Is filesharing the death of music; Trent Reznors model

[next to nothing]

Yes album art was a huge part of the package, and drove sales in its own right as well.

As for the vinyl again, most of the people I know that release vinyl do it specifically *despite* the opportunity to recoup their costs. Both in Dance music & 'indie rawk' / emo / punk it's seen a as a sign of...well probably many things. Respecting the culture, a sign of getting respect for your own work (some ego-bias in there perhaps), a sign that the published work on vinyl is somehow 'more real' than putting a few mp3's on a webpage somewhere, more lasting/collectible/valuable. Probably as many takes on that as there are labels pressing & buyers collecting.

I've got quite vinyl a collection myself as well (4-5000 dance/dnb/downtempo/electronic vinyls collected over about 14 years). Most of this stuff is deeper pressings with only 1 track per side of vinyl, and much of it isn't available for longer than a few weeks, if you can find it at all from resources available where you live. Mp3's have not in any way contributed to the 'death' of my other collection. Rather they've given me avenues to explore I otherwise wouldn't have had available and led to me making more careful choices that are more informed by the ability to actually soak up a piece before buying.

CD purchases were always solely for the purpose of casual listening. Anything I took "seriously" I would seek out on vinyl (even if it was a full LP) just for the sake of it (often having both cd & vinyl). CD's were just a way to acquire music to listen to, whether purchased at a band's show, a retail store, a college-town 'indie' shop or used record/CD shop. Casual listening, bits of music I was into but not enough to want to acquire on vinyl, mix-cd's replacing mixtapes, band-cd's etc. In part I would say this is where mp3's are replacing CD's (at least for me) and if anything I'm even more inclined to pick stuff up if I can pick & choose from tracks or only spend a few bucks on an impulse purchase (versus $10-20 for a full CD).

In fact I'd even go so far as to say tracking my mp3 purchases as my CD purchases dwindled the mp3's not only picked up the slack but accellerated the intake of music. The convenience is hard to understate, and when I want something for the sake of not just convenience alone, there's always vinyl...

as stated in the video, give people a reason to buy, and they will.

[ReD_MuZe]

basically this is the time musicians are getting sober from the "idol" craze, that pumped allot of good money into bad music.

musicians have finally come to realize that targeting the zap culture basically means you get a disloyal crowd that doesn't care about your music, but rather about the latest fad, and can zap away from your station as easily as they zapped to you.

the real business here is targeting music lovers. not the masses and the mainstream.
and you know what?

its about time!

[valis]

I agree with that Red, especially since a cultural change that shifts the focus to more live performances can't be a bad thing!

I also agree with the point that the acts doing these 'highly successful experiments' already have established profiles in our culture. NIN, Radiohead etc, these are already VERY well known acts. That isn't to say you couldn't put time into your own ventures to see how they go, but I do doubt you'll show 250k in sales in your first day/week right off the bat.

[braincell]

i'll just understand that you were intellectually overmatched and so you hads to resort to childishness, because, you're not adult enough to have an actual discussion and modify your veiw, when you point of veiw becomes indefensable.

It is so nice of you to remind me of how superior you are to me. I will have to remember that *snicker*.

[capacitor]

It is so nice for you to remind me of how superior you are to me. I will have to remember that *snicker*.

Isn't this something you could have just left unsaid?

Edit: flimkien ma 'kull ħaġa oħra

[braincell]

Touché!

[garyb]

I BEVER SAID I WAS AGAINST FILESHARING OR WEB SALES, IN FACT, I SAID EXPLICITLY THAT I WOULD HAPPILY ACCEPT SUCH SALES. WHAT I SAID WAS, THAT IT'S HARDER FOR A MUSICIAN TO MAKE A LIVING(as a musician) UNDER THE CURRENT CONDITIONS.

I dont believe you.

My claim is that you are more able now to get a contract for supporting a live act, or be a main act yourself.

I claim that it is easier now to get something through to the "puplic" that gives them a reason to see your gigs than it ever was


And I even claim that it is more easy now than ever to have commercial success without backing from a major.

please correct me if im wrong.

that may be so in Europe. live gigs are sparse and pay poorly here(but not necessarily in Las Vegas and similar places, as Jimmy said), and noone pays for music much...

sure, i'd love to do a European tour!

i know many old timers, i work in a music store and service clients from Joe Walsh and Michael Jackson(or their reps anyway ) and the kid who's just getting started, and as i keep saying, 35 years ago and before, it was MUCH easier to make a living. the owner of the store was in a cover band playing top 40 in the 70's out of high school and he made as much money as his friends with "real" jobs. i know so many people who made a living touring in the 70's who took corporate jobs in the 80's and 90's because all the work had dried up, that it's not funny.

a real tour, even a modest one, with merchandise to sell(that's how the money's made) and contacs made and followed up on to assure local support and turnout takes a considerable investment. someone with deep pockets must fit the bill. artists are always looking for patrons to make it all possible. it's not just a matter of doing the work, it's also about fitting the agenda, which of course is nothing new. i'm not impressed with 4 smelly guys living in a van and pulling a trailer, starving and hoping to meet someone helpful in the next city. i don't need to be in the lap of luxury, i just want to make a living and pay my bills. i'm not seeing that as any easier these days. what do you do for a living?

still, trends are what they are(or seem to be), but there are still plenty of success stories. i'm not trying to say that there are none. if we were all sane, we probably wouldn't play music anyway. we'd just become bankers or lawyers or real estate sales people(although most of us have to do such things anyway )...

[garyb]

basically this is the time musicians are getting sober from the "idol" craze, that pumped allot of good money into bad music.

musicians have finally come to realize that targeting the zap culture basically means you get a disloyal crowd that doesn't care about your music, but rather about the latest fad, and can zap away from your station as easily as they zapped to you.

the real business here is targeting music lovers. not the masses and the mainstream.
and you know what?

its about time!

i'm cool with that.

[Mr Arkadin]

that may be so in Europe. live gigs are sparse and pay poorly here(but not necessarily in Las Vegas and similar places, as Jimmy said), and noone pays for music much...

sure, i'd love to do a European tour!

Don't be thinking of that as a retirement plan. In the UK anyway (not sure about Europe) gigs are poorly paid. Also the download model seems to be based on touring bands - what if you're a studio-based musician, where's your income if your downloads are free? Sure if you're Prince you can give your latest album away in a newspaper, do 21 nights at the O2 (20,000 seater venue) and you're quids in. There's a band i follow who have had moderate success, have supported Gary Numan on two tours and recently did a local London gig and earned the mighty sum of £50 even though they packed the place out. How is this a model for the future?

[braincell]

There are a lot of musicians earning enough money to survive through the internet. Playing live was never an easy way to make money. I think sales are down for major industry labels not so much because of piracy but because there are just a huge amount of entertainment choices. Music competes with videos, games, web surfing, television. The list goes on and on so they focus on piracy as the cause of slow sales because this is the only thing they can try to stop. It won't solve the industry problem even if music piracy totally disappears.

It is interesting to me that the same people who say piracy is bad are frequently posting youtube videos which are full of video and music copyright infringements. They don't see streaming as being the same kind of infringement as downloading but it is. It's illegal. So why is there a double standard for youtube versus pirate bay?

[valis]

1.) The problem with this debate about the whole "Piracy" vs. "Live Music" vs. "Sell it through the Internet" vs. .... um, how many different issues can we glom into a single discussion?

2.) What are we discussing anyway? That GaryB can whop braincell upside the head with those Dangerous Dreads? That braincell's stubborn resistance to any counter opinion knows no limitations? That Trent Reznor's music might be fitting to manic depressives, but his newfangled business models are the salvation for manically depressed artists in today's digital piracy age?

C.) And braincell it's obvious from your perspective that you would freely give away anything you create, one might wonder how much of an income you're actually making off of wordpress & rolling your own distribution since you're lauding that as well? Do you have specific examples of people who are raking in enough dough to 'support themselves' without having been established previously (ie, not a known act before offering stuff for sale online)?

F.) Trent Reznor's model isn't related to "piracy", he's given away the materials in question. So there's 0 piracy involved. It's somewhat related to file-sharing as he is presumably encouraging file-sharing of his materials due to the fact that he's giving away mp3 & FLAC versions for free (I haven't actually READ that he's given away that right, but certainly one might presume so since it's essentially just saving him bandwidth costs).

Section5 redact4.) Also file-sharing and piracy are related, but they are NOT one in the same. File-sharing, fair use rights, being able to loan something to a friend or relative, these are all predicated based on the idea that copyright is limited in scope and doesn't supersede certain rights inherent in sharing and critiquing our own culture. Old models of copyright where you talk about works produced as having THING-ness are broken in our current networked paradigms, where making a copy is fairly transparent (to the original) and doesn't "take away" anything from the original file-holder. That isn't the same thing as not "taking away" something from the original rights owner though...even if there's no thingness to the rights involved.

[valis]

There are a lot of musicians earning enough money to survive through the internet. Playing live was never an easy way to make money. (snip)

Prove these two statements. The rest of your post was framed as opinion ("I think..." & "It is interesting to me...") but you're putting these out there as de-facto statements, back them up!

[valis]

subsection D.) Whereas... (j/k)

There's yet another side to the 'piracy' discussion that established artists here might understand. Consider that during producing a certain work that will be offered up (whether commercially, as art, or both or whatever) you have gone through several iterations of the mix and/or idea. Perhaps you've shared a few versions with people out there, versions that were in understandably half-finished states and quickly rendered out just to get feedback on your idea(s) so far. Do you want that 'out there'? In the electronic stuff I DJ, there are a lot of 'versions' of tunes that I'm allowed to play live only if it's not being recorded, or I can do internet broadcasts but only if I insure that the archiving is disabled (while acknowledging that someone can still record the stream at the other end, albeit in usually dramatically reduces form.) There's basically an agreement between artists who share music like this that you're not going to be 'sharing' it with the general public. This isn't so much about loss of income as it is about having the ability to road-test ideas in front of your peers and/or the audience without worrying about people getting 'stuck' on some certain aspect. For instance tunes that are 'leaked' in unfinished form might either be denigrated for their horrible state (perhaps you only put 3 hours into an idea so far?) or they might be upheld by fans later as being the "one true version" and any subsequent commercial releases avoided for having the 'crappy' version instead (ie, people often grow attached to the first version they've heard after repeated listenings.)

[siriusbliss]

I'll say it again. Having grown up in Cleveland way back in the day, and being in a gigging work-our-ass-off original band back then (when NIN didn't even exist yet), I can remember Trent handing out cassettes for free to his NEXT gig, while the rest of us were busy hanging up posters and standing on street corners in the cold.

IMO Trent's model is somewhat similar to Devo's early model of FREE gigs at the universities, with the 'admission price' paying for a cassettes of the last gig, (and eventually LP's). This created a buzz, the radio stations loved it, the labels glommed on, and the cassettes spread around the campuses, and accordingly served as promotional material. I think Devo and Trent were LUCKY to make any money on gigs, since the gigs were solely used for promotional purposes.

The scene in Cleveland back then was vibrant (perhaps akin to Seattle in the 90's, and Austin in the 80's), but there was no such thing as an internet back then, so you had to really work just to get people into the clubs IN ORDER to even BEGIN selling cassettes or LP's (there were barely even any CD's back then - CD's were a pipedream).

Nowadays, we have myfacebook et. al. to at least handle the otherwise expensive distribution aspect - so it only comes down to promotion, and that requires being able to broadcast somewhere - or handing out music for free IN ORDER to get people to your next gig, or next CD or whatever.

The only real value is maintaining the mystery and buzz of what's coming NEXT.

Greg

[siriusbliss]

Great documentary - 'Before The Music Dies'

Can be seen legally for free on hulu (at least in N. America):
http://www.hulu.com/watch/62945/before-the-music-dies

Greg

[valis]

Yes you're right, I've said too much

[garyb]

i'm glad i got that all off my chest.

[valis]

(dated but seems fitting contrast to the title)

[Fluxpod]

I am not sorry for my comment and i stand by it.
also

[valis]