Check out this Organization:
http://copylike.org/
https://www.facebook.com/copylike
We do this for the Love,
But unfortunately the supermarket
doesn’t accept love, they want money.You might have heard that music is very cheap to make these
days and computers make everything easy, and you don’t even
have to be able to sing.That’s partly true. Big businesses have made a lot of money
selling cheap crappy junk to you. But that’s not our fault,
we’re real artists, we make real art.Art takes time, its not easy at all. If you don’t believe us
try writing a song or directing a movie.We all need to eat and keep warm. If we want to charge
anyone for our work, why should we feel any shame?
Defend Copyright.
It’s All We Have Left.
COPYLIKE.ORG
The Trichordist 
Hello David,
As a retail record store owner, my comments are probably self-serving but here goes. In the old business model of retail record sales there were many people along the chain who made money from the artist’s creations. Certainly the large corporations and their employees but also the manufacturing plants, the people who built the manufacturing plants and the machinery, the trucking companies who delivered the final goods to the retailer, the retailer and the employees of the record store, the mall owners also received rent and the mall owners paid taxes to communities and cities for the right to sell good and receive city services. Now, much of the revenue moves far up the supply chain – the artists provide the digital file to iTunes and then iTunes sells the product to the end user – in a low quality, bit reduced format. A small portion of the revenue stays with the artist and a lot stays with Apple. In the old model there were manufacturing facilities in dozens of countries around the world, paying taxes and employing people in those far-away countries, but now the revenue is sent the the USA for the most part and the benefit of that revenue.
What is needed is a different distribution model which would offer high resolution downloads which offered proper remuneration to artists and would be give some percentage of revenue to artist organizations in the country of the file downloader. If this kind of thing does not happen or something like this, foreign governments should block iTunes and other digital music rip-off sites from accessing those countries. In some ways, the USA is dumping content into the world just like the US complaints about dumping manufactured goods from low-cost producing countries into the USA.
I hope there are a couple of interesting points in my comments.
Best to all….
Interesting post, Bryan, although I don’t quite follow the iTunes blocking part. I would add another major difference. If a physical retailer got caught selling bootlegs, most of the time–in my experience all of the time, but avoiding the categorical–they would stop when they were asked. I don’t recall a retailer suing over their right to sell bootlegs. You also didn’t see the equivalent of Google advertising Google Play on a pirate lyric site then turning around and complaining about royalty rates in their “music service”. I would suggest that this was in part due to the fact that retailers (even Best Buy to a degree), artists, songwriters, labels and publishers are to a greater or lesser extent economically interdependent on each other’s survivial. That’s becoming less true every day.
What is NEEDED is for people to pay for the product they use. To the people who make that product. Why should an “artist’s organization” in Outer Slobbovia get a cut of music made by me in the USA? If they want to get paid they should make their own music.
If you listen to my music, great, pay me for my work.
If you don’t like my music, fine – don’t pay me and don’t listen.
Don’t listen to my music and tell me it isn’t worth paying for – you’re listening, aren’t you?
If you don’t want to pay for music, fine – there’s lots of “legal free music” put out by people for fun who don’t expect to get paid. Go listen to that.
If you think that music assembled in Garageband out of stock loops is what you like I’m not going to argue taste. Go for it!
You don’t think “legal free music” is worth listening to? Surprise, surprise – you get what you pay for.