Music Piracy

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I buy CDs when I can. It's probably not as often as most would like to hear. But I do try to compensate my favorite artists when I am able. When I get my first place (after my first job), I want to decorate the place with framed album covers by all my favorite artists.
 
iron yuppie said:
I'm a bit skeptical of this argument in the sense that I doubt how many music downloaders actually proceed to buy anything from the artist in question. This is a forum of music enthusiasts, so people here are likely to do so. But among the general population, I would think that the vast majority never repays the initial "cost," whatever that may be, of the music they have downloaded, or otherwise contributes to that artist financially in any way.
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I never suggested that illegal downloading was "OK," merely that it isn't a financial black hole. Obviously, the tendency is to not purchase, particularly if the party downloading has no extra cash lying around to buy an album. I would, however, venture to say that those actively engaged in the music world and new albums are more likely to buy concert tickets and memorabilia, which is still a revenue stream. I know many, many people who fall into this category that download before purchasing.

As for the general population, there isn't a whole lot you can do anymore. Offer streams, offer fair prices on albums (I'm puzzled that Cobbler would pay $20 for a CD in this day and age, but I suppose that's the nature of import costs) and make good products. Hope for the best.

Danny Boy said:
With Spotify Premium, playlists can be locally cached to your phone or iPad, so you can still listen to tracks even when you're off network. You just have to plan ahead.

I had a Spotify Premium account for a few months, but I barely have enough time to listen to the new albums in my iTunes library, so I ended up dropping it.
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Grooveshark Mobile has the same feature. Of course, this means you put more money into it.
 
Travis Morrison was my hero before this rebuttal, but now he's even cooler.

If you duped a copy of a Dismemberment Plan record in college or something, it's cool. I guess I'd like to have the money, but you know what, I hope you just listened to it with even 1/10 of the consciousness I gave to the music I listened to as a kid--copied, stolen, or bought.
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I did, in fact, purchase Emergency & I and Change back in high school. But if you don't have the means to, I encourage you all to steal them right now, with Travis Morrison's blessing. Those albums changed my life.
 
Pretty weak rebuttal actually. If you wanted to dub tapes of your buddies record collection you could do it. It would just take a weeks or so of constant recording.

Now you can go to pirate bay and get entire discographies in minutes.
 
I don't know. It seems a bit apples and oranges. Yes, on its base level, it's the "music without paying for it" (particularly the "straight up shoplifting" bit, which made me laugh. I think I might have stolen one cassette from Shopko when I was much younger).

But taping shit off the radio onto a cassette? Yeah, you can get shitty mp3s off the internet and many people don't care about the quality, but I'm with the argument that it's not the same thing, because "exact" (see quality) digital copies is not the same thing of having a shitty cassette tape that might break, sound crappy, and if you're lucky, had the whole song without the DJ talking over the intro.

I didn't take away from Lowery's piece that this is all new and no one ever found a way to steal music before, but that's all this guy seems to be focusing on. You can't deny that the easy, immediate access to millions of digital pieces of music is different than the "old school" ways of stealing music. I don't understand why he took such offense to the piece.

That being said, this section is amazing because it just about sums up a good chunk of my own early teenaged years. (And also, that "Ship of Fools" song is GREAT. I need to go hear it now.)

Taping Off The Radio

This was hilarious. I would psychopathically hound DJs at Q107 or WAVA to play this or that song. I would call the request line until my finger fell off from dialing. Please Please Please play Life In A Northern Town by Dream Academy in the next 20 minutes I have soccer practice at 4!!!! And then I'd sit. With my finger on the record button on my boombox. With more laser-like focus than a Central Park squirrel waiting for a German tourist to drop their pretzel. Please don't let the preceding song overlap too much; Please don't talk over the intro you douchebag DJ; Please no ads for Jerry's Ford ruining the ending. I always kept a tape ready in my boombox in case of suprises. The day that Q107 played "Ship Of Fools" by World Party--an unusual tune in the context of 80s pop radio, with weird sounds and misanthropic lyrics, my idea of a good time and probably an error that got a DJ fired--I swear to god I knocked over every piece of furniture in my room to hit record.

I also used to go to my friends' houses with my little portable cassette recorder and tape their 45s by holding the recorder up to their record player. We were lucky if their brothers and sisters weren't making tons of noise out in the hall, or if the music weren't interrupted with me saying "SHHHH!" twenty times. :lol:
 
Von Schloopen said:
Pretty weak rebuttal actually. If you wanted to dub tapes of your buddies record collection you could do it. It would just take a weeks or so of constant recording.

Now you can go to pirate bay and get entire discographies in minutes.
Click to expand...

Yeah, my thought is that it's not a rebuttal at all, but rather just a counterpoint to one particular line of thought from Lowery's initial argument (SEMANTICS!!!). Mixtapes unfortunately do not explain the precipitous decline in music sales over the last decade or so. Either people are listening to far, far less music, or they are using torrents and such to obtain it for free.
 
iron yuppie said:
Either people are listening to far, far less music, or they are using torrents and such to obtain it for free.
Click to expand...

And the argument being made is that the consequences of listening to less music are far worse than downloading it for free.

I don't think Morrison is overlooking the precipitous increase of available channels for stealing music; rather, he stated outright that he would do the exact same thing we're doing, and perhaps more so. The comparison is off because the technological gap has widened, but the thought process behind it is the same.
 
It seems to me more like he's arguing that if you really like something, you should do whatever is necessary to get it. And, in all honesty, I am somewhat sympathetic to this argument regarding music. If someone really does not have the financial means to obtain music, they probably should have some avenue toward hearing what they want. I suppose I'd be a bad socialist if I felt otherwise, as I see access to art as something that is essentially a human right.
 
One of the best points I've read on this subject was that the industry took a big monetary hit once it started allowing people to buy what they want, and only what they want. In the grand scheme of things, there's a big difference between spending $17 on 3-4 songs you want and spending $3 on iTunes for the only tracks you'll play from it anyway. That was a game-changer.
 
Oh, and I should add that I think the great value of Morrison's argument is in showing that the younger generations are not fundamentally depraved. He is right, I think, in suggesting that Lowery's initial post had something of a "damn kids nowadays" tone to it.
 
LemonMelon said:
One of the best points I've read on this subject was that the industry took a big monetary hit once it started allowing people to buy what they want, and only what they want. In the grand scheme of things, there's a big difference between spending $17 on 3-4 songs you want and spending $3 on iTunes for the only tracks you'll play from it anyway. That was a game-changer.
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I think that this is a really intriguing economic issue. My view would be that Apple was incredibly smart to introduce the dollar-per-song model when they did, because they had to have known that file-sharing was going to start skyrocketing. In that sense, Apple probably thought that a profit of 1 or 2 dollars is better than losing that sale entirely to a torrent.

The more I think about this issue, the more that I come back to blaming the major record companies and chain record stores for the rise in file-sharing. When I was a kid, a CD cost between 17 and 19 dollars almost anywhere you went. That's extremely steep for a middle-class kid or college student. I still cannot see where all that money was going, especially when you consider that Amazon now routinely sells new releases for nearly half that price.
 
corianderstem said:
Taping Off The Radio

This was hilarious. I would psychopathically hound DJs at Q107 or WAVA to play this or that song. I would call the request line until my finger fell off from dialing. Please Please Please play Life In A Northern Town by Dream Academy in the next 20 minutes I have soccer practice at 4!!!! And then I'd sit. With my finger on the record button on my boombox. With more laser-like focus than a Central Park squirrel waiting for a German tourist to drop their pretzel. Please don't let the preceding song overlap too much; Please don't talk over the intro you douchebag DJ; Please no ads for Jerry's Ford ruining the ending. I always kept a tape ready in my boombox in case of suprises. The day that Q107 played "Ship Of Fools" by World Party--an unusual tune in the context of 80s pop radio, with weird sounds and misanthropic lyrics, my idea of a good time and probably an error that got a DJ fired--I swear to god I knocked over every piece of furniture in my room to hit record.
Click to expand...

I just copied that part to paste in here in case someone missed it but you beat me to it. I guess it resonates. Cos that was me, too.
 
I remember being particularly frustrated one year when Peter Wolff's song "Lights Out" was a big hit. It started right in with the chorus, so you never had that safety net of a DJ talking. Unless I was sitting there with my finger on "record" for two hours waiting to hear it, I would never got the song.

I think eventually I just gave up and recorded it missing the first few seconds. But I felt so, so ... incomplete. :(

LIGHTS OUT! UH-HUH! BLAST BLAST BLAST!
 
I would, for the record, happily pay $20, $30 a month for a service like Emily White outlined, one containing universal compatibility with smart phones and 95% of the world's published music, especially if it were proven to distribute royalties properly. I think that's a great idea.

The other 5% I would illegally download though. And then purchase what I would like to keep.
 
Ha! Well, he didn't really mean it in a negative way. At least, it didn't read that way to me.

Beyond the addiction there is a drive in people that is never fulfilled. I get that.

... is the previous sentence.
 
I think we should derail this thread into an argument about what was he really saying about Bono and why we should HATE him.
 
LemonMelon said:
I would, for the record, happily pay $20, $30 a month for a service like Emily White outlined, one containing universal compatibility with smart phones and 95% of the world's published music, especially if it were proven to distribute royalties properly. I think that's a great idea.

The other 5% I would illegally download though. And then purchase what I would like to keep.
Click to expand...

:up:

I've been saying this for years. Give me something affordable and I'll take it. That's why I'm on Spotify right now. As a father trying to save up for a house and my child's college down the road, I just can't justify spending $10 on albums anymore. I'm glad Spotify allows me to do that right now, but I'd be willing to shell out $30 if it means the artists get more of the profit.
 
I used to have a bunch of mixtapes I'd made from those syndicated oldies radio shows - Super Gold!

For a long time, if I heard a particular '50s or '60s song, my brain automatically would start thinking of the song that followed on that mixtape. That happened with a handful of songs.

:heart:
 
Von Schloopen said:
I'm not sure that's a middle ground at all. He's kinda embraces that the music business is over, which is realist, but he almost expects musicians to live off the love people have for their music, which is lala land.
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I think it's more that he expects them to get a day job like he has.

Which is challenged in the comments; can any truly great art be made if you're not spending the lion's share of your time on it? And will anyone hear it without a financial foundation of some kind?
 
LemonMelon said:
I think it's more that he expects them to get a day job like he has.

Which is challenged in the comments; can any truly great art be made if you're not spending the lion's share of your time on it? And will anyone hear it without a financial foundation of some kind?
Click to expand...

My kid will find out.

I find it very hard to believe something like "A Night At The Opera" could be done on weekends with
beer buddies and protools.
 
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