The RIAA Armageddon has begun

Do NPR bumpers generate mechanical royalties?

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, June 19, 2012 5:01 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i could double check but i think i was told by a guy that put out my band's record that NPR has some clause that says it doesn't have to pay into BMI or ASCAP

Will Sheff and Carl Newman also discussing this on Twitter at some length. What's amazing is the number of people telling artists on Twitter LOL YOU SUCK ANYWAY.

― Julie Derpy (Phil D.), Tuesday, June 19, 2012 6:13 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'm enjoying the chatter on beauty pill's twitter

frogbs should read that feed.

@nathanleighsays I love making music, but I'm not that concerned about releasing it anymore.
4 hours ago

@nathanleighsays To be clear, I feel no hope. You notice I have not put out a record, right?

couldn't they make records instead of wasting time delineating the collapse of their idealism

I'm waiting for the "you wouldn't steal a car" tweet

And now...Travis Morrison!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/travis-morrison/hey-dude-from-cracker-im_b_1610557.html

lmao at morrison calling him "dude from cracker" as if he'll be better remembered

Hey frogbs Morrison thinks downloading is pretty much just like the shoplifting he did as a kid. You'd better get over there and set him straight.

that is a sad piece. it's funny how he lists all these methods for stealing music that actually involved people paying the artists or buying the product somewhere along the line (ie, taping other people's purchased copies, taping things off the radio, etc.)

as opposed to today, where a leaked promo copy means nobody pays for it at any point

Taping things off the radio was "stealing music?"

is William & Mary really the place where intelligent grinder kids go

Travis Morrison

Director of Commercial Production, The Huffington Post

Taping things off the radio was "stealing music?"

dude you should read RS and Billboard in the early eighties. The labels were obsessed with this point.

I don't remember much hubbub about it growing up apart from U.K. record inner sleeves that had the cassette with the skull and cross bones.

i remember all the home taping is killing music stuff growing up in the uk

I def remember that, but it was more about dubbing cassettes, not necessarily restricted to radio iirc

of course then they invented the CD boondoggle

which ended up completely fucking them so, hey it all worked out!

Marketing: "Hey! We can charge DOUBLE for this new format. It's DIGITAL, so it's better!"

Technology: "What about copying CDs? A digital media can theoretically be digitally copied pretty quickly..."

Marketing: "What part of CHARGE DOUBLE was unclear to you, pinhead?"

Technology: "Pretty quickly. That's all I'm saying."

Marketing: "Copy SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY MEGABYTES? Whatever a megabyte is, that's big, right? Dude, my pee cee only uses floppies!"

Technology: "I'm going to lunch now."

Marketing: "In your FACE! CHARGE DOUBLE! WOOOOOOO!" /fistpump

basically

I didn't add the five years later of: "Marketing: HALP ME RIAA! YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE!" Thought it was overkill.

Can't copy a vinyl. They should have stuck to something you couldn't put in your computer.

the cd biz started long before your average american family had a pc

well the vinyl/home taping thing had them freaked, but there was no way to do that QUICKLY, which was the real reason it didn't hurt their sales too much. digital copying magnified the scale of the problem exponentially.

xp

i was looking at early 80s Billboards and every other article was about a special tax on blank cassettes or whatever.

And anyone who didn't see PCs in every house coming wasn't looking.

yeah well that's like 98% of the american population in the 1980s

the problem isn't that the record industry decided to go digital, the problem is that music can be digitalized

even if they had a top team of futurists being like "no dudes, just don't make CDs" it would just add one not-so-complicated step to the bootlegging process

Does anyone have any vintage record catalogs? I want to see the prices for music in the 80's. I sort of remember CDs being a big price gouge compared to vinyl.

Cheap blank CDs accelerated the process over here, I think. I remember mentioning in a zine in the mid/late 90s what I was paying for a spindle of blanks, and a friend in Ireland was very tempted to have me buy him one and ship it over there.

Hey frogbs Morrison thinks downloading is pretty much just like the shoplifting he did as a kid. You'd better get over there and set him straight.

i don't think he would steal a car

Oh yeah, albums went from $8.99 vinyl to $15.99 CD just like that -- really put a cramp in my style.

Does anyone have any vintage record catalogs? I want to see the prices for music in the 80's. I sort of remember CDs being a big price gouge compared to vinl

http://cdn100.iofferphoto.com/img/item/199/643/608/rolling-stone-magazine-tom-petty-348-1981-4a063.JPG

i was looking at early 80s Billboards and every other article was about a special tax on blank cassettes or whatever.

i'm not sure why this didn't happen in the late 90's early 00's with CD burners and blank discs - IIRC Canada tried something like that and it seemed to work okay. I mean blank discs were always pretty cheap (though the burners used to be insanely pricey)

I remember in 1990 cassettes being as low as $5 or $6.99 in most retail outlets and CD's at $10.99

discs can store multiple media

cassettes can only store sound

xp

I'm a fetishist for chronology, especially other people's, so I'd like to know when most of you stopped buying tapes and switched exclusively to CD's. I bought my last cassingle in 1999 and burned my first CD in early 2000. Keep in mind: when a friend burned a Bob Marley album for another in early '99 I had no idea what "burned" meant or how he got this technology.

I think you guys are ignoring the fact that CDs were seen as being an improvement on a number of scores: no surface noise, more durable, portable but higher fidelity than cassette, able to be used in portable/car eqipment, easy shipping to the track you wanted, programmable & repeat functions

I mean I'm love vinyl but lets not ignore facts...at first, it's very possible, in the very early days, that production costs of a new optical disc technology would have been higher than vinyl or cassettes

You're acting like this was some kind of out and out scam to charge more for music

People myself included thought CDs were amazing

Burning CDs was prohibitively expensive for me until after 2000 or so

xp

no surface noise
okay sure, if you didn't have a high-quality dubbing setup or whatever.

more durable
no

portable but higher fidelity than cassette

I... guess?

able to be used in portable/car eqipment

cassettes do this

easy shipping to the track you wanted, programmable & repeat functions

okay yeah those were HUGE

Tapes used to store digits, but would be a pretty horrible way to store digitized sound, if you even had access to a digitizer at the time. (First one I saw was in 1988 or 89 on a Mac. MacRecorder, if memory serves.)

And sure, the sound quality of CDs was highly touted back in the day. Portability too, to some degree.

Forgot all about the shufflability. IIRC, some artists didn't like that because the user could rearrange track orders or *gasp* skip tracks. Nonlinear listening introduced to a big audience.

I'm a fetishist for chronology, especially other people's, so I'd like to know when most of you stopped buying tapes and switched exclusively to CD's.

I kept buying cassettes until I got my first iPod in 2004 or so. I was always more into portability and Discmans were far harder to fit in my pocket than Walkmans. Of course, after 2001 or so I was mostly buying used tapes, since they stopped putting a lot of things on cassette.

i hoard sealed high bias cassettes like crazy. always on the lookout. still my duplication medium of chance. i have never burned a cd but i wouldn't mind if someone burned them all.

Bought my first CD in 1986 (lol Songs from Liquid Days) but they were so freaking expensive! I didn't really start accumulating them until 1992-1993, when I all but quit reading comics and had more money to spend on them. There was an intermediate time in the late 80s when I wasn't buying much music at all -- didn't want to buy vinyl because it seemed like the format was dying, wasn't whole hog invested in CDs yet.

Bought Michael Penn's March on CD in early '90 -- a move that infuriated Mom. "A 15-year-old boy on your allowance has no reason to buy something this expensive!"

Eric Harvey aka marathonpacks sez:

Seriously *shocked* that no one's pointed out yet that David Lowery's understanding of music copyright/economics is factually incorrect.

Asked for details, sez more will be forthcoming.

I imagine the guys who did the friends theme song never had to work another day in their life

I think that song had a zillion co-writers though - one of whom ended up being part of The Matrix production group. I remember that R.E.M. and Natalie Merchant turned the song down.

I'm a fetishist for chronology, especially other people's, so I'd like to know when most of you stopped buying tapes and switched exclusively to CD's. I bought my last cassingle in 1999 and burned my first CD in early 2000. Keep in mind: when a friend burned a Bob Marley album for another in early '99 I had no idea what "burned" meant or how he got this technology.

Stopped buying LPs and went to CDs in 1987. Stopped buying CDs and went all-download a couple years ago.

i was looking at early 80s Billboards and every other article was about a special tax on blank cassettes or whatever.

Now in place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy