The new 21-year-old intern on NPR’s All Songs Considered claims to have only purchased 15 CDs in her entire life. This amounts to shocking news for some, probably because it doesn’t match our collective mental image of a true music enthusiast, especially one who works on a national radio show about music.
The passionate music enthusiasts I have known in my life have been, without exception, collectors. They scour the music scene for the next new thing or maybe an old awesome thing nobody remembers. They buy weird-smelling albums from stoop sales. They have milk crates full of music. I don’t even know where one gets milk crates! A cool music nerd of the caliber that could be hired by All Songs Considered should be like a musical Indiana Jones, right?
Emily the Intern is not a collector in the traditional sense. From her description, it sounds like she has amassed her gigabytes of music in huge chunks, looting digital copies of songs from her college radio station, senior prom date, and various family members.
And if it got deleted? She thinks she could probably recreate it fairly easily. She doesn’t have an emotional connection to the “collection.” She just likes listening to music.
From her article:
As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to realize the gravity of what file-sharing means to the musicians I love. I can’t support them with concert tickets and T-shirts alone. But I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience.
What I want is one massive Spotify-like catalog of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices. With this new universal database, everyone would have convenient access to everything that has ever been recorded, and performance royalties would be distributed based on play counts (hopefully with more money going back to the artist than the present model). All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?
Now, as you might have guessed by the fact that we are writing about it, not everyone is thrilled with Emily’s view of how the music industry should work.
The most lucid and polite (if lengthy) of the many responses to her article comes from David Lowery, of the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker.
He makes quite a few points, but the most interesting one is this: Plenty of companies are making money off of what Emily the Intern is doing. (She paid for her laptop, internet access, etc.) It’s just that artists are not chief among them, and there is no market pressure that will help that change.
Mr. Lowery:
Say there is a neighborhood in your local big city. Let’s call it The ‘Net. In this neighborhood there are record stores. Because of some antiquated laws, The ‘Net was never assigned a police force. So in this neighborhood people simply loot all the products from the shelves of the record store. People know it’s wrong, but they do it because they know they will rarely be punished for doing so. What the commercial Free Culture movement (see the “hybrid economy”) is saying is that instead of putting a police force in this neighborhood we should simply change our values and morality to accept this behavior. We should change our morality and ethics to accept looting because it is simply possible to get away with it. And nothing says freedom like getting away with it, right?
But it’s worse than that. It turns out that Verizon, AT&T, Charter etc etc are charging a toll to get into this neighborhood to get the free stuff. Further, companies like Google are selling maps (search results) that tell you where the stuff is that you want to loot. Companies like Megavideo are charging for a high speed looting service (premium accounts for faster downloads). Google is also selling ads in this neighborhood and sharing the revenue with everyone except the people who make the stuff being looted. Further, in order to loot you need to have a $1,000 dollar laptop, a $500 dollar iPhone or $400 Samsumg tablet. It turns out the supposedly “free” stuff really isn’t free. In fact it’s an expensive way to get “free” music. (Like most claimed “disruptive innovations”it turns out expensive subsidies exist elsewhere.) Companies are actually making money from this looting activity. These companies only make money if you change your principles and morality! And none of that money goes to the artists!
And believe it or not this is where the problem with Spotify starts. The internet is full of stories from artists detailing just how little they receive from Spotify. I shan’t repeat them here. They are epic. Spotify does not exist in a vacuum. The reason they can get away with paying so little to artists is because the alternative is The ‘Net where people have already purchased all the gear they need to loot those songs for free. Now while something like Spotify may be a solution for how to compensate artists fairly in the future, it is not a fair system now. As long as the consumer makes the unethical choice to support the looters, Spotify will not have to compensate artists fairly. There is simply no market pressure. Yet Spotify’s CEO is the 10th richest man in the UK music industry ahead of all but one artist on his service.
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Copying or reproducing an author’s work without his permission is copyright infringement. The penalties you face for copyright infringement vary. First-time violators that reproduce or distribute copyrighted material (10 phonorecords or 1 copyrighted work) with a retail value of more than $2,500 during an 180-day period face up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine or both according to the United States Department of Justice. If this is not your first copyright infringement conviction, you may face up to ten years in prison, a fine of $250,000 or both. Violators that reproduce or distribute less than the requisite number of copies, or the retail value is charged with a misdemeanor violation. Misdemeanor charges have a maximum penalty of one year in jail, a $100,000 or both.
Read more: Laws & Penalties on Copyrights | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/list_6567628_laws-penalties-copyrights.html#ixzz1yLOb53iV
Hi there.
For Mr. Lowery, a link to Amanda Palmer’s recent Kickstarter.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amandapalmer/amanda-palmer-the-new-record-art-book-and-tour?ref=live
For everyone else, a link to Amanda Palmer’s recent Kickstarter.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amandapalmer/amanda-palmer-the-new-record-art-book-and-tour?ref=live
Interesting tidbit of information about Amanda Palmer. Every last bit of her music is available online, for free. Most of it is available on her website, in a high-quality mp3, with no DRM, for FREE. And yet, not only did she just rake in just shy of 1.2 million dollars to produce her new album, she has also managed to pay her bills and eat in the years since she left her record label. Which tells me that she’s somehow managing to get paid for her music, despite offering it for free. I wonder how she managed to do that?
Oh, wait, I remember now. She acted like musicians and performers and artists acted for years up until the record labels/movie studios/publishing houses told them they didn’t have to do anything but make music anymore. Things like reaching out to fans, building an image and a reputation and a fan base and producing content that people want to consume. I blame the record labels for a lot of this – they are responsible for the idea that musicians become rock stars without effort. That they are “discovered” and gold rains down from the sky upon them because they are so magical and perfect that they don’t have to WORK anymore.
Art has value. It is HIGHLY subjective. What I am willing to pay money for, you might think is absolute garbage. (For example, I have a friend who cannot understand why I listen to Amanda Palmer – she doesn’t have that great a voice, her music is sometimes jarring and atonal, and the subjects of her songs are often less than polite. I don’t know how this same friend listens to Eminem.) As with all things, gatekeepers and middlemen do more to hurt both sides of the equation than anything else. Producer of content produces content, consumer consumes content, middleman rakes in huge profit and tells everyone else to go pound sand? That model has NEVER worked. It has NEVER been good for ANYONE other than the middleman. The problem with the internet is that it makes it very, very easy to cut out the middleman, and the middlemen are terrified that more people will figure it out.
I support the artists I love. The internet makes it a heck of a lot easier to do so without having to negotiate with a backwards, frivolous, and unnecessary industry.
And part of the problem is that “artists” are low on the food chain and “labels” get the majority of any proceeds from the artists’ work and labels like it that way.
For people who just use music as background noise, it has no value, so they will not pay for it. Art and frivolous entertainment are worth what the audience thinks they are, and no more. If that is nil, tough! No one owes the labels or artists a debt. If there is no money in singing and playing a guitar, get a real job.
“I don’t even know where one gets milk crates!”
You have to steal them.
I’m tired of “buying” things, and then being told I don’t “own” them. Being told I can’t convert them to another convenient, usable format. Having to buy things I don’t want, just to get something I do want. Being asked to pay more than things are worth – not to support artists, but to support a dying publishing industry.
ITMS works for me, though I still don’t believe I “own” anything. Sharing whole hard drives with friends is a lot easier than downloading music, and if I like an artist, I buy their album. iTunes Match just made 25,000 of my songs “legit” for $25 – which seems like a pretty sweet deal, too.
This whole problem boils down to what farking thing: entitlement. She says, “All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?”
Apparently you are unaware, milady, that most of the world doesn’t get even get to eat when they want, let alone what they WANT to eat. The dribbles of goo coming out of your mouth only signify that you have no concept or appreciation of the “real world” we live in.
Just because you have always gotten what you wanted because of your socioeconomic and geopolitical status, doesn’t mean that the world owes it to you. The musicians giving you free music to sate your desires don’t get what they want, when they want, how they want, so why should you?
Is that so much to ask?
“Say there is a neighborhood in your local big city. Let’s call it The ‘Net. In this neighborhood there are record stores. Because of some antiquated laws, The ‘Net was never assigned a police force. So in this neighborhood people simply loot all the products from the shelves of the record store. People know it’s wrong, but they do it because they know they will rarely be punished for doing so.”
And that’s a really shitty analogy.
You want an analogy for music piracy? Here goes:
There’s a neighborhood called The ‘Net. In this neighborhood, there’s a music “store” called Limewire. The owner of Limewire doesn’t actually sell his records; he loves them too much. So instead, he invites everybody in the neighborhood to bring their tape decks over and make copies of his records, and asks them to do the same with the tapes they make with those records. He does this of his own free will, as does everybody else who makes those copies and lets others make copies from them, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Now obviously, there’s some issues with doing this; after all, at some point, the artist needs to eat. But telling everybody that copying is theft is just going to fall on deaf ears, because they’re quite transparently not the same thing.
I like to thank bit-torrent for my music, as well as stationripper and atube catcher.
“They have milk crates full of music. I don’t even know where one gets milk crates!”
Wellllllllllllllllllllllllllllll……
The only cd that I’ve bought in, probably, 10 years, is one that I’d been looking for for pretty much that entire time. Did the industry ever stop to think that maybe the reason that the money they make has been getting less and less is because the music coming out is getting crappier ? “Oh, it’s wrong to not pay for music.” Sorry, but I don’t think so. When we were kids, we would hear a song at our friends’ house and they’d make a tape for us. It’s the same thing with the internet, only now, our friend could be halfway around the world instead of down the street. I just got fed up with buying a 10/15 dollar, 13 song cd for only 2 or maybe 3 songs that I want.
I have a big collection of LP`s Vinyl The Beatles,The Stones,Pink floyd,David Bowie,Queen,Fleerwood Mac,Moody Blues,and so on. And we played them on a music centre which had a tape deck,and if your mate wanted a copy of one of of the records,you gave him a tape of the ones he wanted. If you were in his house he would do the same for you.
So according to the copyright law we should have all been sent to prison.
In those days it wasn`t evan mentioned at all,everybody did it. In my opinion the music today is crap,evan my son likes all the music i have.