The model doesn’t work, so we have to come up with ways in which people can help us to make music for free, or at least for much less. But the current way isn’t working, something’s gotta give.
If I tried to make my albums with that Spotify pays me, I wouldn’t make them. I couldn’t hire other musicians or someone to master it; I’d have to do everything myself.
Read The Full Story at Digital Music News:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/11/14/beckspotifywork
The new landscape is instead dominated by technology companies who see all creative content as mere fodder for fueling their own business models (selling ads or devices for example) and they offer no support, no insulation:
The new bosses further cement their position by “waging a cynical PR campaign that equates the unauthorized use of other people’s property (artist’s songs) with freedom.” Through an army of “quasi-religious” surrogates (“freehadists”), the industry pushes for a “Cyber-Bolshevik campaign of mass collectivization,” where creative output is devalued. He sees it as particularly cynical because there’s one exception to this devaluation, one type of IP that is seen as sacrosanct — and that exception is software patents.
Lowery states that suggestions that artists simply need to find a new business model are a clear indication of awareness that artists are getting a raw deal. The new business model is already here, it’s been in place for over 10 years, and it’s making an enormous amount of money. But very little of that money goes to the creator.
At some point, one has to question whether it is still possible to earn a living as a musician, or any type of creator.
READ THE FULL STORY AT THE SCHOLARLY KITCHEN:
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/06/05/lessons-from-the-music-industry-should-we-put-our-faith-in-technology-companies/
Eminem sent out a public service announcement to address online piracy in the wake of his latest album The Marshall Mathers LP 2.
The album leaked online earlier this week and the Shady Records machine quickly went to work to suppress the leak. Eminem and his management even went as far as making Rap Genius remove the lyrics to the songs.
READ THE FULL STORY AT ALL HIP HOP:
http://allhiphop.com/2013/11/01/eminem-makes-public-service-announcement-against-music-piracy/
We’ll be running more of the artist feedback and commentary from last week’s Virgin Disrupters roundtable. Here’s Amanda Palmer,
“Can I speak up here? I’d like to just add to what Zoe [Keating] was saying. There’s also – the other kind of general problem that I think we’re seeing that doesn’t really get addressed very much because it’s so big and possibly un-fixable is that as bad and clunky as the major label system was, you still had a constant influx of capital back from those giant, sometimes soul-sucking systems, back into content creation.
And one weird thing is that iTunes, Apple, Spotify, Google, whatever, all of the people who are profiting – [and] YouTube – who are profiting off the artists from the small level to the huge levels aren’t really feeding very much back into the creation of new content.
READ THE FULL STORY AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/10/29/palmeritunesspotify
The entire infrastructure that supported the world of music for a century has been dismantled, and in its place we’ve got these little things, these little handheld devices. The worldwide web was supposed to give everybody access and democratize everything. It was supposed to create a level field and increase the middle class and everybody had more access and more information. But now anybody can say anything and nobody cares. This is the problem of ubiquitous data.
And what’s happened in reality is that the power’s been consolidated in very, very few companies, and the middle class of musicians really has just been wiped out. I mean, the Internet has been an honest-to-God con.
READ THE FULL STORY AT THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER:
http://m.hollywoodreporter.com/earshot/t-bone-burnett-silicon-valley-652114
Bestselling author says web piracy is akin to ‘reaching into someone’s pocket and taking their wallet’
Illegal downloading is a kind of “moral squalor” and theft as much as reaching in to someone’s pocket and stealing their wallet is theft, the author Philip Pullman will say this week.
In an article for Index on Censorship, Pullman, who is president of the Society of Authors, makes a robust defence of copyright laws. He is withering about internet users who think it is OK to download music or books without paying for them.
“The technical brilliance is so dazzling that people can’t see the moral squalor of what they’re doing,” he writes. “It is outrageous that anyone can steal an artist’s work and get away with it. It is theft, as surely as reaching into someone’s pocket and taking their wallet is theft.”
His article comes after music industry leaders met David Cameron in Downing Street last Thursday where the issue of web piracy was discussed.
READ THE FULL STORY HERE:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/15/philip-pullman-illegal-downloading-theft
During the protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), critics of the legislation portrayed its process of identifying foreign black market domains and then blocking them from gaining easy profits from, and access to, the US online audience, as “censorship” — full stop.
…
It bothers me that representatives from Google or the EFF, Reddit, etc. are so quick to lump in the attempt to protect artists rights with the political censorship of China or Iran. It is entitlement of the privileged at its worst and demonstrates to me how desperate some people are to excuse freeloading by any means necessary. But, the wonders of technology simply do not excuse clear cases of exploitation.
READ THE FULL POST AT nycRUEN:
http://nycruen.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/real-censorship/
Bottom Line
If YouTube is going to be more than a destination for watching content and a key part of where producers and others go to post their content, it needs to solve its copyright problem, meaning that it is both a place original expression can thrive and a place pirated and infringing content is kept at bay.
While ContentID and YouTube’s rules have done a decent job in the majority of cases, it doesn’t really feel as if YouTube is building on stable ground in either direction.
YouTube has to do more to both protect fair use and legitimate commentary/criticism while doing more to prevent illegal material from taking home on the service. Those two ideas are not in opposition to one another, though many would let you believe they are.
READ THE FULL STORY AT PLAGIARISM TODAY:
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2013/10/23/youtubes-copyright-problem/
With digital downloads, falling album sales and rampant piracy, what’s it like trying to establish yourself as a new performer in today’s troubled music industry?
Well, in the words of one UK music business professional: “It’s like trying to create a hurricane by running around a field in circles.”
Artists can no longer depend on labels to finance their projects and invest in building their careers. Long demonized, it appears the true value of investment capital, expertise and contracts are coming into focus for today’s new artists.
In her guide – entitled Easy Money? – Ms Harris identifies six main sources of money for music projects:
- grants
- friends and family
- crowdfunding
- sponsorship
- debt
- investment
She says that during her 15 years in the music industry, it has “moved from an internal funding model to having to go to external sources” for cash to kick-start projects.
Normally, she says, musicians are looking for about £5,000 to £10,000 to fund a specific project, such as a record or live appearances.
READ THE FULL STORY HERE AT THE BBC UK:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24249918
A familiar figure in one’s 20s is the club owner or event promoter who explains to your band that they won’t be paying you in money, man, because you’re getting paid in the far more valuable currency of exposure. This same figure reappears over the years, like the devil, in different guises — with shorter hair, a better suit — as the editor of a Web site or magazine, dismissing the issue of payment as an irrelevant quibble and impressing upon you how many hits they get per day, how many eyeballs, what great exposure it’ll offer. “Artist Dies of Exposure” goes the rueful joke.
READ THE FULL STORY AT THE NEW YORK TIMES:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/opinion/sunday/slaves-of-the-internet-unite.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
The Trichordist 
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