Yet even though music is easy to pirate, people still buy it at the iTunes store. To me it seems as if there are two problems - how to get the word out, and how to make it easy for people to support you. If you don't get the word out, nobody will support you, because they won't know about you. And if you don't have a dead easy way for people to support you, you won't get the support, because piracy is dead easy. But iTMS is dead easy too, and I think that's why it works.

My big problem with indy music right now is that every place I've gone looking for it, most of what is available there is shit. Absolute shit. Shit that somebody worked really hard to produce, that they imbued with their own blood, sweat and tears. But nevertheless shit.

I think you need to solve that problem, or you're fucked. There has to be some way for the shit to sink to the bottom, and the good shit to rise to the top. And the problem will get solved, because if it doesn't people will stop making music. But until it gets solved, you're going to be in a world of hurt. And the more people in the music industry cling to what used to work, or what's fair, the longer it's going to take.

Oh, and if it depends on *everybody* being decent and responsible, it's not going to happen. Don't try for perfection. Try for something that works.

Bands need new ways to spread the word and interest listeners in investing in them, and the corporate element needs to figure out a business plan that doesn't involve suing potential clientele, even if they're pirates. Pirated music, like other media, is so easily available that for many people it's like pennies on the sidewalk. Pick it up and think nothing of it. No one cares what corporations say; the bands themselves have to do the work of convincing fans to shell out a few dollars on their behalf.

-TTm

i think it may be more accurate to say that the value of media--music, TV, movies, etcetera--is changing. prior to easy piracy, media had a direct value: use of that media could be charged for, making it easy to get money from good (or at least popular) media. this created an era of rich artists and lots of money in the media industry. but despite having direct value, it's important to remember that media does not have any inherent value. that is, there's nothing that says a popular song must cost X dollars to acquire except the principles of supply and demand--a popular song costs X dollars to acquire only because everyone on both sides of the transaction (seller and buyer) agree that it should cost X dollars.

right or wrong, technology has altered the direct value of media. without minimizing the illegality of filesharing, it remains true that it's altered the value of a CD in the same way that CDs have altered the value of cassette tapes: there's a more attractive method of acquiring music available, and people are going to take advantage of it.

there's a fundamental difference between downloading a song and, say, stealing a candy bar, and that difference is the relatively fixed cost of producing a candy bar versus the highly variable costs of producing a good song. that is, a "good" artist (not every good artist, and not necessarily the best artists, but a subset of good artists) can produce good and/or popular music with very little in the way of expensive equipment. whereas a "bad" artist will be unable to produce good music no matter how expensive his equipment is. so there's no "base cost" for a good song to compare against the profit lost when someone downloads a song--all you can go on is the cost of the medium. since the medium is fast becoming outmoded, that's not a very good indicator.

and unlike a candy bar, a good song has a wealth of secondary value. for instance, they're great advertisements for saleables that do have direct value, eg t-shirts and concert tickets. stealing a candy bar doesn't entice me to buy a ticket to tour the Hershey factory.

the point of all this is that i think the lion's share of the burden of making a workable business model for music (and movies, and TV, and so on) is on those who produce it. this has, to be honest, always been true--the act of making music, even good music, does not entitle the artist to fortune and fame (not that i'm accusing you of saying it does). it's up to the artist to convert his/her talent into whatever reward he/she desires.

which isn't to say i'm not sympathetic to the plight of artists, those who've "made it" and those who haven't. i can also sympathize with others who work in the music industry--the companies that create music equipment and mediums, the marketing firms that get artists out into stores, and so on. but the climate is changing, and the species that have thrived until now will need to adapt. it doesn't seem fair... but i'm not sure fairness was ever there to begin with.

Video killed the radio star,

Idol killed the video star.

As a musician, I am sympathetic to the artist, but the music industry is filled with way more bloat than the auto industry. It needs to die, and the musicians need to be able to make it on their own without the labels. Same thing goes for any kind of publishing...the internet has made all of the middlemen irrelevant. Unfortunately, it is the artist that is paying the price right now.

Seriously, there is no reason to ever buy a record, tape, or CD. The artists need to get on board with digital distribution and figure out another way to make a living doing what they love. People just don't buy music the way they used to.

American Idol is a total red herring, though.

David Cook, Jordin Sparks and Taylor Hicks can't go more than platinum. They're blips in the musical landscape.

Of course. It's just a symptom of the cancer. All Idol winners are irrelevant.

You have the example of, say, Ingrid Michaelson launching herself via myspace. how? by being cute of course, but also having a good voice and writing good songs, so it ultimately didn't matter if it was all done on garageband. Now she's a star (okay, also because one of her songs was on ER or whatever the hell).

For a band like yours, Filter Man, it totally sucks and you have my sympathy, however for all those AOR toads who've been wining and dining people like you and even sometimes me on expense accounts given them by their head honcho ARR dads, etc., I'm glad to see their swinish feeding frenzy die down to a roar.

Let the IDOL morons chew their cud - the lines are drawn, the rest of us can find each other everywhere... I'll pay to download an album, I'll even buy it, if I get to hear it first and have a few tracks for free that I really love - but there's no need for fatcats to get rich off it... "promotion" and all that is for the chumps who need to be told what to buy. You know why it took me awhile to get into Bruce Springsteen? BECAUSE of his label push. He's got a bad rap because he was promoted like some dumb "mainstream" rocker, and was poisoned by default. Death to mainstream rock! Look what it did to Bob Marley? He'd be turning over in his grave if he knew how many odious frat boys have LEGEND in their collections..

Of course I sympathize that bands want to reach the great moneyed dumb-class because that's how you sell out stadiums, but you also can do just fine by touring and keeping a low profile.... just ask poor departed Lux Interior, those guys were rocking it out for decades without ever having to rise and fall along some dumb "Craze" like grunge.

Everything dies, the bigger they come the harder they fall, etc. Just sit tight, my friend, once the smoke clears, if you have anything to say, I have the feeling people will still be able to hear it, regardless of your distribution rights in Japan. we hear you now, and you're roaring like the wind.

Oh and there's also emusic.com, which I suscribe to ($20 a month for 90 downloads) Put your band on there, man! Rasta.

Oh yeah? Back in my day (which is pretty damn close to your day ), I had something that looked like this:



We used to buy these things:



and hit this little red button



when good songs came on the radio. Then we'd take them and play them for friends or in the car, or even give them to other people. I'd take them to my friend's house, because she had something like this:



and we'd copy them for all our friends and make lots of mix tapes with albums we already had. Sometimes we even mailed those tapes to friends in other cities (especially our older friends who were off at college already), in return for different mixes from bands we'd never heard of, because radio stations were all so different that you'd hear a completely different sound in another city. It was a really fucking great way to hear bands you'd never heard, sorta like the internet is now. Except the internet's easier to use, so I find a LOT more new music that I really love and buy it. I just looked at my iTunes collection and realized how many songs on there I bought that I never would have heard of if they hadn't been suggested to me online, because they would never get airplay.


Concidentally, I still hear "Hey Man Nice Shot" in rotation on KROQ, so I would hope you're still selling albums (or songs on iTunes) because of the airplay. I bought that Filter album when it came out and it was pretty good. I used it in a couple mix tapes I made for friends. Some of them went out and bought the single or the whole album after I played it for them. I probably shouldn't have bothered, though, since it's still getting airplay nearly 15 years after its release. You guys still making money off that, or all the stuff it got licensed for, like that X-Files episode with Giovanni Ribisi where he channels lightning? That was a pretty cool episode. Or did your recording contract fuck you out of that profit like a lot of labels do?



Did you know that some people at Harvard who are way, way smarter than me figured out that filesharing doesn't actually hurt record sales in any significant way? Apparently there's just really not that much crossover between the people who would actually buy a song or an album and those who download it without buying it, so the sale isn't exactly "lost" since it wouldn't have happened in the first place. Sorta like that Britney Spears song that somehow got onto my laptop. I dunno quite how that happened (my chihuahua might a Britney fan), but there's no way in hell I ever would have paid for it so it's not a "lost sale" anyway.




Oh, but thanks to the major labels and their technological innovation, I will never again have to download a song I wouldn't buy anyway, because the record labels put them all online for me to listen to any time I want. For free.

See, I bought that Filter album back in the 90s when it came out and it's since been lost in the sands of time (or maybe to an ex-boyfriend who stole most of my CDs when we broke up), but sometimes I still want to hear the song. So now I can just go to http://www.mtvmusic.com/filter and listen for free and watch the videos any time I feel like hearing one of your songs.

Hope your contract is letting you make some money off that. Otherwise I'd almost feel pretty bad about it.

Just sayin'.

No, I wouldn't be surprised. I have somewhat of an understanding of how music contracts work. My point was that if Filter isn't making money, it's not exactly likely to be caused by people downloading their songs without paying, despite what the labels tell them.


Courtney Love (or whoever was writing using her name, because her writing tends to be a little less than coherent) once wrote a really great article a while back about how badly bands can get fucked by major labels, if anyone's interested in a fairly simple explanation of what I'm talking about.

There was also a good breakdown (with actual science and statistics and links to studies done by really really smart people!) on Arstechnica in 2007 about how piracy actually affects music sales.

touring, movie soundtracks, i tunes, merchandise, airplay, more touring, endorsements, commercials, side projects, session work, television, selling songs to others, foreign markets, video games... seems to me there are plenty of ways to make $$$ with music. if you are good, it can be done.

bet you could sell "hey man nice shot" for a booze ad

american idol is for retards

i'm a big fan, have been since i saw ya with NIN at the first Lollapalooza in California. i bought 2 Filter cds in the 90's and then purchased them again on i tunes years later. people still buy music.

the music industry is bloated and i don't care about their whining. the cats out of the bag now and the times are a changin

Tapes aren't DIGITAL! They sound like crap! Mp3 are almost perfect reproductions, leading people to not buy the album because they sound the same.

There has always been shit music and maybe there seems to be even more of it right now because no one nurtures artists anymore. Unless you hit it out of the park on your first single, no one will guide you like they use to. Like I said in my article, people would have considered Bruce Springsteen crap or U2 shit because it took them three albums to have a hit. Because the industry is crumbling, bands aren't given the opportunity to grow into greatness. It's do or die right from the start. How many Springsteens or U2s are we losing because the business side of things is failing?

There is a lot of great music happening in the world right now and I would say that less than one percent of it is backed by a major label. Our Hardcore and Punk Bretheren paved the way for everything we have now, and I feel like your pissing all over it.
The Internet has taken the Hardcore DIY ethos to a whole new level and we'll have to see were it takes us. Of course there will always be bad elements to it but that is inherrent in human nature. As technology evolves we must also, and to survive as an artist we have to adapt and over come. I can Imagine a world without the Boss or U2 But I would hate too see a world without the Minutemen or Fugazi. They adapted and overcame the odds and got thier music out with no help from big biz. And so must We