Who is More Evil: Online Music

So are you saying also that every can of Coke at the supermarket should be free because the original first Coke was made a hundred years ago, and all the ones they sell now are just mass-produced copies? How about your car? Should the Ford family no longer be allowed to make money off Great Grandpa's invention because ol' Henry only did the inventing once?

I am a musician as well, and your comments make me sick. Ever spent time in a recording studio, bud? Any idea what hard work it actually is? Any idea how musicians actually get paid? Let me enlighten you.

I may not have grown up to be a "rockstar" like I had planned on when I was a kid, but I've got a few friends who did, and let me tell you, it ain't all sex, drugs, & Rock N' Roll. Just like any other profession in the world, there's profit and loss, with heavy emphasis on the loss. I'll share a few stories so you can hopefully understand a bit of the truth of the record business.

Just so you know, I'll be omitting most of the names, sorry. I've got no problem naming names of people I know who did make money, but I don't feel it's right to discuss the details about people who didn't. Those kinds of specifics are nobody's business. Just understand that rich & famous are not inseperable terms. Just because someone's world famous and they've got videos on MTV and songs on the radio does not mean they're making money. It used to be we could blame it on the record companies and say, "Those guys got a crappy deal. They should have had a better laywer when they were signed," but now we can't even do that. Not even the record companies are making much anymore, due in no small part to people like you who think it's okay to steal. Anyway, here are some personal stories about a few famous musicians I know:

One of my friends from college was the guitarist for a progressive metal band you've probably heard of. They had tremendous "success" in the early 90's, especially in Europe and Japan (metal was on a downswing in the US at the time, but they still did okay stateside). This guitarist friend of mine was still working in the local music store to make ends meet, even though their then current album was placed at number two on the Japanese charts and very highly on the European charts as well. He told me on more than one occasion about how in spite of their success, they just couldn't seem to make any serious money. He said every time they toured Japan, the best they could do was break even because touring is inherently expensive, and like everything else at the time, it was even more so in Japan.

You see, it's commonly held misbelief that the record company pays for the tour. That may be true in some cases, but for the most part, it's the band who foots the bill. The way it works is when you get signed, you get a grant of a certain amount to make your album, book venues for your tours, etc. Your first duty is to pay back that grant before you can actually make anything yourself. You can pocket some of the grant and spend less on your production if you wish, but it's a gamble. A worse sounding album won't sell as well as better sounding one, obviously, and the last thing you want to do is end up owing money to the company. Also, most self-respecting artists want to make the best sounding record they can anyway, and that takes big, big bucks. Usually those grants aren't huge anyway, and so they get eaten up pretty qucikly no matter how frugal you are.

Another friend of mine was the bass player for death metal band you probably haven't heard of unless you're into death metal, in which case I can promise you that you have. Death metal has never been mainstream, of course, but as far as the genre goes, these guys were at the top. I haven't seen or spoken to this guy in many years, but the last time I did, I remember him saying, "Well, I'll never be rich, but at least I don't have to work anymore." Of all the signed artists I know, that comment was the most positive statement about making money I've heard yet.

Going back a few more years to my days growing up in NJ, there were a lot of local boys who had made good. Bon Jovi & Skid Row were both from a couple towns over. I never met them (unfortunately) but they were friends of friends. Okay, those guys made money.

There were plenty of other local bands who had "made it" who barely saw a dime though. One story that comes to mind was in my junior year of high scool. One morining one of my classmates came in and said to a few of us (we were all in bands and played a lot of the same clubs regularly) "You guys remember that band we played with a few months back, _____ ? Dude, I just saw them on MTV this morning." It turned out these guys indeed were on MTV. They had just recently been signed (none of us really were certain why we hadn't heard about it) and their video was soon in the MTV top 10 ...for about 5 minutes, anyway. By all accounts, they were now "rockstars". Did they make money? Nope.

I could go on with similar NJ stories all day, but I'll skip ahead a few years to Buffalo. Again, I'm not gonna name names here, but if you think about famous bands from Buffalo, and think about naming names or not naming names, and about hit songs with names, or not with names, it's pretty obvious who I'm talking about. The nameless band in question, whom I had known simply as the guys who practiced down the hall from us who were kind of cool to hang out with sometimes, went on to have three number one hits, three grammy nominations, a double platinum album and a triple platinum album, among others things. As I understand it, despite their huge fame and popularity, the band did not make a dime off their first major album (actually their fifth album, but the first one that most people know about), the double platinum one. They were rockstars, no question, famous yes, but absolutely not rich. Whether or not they've made money since, I don't know, since I don't really know them anymore. Also, since I'm not that active on the local music scene anymore, I've fallen somewhat out of touch with friends who know them well.

So, regardless of whether or not you think musicians SHOULD be payed at the time they do their recording, Mulch, the fact is they're not. Even if they were, that still wouldn't give you the right to steal.

You have convinced me that your motivation for stealing copyrighted material is purely selfish. Despite being a scientifically minded fellow, you've never come across politically progressive, so I have no reason to doubt your statement.

On the subject of political statements made through illegal actions, today I walked past a Hummer H2 in my neighborhood that had its side window smashed in and its two curb-side tires deflated. The interior of the car was not harmed. (I'll post pictures later today.) It makes my tongue-in-cheek Key an SUV thread look tame in comparison.

~Ulrika~

That's three. This is an ad hominem tu quoque fallacy, otherwise known as the "you too" fallacy. The problem with such a fallacious argument is that if assumed valid it becomes possible for anyone to excuse any crime unless their accuser is absolutely puritanical. One should focus on the argument, not the individual.

In the previous thread my argument is that one should do business from companies which are the lesser of evils. It's a standard utilitarian argument. In our case we've chosen computers and operating systems made by Apple over Microsoft's operating system, simply because Microsoft is a monopoly.

I'm still not done with that thread. I'll revisit it shortly with the results from this and the other poll later today.

~Ulrika~

There seems to have been a cultural change in recent decades. At one time people who engaged in artistic enterprises did so because they wanted to express themselves, not because of any expectation of financial gain.

I was part of a group of writers in the sixties, only three or four of whom made money from what they were doing, although there were many, equally talented, who did not. I, personally, discovered that a book of mine had been pirated in an unauthorised Polish edition, and my reaction was amusement more than anything else. Also I voluntarily carried out a reconstruction of a book (a story too complicated to go into here) with the blessing of the author's family, and although it is now used as a standard edition of the work (which sells very well) and although it took six months to produce, all I have ever received has been the intial £50 payment, which I did not seek.

At one time being paid was a bonus.

Now it seems that art has become a commercial, not to say corporate affair. Let me say that if any musician goes into the field with making a living as his prime priority, then he is not a good musician. Perhaps that explains why popular music is so crappy today.

Are you saying Bach, Hayden, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. did not go into music as a means to make a living? Hayden was arguably the most commercialized musical talent in the history of the world, producing more great works of classical composition than anyone. The fact that he did it all for money doesn't diminsh the qualtiy of the work. Mozart's Magic Flute was written entirely for the money, but it's still considered one of the greatest operas in history, and Mozart himself was one of the greatest genius minds this planet has ever produced. Had it not been for Bach, none of the music of the past 500 years would have been possible, but he was an employee of the church, and wouldn't write a note without tugging at their purse strings. Beethoven was a raving commercialist who often publicly berrated the nobility for having been born into money while he himself had earned his by his talent.

The concept of making your living by doing what you're good at is nothing new, and it should be applauded, not condemned. If you're happy to have done some pro bono work, good for you, but that in no way gives you the right to say that people who choose to benefit from what they do are somehow wrong. As long as I live, I'll never understand the kind of jealousy that fuels these kinds of "if you do well for yourself you must be wrong" kind of arguments, or at least I hope I won't. That attitude is really quite disgusting. I wish you were able to say, "You're doing what you love, and you're making money at it. Man, you're lucky. Congratulations." instead of, "Ew, you're making money. You must not be a real artist anymore." Wouldn't it feel better just to be happy for the success of others? Give it a try.

Not only did Beethoven try to get as much money as he could, he engaged in slightly shady practices in order to further this. Beethoven actually wrote at least one piece of crappy music specifically to make money.

I am not saying that artists do not appreciate money when it comes, and I am not saying that they do not seek to gain more, especially if they are trying to live off their creations.

What I am saying is that money is not the raison d'etre for them.

The British composer, Havergal Brian, for example, composed his Gothic Symphony over a period of six years. He earned a living of sorts by day, copying music, and by night he worked on the Gothic Symphony. He was so hard up at that time that he was literally starving, to the extent that he started hallucinating. He recounts that he would look up from the page he was working on, and see the figure of, say, Bach, sitting in the chair opposite, looking at him quizzically. Being a hard-headed Northerner, he said that he knew it was just a hallucination, and didn't take any notice.

The point is, Beethoven would have composed music whether or not he had been paid for it. The figure of the starving artist in a garret is not a romantic fiction. There was an sf writer who claimed that for some time he was reduced to living off boiled cockroaches in order to keep writing.

When making money becomes your *reason* for being creative, then you are no longer creative.

Just a quick contradiction.

Bach, while being undoubtedly a genius, was unusual in that unlike most other great composers his music did not advance the musical vocabulary available at the time. Beethoven virtually single-handedly went from the Classical period (some of the early piano sonatas) through the Romantic (the ninth symphony) to the Modern (the 'Hammerklavier' sonata and the Grosse Fuge as two examples).

Bach remained a musical conservative, rooted musically at the very end of the Baroque period, and had virtually no influence at all on he course of music that followed his. Apart, that is, until the 20th C, when he influenced some jazz and the neo-classical composers. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, he was virtually unknown.

Just to deal separately with the personal attacks in your posting, which are quite uncalled for.

If you are going to condemn someone for what they say, at least make sure that you are quite clear about what they are saying.

I have never, ever condemned an artist for making money. I wish the world was such that the great artists could be adequately recompensed for what they give the world. Unfortunately only a few of them are, and many who deserve it don't get it.

I won't say any more, because unlike you I do not make personal attacks.

Okay, but who exactly are you saying is being a musician for no other reason than just to make money? I've never met one. If all someone wants to do is make money, there are much easier and much less risky ways to do it. From a strict business standpoint, goping into the arts is the worst possible move one could make. I'm not aware of anyone who woke up one day and said "I want to be a millionaire. So long, Harvard. I'm gettin' me a guitar." Trust me, nobody does that. Every musician who makes money was a musician long before they ever got paid for it, just as you point out Beethoven was. It's the talent that comes first, and the decision about what to do with it that comes later, just like with every other career.

As for the reference to Havergal Brian and your celebrated cockroach chef, I fail to see what that has to do with anything. The history of the arts is full of tragic figures, just as is the history of anything else. That in no way means that tragedy is some sort of requisite or right of passage or anything that makes those people somehow more worthwhile. People love to romanticize heroes, and the notion of suffering for your art certainly fits that bill nicely, but romanticism is all it is.

So Brian was poor and suffered from halucinations; so what? That's awful for him, but it's not relevant to his worth as a composer. Had he been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he would have been no less talented. His life experiences may have led him to compose works that were different than those he ended up with, but they would have been no less worthy.

And so this writer of yours couldn't hold a job and decided to romaticize a tale martyrdom with stories of boiled insects. Again, I say so what. He could have written his books while working the night shift at the seven eleven just the same as he did while sitting home being a bum. All the story proves is that the guy's an idiot when it comes to taking care of himself, regardless of the level of genius of his writing.

People love to tell stories of "Oh, I had to give up this and this and this, all so I could keep on doing that." Well, as someone who taught time management courses for six years, I can promise you that adding "this and this and this" back into your life in no way diminishes your capacity to do "that". Anyone who insists otherwise is deluding themselves. We all have 168 hours every week, and no one on the face of the earth ever devotes all of them to just one thing. Most peope simply "squander the stuff that life is made of" as Ben Franklin put it, and then they rationalize it later by saying "I was soooo busy working on my great American novel," when in actuality they spent no more or less quality time on their art than they would have if they'd kept a job all along.

You say money shouldn't be the soul motivation for creating art. Well, let me turn that around and say neither should poverty, and aversion to money is just the equally unhealthy flipside of obsession with it. A painter who sells a painting is no more or less a painter than one who doesn't. The only diference is the guy who sold got to eat that night, and the other guy didn't. I don't know about you, but I'd rather eat. There's nothing noble in boiling cockroaches.

Dude, you're talking to a music major here. There's not a formally trained musician alive who did not learn his craft by studying Bach. That was as true in Mozart's day as it is now. So, did Bach inspire radical, sweeping changes to the music of his day? Not at all, which is why I didn't say he did. What he did do was provide a solid foundation upon which all composors have built their work, knowingly or not, ever since.


As for your other post about the attack, it was meant as a rebuttal, not an attack. My impression was that you had insulted all proffessional musicians by saying they're not real musicians since they make money. If that's not what you were saying, then I retract my statement with humble apologies.

Yes, many composers have learned about counterpoint by studying Bach. Except in the nineteenth century, when many of them would be unaware of his existence. But your comment was: "Had it not been for Bach, none of the music of the past 500 years would have been possible." Composers have learned a musical technique from Bach, simply because he was the finest exponent of the craft. If Bach had not existed they would have learned counterpoint from someone else. His influence on the actual music of the past 500 years is, IMO, negligible.





Interesting rebuttal. (Personal attacks emboldened).

The point I was making about Havergal Brian and the sf writer's cockroach diet is that at heart, creativity is not driven by money or even by the survival instinct. Genuine artists create because they have to. As a writer my main objective was to get my work out in the world. Whether I got a cheque at the end of it was irrelevant at that point. Obviously I preferred to get a cheque, but that was not the main issue. If someone pirated my work, then so long as it didn't happen too often, I was glad that it would go to a wider audience.

It seems to me that most popular music these days is corporate-driven. I have seen quotes by popular musicians who have said that they don't mind when their music is downloaded, for the above reason, so long as it doesn't impact too much on their sales.

I don't know too much about the corporate side of music making, but I do know that one excellent classical record company (Hyperion) was bankrupted by a litigation for copyright infringement. When that sort of thing happens it is not to the benefit of anybody, and it seems to me that this is part of the change of emphasis I detect, rightly or wrongly.

I think the two worst things to ever happen to artists, writers, and musicians, is the romantic notion of the suffering, starving artist, and napster, which has convinced an entire generation of people that they're entitled to have the fruits of other people's labor simply because they want it and can take it.

Also, as Chosen hit on, the popular notion that fame automatically equals wealth is a complete fallacy. I have first hand experience with that having grown up the son of a local tv personality. Many people who didn't know me treated me like I was a rich snob. They simply assumed that because my dad was on tv that we must be wealthy, and that I wore clothes that were two years out of style because I was a dork, not because that's all my parents could afford to buy for me.

The meme that says creative people create because they must, because they're driven, and because it's some kind of unstoppable compulsion is also a fallacy. It's a romanticized exaggeration of a trait that's not in any way unique to the arts. The same can be said about engineers, scientists, builders, and anyone else who learns skills and takes up a trade because they're naturally drawn to certain kinds of activities and mental apptitudes. A carptenter would likely still be building things out of wood even if he didn't make his living from it, yet no one would accuse one of selling out if he does make his living from it, or commands a high price for his talent and skill.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this. I suspect we were taught music history differently, and we're both going with what we know (or think we know). Since neither of us was there, neither of us can really be right here.



Look, I already apologized. What more do you want? I felt insulted by your comment, and I said as much. Saying I personally find a particular attitude to be disgusting is not an attack. It's a description of the emotions I feel when I encounter said attitude.

Further, my mentioning that my limited understanfing of said attitude is that it stems from jealousy is not an attack either, and neither is my paraphrasing it to describe how I see it. Putting it in bold face doesn't change that.

I'm sorry you seem to be so sensitive about it, but look, I acknowledged the misunderstanding and apologized for my half of it. That's really all I can do. I'd appreciate it if you'd recipricate, but if you can't bring yourself to do that then so be it. If you choose to retain the misunderstanding and dwell on it from this point on, that will be entirely your doing. I've acknowledged it. I've apologized for my part in it. My hands are clean.


Yes, artists create because we have to. We can no sooner stop creating than we can stop breathing, just as those with other callings can't stop doing what they do either. And yes, it's unfortunate when corporate greed enters the mix. However, I disagree slightly about tolerance of piracy. My feeling on it is if someone wants to take inspiration from something I have done so that they can then produce something similar in their own image, that's great, it's flattering, and I whole heartedly support it. However, when someone outright steals, that's another matter entirely. Stealing is wrong, period. I live by principle, and I cannot abide a thief.

Even putting philosophy of right and wrong aside for a second, I can't ignore consequences. I have to live in the real world which means I have to eat, and unfortunately food costs money. When someone takes money out of my pocket, I have a problem with that, whether it's one penny or a million dollars. I won't steal from anyone else, and no one else should steal from me, plain and simple.


Well said, Chip, as usual.

It has been true of every single creative person I have known - and I have known a lot.

I wasn't taking issue with your apology, which, needless to say, I accepted. What I took issue with was what I perceived as your justification for an attack by calling it a rebuttal.

I am quite happy to agree to differ both on your view of an artist and on your view of Bach's influence on other composers.

Each can must me mixed, canned, packaged, shipped. That takes people. So do the materials required to make it it all. Hence, Coke needs to have a cost to bring it to market.

Yes I know making an album requires a cost to bring it to market (even in digital form), but those that front the cost generally recoup multiple times over, far more than the artist.



Actually I disagree that relatives of dead people who feel "entitled" to the fortunes should receive money based on the work of past generations. Where I live, we have quite a few "trust fund kids" who contribute nothing but problems inherent in the entitlement attitude. I am not saying all the children of wealthy are worthless, but I know plenty who are biding their time until they can inherit it all. And they get whatever they want with little contribution in the meantime. Generalization, yes, but it is based on PLENTY of first hand experience.



Yup, Yup, and Yup.

I understand completely that the signing money from record labels is in fact just a loan that makes the musicians "property" of the record company who fronted the loan until such time that the "indentured servant" can pay it back.

There are other ways to be a successful musician, I am just rebelling against the model that guts a musician and turns them from a creative force into a commodity. I happen to believe music in many instances is art, and art is sacred, and true art is inspired by the hand of God. There are other effective models, but extorting artists for gain, or creating "flavor of the month divas, boy bands, and American Idols" makes me much sicker of the perversion of a true art form than my statement could possibly sicken you.



My opinion is that a new system of music distribution needs to be looked at that doesn't leave artists swaying on a meathook and ground up when their sophmore effort doesn't produce the "buzz"of the first release

It is up to musicians to take initiative and make a model where they make a fair deal. I know of plenty of bands who bucked the system and made thier money being true to their craft.

And I never said I steal anything. I own hundreds of Cds. I do not own an IPOD or portable MP3 player. the only CDs I burn I have every right to LEGALLY burn

I say limewire because the recording industry needs to be torn down before it can be rebuilt in a more artist supportive way.

Based on your anecdotal evidence, I think we are closer to philiosophies than you would imagine

I just don't feel it is right when the culture supports people like this asshat, who make a one hit wonder and are then able to support his lifestyle of shagging 12 year old girls 33 years after he did his days work

as stated here, what gives this guy the right to make money on something he did 33 years ago more than the guy who paved the road that keeps civilizasion intact and connected?

I don't disagree. My point is that it's not at all unique to the arts or artists. It's true of anyone who is driven to do a particular craft. The only difference is that with artists it's a trait that's exaggerated and romanticized. All of that is beside the point, however. Does the fruit of someone's labor have less value if it's something they'd do even if they weren't being paid? I think you know my answer.