The chickenfarmer's lament

[LMNO]

Unauthorized filesharing is the DEVIL!

[Eater of Clowns]

Almost every time I hear about an artist I haven't heard before, it's from a friend who has their album and says "hey, you should listen to this."  Usually I trade them something back (which might have been traded to my by someone else previously).  So maybe one copy of the album has been purchased and there's a dozen or so copies floating around in my circle of friends.  Now, I don't download music, but it seems what I'm doing is essentially the same thing.

In the last few years, though, I've been attending a ton of shows, so I have been giving support to the bands I like.  Just I guess not as much as there could be.

[AFK]

Bullshit.  If people cannot own their own body of work, and determine it's distribution, then why fucking bother?

Because they like to create?
They will earn some money from the edge of having it first?
It may get them noticed by talent-scouts?
music specific: the freely given music touches millions of people and they want to see you perform or want your merchandise

So, you are willing to shell out 60 bucks for a concert ticket, another 20 to 30 for the t-shirt, but you won't fork out the measily 13-15 bucks for the CD?  Or, the 99cents for the one or two songs you like?  WTF?

And what good are the talent-scouts if you don't make enough in album sales to finance future albums?  Records don't make themselves and they aren't made cheaply.  When you pirate music you are diminishing the capacity of the band to make the music you supposedly enjoy.  If the record company isn't selling the t-shirts and posters themselves, they don't care how much bank you are making off of those if they aren't seeing the money necessary to fund your next album.  You'll be dropped like a bad habit.  

Is there a difference between stealing a band's music online, and sneaking into a concert they're playing?

In both cases, the band has decided that if you want to hear their music, you have to pay for it.

Yes:
One is making a copy of a copy of a (stolen or bought) copy.
The other is entering a private area without permission.

When did the artist give you permission to copy their music without paying for it?  

That reminds me.
The way it is now you are not buying music.
You are buying the use of music.
Because if you actually bought the music you should be allowed to do whatever you want with it. (except shatter the cd and stab someone with the pieces. but even then it isn't the way you use the music that is unethical, the hurting someone bit is the bad bit.)

No, you are paying for the opportunity to experience the art in a convenient form.  The intention of the artist is for you to pay a fee for the privilege of enjoying their art in the convenience of your home, office, car, wherever.  The musician never intended to give you their music.  It is an exchange.  You get the enjoyment of having a device or package containing the musical expression and they get money in return which they can invest in making future musical expressions.  Otherwise every band would have a website streaming all of their music 24/7.  

The attitude I'm seeing expressed is essentially, "I pirate it because I can."  Well, sure, great, you can, but why not throw some support to these artists you supposedly like?  Just because you can doesn't mean you should.  

[Cramulus]

(cramulus repeating himself warning)

So this piracy issue isn't going to go away, because

A) it's nearly impossible to legislate away communication methods. The pirates are always going to be one step ahead of anti-piracy software and legislation. Everything we do on the Internet involves sending and receiving data, it's impossible to allow certain types of data and not others.

B) speaking for myself and likely millions of others, I'm not being properly motivated into buying the music because free copies are ubiquitous. I'm much more likely to pay for a friend's album than I am to buy a professional album because in the latter case, the artist is only making a tiny sliver of royalty money.


^
this is not what I want to encourage with my dollars


what is the answer?

I don't think you can change the behavior of millions of pirates on moral grounds alone. They are doing what they're doing because they have a choice

-pay an exorbitant amount of money for the album
-get it for free, instantly, with almost zero risk

The record companies are STARTING to figure it out with these microtransactions for individual mp3 sales. I would pay a buck for a song I like (if I didn't think iTunes's DRM policies were totaly draconian) much more readily than I would fork over fifteen or twenty bucks when the only advantage to the latter is a glossy insert and the ownership of physical media (which will sit in a case on my shelf anyway).

So if you ask me, for both producers and consumers to be happy, the idea of an album needs to change.

I really like what bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have been doing - they include all sorts of extras with their albums (art, text, video of live performances, raw FLAC files in case you want to remix) that give the physical media higher value than just buying the data.

I also love Trent Reznor's current model, which seems to be that he releases the first ~10 tracks on the album for free, but if you buy the album, you get the other 13 tracks AND art AND it's a little higher bit quality. Trent is also a little ahead of the curve because he's abandoned record companies all together and sells directly to his fans. (Unfortunately, this works best if you're already famous)

Trent realizes that he can't stop people from trading and pirating his work, so the best thing he can do (for sales) is use that underground trade as a form of marketing. Rather than hoarding his IP, he runs the website where people can remix NIN tracks. He's just a regular user on that site too, not claiming to be the controlling authority on even his own music.


The other solution (IMO) is that we need an alternative artistic subculture which encourages the sharing of IP rather than the hoarding of it. This means taking money out of the equation. Luckily, this sort of thing is being born all around as we speak. I'm talking about websites like indaba and flickr, where the emphasis is on production and enjoyment instead of profit. Speaking as an artist, I use a lot of material from the public domain, and I try to give as much back to the public domain as I can because it makes all of our art richer. Remixing, sampling, and collage represent some of the coolest art to come from this century. As a collage artist, if somebody remixes my work, I don't see it as a rip-off, rather I am flattered that my idea transcended the form I presented it in. If I write a song and I perform it for you, and you perform it for somebody else during a concert, I would be ecstatic, not offended. It is only the sale of my recordings by somebody other than me which would really cheeze me off.

But if I was trying to make a living off of art, I'd have to learn to produce art which couldn't be easily duplicated and distributed. You can sell somebody an oil painting, but nobody's going to buy a jpg. When I go to a movie, I am paying for the indistributable experience of sitting in a theater, not the movie itself. When I buy a DVD, I am buying an unduplicatable piece of physical media which happens to include the data on that disc.



So in summary,

1. producers need to adapt to the times because
2. piracy isn't going away
3. in order to adapt, start selling things that can't be pirated

[LMNO]

Your solution is that music as a sole means of making a living is fucked forever?

[Cramulus]

I'm pointing out that if you're trying to sell something which people can get for free, you're going to end up really frustrated.


imagine if there was a long literary tradition of really short novels, less than 140 characters in length.  And that people make a living selling these tiny little novelettas.

And then twitter comes out and all of the sudden your customers are sending these novels to each other left and right.

Well you can't prevent people from communicating with each other, so you have to start producing stuff which can't be typed up so simply.


my argument in the previous post is that when you buy music or a movie, you should be getting something which can't be so easily duplicated, like lyric inserts, art, bonus material, etc. If producers are going to beat piracy, this is how they're going to do it, not through shutting down the pirate bay.

There was a computer game series called Ultima which included a cloth map and a little prop (like a coin or a moonstone) with every copy of the game. Some of the games included a little booklet which comes from the ultima world. I can lend my friend the install discs but they're only getting part of the ultima experience.

[LMNO]

Ah.  Your solution is to consider the music worthless, and all real value is in associated gimmicks.

[Cramulus]

I guess a simpler way of saying it is to explain using the melioration principle

which states that an organism will engage in a behavior until a competing behavior offers better rewards


So far, the industry's solution has been to add punishments for piracy
but if they're going to win, they have to start adding incentives for actual sales

[Doktor Howl]

(cramulus repeating himself warning)

So this piracy issue isn't going to go away, because

Of course it isn't.  The OP is trying to justify it, though, on a moral level.

If you're swiping it, so be it.  Just don't paint the artist as the bad guy, as Regret did.

[LMNO]

I guess a simpler way of saying it is to explain using the melioration principle

which states that an organism will engage in a behavior until a competing behavior offers better rewards


So far, the industry's solution has been to add punishments for piracy
but if they're going to win, they have to start adding incentives for actual sales

Well, that may be true.  But it's incredibly disheartening to think that the main thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is so widely disregarded, merely because of a piece of software.

[Cramulus]

imagine if you were a jpg salesman.

[Doktor Howl]

I think we may be onto the root of all evil, here.

Yes.

Saying that a principle applies only to certain people, defies the entire concept of the rule of law.

Regret states that he won't pirate from friends.  This is privilege, not respect for his friends' rights.

I'm trying to see the difference between this and some of these new laws in Arizona, for example, where your rights are invoilate, unless you happen to be brown...In which case your "rights" are entirely dependent on the mood of any given cop.

[Doktor Howl]

So far, the industry's solution has been to add punishments for piracy
but if they're going to win, they have to start adding incentives for actual sales

So far, the country's solution has been to add punishments for rape
but if they're going to win, they have to start adding incentives for not raping.

[Doktor Howl]

I guess a simpler way of saying it is to explain using the melioration principle

which states that an organism will engage in a behavior until a competing behavior offers better rewards


So far, the industry's solution has been to add punishments for piracy
but if they're going to win, they have to start adding incentives for actual sales

Well, that may be true.  But it's incredibly disheartening to think that the main thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is so widely disregarded, merely because of a piece of software.

Again, on the level of perceived value, you come in below a company that manufactures butterfly mines.

[LMNO]

Good thing I'm The Man™ then.



But you know, it might be interesting to see the entire music industry turn into a side hobby, done only after you do your "real" job.