Even Less Reason To Trust Music Store Clerks (RANT)

Read this news article and come back.

You didn't read it, did you? To summarize, Universal Music & Video Distribution has created a game for employees of stores carrying its products. Players create virtual record labels and sign and trade artists and those artists' success on the Billboard charts determines the players' success. It's fantasy baseball for the music industry, and players compete for prizes like iPods and plasma TV's.

Great. So now when I'm browsing CD's and some hipper-than-thou parent's-basement-dwelling cooldude comes up and says, "Oh, yeah, they're soooo good" he's no longer just implying that he is the epitome of indie / undie doubleplus radness and saying, "Buy that album or you can't be one of the cool kids" he's also saying, "...and you should buy it so that artist charts high and I can win a plasma TV".

Not to mention this is a great way to make the big sellers even bigger sellers since all the players will pick them knowing they have the best chance of charting high and netting them the swag. All the new artists who are just breaking out? Forget them. Too much risk trying to promote them since there's no way they'll hit the top of the chart and if you do recommend them and someone buys, that's a sale away from the top dogs. Basically this means that instead of plain old snobbish intellectual self-interest driving music store clerks' recommendations, now UMVD has added material gain as a motive for insincerity.

The music industry is screwed. The recording industry tells artists they don't matter and aren't worth anything. The distribution industry tells customers music that sells equals good music so buy the top sellers so they sell more. Then their legal departments say, "Go tell the press that Napster reduced our total album sales by 10% last year, but don't tell them we reduced our total new releases by more than 10%".

I'm just going to start downloading off BitTorrent and sending artists a $5 check if I like them.

It doesn't surprise me a bit that record companies are pulling something like this, though it is disappointing.

I just read an article in the May/June issue of Utne Magazine about a writer, Nicholas Thompson (http://www.nickthompson.com/), who also plays and records solo acoustic guitar music. He works occasionally as a buskar (street musician) in NYC and sells his CD while performing. He mentioned that it only costs him $1.10 to produce each CD, so he's happy if he makes a $5 CD sale.

He said that the internet can really benefit small, unknown artists by helping a broader range of people hear their music, but that it doesn't exactly help the larger, better-known artists: "I profit tremendously when people download my music. The free cyber-samples make listeners more likely to attend my concerts and request my songs on the radio. On the other hand, big artists do indeed lose with file sharing, and it's their profits on which the industry depends for survival. That's why the big names tend to fight the trend. But it's a fight they will eventually lose, and that won't be a bad thing either for bands or for fans. Much as the movie industry figured out how to profit from the VCR, record companies should look harder for ways to profit from the Internet."

I think its sad the that record industry is taking the stance its trying to take. And I think its a shame that they treat both the bands they produce and the fans that buy the records so poorly.

And I'll agree that the internet is a *huge* boon to smaller groups... Almost everything I listen to today I've found on the internet. Until the internet and the music industry got so tied together, I listened to virtually no music... I didnt like the stuff the record company was pushing on me, but *finding* the stuff I did like was such a royal pain I didn't even try most times. Now I buy 1-2 CDs a month, which probably is pathetic by a lot of peoples standards, but thats up from 1-2 a year before. And almost everything I buy is from small people, and normally directly from them, or at least from a very small publisher. The biggest stuff I listen to is probably Blind Guardian, which is big enough you will find it in stores, but never gets much press. Most of what I listen to now is just individual singers or small groups, a lot of folk music and the like, and produced on a very small scale. None of which I would ever have found five years ago.

That's all it is with the RIAA, one money scheme after another. I get physically ill every time I think about the fraction of a percent of what I pay for a CD that actually goes to the band that produced it.

The way I figure it, any band that is truly serious about making a living on others' enjoyment of their musical performance should base their income solely off live performances.

Any band that records should keep it as a hobby for the love of MUSIC. not money. They should throw a single-finger-salute to the corrupt RIAA, and upload their songs to acidplanet.com or similar free distribution sites. Recorded date should be free for everyone.

It's the personal showing and the display of content that you DON'T receive on a recording that should be the foundation of any career as a performance artist.

http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?songs=139264&T=9444

I'm not sure I can really agree with that... Just because I cant see a concert of band X, doesnt mean I dont feel they deserve to be compensated for their effort.

I'll gladly concede that point, there are plenty of artists out there who deserve compensation for their talent, but going through a major record label is certainly not the way to do it.

This is an age where data and information is (or should be) free. Sometimes we have to pay for access to changing or interactive data, like SL. But forcing us to pay ungodly costs for hard-copies of audio recordings through which 99% of said cost goes directly into the packaging and distribution centers that we care zilch about....that's just down-right stupid.

If I like a band so much that I want them to make more music, I'll gladly throw money into a trough for them, or buy a CD and novelties directly from their web-site thru which all the money is being paid directly TO said band.

But I'm not going to any record store. I like to pay the creators of the music, not the industry that bought their souls.

"Should" doesn't apply; most of them have to. Unfortunately Clearchannel, the nearly monopolistic radio gods, also own the majority of the concert promotion biz. If you don't agree to their payola policies, they don't play you and they don't promote you. No shows, no dough.

I can't even imagine getting into music now with the intention of making a living from it. The busking model is probably more like it: do it because you love it and hope people toss a few bills into the hat.

hehe another reason to buy my music on amazon

Cath

As long as the clerks don't start posting customer mini-reviews. Ok, no conspiracy theories.

cdbaby.com is a neat place for indie musicians. They charge a one time fee per different cd of $35 to set up a web page for you and the artist sends them a minimum of 4 cds. The artist sets the retail price. cdbaby keeps $4 for each cd sold, and takes care of all the yucky stuff like credit cards and shipping. The artist gets the rest.

They say they have 60,000 artist's cds and have payed out 7 million dollars. Most artists allow for a number of free two minute samples to listen to. I'll just browse their site until I find interesting samples and put that cd on my shopping cart.

This is a very interesting thread. The debate over the state of the music industry is one that fascinates me because it also includes the fate of collective culture.

On one hand, control and dissemination.

On the other, open and shared.

What is the fate of the music "industry?" Is it going to be the extremeist basker-model? Is it going to be a la carte DRM restrictiveness? Are physical mediums going to win the day in the long run?

Here's what I think:

File-sharing has already been deemed legal in Canada. Now consider that performance-rights societies are already in courts w/ ISP's over collecting performance rights tariffs for downloaded music. Now this doesn't cover mechanical rights, but check out this: VCL and this.. So really, once VCL gets set up in Canada and other parts of the world, the legal precedent will likely spill over to the US where it counts. So what this all means really is that in the future I think music will make money like television through ratings.

Who knows what will happen, but the effects of such a system would be enormous... and it will probably be a lesson learned for humanity as well. It may hurt some large corporations though, so we can probably expect some attempts at resistance, but if there is a modicum of intelligence out there, this will most likely pass.

I know this is all over, but IMHO the future is this: for a small monthly fee, people will have access to all the music ever generated. This fee is collected and distributed out based on ratings and download data and distributed back out to the publishers/copyright holders. Sure there will still be some players and such trying to screw people, but with such a massive ratings-based market, the larger part of future record labels will be forced to treat artists fairly. Also, this future includes legitimized p2p applications, protecting the greatest cultural tool humanity has ever realized yet. It's open.. free.. and has many possibilities.

Unlike a restrictive DRM controlled, legislated, BS one.