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Post by Ginnie on Aug 13, 2008 23:31:16 GMT -4
Then it is okay for me to download all the albums I bought in the seventies and eighties? Great!o I guess, enjoyment is not always tied to the best sound but has a component of the familiar as well. Still, I don't miss the pops and surface noise associated with LPs nor do I miss turning them over and using the Diskwasher every 20 minutes. Particularly for a 4 LP opera. What I don't miss is the money I spent on needles and cartridges. It was a lot if you converted them to todays dollars. Lets see: 1978 bought a $200 turntable (about $600 today) 1980 paid $100 for needle and cartridge (about $250 today) 1982 paid $ 100 for needle and cartridge (about $225 today) and on and on... I was rough on my records and turntable, given my age at the time so they didn't last that long before getting scratched. I remember having to increase the weight of the arm more and more over time to get over the bigger scratches.
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Post by Data Cable on Aug 14, 2008 3:26:34 GMT -4
Its the bulldozer versus a hundred men with shovels argument. Exactly. I'm sure Gutenberg put a lot of scribes out of work, but I don't often hear him reviled for it. (Hey, for that matter, Gutenberg facilitated large-scale piracy... he'd be in violation of the HMCA, if today's IP lawyers were around at the time. ) So you prefer to take food out of the mouths of the artist's grandchildren? Let the brats find their own food. Young people need a place to start out, and for a lot of people that is in retail. Last I heard, Wal*Mart was still in business. Then again, they could always go to work for ProBoards, hand-copying all our posts and delivering them on foot to all who request them. There are people who build cars from scratch as a hobby, but it's no where near as easy, or cheap, as buying one that was mass-produced. Until/unless Star Trek-like replicators become a reality, copying cars will never be as cheap or easy as copying music. Who said record companies aren't allowed to (or don't) make a profit? I'm not at all opposed to artists, or their publishers, making a profit. But what was originally intended as a limited legal protection to help recoup the initial investment has been mutated into essentially indefinite ownership of an idea -- the oxymoronic term "intellectual property." The way things are going, with Congress rolling over to every whim of the entertainment industry, in 50 years it'll be mandatory for every citizen to have a chip implanted in their brain which will make it physiologically impossible for them to even perceive a particular piece of copyrighted material until they've purchased a license... pay-per-view, of course. Right now, in the U.S., that point is 70 years after. (120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier, for works of corporate authorship.) I think even Mozart 's offspring should be getting residuals. And automakers should be cutting royalty checks to descendants of the inventor of the wheel. (BTW, welcome to ApolloHoax, Congressman Bono. ) Well, they are doing the hard part... the part that can now be done effectively from the grave, according to the lawsuits. By the Constitution, the copyright is there to promote creation and innovation, not to protect artists incomes. Exactly. I'm kinda dubious as to the the societal enrichment that merits granting a minimum 70-year de jure monopoly on reproduction and distribution for Oops!... I Did It Again, but whatta ya gonna do?
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Aug 14, 2008 5:21:23 GMT -4
I'm kinda dubious as to the the societal enrichment that merits granting a minimum 70-year de jure monopoly on reproduction and distribution for Oops!... I Did It Again, but whatta ya gonna do? In that case, it could safely be extended to 1,000 years: the less people reproducing and distributing that, the better
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Post by BertL on Aug 14, 2008 10:07:26 GMT -4
I'd buy all the exclusive rights to Oops! I Did It Again just to make sure nobody is ever going to be able to use it ever again.
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Post by Ginnie on Aug 14, 2008 13:56:17 GMT -4
Data Cable said: Hey, that wasn't nice... Well, I might have extended the copyright a little tooo long. I know that when (rarely!) I sell a painting , I lose all rights to it. I think. Hmm, I wonder if I'm even allowed to display it on my web page unless I get permission, even though I created it?
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Post by echnaton on Aug 14, 2008 14:02:41 GMT -4
More analogous to the entertainment business, if you sell a print you retain copyright. Normally a sale does transfer all rights but some artists do not do this and retain some interest, including partial proceeds from resale. When you sell an original, the contract can be negotiated anyway the buyer and seller agree. Like with music, contracts can separate rights to the physical object and the art contained.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 15, 2008 13:52:13 GMT -4
I have mixed, rambling feelings on this. As an artist (visual and musical) I naturally want to reap some reward for my efforts. I've been putting together my fine-art photography for sale. I've been doing backup vocals for my friend Aaron de Azevedo's album, which he hopes to release commercially very soon. All these activities create value and require talent and skill that ought to be compensated. The basis of intellectual propertly law in the 1700s was that people who do these sorts of things enrich our lives and culture, and ought to be able to do them as full-time compensated pursuits if they choose and if there is a market.
However, as someone who has been repeatedly screwed over by money-grubbing publishers, I have not-so-nice feelings about their policies in general.
First, the difference between publishing and selling. If I paint a picture, I can publish it by displaying it in public. Or I can sell it outright to you. Each of those activities conveys different rights to the content. A published work, depending on how it is published, grants the viewer or listener certain rights of normal enjoyment and of Fair Use. By paying admission to a gallery advertising an exhibit of Degas paintings, I can reasonably expect to be able to see paintings done by Degas. However I may not be allowed to photograph them, because that isn't covered under Fair Use for a published painting. But if I buy a Degas, I own the painting and a fair amount of the proprietary rights to its content. I can become a new publisher of it. I can license its use by others. I can do a whole bunch of things.
The content of phonorecords is licensed, not assigned. You own the phonorecord as a physical object, but its content is licensed to you. The purchase price of the record includes a reasonable license fee.
For many years the producers of phonorecords have required that artists relinquish and transfer the intellectual property rights of their content to the producer. In return the producer/publisher offers some consideration to the artist, which may or may not be tied to the actual sales of the material. But once a third-party publisher is engaged, the artist typically loses all control over the revenue model and over how it may be subsequently used.
The situation I find myself in is that a popular recording I did in about 2002 (a new recording of the Alfred Burt Christmas carols) is no longer for sale by its publisher. It was quite popular at the time, and still gets requests. The publisher naturally required us to sign over intellectual property rights, and essentially dictated the terms under which that assignment would occur. While a royalty appropriately issues if a phonorecord is sold, that only happens when the record is for sale. No sales, no royalties. Now in order to satisfy the demand, I could produce CD phonorecords quite cheaply. The digital AIFF files can be applied to a blank CDR for pennies. However, I don't have the right to do that anymore.
Can I get the intellectual property right back from the publisher? Only if he consents; and he does not. Why? Because the publisher can continue to make money by licensing others' use of the music in other forms, such as in television commercials. That revenue stream requires absolutely no effort on the part of the publisher aside from printing a sheet of paper granting the right; the end user can simply "rip" the CD he already has to obtain the actual content, once he is permitted by license to do so. The take-it-or-leave-it terms under which the publisher accepted our work did not include royalties from this residual income. So here I, the artist, have the opportunity to profit further from the fruit of my labors; but that opportunity is quelled by the no-risk, no-added-value opportunity of the current publisher to reap his profit. He makes money not by assuming further risk or by adding value, but by simply doling out access to something of value that he did not create.
The name of the album is Caroling, Caroling. If you can find it and download it, I won't object. It's not taking any money out of my wallet if you do.
No, not all music publishers are money-grubbing robber barons, but the industry in general condones it. In general it is a ruthless business that screws over both its suppliers and its customers in a single-minded pursuit of profit, hiding behind Title 17 all the time. (Title 17 is the U.S. copyright code, for you non-American readers.) Yes, they -- as do all busineses -- have the right to make a profit. But they also bear responsibility ethically for the way in which they go about it.
The audio and video publishing industries for many years did not care so much about reproduction of their materials. VHS copies of copies of movies were never very good. Cassettes made from vinyl LPs were not as good as the original. VHS cassettes wore out. Audio cassettes wore out. LPs wore out. The only way to get a pristine copy was to buy it again from the publisher. As long as the revenue stream was intact, the publishers didn't care so much about the technical illegality of copying their stuff.
Unfortunately by failing to enforce those rights when they were being widely infringed, the publishers lost those rights. Such is the nature of enforcement. The courts shaped the interpretation of those rights based on how important they seemed to the holders of them. Now that anyone can make a perfect copy of a CD or a DVD, such that one need never buy a replacement due to loss, wear, or damage, the publishers have lost a revenue stream they once counted on. They can enforce their right to it only by capricious (and therefore questionably lawful) enforcement of rights they long since abandoned.
And the role of publisher is becoming less important. Back when I started in music production, you had to contract a recording studio, an editing studio, and a fabricator of vinyl discs in order to make a record. My first record, made in 1981, was printed on vinyl, took two days to record, six weeks to mix, and six more weeks to fabricate. Nowadays a musician has all that capability available to him for a small investment, and access to a worldwide distribution network that costs pennies per unit for him and his listeners.
In other words, the role of the middleman is greatly reduced. Hence the middleman has little or no opportunity to add value, and hence little or no opportunity to reap a profit. The only way they received a profit before was to co-opt the artist's rights. And the only way artists agreed to reliquish those rights was when publishers had the only means of distribution. In short, artists and listeners have obviated the middleman. Too bad for the middleman.
In a last-ditch effort to retain relevance, the publishers have entered the digital production and distribution realm, but in doing so have shot themselves in the feet yet again. In order to prevent piracy of content they legitimately own, they have put technical limits in place to restrict use. However, those limits are being used to acquire and enforce rights the publishers don't strictly have. Publishers have long sought a pay-per-play revenue model, in which they get a few pennies every time someone listens to "Oops, I Did It Again," or watch "Rugrats: The Movie." This would net them lots more money than offering unrestricted listening licenses in perpetuity.
Unfortunately the public absolutely despises this, and with good reason. Ever since sounds were first fixed in phonorecords, the buy-once listen-forever model has been the norm for consumer home music. Pay-per-play works for the radio, the concert hall, and the cinema. But that differs greatly in fundamental character from other well-established forms of publication.
Yes, if I want to see Degas paintings for real, I must go to a gallery; and I must pay the admission price each time I want to go. But if the owner of the Degas licenses it for print, and I buy a print and hang it up in my home, I don't have to pay a fee every time I look at it. It falls to the owners to negotiate the print license such that they don't dilute their own market for displaying the originals. Similarly it falls to the music publisher to negotiate home distribution licenses so as not to dilute their market. Trying to change the model after it's established is bad business.
Artists are no longer slaves to publishers. Consumers are no longer slaves to publishers. Hence artists and consumers can increasingly work out their own markets. The publishers' attempts to shore up an obsolete business model through legislative and arbitrary technical means simply won't last for very long.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Aug 15, 2008 15:14:29 GMT -4
I think there would be more demand for CD music if you could actually rely on it being good. Often you get a CD for one or two sings and the rest are rubbish.
About 10-12 years ago when downloading was just starting to become popular, a New Zealander had the idea of creating Pick and Mix booths in Record Stores where the customer could select what sound tracks they wanted to place onto a CD, then the booth would burn the CD, create a label, package it and spit it out, along with determining the fees for the record companies so they could be paid according to the songs sold that they had produced. The idea was floated to the music inductry and was rejected by them. They shot themselves in the foot more than once.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 15, 2008 15:58:14 GMT -4
The music publishers co-opted the album concept as a marketing tool.
The album I referred to is a collection of compositions that fit together as the composer's major opus. All of Alfred Burt's carols fit neatly into a 45-minute program and are stylistically and thematically related. Another example of the album concept, properly executed, is Boston's Third Stage album. Although composed of individual songs, the songs are related by common musical elements and progress in a sequence. While each song works individually, the entire album works better when presented together.
Most modern "albums" of popular music do not follow that rule. Publishers realize that only a fraction of any artist's work will become popular. In the good old days, an artist would write several songs. The producers would select a fraction of those songs to record -- the ones they felt were worthy of consideration. And from perhaps 20 recorded tracks they would select the best 10 to put in an album. Nowadays an artist records fifty songs, and the five best tracks are put as the flagship tracks on five separate albums, with the other 45 tracks added essentially as filler material.
Since it costs no more to fabricate a CD album than a CD single, but the publisher can get away with asking an album price for a CD album ($15 versus $4), he is well motivated to offer five albums instead of one, believing that fans will purchase all five albums ($75) in order to get the five good tracks.
Because electronic distribution opens the door to buying only the popular tracks, another lucrative revenue stream dries up because it wasn't based on adding value but rather by locking consumers into a model that fleeced them. Publishers ostensibly offered a lot of volume and commanded large-volume prices, but only at diluted quality. Now that quality is taken out of the publisher's hands, their revenue model breaks.
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Post by Ginnie on Aug 15, 2008 16:19:42 GMT -4
Phantom Wolf wrote:
I hate when that happens. Doesn't happen much anymore though,because I can 'preview' most cd's on Amazon and get a good idea of what it sounds like.
Remember 'Moontan' by Golden Earring? The rest of the album wasn't nearly as good as 'Radar Love' was it?
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Post by gillianren on Aug 15, 2008 18:35:29 GMT -4
There are certain artists you can rely on being pretty steady. I have Cyndi Lauper's At Last, and there's not a bad song on it. There are some I don't like as much as others, but none I feel obligated to skip.
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