The RIAA Armageddon has begun

lowery's "you care about foxconn, but not me?" bit is overreaching, but the basic point that people are cavalier about contributing nothing to enjoy a culture they claim to love is pretty dead on

David Lowery is the drummer for Gay Dad.

it is weird to hear musicians be nostalgic for the good time 80s/90s. being a musician didn't ever seem like an easy road. in the 80s indie acts complained non-stop about ripoff distributors and shoddily run labels,

how's Grant Hart's financial status these days?

how is it 'idealism' to always attempt to operate at a profit instead of going for the big risk/big reward gambit of more ambitious music industry go-getters?

It's not a strictly binary dialectic here. It's not a black and white thing. There's nothing wrong with idealism. But I think often idealism falters when things get less ... ideal. For example, Mackaye is an idol of mine, on many fronts, and proof that there is a successful way to make a living as an independent artist. And yet he's not paraplegic, or depressive, or with a son with a congenital disease. If he were any of those things, he may have been tempted, at least once, to take major label money, or do something that infringes on his idealism, just as many people take shitty jobs just for the health care, or to help pay the bills.

xpost I think Grant makes money as an artist. Like Chris Mars.

Marc Masters' mention of the piece on FB led to a lot of back and forth; you'll see some familiar names in the comments (besides my opening snark, obv.)

https://www.facebook.com/marc.masters/posts/10151830688220707

link dnw

yeah i think DL's point is worth making to young people who spend discretionary income on all sorts of things but not music. but at a certain point when he's lecturing someone who was in 3rd grade when Napster happened, it's probably also worth pointing out that they didn't start the fire. (xpost)

it seems like people want to paint "i want to own my masters and not answer to an A&R when writing my songs" as a more pie-in-the-sky career priority than "i want to sell a million records and be world famous no matter what it takes

I just finished that Paul Trynka bio of Bowie and even a Rock Star of his stature didn't own his masters until 1999 after being royally fucked out of millions.

it's probably also worth pointing out that they didn't start the fire.

especially if your mouth is full of s'mores

?

i refuse to elucidate my glorious metaphor

the smores are mp3 files

Fluffy bunny?

i filled your mom's mouth with s'mores

peculiarly enough i still mean 'music piracy' there though

I just finished that Paul Trynka bio of Bowie and even a Rock Star of his stature didn't own his masters until 1999 after being royally fucked out of millions.

But he part owned them already by the late eighties, IIRC? So better than might have been the case. I think the only album he doesn't have any specific rights to at all is the first, self-titled one.

yeah i mean 'owning your master recordings' as something even on the radar of many musicians as any kind of priority seems like a relatively recent development that we can probably thank diy indie for to some extent

if only lowery realized the kneejerk defensiveness he'd get from music fans who don't want to admit their complicity in fucking over musicians

Perhaps if he hadn't just completely eliminated the industry's long history in fucking over musicians in favor of jumping straight from "Artist controls everything" to "Post-Napster Music Apocalypse".

Let's just be thankful that before file sharing no musician died broke and unhappy.

People keep saying stuff like this, which seems to boil down to "because musicians have always had it hard, there's nothing wrong with people availing themselves of musicians' labor withing paying for it." I'm more sympathetic than most artists I know to filesharing, but that logic is nonsense.

Filesharing however is reality, it's not going to change & all parsings of it are pointless: it's like resenting osmosis. So in this matter I'm pretty Lefsetzian even though I can't read him for more than a few lines without getting hives: you have to get out on the road & stay there, and you have to remain compelling live & kick ass every night, and if you don't, you're going to go hungry. That is a damn shame - there are plenty of great artists for whom the live arena just isn't the best venue - but those are the breaks; the future belongs to the charismatic, for better or worse, probably worse.

Perhaps if he hadn't just completely eliminated the industry's long history in fucking over musicians in favor of jumping straight from "Artist controls everything" to "Post-Napster Music Apocalypse".

your stuff is kind of incoherent here man - you seem to routinely be arguing that since somebody's always been fucking artists over, it might as well be their fans

But he part owned them already by the late eighties, IIRC? So better than might have been the case. I think the only album he doesn't have any specific rights to at all is the first, self-titled one.

The principal reason, according to Trynka, why Bowie approved the Bowie Bonds thing was so he could use the advance to buy his songs.

those who can play live play live. those who cannot charge twice as much for DJ sets.

shakin my fist @ rich-ass DJs

because musicians have always had it hard, there's nothing wrong with people availing themselves of musicians' labor withing paying for it

Yeah i didn't say this. Just trying to smash the ridiculous golden age this guy is painting by leaving the industry completely out of the conversation.

why though

shakin my fist @ rich-ass DJs

― decrepit but free (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Tuesday, June 19, 2012 10:48 AM (22 seconds ago) Bookmark

ha i'm just sayin, i think the uncharismatic studio rats will be aight

The principal reason, according to Trynka, why Bowie approved the Bowie Bonds thing was so he could use the advance to buy his songs.

Matches with what I'd heard. Nice move if you can do it (the Rolling Stones have to be pissed they didn't think of that).

I mean ideally, nobody would be fucking over musicians. I am a musician.

Pointing out that the industry has been fucking over musicians does not mean I support stealing music. It's that this guy has painted a pretty unrealistic and idealistic portrait of the pre-filesharing music industry. I feel the need to bring that up because he has left it out of the discussion, on that page at least.

xpost Aero, at your commercial peak, as such, I'd be really curious how reliable your record sales were/are. Like, ever enough to impart a certain level of comfort/freedom, or never enough to put the hustle on hold?

it was kind of irrelevant to his rebuttal, though. xpost

I'm not sure it's an idealistic portrait of pre-filesharing so much as underscoring how much worse things have become post-filesharing.

Like, now even your fans are screwing you out of money, awesome!

The accepted norm for hudreds of years of western civilization is the artist exclusively has the right to exploit and control his/her work for a period of time. (Since the works that are are almost invariably the subject of these discussions are popular culture of one type or another, the duration of the copyright term is pretty much irrelevant for an ethical discussion.) By allowing the artist to treat his/her work as actual property, the artist can decide how to monetize his or her work. This system has worked very well for fans and artists. Now we are being asked to undo this not because we think this is a bad or unfair way to compensate artists but simply because it is technologically possible for corporations or individuals to exploit artists work without their permission on a massive scale and globally. We are being asked to continue to let these companies violate the law without being punished or prosecuted. We are being asked to change our morality and principals to match what I think are immoral and unethical business models.

Who are these companies? They are sites like The Pirate Bay, or Kim Dotcom and Megaupload. They are “legitimate” companies like Google that serve ads to these sites through AdChoices and Doubleclick. They are companies like Grooveshark that operate streaming sites without permission from artists and over the objections of the artist, much less payment of royalties lawfully set by the artist. They are the venture capitalists that raise money for these sites. They are the hardware makers that sell racks of servers to these companies. And so on and so on.

How did the old system work, exactly? "By allowing the artist to treat his/her work as actual property, the artist can decide how to monetize his or her work"? That was standard practice in the music industry for 50 years or so? And then it jumped straight to looting?

My beef is not with his message, which i think is good. It's just how he is misrepresenting history to the dumb younger generation he is supposedly trying to educate.

shitty as they might have been, people signed contracts to monetize their work. the only reason to describe the corruption of the music industry is to let fans off the hook for being shitty too.

i think you are oversimplifying an oversimplification

xpost

Aero, at your commercial peak, as such, I'd be really curious how reliable your record sales were/are. Like, ever enough to impart a certain level of comfort/freedom, or never enough to put the hustle on hold?

I have never been able to slow down my hustle but I mean I love my job so it's more or less cool? But record sales, actual sales income, that's extra money, not get-paid money. I haven't ever been able to stay home for a season because of royalties checks/advances & that trend will continue although my sales personally have literally been on the slow incline since forever: they reliably get a little bigger every time, but they will never afford me enough pay to keep me off the road. It's cool I didn't really need to see the baby's first steps, seen one baby walkin' you've seen 'em all lol

and that, my friends, is how you guilt people into buying your next album on CD

You mean buying a ticket to see you live!

If they can walk, they can damn well carry a guitar case. Resource that shit my mans.

<i>It's cool I didn't really need to see the baby's first steps, seen one baby walkin' you've seen 'em all lol</i>

tbf this is the case for parents of every profession

well it's different coming home that night and seeing their 10th step than coming home 3 weeks later and seeing them run

tbf this is the case for parents of every profession

Er, no? There's a big difference between a parent who can go home every day at 5 pm versus a parent on the road for extended periods of time.

That punk rock dad doc gets into this. Even Flea cries.

jeez, you guys are reading context into it that wasn't there. aero said BABY'S FIRST STEPS...not BABY'S FIRST STEPS AND THEN ANOTHER 2 WEEKS WORTH OF WALKING.

If that were the case, that baby would be clear out of the county by now.

"follow the tour bus, sweetie!"

Are you being deliberately disingenuous now or what. xxp

and then he comes back, and baby be downloadin' the set!