The RIAA Armageddon has begun

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!

johnny wasn't actually rebutting the point of aero's post, just missing/ignoring it to nitpick the specific wording, jeez guys.

Pierced Arrows to thread

Are you being deliberately disingenuous now or what.

No, I'm not. aero made a thoughtful post about his own situation, but then capped it off with a dilemma that affects moms and dads in all professions. I pointed that out without considering the context that it might be a few more days before he gets to see it. Though, again, there are other professions besides musician that require extended travel (perhaps not for months or weeks at a time, but it could be several days before Jane at Widgets-R-Us gets to see her child walking because she's been in meetings across the country with her Taiwanese part suppliers).

"curse this road life, I've missed baby's first step-ball-change"

I'd be pretty interested in reading an article on how the live side of the business has changed. Has it? Are ticket sales down too? In a way that doesn't just reflect the lousy economy?

there's a lot of stuff about the summer touring circuit (and the increased economic necessity of it) in the new issue of Spin actually

I have a trench-level view of the attitude lowery is decrying, where I see ivy league college students trying to stroll into warehouse shows without paying the cover, or folks who "love this band" but spend more on their beer tab than they do at the merch table cuz they'll just download that shit later. that's not to say those ppl are disgusting savages, but maybe they just don't get the connection between that $5 cover or $10 CD and the $100 in gas the band needs to get to the next show. explaining those dependencies can sound patronizing or badgering, but it's as much of a reality as "tip your bartender", and arguing against it makes you sound like mr pink.

obv that's a microeconomics perspective, but that same attitude extends to the macro-level, and appears to be more widespread in younger generations. it's not a bad thing for somebody like lowery to pull back the curtain and explain some of the mechanics, to dispel some of the romanticism around being a musician. as mr aerosmith said, touring is one of the few ways to make money nowadays. some folks may say "boo hoo you have to go on the road with your blow and groupies, dl'ing yr album now" but touring is hard on the body and the soul for real, not to mention high risk - bands can be one van break-in away from losing everything they made on tour.

one million xps

^^ quality post

Anyone notice the price increases for album downloads on both Amazon and iTunes recently? In most cases just a buck or two but it's still significant (iirc, the standard was $8.99, now showing a mixture of $9.99 and $10.99 usd). Not sure if this is at all tied into the July 1st RIAA/ISP crackdown but thought it was interesting.