The RIAA Armageddon has begun

why are libraries a bad analogy? bc we believe everyone should have free access to books but don't have a similar ideology about recordings?

Yeah, Mr. Que, I'm not sure I agree. The model I posted the other day was $10,000 in royalties for only 30,000 album listeners playing a ten-track album ten times over the course of a certain span of time. 30,000 listeners isn't that many, comparatively. If we're talking about considerably more popular albums, there's a lot of money there. 300,000 listeners would mean $100,000 in royalties, three million listeners would mean a million dollars in royalties, etc.

free access to books=you don't get to keep the books
free access to music=you can download the music, have it forever, you get to keep it

Because books go back to the library.

xpost bah

You can check out CDs from the library so maybe that is a good analogy.

libraries are a bad analogy because EVERYBODY pays for them. it's the law.

tim that is fine if you don't agree! i think a fraction of a cent for one play is insane.

fwiw I am totally cool with taxes funding music libraries. let's raise taxes! Everybody is always cool with that!

i don't get to keep the music on spotify fwiw. if the labels pull the music, i lose it. if i stop subscribing, the ads come back.

i just got great discarded CDs from our library during their book sale. bud powell and ligeti, yo.

i'd totally be into taxes being used to fund a massive nationwide wi-fi network

sorry in my comparison i meant downloading/pirating music, not spotify

spotify is fine if you want to use it. just be aware it doesn't pay shit to the artists.

the only time i go to a library is when i can buy stuff. hate those places. worse than bus stations.

I'm into taxes being used to fix roads, pay for academic instutions and pay for citizens' health care

i used to listen to all the records at my library when i was a kid. they had pretty decent listening stations. i learned all the words to doors songs that way.

i don't see why the amount that spotify pays to artists should matter to me? like, i guess in a collective sense we should be concerned about how much ppl in our creative classes are making. however what i am doing is a) legal and b) agreed to by the artists i'm supposedly stiffing!

yeah really its lawyer time if they are getting stiffed. you can't legally pay for music online and STILL have people yell at you for not doing the right thing.

Mordy, I've seen some Tzadik on Spotify!

i don't see why the amount that spotify pays to artists should matter to me? like, i guess in a collective sense we should be concerned about how much ppl in our creative classes are making. however what i am doing is a) legal and b) agreed to by the artists i'm supposedly stiffing!

^^^ this is the part I don't understand re: the "Spotify is evil" argument

like, I get that it's not like everyone on Spotify is rolling in mountains of dough due to plays on it, but it's still a revenue stream, and a legal one at that; why is the concept so fatally flawed just because this particular implementation is imperfect?

recently? i think they pulled all their stuff a bit ago xp

lucifer's hammer taught me to keep a copy of 'the way things work' in a ziplock bag

― mookieproof, Wednesday, June 20, 2012 3:25 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Love that fkin book (TWTW that is)

i don't think spotify is evil!

i don't see why the amount that spotify pays to artists should matter to me? like, i guess in a collective sense we should be concerned about how much ppl in our creative classes are making. however what i am doing is a) legal and b) agreed to by the artists i'm supposedly stiffing!

they "agreed" to it because they have no option because piracy has driven down the value of music to the point where most artists can no longer make a living at it.

Looking right now, there's a bunch of Zorn -- Filmworks mostly, some game pieces, 50th birthday stuff, etc.

Yeah, my hemming and hawing stops at spotify. It's legal, it's negotiated, and labels don't have to participate. Obviously the ones who participate see it as a better deal than not participating. Little money per play with a greater universe of potential listeners, I guess. I added 15 albums already this month to my "playlists" meaning I play them somewhat regularly. I would never have bought 15 retail-price albums in a month.

in a collective sense, no one is concerned with how much ppl in our creative classes are making because the market has determined that the creative classes output is essentially worthless. just like your teachers used to tell you in school!

xp

nothing from the rjc imprint as far as i can tell xxp

I'm into taxes being used to fix roads, pay for academic instutions and pay for citizens' health care

― Victory Chainsaw! (DJP), Wednesday, June 20, 2012 3:50 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You can't dance to roads or listen to healthcare in your car, gtfo.

Dancing about roads is like listening to healthcare.

our society has collectively agreed that art, specifically music but other media aren't far behind, isn't worth anything

which, you know, okay whatever, I am into a lot of things produced by folk culture (ie by poor people for their own edification with no expectation of renumeration) but let's not pretend that anyone's going to be making monumental magnum opuses in such a scenario. otoh you can end up with tunes like "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" so it's not all bad.

xp

I've purchased all 12 of the albums I've added to my "faves of 2012" playlist except for Dawn Richard's "Armor On EP", mostly because I haven't seen where I can actually buy it

in a collective sense, no one is concerned with how much ppl in our creative classes are making because the market has determined that the creative classes output is essentially worthless. just like your teachers used to tell you in school!

otoh, when you were in school did you think that people would regularly buy $10 sandwiches?

itunes.apple.com/us/album/armor-on-ep/id513094513

nothing from the rjc imprint as far as i can tell xxp

― Mordy, Wednesday, June 20, 2012 2:58 PM (5 minutes ago)

Not much, but there's Coleman's Sephardic Tinge...

bc magnum opuses can only thrive in a culture of abundance + wealth? i disagree. lots of great art has come out of impoverished circumstances. which isn't to say artists should be poor, just that them being poor doesn't mean the end of great art.

lol of course it's on iTunes now, it wasn't when I last looked

bc magnum opuses can only thrive in a culture of abundance + wealth? i disagree.

I dunno most of the large-scale, technically complex cultural achievements I can think of were created when cultures (if not the artists themselves) were at their economic peak

I mean to extend my original point of comparison, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" is a deep, utterly classic fucking song that you only need like two strings and a voice to play/sing, but it is nowhere near the scale of, say, "Abbey Road", which is a distinctly different kind of artistic achievement. Which is "better"? I dunno. But expect more of the former and less of the latter when there's no money around.

bc magnum opuses can only thrive in a culture of abundance + wealth? i disagree. lots of great art has come out of impoverished circumstances. which isn't to say artists should be poor, just that them being poor doesn't mean the end of great art.

in the realm of classical music, practically every lionized piece of music we have that has survived the centuries was composed at the behest of a king's or church's patronage

in modern times, with pop and rock music, this patronage model shifted to record labels both large and small

now that that model is slowly dying, where will the resources come from?

music more and more is operating like folk art. whether it's good or bad depends on what you want out of music, for most of us here, we like a lot of different kinds of music, so it's a mixture of good and bad.

but i feel like i finally figured out the strange phenomenon of under-employed 20 somethings in the mission regularly buying $10 sandwiches -- they can afford it because they get most of their entertainment for free, unlike people of my generation.

Also easier to produce a magnum opus now than probably ever before. Who needs an orchestra these days?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Hunger_first_edition.jpg

Also easier to produce a magnum opus now than probably ever before. Who needs an orchestra these days?

Someone looking for the sound of an orchestra playing live rather than synth patches? There are certain phrasing things you're never going to get from a keyboard approximating a stringed or wind instrument, which can make a difference to the piece you're trying to create.

something that's easy to do is by definition not going to impress anybody, and won't really be considered a magnum opus

I've heard the state of the art and they're nowhere near simulating an orchestra yet. Not to say it can't be done.

Samples are more appropriate for many productions

Whoops, accidental click. Samples are more appropriate for many productions, but hiring an orchestra or even just a quartet is cheaper and easier than you'd think. Building an orchestra w/ friends doing overdubs, too. afaic the major price-sink in album-making that is more deeply shaping the, uh, meta-sound is the expense of recording to tape, recording live drums in nice rooms.

"Someone looking for the sound of an orchestra playing live rather than synth patches?"

Not even just talking about synth patches though. There are so many ways to create sounds now (sampling other obvious).

"something that's easy to do is by definition not going to impress anybody, and won't really be considered a magnum opus"

Yes if you don't suffer your art it's not really art, right.

no that's not really what I mean - I'm referring more to the resources marshalled for a work, ie, writing out the actual score and having it performed by an orchestra is more impressive in terms of the scale of effort involved and the resource required than playing some string patches by yourself through a laptop. suffering doesn't really have anything to do with it.

Scale of effort does not seem to me to have much to do with the quality of a work.