The Internet: All the music in the world that nobody's buying…

[DeepFiber]

but you do understand its too late too little right?

this should have been taken care of like 10 years ago, now the majority of the people feel its natural for them to download a few tunes. and you cant stop a majority, well because that means youre in minority, and that means losing.
U knowz whatz im zayingz. (<-special code)

[eduardo_b]

but you do understand its too late too little right?

I think this is correct. The cloud cannot be controlled in a comprehensive way, so any effort will be of small consequence and those affected the most will be the least sophisticated users.

[KVRdataminer]

The crackdown is already underway.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/no ... onomy-bill

Bill passed or just being presented to be voted on?

[A.M. Gold]

but you do understand its too late too little right?

I think this is correct. The cloud cannot be controlled in a comprehensive way, so any effort will be of small consequence and those affected the most will be the least sophisticated users.

I completely agree that stopping it may be impossible, but I'm personally not convinced that a significant dent can't be made, particularly among older-than-school-age people. Teenagers are impossible to control anyway so they may be a lost cause.

[futurefields]

There is no way this is democratising. It just clogs things up to the point where peole stop trying to find the good stuff.

I think people want to listen to music, not turn finding things they like into a job.

I'd rather have a cluster f*ck of dodgy music than be spoon-fed the 'taste' of some coked-up A&R chimp. I'm old enough to remember how shyte it was to have a few dominant companies that dictated what was worthy and what was not.

Really?

In the 70's that coked-up A&R chimp was putting Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, etc. on the radio when it was new.

I think those coked up A&R chimps had pretty good taste in music.

Now the problem is they just pick whatever has the most plays on Myspace, which is whatever band has the most cute boys under the age of 19 in it.

[P.T.]

There is no way this is democratising. It just clogs things up to the point where peole stop trying to find the good stuff.

I think people want to listen to music, not turn finding things they like into a job.

I'd rather have a cluster f*ck of dodgy music than be spoon-fed the 'taste' of some coked-up A&R chimp. I'm old enough to remember how shyte it was to have a few dominant companies that dictated what was worthy and what was not.

Really?

In the 70's that coked-up A&R chimp was putting Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, etc. on the radio when it was new.

I think those coked up A&R chimps had pretty good taste in music.

Now the problem is they just pick whatever has the most plays on Myspace, which is whatever band has the most cute boys under the age of 19 in it.

People lack historical context.
To people who weren't around in the late 60's early 70's led zep and the Doors
and many other bands are just something that they have always heard.
Thy don't understand how unique they sounded when they were first played on the radio. Same with a band like Jethro Tull.

The A&R people did have good taste and took chances by putting such interesting things on the radio.

[zircon]

The primary purpose of record labels is (was?) to be a specialized form of investor, or, specifically, a venture capitalist. In my opinion, that's the best way of framing it.

Almost any business requires money to start up. If you were to go to a bank and say "Hey, I want to record this album. I think it will sell a lot, but I need $20,000. Can I have it?" You would be laughed off, because the chances of that happening would be way too low to justify the loan, and there is no "fixed asset" to reclaim. In comparison, banks love loaning to people/businesses buying things because if the thing ends up not making much money, the investor can just take the thing (whatever it is) and sell it, recouping a good amount of money.

Banks generally don't take anything out of what you do with your loan - they just want you to pay it back. However, they take generally non-risky loans. Just TRY getting a startup loan in the U.S. right now. Even for a very solid business idea, it's not going to happen. For that, you need a venture capitalist. But even venture capitalists are more inclined to invest in, say, something like pharmaceuticals, where a huge amount of money is involved and the industry is considerably more stable/consistent.

The music industry has NEVER been stable, however. No venture capitalist, even 10 or 20 years ago, would seriously consider funding a random singer-songwriter or rock band to produce a big album. The record label is basically a super-specialized VC that is willing to take on EXTREME risk (most VCs want something that is *probably* going to succeed - the average major CD release has always had a probable chance of failure) but they require more of the profit back. A lot more. Your average VC might take 10-50% of the profits, whereas major labels, taking on more risk, shoot for much more.

If you look at things this way, it's no wonder labels operated the way they did for so many years. It was simply good business. Why invest money into an abstract idea like digital distribution? In ~2000 the tech bubble was pretty much bursting, so why would ANY investor want to pour money into what seemed like a passing fad or a black hole? I mean think about it. If you were old enough to be investing at that time, would YOU have sunk a huge chunk of your money into an industry that had pretty much just failed? Or would you seek to GROW your money into something that was increasingly PROFITABLE (traditional distribution)?

I'm not saying the major labels have always made great decisions (they haven't, in hindsight), but if you look at things in this framing, their decisions certainly make a lot more sense.

[eduardo_b]

If you look at things this way, it's no wonder labels operated the way they did for so many years. It was simply good business. Why invest money into an abstract idea like digital distribution?

On one hand, the record labels have been viewed as evil manipulators of artists even though the labels took all the risks and more often than not lost money in the process. The artists who did well not only paid for the investments made in them but also all the investments made in the many other artists whose costs were never amortized from their own sales.

However, the inability to grasp the obvious market in digital distribution, and then the attempt to manage digital rights so that customers would have few or no fair use opportunities, was stupid. Which has been the case for virtually every music biz corporation over the years. New technologies present opportunities, but all the record companies see is a threat to the existing technologies.

Film studios were equally obtuse and remain so. VHS and then the DVD proved more valuable than theatrical releases in the long run, but now with DVD sales falling, they are facing the reality that digital distribution is an opportunity they either will fight and lose out in the end or embrace and make a viable business model that appeals to customers.

[.Parsec.audio.tron.]

i don't agree with dude really because here's how it works on beatport for me...

it goes by artists and labels i've put in my "favorites" section. this guy assumes that people actually let beatport/track it down employees choose their music for them??? gtfo. that has never happened to me once. if he's a blogger about music, how come the crowd he's representing in his article is affected by "featured" tracks? people who don't dig for their own music to find what actually speaks to them don't deserve to be grouped in with true music heads. seems he's comparing house and electro to pop music... if you're making it probably people are buying it my ass. there's always been a ton of shitty music to wade through to find the gems.

end rant.

sorry for the negativity.

[dj ray]

i don't agree with dude really because here's how it works on beatport for me...

it goes by artists and labels i've put in my "favorites" section. this guy assumes that people actually let beatport/track it down employees choose their music for them??? gtfo. that has never happened to me once. if he's a blogger about music, how come the crowd he's representing in his article is affected by "featured" tracks? people who don't dig for their own music to find what actually speaks to them don't deserve to be grouped in with true music heads. seems he's comparing house and electro to pop music... if you're making it probably people are buying it my ass. there's always been a ton of shitty music to wade through to find the gems.

end rant.

sorry for the negativity.

So how would you discover new music that wasn't by the artists and labels in your 'favorites' section? Most people just go to the featured tracks section and/or Top 10 charts by well known DJs, and thus a majority of tracks by smaller labels get ignored.

[waveriderarts]

I think this even hurts the little guy giving their stuff away for free on purpose. It seems to me the most popular stuff on file sharing sites & networks is still the same pop crap the media shoves down people's throats. People might come across the occasional unknown and check it out, but I don't think the majority of people are going any further from the mainstream than they otherwise would.

yeah that is the tragedy

you give it for free but all they want is the same mainstream pop

[waveriderarts]

Maybe we will have generations of "hobby"-musicians (I don't like that term, I'd like to regard music as my complimentary second profession). This will change music, of course. Bad thing? I don't think so. (But I'm sure I will not like every result, but that's the same with any musical decade.)

Let's try some forward thinking.

well it takes time to be on top of your game

hard to do without time off making a living in my opinion

[P.T.]

I think this even hurts the little guy giving their stuff away for free on purpose. It seems to me the most popular stuff on file sharing sites & networks is still the same pop crap the media shoves down people's throats. People might come across the occasional unknown and check it out, but I don't think the majority of people are going any further from the mainstream than they otherwise would.

yeah that is the tragedy

you give it for free but all they want is the same mainstream pop

For a very long time I have been of the opinion that most people don't really care all that much about music and they don't really know that much about music to really be able to appreciate the nuances that a good musician will put into a work.

Thy want to be a part of something, a movement or trend or clique.
They want to worship celebrity.
They want their existence validated by being a part of something popular.
That's why they will always go with the mainstream and allow themselves to be force-fed.

It has always been the few who really seek out excellence and originality and stimulating ideas.
It has always ben the few who understand deeply.

I don't expect that to ever change.

That's also why I want music sites and critics who will sort through the piles of ordinary stuff to find the interesting stuff.

[any1particular]

If this was already posted, my appologies.

Here's some food for thought!

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... -of-music/

[lagavulin16]

The real issue isn't piracy. It's availability.

For those of you old enough, think back to when you were 13, just getting into music, and there was no such thing as the internet. When you heard a song you LOVED, a song you wanted to listen to 100 times in a row, you basically had three options:

1) Buy the tape/CD
2) sit by the radio and wait for it to play
3) sit in front of MTV and wait for it to play
4) buy a VHS or audio tape, record it off MTV, the radio (a real pain in the ass waiting for either one) or copy it from a friend.

That was it. Now, for any 13 year old who hears a song that have to hear 100 times in a row, all they have to do is go to the record company site, the artist's site, the youtube link posted by the record label, etc.

I think this is a part of the argument that is ignored by too many people. The urgency and need to hear a song and control the song used to drive purchases because the only other option was hoping it would come on the radio/MTV.

You can now sit in front of your computer and listen to the song 200 times and get fully sick of it just by going to the artist's myspace page.

Let's say we take care of piracy completely, we snap our fingers and music can't be pirated anymore. What happens to youtube, myspace, sites that stream on demand, etc?

How much of the demand to purchase music has been/will continue getting killed off by these options?