NEWS: Yet Another Reason To Go Ahead And Get that iPod

I've been down both avenues, and this is blatantly not true. I'd like to think that I'm a reasonably good "home" engineer, as it were, and I have way more than just $200 worth of gear. There's no way anything I've done at home holds a candle to the stuff our label shelled out close to $1000 a day for us to record, even at .mp3 quality.

You keep talking about exposure, but exposure is what you REALLY need record companies for. The only way to get any kind of broad exposure is for someone to drop a couple million into radio promotion. Sure, you could cook up something great in your basement, and get it stuck on iTunes, but who's going to download it? iTunes doesn't advertize for you or get you radio play.

Yeah, but they get a bigger chunk than if you download their one single from iTunes.

Also, smaller, more "indie" (as it were) labels tend to give artists better deals. I have to admit that I'm not particularly broken up by someone downloading, for instance, 98 Degrees or (heh) Metallica. The major label dominance of the industry really is a huge millstone around the neck of modern music in this country. Sure, sinking them all would be a good thing, in the long run, but it's a tough order, and it's hard to know to act as a responsible consumer. We all know that Metallica doesn't need the money, but if you start pirating their work, then their label (who doesn't need the money, either) has less money coming in, and they're going to be less supportive of their smaller acts (who do need the money) and take fewer chances on the as-yet-unsigned (who undoubtedly could use it).

Hey, just because YOU don't like the other twelve songs on the album doesn't mean that nobody likes them, or that they're just "filler." I think it would be a bad thing for music in general if bands were encouraged to try to make every single song they wrote into a "hit single."

As people more and more buy only the parts of an album that they like, the cost for the individual portions of albums will rise. Let's say that selective purchasing allows you to buy (and pay for) only the 20% of each album that you like. Unless you're buying music from 5 times as many albums as you would have if you were not able to purchase songs selectively (and thus were forced to buy entire albums), sales will drop, and prices will increase.

I have always hated the idea of singles mainly because if someone puts out an album you should buy the whole thing or not at all, and as for piracy dishonesty is dishonesty wether you call it cool or not and I for one apprecite the performers I like too much to think it is cool to fuck 'em over. As for the whole napster vs. ipod thing it is always better to OWN then RENT!

Yep, most download services don't stock indie/local bands....but neither do the major CD selling chains like Wal-mart and Sam Goody. Nor are they getting pirated in any significant quantity, I would tend to suspect. It's because they're indie/local bands. No one's heard of them, therefore no one bothers to waste shelf space on their albums, nor look for them on Kazaa or a torrent site.
But at least services like iTunes will distribute them without a label should they sign up. (Well...I think they do, anyway.)

This is why I miss the old MP3.com. It was a great way for a band to get some free exposure by submitting as many songs as they cared to for download. I bought at least three CDs off bands I found there, and still play them regularly today.

If you think of it as your own personal radio station, it might not be such a bad deal, were it not for the lack of a standard DRM protocol. If I could play Napster's music on any portable mp3 player, in the same way I can play almost any studio's movies on my DVD player or any companie's CDs on my CD player, it might be worthwhile.

Think of it as the Netflix of music or an infinitely customizable XM.

Also, their selection would have to be really fucking good.

But this is all a pipe dream, finding a standard copy protection across iMS, Napster, whatever MSN is running, etc. Because then there's no point in having different music services if you can use any of the services with any mp3 player.

C'est la vie. Yay CD's.

just started then did you ?

Correct me if I'm wrong (and I haven't used iTunes so I may well be), but aren't you screwed with the music you download from iTunes in the long run? I heard you can only transfer between computers, what, three times? That's at most twenty years.

Well, my issue is that my multi-disk RAID isn't setup yet.

yes but those are the obscure songs you can never find online...so you HAVE to go out and by them.

You can put music from computer to iPod as many times as you want, but you're not supposed to be able to transfer music from iPod back to computer. There's software that gets around this, though. My friend usually puts his entire iPod contents on my computer every time he visits me.

Curi.

This is cute, but I have had more music available online than in record stores, and I drive a little Mazda station wagon.

Well, I meant a $200 software package (assuming one already had the computer, and ancillary equipment), which was still a huge exaggeration. You may not get good results, but that doesn't change the fact that you can. I know two professional musicians who have shifted to using computers for 100% of their industrials and artistic work. (they play on broadway, so they obviously don't do all of their work that way, but all of their personal work).

This is exactly what I'm talking about. filesharing gives great new avenues for cost-free exposure. Hell, a band that my father was in 30-40 years ago might start to make money again, becasuse maybe *one* person encoded their work from one of the few copies of the one album they ever sold (which never made them any money), and started sharing it. Now it's getting attention in Europe to the point that they might release some stuff they did that's been sitting in a drawer since then. Filesharing to small artists can be just as beneficial as radio play, and doesn't cost them a dime.

how much do they get from itunes? How much do they get if they don't have a production company taking a cut? Every artist I know is talking about being able to release their own stuff now, and skip the "sign your soul and wallet over to us" record contract. Artists that haven't done stuff in years are talking to me about putting them up on the web, because they can cut out the middle man now. So far there hasn't been a single one who asked me "how can we keep this off the filesharing apps"... On the contrary, most want to know how I can get their stuff circulating (for free).

That's a very tenuous argument, you could just as easily argue that big acts making less money will drive labels to look for more new acts and treat their lesser known talent better, because they're less likely to be on kazaa...

That's awesome. Maybe it's starting to work. In my experience, just having your music available, even for free, doesn't, in itself generate any significant amount of exposure. That either takes critical acclaim (largely luck, but pretty much free advertising), or money.

Even for small runs, duplication facilities generally charge only about $1-2 a copy, which is not a huge cut of the total. For major label runs, the actual cost of duplication is miniscule. Distributors can run you $3 a CD. That's always seemed steep to me, but still not a super major slice, either. But when someone buys the one song of yours that they heard on the radio from iTunes, they're only buying a tenth (or less) of your album. It would be informative, at this point, if we had some numbers comparing the number of CD purchases that aren't made because someone only wants one song off the album to the number of partial-album electronic purchases that are made that would NOT have been made if only buying the entire album were an option.

Now, this discussion has pretty much been a financial one. I didn't really intend for it to be that way, but I took umbrage at the image people brought up of the Ferrarri-driving rock star whining about file sharing nibbling away at his multi-platinum sales, and I took that tack.

Let me steer away from that for a moment. As a way to GET a finished product you can actually produce for someone and put in the ears of other people, the record-on-your-compy-release-on-the-web route is a great one. You don't need a studo to actually make a recording. You don't need a pressing house to actually dub you a bunch of copies. With very little overhead you can actually put out a product. I do this. I send my friends my noodlings from the basement. However, as for the financial argument, you will clearly never make any money this way. Even if you DO manage to SELL your work, without a significant promotional investment, your realistically reachable audience will remain small. If you are trying to SELL your work, however, because a lot of money has gone into making it, then it's downrightly shitty of people to steal it, and make it widely available for other people to steal it, too.

Now, I know, clearly, making money at this is not everyone's goal. That's okay for now, because I'm done with the financial argument. It used to be my goal, but I've given it up as unrealistic (this was a while ago, and not related to this discussion, although many of the issues involved were of course the same). I only have a few more bitch points:

(-) If I make an album, I want people to listen to the whole album (and look at the cover art and read the liner notes)! If you were to write a novel, you'd want people to at least give the whole thing a once over, and not just read their favorite chapter again and again.

(-) *I* personally like sticking a physical thing in my CD player. I like having a hard copy, especially if I'm going to buy something. I hate having to use my computer to listen to music. Yeah, I know we have iPods now, but I also hate headphones, and I hate shelling out a couple of hundred bucks for an iPod. Also cars do not have line in jacks on there stereos (what a great idea? why the hell haven't car stereo manufacturers done this yet?!?).

(-) mp3s sound like crap! Sure, sure, some of them aren't so bad at higher bit rates, but give me my 10 megs a minute and all the fidelity along with it.

The list goes on, but I'm ranting now, and... d'oh, I know I said I was done but...

Except that the goal of every major label is to make their acts well known and milkable. I think what's going to happen is that the majors are going to collapse under their own weight (gigantism is just about to precede extinction), but not in any kind of dignified or elegant fashion. They are going to make a lot of noise and suck a lot of the industry, artists included, down with them.