a time in the 90's where I was able to buy 5 cd's,
the black album from metallica, use your illusion II guns & roses, and 3 from green day. That wasn't enough for me, really! Bad decade to be living for me.
Not everywhere is USA and Europe, though the main sales comes from those places. I have a different experience, and wished to have listened to a lot more music in my childhood, but I did have to pay to listen.
So it's a little tricky, wasn't I or or my friends not worthy of music?

My other suggestion is, like you did, DONATION. Though not everyone who has a computer, has a credit card...
If you can, you pay. Even more, if you like it a LOT after you listened, you can go back and donate even more.
That's like a Mecenas of this actual times.

Music in the right moment, is spiritual elevation, everyone should be given this right.

I'm beginning to think that until we can "get" people to respect intellectual property rights, either morally or legally, there won't be an end to this cycle anytime soon.

And people complain that all the music on the radio is manufactured uninteresting corporate pop.

Buy some interesting music and people will make more of it. Otherwise we'll all be stuck with hippies playing in the park...

great, than you won't be stealing any more music than? I'm pretty confident that everything you want is available someplace where you can pay for it.

that's rough, but somehow they manage to pay for the things that can't be easily stolen without consequence.

yes, you wait, and/or you find the legal alternatives. there's no excuse for stealing... you are just rationalizing at this point.

why should the artist be open to having their work stolen and not being compensated for their work?


but you did buy them... you found a way to prioritize your budget to pay for the things you valued.

you're not allowed to steal it, or distribute it en mass. what will you do when the great illegal supply of music is cut off? you'll go back to figuring out how to pay for it.

but you had that choice and you didn't, that doesn't make a strong argument for that model working.

so how much are you going to pay for In Rainbows, now, that you've had time with it?

A lot of things in the right moment are a spiritual elevation, which is even more reason why it's bad karma to steal it if it negatively effects someone else.

Stealing music is Bad Karma...

watch this...



or, tell it to this guy...



I'd be genuinely curious to get your thought on both of those videos.

Well, I'm off this discussion. To tell me to watch a stupid video, as if I was 5 years old, and from YOUTUBE! (a piracy place) is too much really.
I'm tired of being called a thief, out of nothing. It's going to be difficult for you to understand, if you first believe I'm a pirate and a thief.
We have different opinions, and big differences in our experiences of life. I'm a peace & love guy, and music is my life. I've sold my share of albums (I released 4), but even now and then I give away some cd's to people who can't buy it. I also put my records online for free, for people who are too far away where distributors don't go.

Also, I love football, the real one, with the round ball. that you use to play with your feet, not football to play with your hands...
Messi best player ever. Goodbye.

promises, promises...

if the shoe fits, ya know...

I don't supposed you actually watched those videos, which are what YouTube should be doing, original user generated content as it is supposed to be...

I'm just reading your posts.

peace and love as long you get to take what you want? well, I'm glad you get to do what you want with your music, that's the point. the artist should get to make that decision for themselves, not have it taken away from them.

okey, goodbye... ...and good luck!

Bingo... Just like the OWS guys who have been used to all this free digital media, etc, went to arts school, can't get a job, and is now demanding that the rest of the world gives them the world for free. They are so backwards in thought that they can't even figure it out and it's sad. The crowds are almost parallel. Someone should subpoena them to see if they all have licenses for all of the music on their ipods, macbooks, etc. I can almost guarantee 75% of all of it is pirated.

They "have enough" when people are no longer willing to give them money for what they do.

Nobody's holding a gun to the heads of the audience and forcing them to pay for something they don't want.

That's the essential point that's missing from the thinking of all the freetards - rich stars are rich because they produce something that's desirable to their audience - and evidently to the freetards as well or they wouldn't steal it.

And Radiohead deemed the experiment a failure and will not be repeating it because of people like you who were not willing to pay even the cost of production.

It doesn't matter if you went to the live show. Live shows have their own cost of production and their own labor involved. How would you feel if you were expected to work 40 hours a week for 20 hours pay? Because that's what you're expecting artists to do with your "Oh I steal the record but it's OK because I go to the live show when it comes to town every 2 or 3 years" excuse.

No. Free music is impossible to put into practice because people must be paid for their labor or they can't do it. Unless you're willing to settle for the dabblings of amateurs.

You know, doctors make too much money - they should work for the joy of helping people and get real jobs flipping burgers or selling insurance to support themselves. But would you want to trust your health to an amateur doctor?

Would you want to live in a house built by an amateur carpenter and wired by an amateur electrician?

It takes a great deal of investment in time, energy, and capital to become a professional musician or audio engineer. Regardless of what the gear pimps tell you you just can't buy a couple of boxes and do it, it takes work. If people's work produces something that other people find desirable they deserve a fair compensation for that work.

A lot of people in the freetard contingent complain that most new music is crap. Well, you get what you pay for. If you don't put out the cash to support quality music, quality music goes away.

A vanity label, eh? That means that you make money by charging people to put out product that won't sell. You make your nut essentially by bilkiing the artist.

There's an industry term for people who do that. That term is "sharks".

Profitable for who? Not the artist. You can't make money by working for free.

"other brand extension"? You mean selling t-shirts and coffee mugs? Let me clue you in on that - merch is pirated just as much as recordings are if there's any significant interest in an act. And for acts on the local level doing small quantities it costs nearly as much to buy the merch from the wholesaler as you can reasonably expect to sell it for.

Have you ever toured? Do you actually know anything about the realities of touring besides the nonsense you read in the popular press?

It is essentially impossible for an entry level act to make any real money touring. You're lucky to get home with a couple hundred bucks in your pocket, if that. If an entry level act wants to do a tour opening for a major name they generally have to "buy on" to the tour - that means that they pay the headliner a large sum of money up front for the privilege of being on the tour.

Mid level acts may turn a modest profit but the ROI really isn't very good when you consider the amount of work involved. And to actually make a living at it you have to tour constantly 200-300 shows a year.

If you're The Rolling Stones or AC/DC then yeah, you can make a lot of money. But being a huge star does not always mean that touring is profitable. It's pretty well known in the industry that Lady Gaqa doesn't actually make anything from her live shows because her cost of production is so high.

Yeah, on paper. Good luck getting anything out of Youtube if you're not a major label or at least a wildly popular indie.

"Predominant revenue stream"?????? I'm a MUSICIAN and audio engineer. That's what I do. I HAVE NO OTHER "PREDOMINANT REVENUE STREAM".

You have a lot of nerve coming in here and preaching at us when your "predominant revenue stream" is based on taking advantage of the naive hopes of amateur musicians with your "vanity label".

You're funny. You have no idea who the people are here.

Yes, there's amazing potential for unscrupulous businessmen to build their company on the backs of the artists whose work they rip off.

And where are these "large amounts of money" going to come from if they give away the product for free? Or it the product they're selling is stolen and given away?

Sure they would if they thought they wouldn't get caught. A couple weeks ago I heard some young kid arguing about paying a buck for rice at a Thai restaurant. He was using the same BS that I encounter here.

You mean a person who professionally victimizes hopeful amateur musicians, right? That's what vanity labels do.

Oh, and vanity labels were not really considered to be part of the actual music industry last time I looked.....

One more thing - as a person who spent a good portion of his life touring and working live shows i'll be DAMNED if I'm going to give a cut of my performance earning up to some company that didn't earn it as part of a "360 deal"! Bloodsuckers!

I did a quick web search for Chad Sterling - the only thing I could find that was at all relevant to music was this:
http://www.myspace.com/534236548/music

Is that you?

Not to be a thorn, but what's your source?

Hmmmm. I may have been beating you up unfairly (but based on your own statement above).

It's becoming increasingly apparent that you may not actually know what a vanity label is.

A private label owned by an artist or group of artists is not properly called a "vanity label", it's simply a small artist owned label, essentially the same thing as self-releasing. Some such labels eventually grow to become respected indies, for example Jello Biafra's alternative Tentacles or Black Flag's SST*. If that's what you meant I apologize for previous statements which were based on the assumption that you were operating an actual commercial vanity label.

A real vanity label is a commercial company that profits by charging amateur artists to release their music on their "label", often promising exposure, promotion, and distribution while charging the hapless amateur for things they could have just as well done themselves. Their business model is based on pandering to the unrealistic hopes of amateurs and bleeding them rather than actually selling records.

"WE WILL PRODUCE AND MARKET YOUR RECORDING FOR ONLY $5000! PREMIUM PACKAGES AVAILABLE AT ADDITIONAL COST!!! YOU CAN BE A STAR!!!!!"

Things like that.




* - They do NOT do it by giving away product.

ROTFLMFAO!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, Chad.

Rack Gear is the pseudonym of a person who actually does own a real commercial record label. One with actual real product. Which is actually, really pirated. He has asked that his name (which I know) be kept private. If you PM him he will explain why. Maybe if you stop behaving the way you have been he might let you know who he actually is, but given they way you've been carrying on I would not blame him at all if he didn't.

Rack has already given you the link to Chris's identity (Chris gives his real name in his sig as well).

Who I am is given in my profile on this site, my facebook page, and in this post on another site: The Womb - View Single Post - Time for re-introduction

None of those bios is fully complete, but they give the general picture. If any of the names of people I've worked for or played with are unfamiliar I'd suggest Google.

Incidentally my avatar pic is me, as well.

Most of the other so-called "hard liners" are also real industry people.

ROTFLMFAOA!!!!!!!!

Lotsa comedy today.

Your statement above is true in the same way that the following statement is true:

"ONE NUCLEAR WAR CAN END WORLD HUNGER!"

Funny. Seems to me that the ones (selectively) shutting down the internet are the piracy supporters in Anonymous and Lulzsec.

Hi frawnchy! Still taking the word of the popular press over that of those in the industry, I see.

We've been through this before, but you can't take what you read in the popular music press* as being true any more than you can believe a politician's campaign promises.

They're both telling the public what they think the public wants to hear to boost their popularity. Actually in many cases in the music press it's a matter of the writer putting words he or his editor thinks will sell copies into the mouths of the artists. I'm not saying that's the case in any specific instance but it happens a lot.

In the Radiohead case what tells the true story for all to see is the fact that the offer was withdrawn, the album was put on sale in the normal manner, and the offer has not been repeated. If it had been a success wouldn't they have continued doing it?


* including music articles in general content publications.

BINGO!

And also, wouldn't other bands be repeating/copying this if it actually worked?
It doesn't, so they don't.

Some friends of mine got a great deal with Roadrunner a few years back. They toured for almost a year straight in their van opening for BIG acts on the label. The first week their CD came out there were around 20,000 illegal downloads and about 500 actual sales. They were dropped pretty quickly. With all that loads of money they made touring while it lasted, 2 of them lost their houses, one got divorced, and the other joined the military.

This is the real problem, not rather or not Bieber looses a few dollars here and there.

I guess maybe they should have tried to sell more coffee mugs while on the road.


FWIW, I used to be one of you to an extent. I got in the habit of downloading reference songs that bands suggested I listen to during projects since it was music I didn't usually like or would buy for listening pleasure. I then woke up and realized this was maybe even worse because I was PROFITING from the guidance provided by these tracks as opposed to just enjoying the content. Spending a dollar in the process of making a few grand really isn't anything to complain about.

There really are no excuses to be honest.

that's a really great post and a message the pro-pirates really need to hear more often.

Hi John, good to have you back.

Every source, even the negative ComScore report on In Rainbows' sales, indicates that sale for sale, even with a ratio of 3:2 in favour of leeches, they made more money than they could've from a CD.
They didn't repeat the process because it's worth giving the $500,000-1,000,000 extra they would have earned away so they didn't have to organise and do so much again.
Six of one, half-dozen of the other.

Nine Inch Nails continue to repeat the process.

That's the hard truth.

It's seems a certain "Tech can do no wrong" crowd here would shield their eyes at a post like this. Kinda like a 5-year-old screaming lala-lalala-lalala while plugging their ears with their fingers.

while everyone deserves equal protection under the law, it's the people at the bottom and the ones trying to climb the ladder that are getting burned in the blazing fire that is piracy.

The fact remains that something like that is only viable if an act is already hugely successful and even then is questionable at best.

The question of whether Radiohead made more than they would have on CD sales is really beside the point. The real point is that they would have made more on CD sales plus conventionally priced downloads and their "pay what you like" experiment did not measurably reduce pirate downloads at all.

NIN continues to do free downloads because Trent Reznor is philosophically a communist who feels that he already has enough money, not because it's a viable business model.

The fact remains that this is an expensive practice that is non-viable in a business sense (in other words it's NOT a "new model for the music business") that only acts that are already wildly successful can afford to indulge in.

In other words, a rock star ego trip.

Encouraging entry level or mid level acts who are not already rich to pursue this path is disingenuous at best and disastrous for those who heed this ill advised "advice".