What the BPI really thinks of the public.

This article by Mike Batt appeared in "The Times" today. In it the deputy chairmen of the BPI describes the music buying public as "are greedy, thieving, conniving bastards, every last one". While it's kind of refreshing to hear what they really think, is it any wonder they are in trouble if that is their attiude?

There IS still a place for middelmen but ONLY if they actually add value; at the moment the big music companies are really struggling to justify their existence now their control of the market has been broken.

He also says, "ISPs talking to record companies in order to limit online music theft through their broadband channels is good news for everyone except those who think all music should be free and musicians should go out of business. "

It isn't the musicians that will go out of business because THEY still have a product people WANT. It's the middle men who go out of business because they never did anything useful in the first place. People at EMI got payed huge salaries because they had once introduced a producer to Madonna at a party 12 years ago, these kind of people SHOULD have to do something useful to justify their existence. What do they think the rest of us have to do?

Is this really the same guy who did all the Wombles songs?

Darkheart

i always look at it as not stealing from the record shops (via a loss of physical sale via an illigal download not a shoplifted CD)
nor the distributers
or the record label

but the artist themselves who when you look at it earn royalties which is kinda like working piece work
sure some get huge advances but loose the ownership of the recordings to the label because the label paid for the studio time, then to top it off took the money back in future sales
the band still own the songs other rights (unless penned by someone else)

as with iTunes and other digital downloads no one but the artist should be taking a slice as what have they done?

the business model is evolving but the business isnt
people want to download songs for a small fee and not pay full whack for an album where they might only like 2 songs, ive had many albums like that, even forcing myself to listen to it in its entirety doesnt make the others grow on me

we lack ethical lables
and once established artists are free of their contract they can post whatever new songs they like onto iTunes et all and reap every penny not the megre percentage that the fat cats leave them with for doing fek all in the publics eye

Nine Inch Nails is now self publishing after completing his/their contractual obligations and with his (trent reznor) widly reported anti lable comments re pricing he has stated hed much rather the band stole online than pay over the odds
he once asked why his CD's were still expencive even a few years after release and or why the austrailian release of year zero was massivly over priced
paraphrased record exec "your fans are rabidly loyal if we released it at $50 they would still buy it"
but i doubt his royalty cheque would increase that way, he probably gets paid the same rate regardless of the price of the album

I think as well that at some point the artist will directly sell to his audience. In the yester-decades you needed a publisher's fortune to hire a studio to produce a quality album (those studios with a mixing console you could land an Apache on). Today's supermarket PC's run circles around those studios.

i have a friend whos in about a gazillion bands and im in or have been in atleast 3 of em (details can be found on digital vomit)
wat w.a.t. or w@ take your pick
distance
grey mic black ear (but not i always forget our real band cos of the speccy mantra being too memorable)

none of our stuff, nor any other 'vomiters' would make it on to top of the pops or CDUK if both were still running today, im not even sure if they would make it onto the most fringe market radio 1's setlist let alone any clubs

we end up making music cos we can (or in my case its mostly rants and monologues with over dubs breakbeats and stuff layed on top by my mate in manchester, or an ages old fx pedal recording that gets tweaked here and there into something new)

iir alec empire set up digital hardcore records because no record lable at the time knew how or where to market his atari teenage riot bands material
so he got a bank loan or some other form of start up capital and made his own lable with a few fellow musicians signed within weeks of opening

now if you are too untouchable by a lable all you have to do is set up shop with itunes etc and just keep on gigging

...and you're blaming piracy for the fact that nobody wants to pay to hear that? I'd suggest a very different reason.

What I want to know is... What will the ISP's do, if they had to ban everybody from the net for illegal downloding ?. They would then be the one's that are out of business.


Also, in reference to the following...



This quote is suggesting that we as humans,

and

So am I correct in saying that the people that put the laws there to stop us, are the same as they accuse us to be ?.

After all... They did refer to as

The over-rated, useless b*st*rds who 'compose' the repetitive drivel should be paid less than the local lollypop lady anyway. Let's see the execs feed off that.

We should be allowed to pay what we think their mind-numbing, banal crap is worth! Which is what individual piracy poignantly demonstrates - naff all!!

What's "mind numbing" or "banal" is subjective. Alternatively, why would you object to paying for something "mind numbing" and "banal", then go and download the exact same "mind numbing" and "banal" product for free? Isn't it still "mind numbing" and "banal" regardless of whether it can be had for free or not?

I'm not sure you've thought this through.

Anyway, they might be saying exactly the same about casual games.

I pretty much exclusively download mp3's from limewire and albums from bittorent. Here's why.

I joined a few legal music download services namely tesco digital, itunes and MSN Music. I spent close to £300 on music. Here's where it went pair shaped for 2 reasons.

After formatting my PC a few times I realised that (according to the music download services - msn music etc) I had run out of credits to play the music. So I had to email them seperately to see if I can get more credits to allow me to play the Music I bought. All except Tesco Digital gave me an extra credit to play my music. They would have given me 3 but they didn't believe that I honestly formatted my XP/Vista machine 3 times in 9 months. You see when you format your PC you lose the license. They say you can back it up but this has never worked for me. Anyway I used up the credits I got to play my music. Then about 6 months later I had to format windows again so I lost my licenses, again. This time neither of the Music Services (MSN Music, Tesco Digital, itunes etc) would give me credit unless I paid a small fee. So I told them to go jump off a cliff.

Here's reason number 2.

You buy a download from MSN Music and then 3 months later the license to play and listen to the music expires because the artist has changed their mind about allowing it to be downloadable via Music sites like MSN music, or, the catalogue numbers for the music change therefore invalidating the license you have for the music. Now you may say that you would get a refund for this but do you? of course not. They either tell you to pay for another version, give you a small credit towards another song or send you on your way.

So again, I told them all to go joggin.

Lessons learned and I will happily stick with limewire and bittorent. Also, if I get a BPI letter regarding my illegal music downloads I'm going to send them the receipts for all the music I bought from the legal music sites and ask show them that none of the music is playable or downloadable because they decided to have shitty DRM to ruin my listening pleasures.

Limewire and bittorent FTW.

GFK, I don't download it ( in-fact I even slung out my CD collection years ago ) - and I have yet to see any self-obsessed, vapid, disfunctional, cretinal 'role-models' or 'idols' making casual games with the full weight and support of media and big business behind it... though maybe one day that might change, these weasel execs could sniff-out a free dollar in a mountain range of sloppy pig sh*t.


That's where I'm coming from. Over-rated musical preachers of this or that, not one ounce less hyprocritical or odious than the American TV preachers that infest the other end of the TV channel spectrum.

I don't see their problem. They're worth jack-plop, and music piracy ( to me at least ) demonstrates it doesn't it?

Truthfully, in this instance they're only worth what people are willing to pay and for a large part it seems the answer is nothing - and quite right too in my book. Can't even listen to the radio these days without profanity or licentious vomit hammering our brains over and over.

Well anyhow, not one tiny twinkle of sympathy for the 'music biz' from my corner...or Hollywood come to think of it.

Yahoo on a whim, decides to screw you over.

Exactly who are the crooks here?

Try using a few less adjectives and I might be able to work out what you're trying to say.

This is a good place to post a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head, but I can't be bothered to look for it.

I work as a sound producer and play in several bands, additionaly to being a freelance coder. I love to see my records in some p2p nets. specially when they're shared by a big amount of people, but honestly I would preffer to get paid properly for the work I do (like 10 years ago). Lots of small labels are closing and lots of good bands are just not being known by people. We all lose.

That's not true. Brian Epstein made 'The Beatles' to name one... Musicians are in fact slowly going out of busines. Nobody contracts you if they don't know you, and they don't know you becouse your label is closing. I know a very important Label in Spain that closed while one of its bands was the most ilegally downloaded in the p2p nets in Spain. surprisingly this band's record was also available by 5 euros legaly from the official label website.
[ironic]Why not stole software packages from the shops? coders will survive becouse they still have something we want...[/ironic]

Sure. But this is not due to piracy. It is because of low market penetration.

Yeah, and Sam Phillips made Elvis and Cash. The question is do you think The Beatles, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash were talented enough that, had a service like iTunes or MySpace existed at the time, they would have had their big break regardless, simply because of their immense talent?

It's the Britney Spears, Paris Hiltons and Justin Timberlakes of the world who need to worry about not being discovered if producers and managers are taken out of the equation, not the David Grohls, Eric Claptons and Neil Youngs.

Ziggy, I acknowldge in what I said that there IS a place for middle men who are adding value, this happens in most business models. However the music industry has been savaging itself and it's customers by thrashing around and making most of it's customers really angry with it. On top of that if you've worked in the music business then you will have to acknowledge that there were (and probably still are) a lot of people who made an awful lot of money out of doing very little. There are also those who willfully damaged both artists and the public if they felt they could make more money doing it.

They could have cut CD prices many years ago, they didn't.

They could have invested in legal download sites many years ago, they didn't.

They could have given the artists a reasnoble cut of the proceeds from the start, they didn't.

They could have given artists fair contracts where the artist still retained some control over their work, they didn't.

There are numerous other examples of how the industry has shot itself in the foot and really engineered the situation where the public really couldn't care less if the music industry suffers and dies. In fact many people feel they deserve everything they get.


If they had done just a few of the things suggseted above the illegal file sharing scene would never have got started. Why download some dodgy, poor quality, might be a virus, MP3 from some dodgy guy in the Ukraine when I can buy the track I want for 50p and it's high quality, safe, allows me to try out other tracks from the band, has full metadata, no DRM etc. They could still do this now...but they don't, hence the music industry is it's own executioner!

Darkheart

I'm kind of with Ziggy here. and I've just had an interesting idea.

how can you pirate something that is listed as free to download?

im not with a lable as such afaik digital vomit is more of a webforum/(anti?)creative melting pot they do sell cds but rarely anything expencive and the same cd is free to download anyhows

my initial post was about sod what sony/bmg emi virgin etc get lets make sure billy bragg sting nine inch nails eminem the who the doors radio head etc get the dosh they deserve

and they should have ditched the CD single years ago
its a waste of plastic
one 3 track song uses the same amount of material as a full album and is stammped just as quick, do people listen to the remix b-sides?
and at damn near £5 a disc it only takes a few singles and you have the £15 you were going to spend on the album spent already and hardly anything of worth to show for it

(legal) digital downloads allow you to get the tracks you want not the dross they padd out some discs with
and even if you dont want to do the download route chances are it will be on the next now thats what i call another poinltess compilation, they are better value for money if all you ever do is listen to the a side radio version

CD's can be recycled, i can think of alot of singles that should be trashed the same way ET was on the 2600, im glad alot of mass air play bands arnt carbon friendly cos theyd never get to be carbon nutural releasing a truck load of dross that only a few people really care about and the others endure cos dross sells better to tweenagers than intelegent articulate and informative artists (who just get pirated by their older relatives)

i remember making mix tapes off the radio
yes you would get a bit of talking at the begining or end of the track
but it would be nice if radio stations allowed you to download the latest shows setlist, you hear a song for the first time, why not buy from radio 1 or virgin radio instead of having to get the name and look it up elsewhere

here is a new song buy "x" click here to buy online now even if it is an affiliates with itunes or hmv digital, if i first heard it on web radio id want to also buy it from said station (esp if it helps fund future broadcasts)

No, I don't think so. they all are great for several reasons, one of the most important of them is that they had big companies investing money on them. Otherwise they could not have had spent a whole year recording one single album in studios like Abbey Road. No money = not this time to produce music = less quality albums. How many records currently can afford to pay an entire orchestra on the recordings for, lets say, a week?

don't you see you have mixed current bad artists with good classics? (where are the contemporany classics?) currently companies only spend money on things they're sure they can sell and this is causing no more Neil Youngs and a continuation of several Britney Spears and co. In fact, if interesting labels are closing, who will promote a good artist? a non-proffit association?

Johnny Cash had talent?

Can't stand him, myself. His songs are so miserable even Thom Yorke would tell him "Oh cheer up FFS!". And that's saying something.

(if he wasn't dead, obviously).

I completely agree with that. They were needed once but now are an obselete relic of a past era, at least to the capacity they enjoyed in the past.

got back from the cambridge folk festival with a fair bit of cd's from the propper stall
finding more and more artists these days have ownership of the sound recording aka the (P) but in a full circle dont know the ascii for that one ;)
this means that should they wish to leave their current lable they can* and if they want to prevent said lable re issuing old disc's they can also allowing their current distributer (as thats all the lable becomes when the artist owns all rights) to re issue it when the next print run is due

there was a time when i could only list bruce springsteen, ray charles (after leaving atlantic) and iron maiden (holdings) being band/artists owners and their lables nothing more than distribution

sure if your new or if your last album wasnt selling well they arnt going to press a gazzillion CD's, but its better than being a fully financed vanity lable

* ok some or most might still be under obligation to realease X ammount of albums before its due for renewal, but whats to stop someone releasing a tonne of unreleased songs and a best of and calling it quits?