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SilverBoat -> RE: SOPA and PIPA info (1/22/2012 5:11:02 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Musicmystery
You are way behind the times. Record companies have little to do with it these days, and exist only because they have deep catalogs and rely on mass marketing (I've done marketing for both major and independent labels and distributors...it's a completely different operation with a completely different audience).
Artists since the late 60s learned the lessons earlier musicians had not--real money and artistic control in the music industry lies in the publishing companies, and early high profile examples like the Beatles and Joni Mitchell showed musicians the advantages. Musicians simply started holding onto the publishing rights (the key to earning royalties and controlling use), or selling them with the aid of qualified copyright attorneys representing them.
Since the early 80s, far more musicians than not took advantage of advances in technology (the four-track cassette recorder at first, then digital recording and desktop publishing for printed product) to set up studios in their own homes, many (including me) including a small but viable manufacturing operation in-house. I sold directly to distributors globally from my home. Both my studio and "label" are still listed in trade directories.
Not that stealing from record companies is justifiable either, but the bulk of the damage isn't to the man--it's to the musicians running their own small business, and business with a great deal of overhead, performance and studio, in a field requiring frequent upgrades.
Yeah, I've done some solo, small group, and concert/theatre work. What's amazing, though not unexpected, really, is that there's better small-scale digital recording and software mixing gear available today for a pittance of costs just 10-15 years ago. (I bought a 2-chan 24-bit A/D I/O PCMCIA card for about $700 back when, now Roland has 4-chan handhelds for half that price with 300x a good laptop of that time's hard-drive.) If the project demands 64-tracks, a full orchestra, etc, maybe the criteria of having enough track record for initial funding and speculative buy-in is reasonable.
I'm only a marginal, incidental appreciateur of over-produced big-budget music and shows. Most of 'em seem drearily formulaic; bass beat so, hip thrust so, screech note so, dramatic eye so, blah. Put the band on the stage, let 'em play, if they can't 'sell' the song without costumes, lights, and hoorah, it wasn't all that good.
It might be a little bit different-drummer, but one way to cleave the conflicts of interest in all this would be taking Art out of the producer-defined value paradigm and into a perceiver-defined valuation. Several quite successful bands encourage their fans to video shows with cellphones and post those on the web. They figure that increases their concert revenue, music-sales at venues, the occasional online sale of higher-quality video, audio, etc.
That's a radically shifted business model from the big-industry control-the-content approach, and I'd argue that it's better for society as a whole, if maybe a little tougher on artistic critique. (In other words, if they won't pay for the music, keep a day job.) I've been involved in discussions where others argued that good artists "deserved" opportunity to pursue their work full time, but they really didn't have a sound answer for who decided what art was good-enough to deserve that. (The art/music/stage critics? Really?) ...
Anyway, it's a complex topic, NY is 10-7 over SF, and I'm out of beer.
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