Open source projects like Relisten [1] depend on the Internet Archive for long term storage of legally recorded concerts from artists like the Grateful Dead, known for their unique concert experiences. This is an invaluable public service for millions of music fans and a boon to American history and culture.
Look, don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of copyright violation. But every time something like this pops up my instant reaction is that Internet Archive are inflicting this on themselves.
They are aiming to provide storage service for legally recorded concerts? Great. This should be a separate project, partnered and advertised, but formally unrelated to IA "backup the internet" thing. They are aiming to be a huge online library that allows you to "legally" borrow books? Great, let it be another separate project. Internet Archive has enough problems on its own, there's no need to keep loading all sorts of obviously dangerous initiatives on top of it.
I used to agree. But—Part of what they’re working towards is a demonstration that librarians are gonna do stuff like this, and shouldn’t have to do defensive organizational engineering about their archival projects.
Credibility doesn’t fall from the sky… it has to actually be earned by someone or groups of someones. Usually in the course of their decisions and activities.
Librarians don’t magically start off with an unlimited amount of it, such that they can completely ignore these considerations, and experience no consequences.
Even if they truly are all the most amazing, wonderful, honorable people on Earth, their credibility would still be depleteable.
It means, archivists are gonna archive stuff. What does what you said mean? "Credibility"? Is that some kind of apologetics for lawyers hunting for copyright infringements?
Would it be easy for funding given to the Internet Archive to be transferred to a separate project (under its own legal umbrella)?
Second, I don't know much about charities or whatever legal form the IA and co fall under, but I do recall they need to have a board of representatives; is it legal for the same people to be on that board for multiple related charities? I can imagine adding more leadership to different charities becomes challenging.
The conventional idea is a band makes a CD of their songs, mastered to perfection, stamps out CDs and streams, and that's it. The exact same audio, let's call it the "radio edit". I hear the song on the radio, it's exactly the same. I can tell when a performer is lip syncing, because no singer sings a song the same way twice, and I know the radio edit. It's burned in my brain.
But, I discovered that when real bands, like Fleetwood Mac, play a concert, they play their old standards, but in a different way every time. I bought their concert CDs, because hearing different versions of the same song makes it fresh and fun again.
So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs? I bet they'd increase sales, especially to people like me.
I suppose they think they are doing that with the "remastered" edits, but those all stink. Sing it again, Sam!
First you are wrong from the very start. Although the original source is usually the same many cases the radio-edit was not the same audio as the album version. It was usually much shorter. There is a reason it was called radio edit.
> So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs? I bet they'd increase sales, especially to people like me.
In no particular order:
- because concert recordings already achieve this purpose.
- because time in the studio is costly, and you are not touring or composing while you are doing it.
- because every single person will have her favorite studio version, the same way they may have their favorite concert radio and most would not buy n versions of the same song and would dislike the slightly modified one. Some have already produced n version, uncensored and censored versions. Usually you like the one you heard first the most.
- Producing many different SKUs does not magically equal to making significantly more sales and can reduce revenues if stock of the less popular ones do not sell.
Also, if they're not the same recording, they're not the same album, which means that the popularity of any individual album is split. Contracts get better the better an album does on the charts, but if you release the same album three times, you're competing against yourself.
Release the variations under the same SKU. It's not like you're manufacturing rocket engine parts. Have some fun with it! This whole thread of "it can't work because that isn't the way we've always done it" is comical to me.
"Have some fun with it"... For most bands, each album they put out is a year's worth of effort and a year of income. You don't want to get de-listed from the charts because it looks like you're gaming the system. If your album charts, it's guaranteed radio and playlist placements, leading to more exposure.
Most bands are funded similar to VC.. there's an investment, then payoff then profit. If you don't payoff the investment because you "had fun with it", your band will be dropped and you are searching for a label while working your day job.
I didn't even think about that when writing the comment. But even the great Jobim had some duds. More importantly, I think the career of Jobim proves the original user's point. He was without any challengers the best composer of the 20th century, and he released different versions of many of his songs. Something which was not uncommon in the past. So why don't modern stars for example invite another popular singer to sing their song and release such a version?
There used to be a few sites (what.cd? waffles?) that, while officially pirate / torrent sites, were treasure troves of rare music; unpublished stuff, limited issue tapes from music markets, bootlegs / live recordings, FLAC versions of vinyls (which, at least for a while, had improved dynamic range compared to CDs, think music without the loudness war stuff), etc.
Of course, the music industry went after them once it was discovered they weren't actually a waffle recipe website, and the sites were taken down. I hope the copies and archives continue to live on on data hoarders' systems.
> When they do 20 takes and pick the "best", there's always a second "best". It's not like you're starting over.
For modern pop music... as i understand it, the 'best' is a compilation of the 20 takes. There isn't necessarily a 'second best' take to choose. You could comp the takes differently, but i don't know anyone in any field who likes intentionally doing a job less than what they think is the 'best'.
From the 'Save the Archive' site:
"But when their Great 78 Project rescued over 400,000 recordings, major labels responded with a lawsuit against the Internet Archive for research library streams of old vinyl records.... Artists and labels alike should partner with valuable cultural stewards like the Internet Archive—not sue them. It’s time to support nonprofit music preservation to ensure that our music and our stories aren’t lost to history."
Most of the hundreds of old 78 labels (Brunswick, Federal, Odeon, Okeh, to name a few) [0] are long gone, as are their masters (if any) and their artists. IA recovered those recordings from existing copies made long, long ago... preserving a cultural heritage directly from collections of music available -only- on 78s. Many of the recordings were made with fragile shellac.
That is apparently the focus of these invidious lawsuits.
Because they don’t make (practically) any money on CD sales, streaming, or radio plays, the record labels do. That one performance is recorded, and they get paid for that performance and the record label owns it. Any time that recording is played, it’s seen as a marketing to sell the album.
The artist makes their money through each live performance, so it makes sense for them to change things up so concert goers have an incentive to see something new.
> they don’t make (practically) any money on CD sales
No, not any more, because Napster and the other IP-theft networks that followed in its wake destroyed that revenue model, both for the musicians and the record companies. But before that, many popular musicians made very large fortunes purely from record sales. So much so that some of them, most famously the Beatles, were able to give up live performance altogether.
Also, I would suggest that what draws typical audiences to live performance is not the hope of hearing the lead guitarist bust out hot new variations on his solos. What they enjoy is the communal experience and the thrill of seeing famous people in the flesh.
May I introduce you to literally all of Classical and Jazz Music?
Hell, tons of other genres are recorded piles of times with each being different. Even in the pop world, covers exist, a long tradition of different artists doing the same song.
In jazz it's more common to see multiple recordings of the same song by the same artist. Bill Evans recordings of Autumn Leaves opened up my mind for exploring this.
> So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs?
I had that exact same thought today when listening to Snarky Puppy’s re-release of We Like It Here. I have become so familiar with the original release that all of the differences in the remixes sound like mistakes, and the alternative takes sound like the musician forgot to read the music.
Yes, I realise they’re improvised. Which is the point. Because they only published one canonical improvisation (until now) my conception of their music was made rigid in a way that probably wasn’t intended by the artists.
(It also makes me appreciate the work that Giles Martin did on The Beatles’ remixes, that any deviation would be seen as heresy, and yet he’s managed to avoid any substantive controversy.)
Maybe in the future, recordings could have an AI component to them, such that every time you play it, you get a subtly different performance.
Some artists may choose to lean in the technology more than others, with one extreme being soloists and improvisations published in the form of a bespoke model, trained on the entire history of jazz and refined by the artist to suit their tastes and the particular piece of music.
> So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs? I bet they'd increase sales, especially to people like me.
They do though; more and more I'm seeing artists publish alternative edits, remasters, live versions, demos, songs-that-didn't-make-it, basically more of their back catalog onto streaming platforms. These "rare" tracks aren't going to sell albums so the investment to publish a new album won't be worth it, but uploading more stuff to streaming platforms is relatively cheap and easy in comparison. It's long tail stuff, but streaming platforms earn big on long tail.
That is absolutely nothing new. Artists have known what OP is saying, and have been doing exactly that, since we started putting music on tin foil in 1877.
thats like the entire jamband scene which been around since the 60s... the grateful dead, phish, kind gizzard and the lizard wizard...
one could also mention the electronic scene in there. aphex twin released ventolin in 1995 which was the same track remixed multiples times with different edits.
A while back, Scorpions decided to re-record all their hits and release them on an album. The result was so close in production and performance that Apple Music went ahead and swapped the new version in place of the original.
You'd dial up Rock You Like a Hurricane, and it'd play this thing that sounded just like the version you had burned into your head, but subtly different. It was like watching a car chase scene in a straight-to-Netflix movie where they thought they could get away with doing the whole thing in CGI. Straight down the middle of Uncanny Valley, to the point where you can't enjoy the song at all, and just spend your 4 minutes cataloging the tiny differences that don't live up to the Real Thing.
Those hit songs all captured Magic in some way that just can't be recreated. Plenty have tried what you're talking about (Great White did the same trick, redoing their early stuff with their new singer), but all it does is create bland copies that don't live up to the original. They actually make you wonder why you liked the original in the first place, since (in GW's case) the replacement is just a cookie-cutter blues rock song that anybody could have done.
It's hard to believe until you hear it, since yeah, it seems like a good idea.
They are much more raw and less polished so you can't mistake the concert radio for a studio one and vice-versa and it doesn't catch you completely off guard when there are differences.
> So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs? I bet they'd increase sales, especially to people like me.
Because, to a first approximation, you and I don't result in any real revenue no matter what an artist does.
If you're a mid-tier artist, you want to fully extract money from your 100 rabid fans who will show up every single time you appear in that area and everybody else can go hang.
> So my idea is, why don't bands produce a dozen or so "radio edits" of their better songs? I bet they'd increase sales, especially to people like me.
When was the last time you heard anything off of Blackstar by Bowie? Or any of Johnny Marr's latest stuff?
The issue isn't creating music. It's getting any of your music played anywhere.
Relatively quick, ~3 minutes wasn't it? For quick consumption you'll now get the "tiktok edit" of ~10-30 seconds. I wonder how much the artists of popular short-video music earn though, given the samplers of their songs can get tens of millions of views / listens.
Pop music is kind of doing this, serially recording variations that prompt critics to ask "why are all songs the same?"
I've worked in a number of recording sessions. There are seldom actually multiple takes -- those cost money. There is usually one publishable take. When you've got that one in the can, you move on to the next song. But naturally I can't speak for major acts like Fleetwood Mac. Historically, bands varied a lot in terms of how much editing they wanted to do. Many hits were recorded in one take by hired studio musicians.
I agree that something like this would help bring back the authenticity to music, it would almost be like the equivalent of how DVDs have director commentary, outtakes, etc.
Some albums are published (also on streaming) with a commentary track, or a podcast series and making-of video series alongside it by the musician. Or n=1, I know Devin Townsend has taken to doing it. Ultimately they're all promotion for their albums and concerts, of course, but they're great for their "personal branding" as well.
The movie business does things like "directors cut", "restored cut", etc. I'm sure it would be expensive to have more alternate cuts of the same scene. But when a studio does 20 takes of a song to get the perfect version, it would be cheap to release a bunch of them.
Have you ever seen a TV commercial played to death, to the point where you hate the commercial, the product, and the company behind it? I bet that would be less of a problem if the same commercial had several different takes, and then mix them up when broadcasting them. (Yes, I know some are deliberately different, and yes, it helps.) Even a version now and then where they flub their lines, or trip over something, etc.
Wouldn't it be more fun if Star Wars had two versions, one where Han shoots first, one where Greedo does, and you never knew which one you'd see when going to the theater? There are still a couple flubs in the released version, like when Luke yells "Carrie", there could be different reels released at the same time. The fans would then be impelled to keep going to the theater hoping to see all the different versions.
Right, and they're done to juice the declining sales of the original. My idea was to release slightly different versions at the same time. Have two albums, identical cover, identical catalog number, same songlist, just the songs are different takes, maybe a different arrangement. The fans will be impelled to keep buying the album until they get both.
The deadheads were more of a cult than a business model.
I know that Jimi Hendrix seems to live on and on as his estate finds alternate cuts of his songs and releases album after album. They seem to have done well with this, but only pursued it out of desperation after he died.
Do you not find it enjoyable to hear live performances of a song because it's different than the radio edit? Why not take more advantage of that?
There are. They call them Diet Pepsi, 7UP, Gatorade, etc.
But more to the point, music doesn't work like soft drinks. In soft drinks the product is physical and has a unit cost so the customer isn't just buying Pepsi once and then they have already have Pepsi and never need any more. In music an artist makes an album and then people buy it, at which point they have it and if the artist wants more money they have to make more albums. But making more recordings of the same songs is kind of like making more songs, in the sense that it's something people might want and don't already have.
Everything falls into place if you think of the arguments as aimed at reducing resistance to the abolition of copyright rather than actually helping musicians.
The problem with existing copyright is it's written by record labels in order to screw customers and musicians instead of being written to screw record labels in favor of customers and musicians.
You want something that makes it so a signed artist can't just do a cover of an independent artist's song, or use it in advertising, without paying. You don't want anti-circumvention laws that lock down consumer devices. But the laws do the latter -- which facilitates the monopolization of distribution -- and then artists de facto lose the former because once there's a cartel you're under pressure to sign with the record company and lose the rights to your music.
The entire copyright thing needs to stop. It is preventing great music from being made or at least released publicly.
I understand that some musicians get nice royalties and this is their full-time thing, but most of us get close to nothing from streaming and barely break even from record sales.
I'd rather get nothing and be allowed to sample and remix everything.
That's besides the point. The handful of big pop stars tilt the scale so massively that the interests of whomever is financially representing them will always guide the direction of the music industry as a whole.
That's entirely up to the artists though, and plenty choose to publish their work rights-free. However, they can't earn a living off of free or charity-paid-for music. While I'm sure there's a way to make money off of rights-free music (I mean you can still publish your albums, get on Spotify, do concerts etc), it's going to be similar to open source software - you can't compete with free.
> They're in competition with all the other bands.
I feel like we need to break out the Housing Theory of Everything on this one.
Bands have been in competition with other bands since music was invented, that's not new. What's new is that it costs $200/night for a hotel room when you're making, uh, $200/night. If everything didn't cost so much then making that amount of money would work.
But the system is set up so that, more and more, they're competing for scraps. Shouldn't we incentivize making good art, rather than just becoming a superstar?
> Shouldn't we incentivize making good art, rather than just becoming a superstar?
The music I like is good, and the music I don't like is bad. Zero people share my opinions on which is which. Are you sure you aren't just unhappy that other people don't share your taste and prefer superstar music?
Pretty sure. Tastes vary, but you're arguing that runaway commercial success is a prerequisite for artistic success?
Not to mention that those superstars need to come from somewhere. If a career in music is basically like spending all your money on lottery tickets, society ends up poorer: many hard-working young musicians are going to see it for the exploitation machine that it is, and go sell advertising instead.
Sure, however, "good" does not mean "commercial success"; a lot of "the arts" are subsidised, by e.g. governments, foundations, charities and donors, simply because it's not going to be a commercial success. Other parts of "the arts" are commissioned, like statues. They will be "good", but the problem with art is "good" is a very hazy goal.
I mean. I can enjoy ambient eerie dream-themed wailing and blown brass instruments [0], but it's not for everyone.
It doesn't appear to be competition. David is basically saying there are two tiers: the big stars and everyone else. Everyone else is making their money from selling their music, not from touring.
Yeah, probably not. But David was dispelling the myth that touring is where the money, if any, comes from. Apparently as a mid-tier musician the crumbs are record-sales crumbs, not touring crumbs.
He definitely brought up some interesting points I had not considered about how only weekends will give a band a large draw, about over saturation of venues in the U.S., etc.
I'm not sure that's making a strong case though. The fans go to the concert and buy what they're selling. That's albums and posters and shirts etc. But the fans have a given amount of disposable income and are inclined to support the band (if they wanted the music without paying they could just pirate it already), so what do you lose if you instead sold more posters and fewer albums? If anything you end up with more exposure on both fronts. If the fan who wants to support you buys a shirt instead of an album then people see them wearing the shirt and discover the band, meanwhile if recordings were free then people who wouldn't have paid might listen and once again discover the band.
More fans mean more attendance on tours, so we're back to that, but also more fans buying merchandise, whether that's albums or something else. So there's no disproof of the argument that the band's worst enemy is obscurity, and then limiting the distribution of their music is still the threat rather than the solution.
We used to give away a swag bag at the D conferences. Eventually, we realized that what everyone liked and wanted was the t-shirt. So instead of swag, we gave out higher quality t-shirts. Better for everyone!
Only for the most successful ones. But I guess that is the future we are headed to: a cutthroat industry where there are a few successful musicians that give us the illusion that music is still created by people, and the rest of them out of a job anyway because of AI.
There's also the wedding band business, and people hire live musicians for parties all the time.
It's a supply and demand thing. There are so many musicians, the idea that they all can make a living doing it is simply not realistic. Only a very few will, regardless of whether they make a few pennies off of streaming or not. Having the government pay them through taxes is a terrible idea.
I know many people who are musicians. It's always a side gig.
I know artists, too. No money to be made there, either. Maybe a few pennies at the local arts&crafts fair.
Musicians are more likely to stick around these days because you can get a small piece of the pie instead of just immediately dying off if no label or radio station will pick you up.
The underground is dying though due to a plethora of other forms of entertainment. Shows were a great spot to get some social interaction, but people just don't go out as much anymore and are more likely to do discord and videogames instead of hitting up a basement, bar, cafe, or warehouse.
Which would include the family of working musicians | fencing contractors over the road from me in rural Western Australia.
The husband and wife lead performers are in their early forties and have been playing music live for 20 years .. they sell recordings but their main music income is hotel venues and music festivals - they tour almost half the weekends of the year, mostly local, sometime by plane to the other side of the country.
When not touring they're building fences by contract (ATM mostly around solar setups for Telstra and mobile repeater towers in the rural telecomm domain)
They're not a super band, the live performances pay for themselves and turn a profit, all up they're making something like $200K (AUD) per annum from both jobs.
They're not especially well known by name outside of blues hotel gigging.
This has always been the case with artists, and copyright utterly failed to change this dynamic. It functions primarily as another mechanism for a few incredibly wealthy private individuals to wield state power to attack artists. If you want to help artists then I almost cannot think of anything more counterproductive than treating their cultural output like a physical good subject to market forces and capture.
> treating their cultural output like a physical good subject to market forces and capture
Like it or not, that's always going to be the case. The Law of Supply & Demand cannot be repealed. It's in play even when the government fixes prices and payouts.
data based products aren't subject to the supply law, obviously, since the supply is infinite and would therefore have a zero price if it were not for copyright laws.
Exactly! Imagine if FOSS weren't a social norm in the space of programming tooling. You'd probably see something like what's gone on in the music industry, with Microsoft, Apple, and Google buying up exclusive rights to nearly every language and toolchain, then selling subscriptions to be allowed to use them (subject to T&C), and they'd be able to do this only because they could wield legally-granted power punish anyone distributing their purchased toolchains. The world would be significantly worse.
Why are you talking about the future? It has always been like that. I am pretty sure it was already like that in the trobadors days, antic Greece or Olmec civilization.
Artists have almost always been poor unless they found wealthy or state sponsors.
There's no "will be" about it. Live performances are the past, present and future of the music industry. Musicians have basically never made real money from recordings.
The Beatles gave up live performance in 1966, because they no longer enjoyed it and because they were making huge sums of money from their record sales. In fact, the following year, they released their biggest-ever selling album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
People like both and there are tons of players out there.
Heck, the car I just got has one. (Used 2001 model
My granddaughter absolutely loves CD media. She looks at the notes for the couple I have cases and liner notes for.
She decorates the ones we made with her tunes on them.
And working the SONY player has shown her the allure those techy looking vacuum, phosphor displays [1] coupled with buttons, dials and the little noises the thing will make, all combine to make for a fun experience just operating the thing.
I wonder what she will make of hidden tracks... [0]
By how much are they going up, and how does that relate to inflation? The production and distribution costs of CDs aren't going to improve much, the volume of them (production and sales) is a fraction of what it was (around the 2000s, pre-Napster).
I don't think it is unlikely. I think those who go to mega-concerts are the same who go to local venues and festivals, or at least, the overlap is significant. It is more about going or not going to live events in general.
It is just that for Taylor Swift in particular, I don't know if this genre is well represented in local venues.
That it works for the top 0.1% of musicians demonstrates literally nothing about what the effects are for musicians in general. This is like saying that because Stephen King makes good money, writers are fine. It is a willful misunderstanding of reality.
The reality is that things have gotten much tougher for working musicians in general.
2. I sign a dance all the time with my kid. have also been to tens of concerts where various artist sanged and danced. this comment makes no sense at all…
Everything you've posted on this page leads up to this. The postings about musicians livelihoods seem haphazard and half-hearted. But this, getting government out of copyright, is a point I sense you cherish deeply.
Your inference is right on target. Although I have made a living via copyright in the past, I'd prefer it abolished.
I do eat my own pudding, though. The D compiler is given away for free.
As evidence, Germany in the 1800s had no copyrights nor patents. Their economy boomed. Look at how free software, of the highest quality, has taken over the internet. I am not aware of any particularly compelling counter-evidence that copyright and patents improve productivity.
I made my living for a decade off of FOSS I originally authored, and was highly active in FOSS circles for much of that time. Being well acquainted with the economics of open source I am thus inoculated against the laughable notion that FOSS is analogous to music. Selling software != selling documents.
> Lobbyist organizations should redirect their power into making the government appropriately tax streaming platforms to fund artists, rather than side with monopolistic corporate players.
Sorry, what? We're talking about streaming platforms here that have contracts with record labels that have contracts with musicians. If those contracts aren't paying musicians enough, why is the solution to impose a new tax on streaming platforms specifically to pay musicians?
From the page they link to:
> The Living Wage for Musicians Act would tax providers’ non-subscription revenues and add a small fee to the price of music streaming subscriptions. DSPs like Spotify offering interactive music streaming services would pass their taxed revenues and royalties to a non-profit collection and distribution fund, that would in turn pay artists in proportion to their monthly streams.
Isn't this what these contracts are supposed to already be doing? If the numbers aren't making sense then the contract needs to renegotiated. If musicians don't have enough power to renegotiate then the government can and should address that. But why would the solution be to use the taxation power to do the job that royalties are already supposed to be doing?
This feels like a classic case of addressing the symptoms (musicians aren't making enough money) while failing to address the actual problem (musicians have no power to negotiate for what they want).
To solve this issue, copyright needs to be permanently tied to the person who made the work, and can never be transferred. Not allowing copyrights to be transferable grants significant leverage to the artist, whilst also allowing works to enter the public domain via the author's eventual death (or earlier if copyright expires in 20 years as it originally should have).
I just want a streaming service where all the money I pay (minus some fee) goes to artists I listen to. Right now the biggest portion of what I pay for music streaming goes to Taylor Swift and I don't even listen to her albums.
> The music we make today is valuable, and it’s time for the industry to treat it that way and invest in working musicians by paying fair royalties for streams.
They do treat it that way. They use the economies of scale and their skill at exploitation to steal it without paying a fair amount for it. By "fair", I mean an amount that would be paid if the industry were collectively owned by musicians.
But the key here is that in global capitalism, an amount of money is not proportional to the value you bring to others any more. Instead, it is proportional to how effective you are at growing the existing power structure itself, which is an emergent phenomenon of global, high tech capitalism.
Studios are akin to large corporations who extract raw materials for cheap from economically-poor countries. They exploit and short change the people who live there for enormous profits. Extracting "raw materials" as music is much the same phenomenon.
Therefore, in order to truly solve this problem, large corporations such as music industries must be taken down, and not negotiated with. So, my advice to musicians is not to negotiate, but to create and sell your music directly. Start a Patreon and take orders yourself.
I get your point, but I think this is overly cynical.
The fact of the matter is that simply creating a product/service (or in this case, a song) is valuable, sure, but is typically only of limited value. Millions of people sing and write songs every year that nobody listens to or pays for. That fact predates evil executives and greedy companies. In fact, it's been the case for the entirety of mankind's history.
The ability to take a song, popularize it enough for consumers to want more of it, package it in a way that consumers will pay for it, and distribute it widely enough that a large number of consumers will pay for it, is very difficult. And very valuable. It's the difference between the 0.01% of music that makes money and the 99.99% of music that doesn't. Of course the people who are skilled at doing that are going to be able to demand and extract large fees.
This is true in every industry, not just art/music/etc.
For example, lots of people make software and games. But improving it to the point of wide desirability, packaging it up, marketing it, and selling it on a marketplace where it successfully out-competes with other software and games is very difficult.
The difference is that in most industries, the creators of the products themselves have taken on the responsibility for packaging, marketing, and selling their creations. Artists have largely outsourced this work to others. You may argue that they've been collectively hoodwinked, and I would partially agree. But it's also true that some of the richest and most powerful businesspeople of our generation are successful musicians (Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Dr. Dre, Madonna, Beyonce, Paul McCartney, Lady Gaga, Drake, etc.)
“
Then they take your money and, based on the Billboard charts, decide that statistically all of this money goes to Taylor Swift, regardless of what song you were actually playing.
(They don't ask us what songs were actually played, and we couldn't really tell them if they did.)
Unbelievably, ASCAP's slogan is "We Create Music". They do not create music, they create lawsuits. The only service they offer is, "You pay me whatever I ask, or I sue you". They provide the same service as in that Sopranos episode where Patsy and Burt try to extort a Starbucks. It's just a shakedown. It's just some wiseguy saying to you, "Here's your cigarette machine, there's going to be $500 a week in it, capisce?"
[…]
You might wonder how they get to that number. Is it all just arbitrary capriciousness? Yes:
BMI: They take your official fire department capacity and multiply it by the number of days you are open per week, and by some dollar amount. Actual attendance does not factor in. That dollar amount is higher if you ever charge admission, higher still if you have DJs, and even higher if you have live music! That's right, they charge you more when bands are playing their own songs. Oh, and of course there's the Footloose tax: it's even higher if you allow dancing. Or if you have a jukebox. (A jukebox!)
ASCAP: I don't remember and I can't figure it out, but I think it is roughly the same nonsense that BMI does.
SESAC: This one is based on capacity times days open per week, then multiplied by vibes. Also does not take attendance into account.
GMR: This one is based on gross revenue times 0.15%. So if you play the same song at an event with a $10 ticket, and at one with a $30 ticket, sometimes that song is worth three times as much.
[…]
Over in one corner: the entire streaming industry, paying nothing. And over in the other corner: small rooms like mine, providing that which is in actuality the only way for many bands to make any money at all, that is, by giving them a stage to play on in support of their t-shirt sales business. Because, yes, the way you make money as a band is to actually be a garment retailer.
”
-- /backstage/log/2024/12/03.html on a site that doesn't like hn very much
>It is indeed, as you say, purely a racket, as is - let's be honest - the whole industry. Not even the Ferengi could some up with something more extractive. If the Ferengi were real, the American musical performace rights system would be in their textbooks, I swear.
Reply
Dara
6 days ago at 12:46pm
7
(If anything, I feel like I'm being a little unfair to the Ferengi.)
But you also have to admit that the concept of business leverage means that a lot of the people who aren't creating the value can steal the fruits of the labor of those who do create the value.
It's not like every radio station, record label, and performance venue is owned by a wide array of competing companies in a free market. In reality it's a small handful of owners who will only put you in the spotlight if you accept unfair contracts.
Check out how a lot of K-Pop contracts are structured. Imagine having a lifetime non-compete where your co-workers at Microsoft were never allowed to work on your team ever again, forever. That's how bad contracts can be in the music industry.
> The ability take a song, popularize it enough for consumers to want more of it, package it in a way that consumers will pay for it, and distribute it widely enough that a large number of consumers will pay for it, is very difficult. And very valuable. It's the difference between the 0.01% of music that makes money and the 99.99% of music that doesn't.
Well, I believe that beyond a certain point, we should not have the capability to reach such a large audience in the first place. The entire phenomenon of globalization reduces meaning for the individual and is not a societal improvement.
I disagree. Participation is optional. There is always the option to move to the woods, live in a small cabin or group of likeminded people, and keep to yourself. There is always the option to listen to the music you want.
If that isn't enough for you, then your goal must extend beyond wanting to control your own experience and into wanting to shape society, which means shaping the experiences of others. Others who are doing just fine following their own preferences and don't particularly need you to limit their options to conform to your preferences.
Meaning is purpose, purpose is reason, reason is intention, and intention is by definition an artifact of the mind. The only one who can reduce your meaning is you. If the fact that music spreads far and wide to many people whose taste doesn't match you reduces your meaning, then that's because you choose to reduce your own meaning.
Capitalists shape society beyond what they want too. They work to make optional technology mandatory. Don't tell me about shaping the world. Everyone does that, only they use lower-level mechanisms. Most others aren't doing just fine, though, and many probably would like a better world.
All people try and shape society: right, left, anarchists, greens, etc. There is nobody that does not.
I have no qualms with wanting to shape the world when it comes to trying to put your own creations, opinions, etc, into the world for others to have the option to consume. But I'm not a fan of wanting to shape the world by stopping people from doing things.
Labels today do things like get their artists added to popular playlists and run major media campaigns. But the latter is definitely reserved for top tier artists.
Ultimately it's a tough industry. The fact of the matter is technology has made it vastly easier for more people to become musicians and distribute their music. The result is way more competition, which has turned music into a commodity. More competition = lower prices, that's just how it works, unfortunately.
Some artists succeed at making a living, but most don't. But the fact of the matter is that this is how it's always been. There wasn't a golden era of the past where millions of musicians were making a comfortable living. Even when artists got paid more-per-sale (because consumers were willing to pay more for physical copies of media), there were far fewer people able to become artists in the first place.
What is the Internet Archive's current position on all this?
The Internet Archive's "National Emergency Library" seemed legally almost suicidal. It made me wonder who is calling the shots there and what their rationale is. Are they looking to cut a deal on this topic?
How do you know which is which. Public suicide is often the last resort of calling attention. If you are asking "Why would they do that?" the answer can be that it is an act of protest so that the public rises. The latter (hope in a public rising for an ideal) will probably be the bad bet, the «poor [judgement]». Sometimes it comes out of despair.
Was it an act of protest intended to get into ... a guaranteed loss legal battle?
Even I, someone inclined to take up the banner of IA thought the whole thing raised serious questions about their decision making as an organization. That's not a good thing.
Part of a library's primary purposes is the preservation of history and culture. In the modern cycle, one of a company's largest competitors is their own history and back catalog. Destruction of historical artifacts is becoming necessary to ensure customers keep coming back, as we have reached a point of diminishing returns at most corporate scales. If a corporation's motive is to destroy history, and a library's goal is to preserve, there is no compromise.
The sought damages is $621 Million. Internet Archive reported having about $7 Million in assets and $30 Million in revenue (for those who accidentally read over that, revenue is before factoring in costs, which for IA budgets around $37 Million annually as well.) (EDIT: in 2022. I've been rewriting this a few times and forgot to re-add that part in the final comment)
If the suit is found in favor of UGM and enforced at full effect (not impossible, but Hachette v. Internet Archive was not either), then IA will be on the hook for the full $621 Million. You can guess how that ends.
But even if they don't enforce at full effect (and given Web Archive has been successfully used to provide evidence against UMG and Sony multiple times now, they have a pretty strong incentive to get it burned down), a sizable portion of the 400,000 recordings are from disks that quite literally broke down after capture. Those disks are the last copies of those recordings. Ever. Should UMG and Sony succeed, it is a very safe assumption, given they already confirmed they don't have those recordings (and based on that, don't want them), that those recordings immediately become lost media.
Probably they're thinking "This person brought us something that is about to be extinct, our job is to keep things from going extinct."
The entirety of IA is the idea that culture and history are to be preserved for future generations. The job of these big companies like UMG is to make as much money as possible, and destroying history eliminates a core competitor, themselves. IA's existence is poking the bear (just look at how often the Web Archive's existence is used by others to show off back actors in companies). Compromise left a long time ago.
>a sizable portion of the 400,000 recordings are from disks that quite literally broke down after capture. Those disks are the last copies of those recordings. Ever.
Somewhere, there was a critical failure of risk assessment and management.
As I mentioned in a sibling comment, the entirety of IA's existence is a "critical failure of risk assessment" now. Their existence forces companies to deal with the one competitor they can't beat, their past selves. The question we begin to ask here is "This is the only place that was able and ready to accept and preserve these otherwise permanently lost works. Do we let copyright ensure the destruction of itself, or is culture and history more important?"
In the course of preservation, the Rule That Shall Not Be Violated(tm) is that anything which would lead to significant and irreversible damage or destruction of the artifact is off limits. Especially if the artifact is irreplacable.
Recording the audio off of those disks should not have happened if it was already understood or reasonably expected that doing so would lead to their destruction. Whoever gave the OK on that exhibited a critical failure of risk assessment and management.
The lawsuit seems to be about the Great 78 project.
From 1909 to 1975, copyright in the US had a term of 28 years, renewable for another 28.
An artist (perhaps Tony Bennett, who performed with Lady Gaga in 2021 at the age of 95) who recorded one of the last 78s in the archive's collection would have done so in 1954, expecting the copyright to expire no later than 2010.
I remember reading an article by jerry pournelle, and I swear I read that the publisher would (could?) assign the copyright back to the writer for the second 28 years.
That's a fantasy constructed by people who want to keep idolizing their favorite musicians. Labels do exactly what the musicians signed with them want them to do. Heck the vast majority of record labels are owned by musicians.
By number sure but by volume no, UMG/Sony/WMG etc are not owned by Musicians.
Indie labels and the occasional hit independent label like Def Row/TDE are small in comparison and usually only include the owning musicians established music, not their beginnings. Bands often have to fight to buy back rights for that kinda stuff.
Interscope, Reprise, etc are all owned by the big three. Interscope wasn't even founded by artists.
Also labels (like Def Row and Reprise) often sell out to the big three, so even if you sign to one of them when they're independent, that won't mean it'll last forever and you as an artist won't get veto over that.
The record labels fight tech, which as an industry is substantially more abusive to musicians than the labels.
The Archive provides a valuable service, but if they're gonna die on this hill I'm going to fight them alongside my allies of convenience the record labels.
For discussion here, the number of labels is irrelevant: only their market share.
UMG alone has 38% of the entire record label market share. Its annual revenue is more than the entire revenue of all independent record labels combined.
AFAIK the lion's share of the market is held by the top ten labels, none of whom have the musician's best interest at heart. So yes, it's reasonable to say that labels generally don't represent musicians.
This is a tech forum. If you find musicians here, they will be downvoted into oblivion because their positions are unpopular and the HN rules encourage downvoting for disagreement.
Indie musicians love tech. "Sound cloud rapper" was a whole genre. Bandcamp brought so many indie artists into the mainstream who never would have been found without it.
Historically, musicians made most of their money off of concerts and merch (especially merch at concerts). Established musicians definitely rallies against streaming/digital downloads when it first came out, but some newer artists have embraced it given it cuts out the middle man and you don't necessarily need to suck up to labels to get any "airtime" and thus reach.
I love the Internet Archive in its current form, but let’s assume that a court rules it can’t operate as it does now. Why couldn’t it adopt a system similar to YouTube’s ownership claim? For example, if the Internet Archive hosts a song owned by Universal, the company could claim ownership of that song and receive a share of the revenue each time it's streamed. To help cover costs, the Internet Archive could introduce a paid plan, like YouTube Premium, for 10 bucks a month. While this might not be the perfect solution, it would at least be better than a world without the Internet Archive.
What really stands out is the call to refocus on living artists rather than endlessly monetizing back catalogs. I think that’s where the industry’s priorities need to shift
>Make streaming services pay fair compensation
Others have probably pointed it out already but if it happens, streaming services are very unlikely to survive. They are not profitable even today. To make things worse, AFAIK there is research that basically says that streaming services will never generate money for their investors.
Spotify can only afford to pay its musicians "unfair" compensations. Otherwise it will be forced out of business.
Surely if the cause is important to them they should sign with their legal name.
If I signed an ink-and-paper petition as CuddleBunny227 it would be rightly disregarded and stricken even if I insisted that was my username on Reddit. Does that change if it's "on the Internet"?
If CuddleBunny227 is your stage name that you release music under and people know you as, you should probably use it so people recognise the name. It's ultimately a personal choice of whether you wanna doxx your real name or not, and many online artists prefer not to, in which case putting both names alongside would be unacceptable
I've noticed a similar trend on YouTube and Bandcamp too. Sadly, I personally know a few people who are engaged in those activities in my business school class.
The usage of generative AI has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for the creative industry, leading to an influx of AI generated products that are easily consumable and can be used to generate revenue.
Until the platforms begin to regulate AI art, which I don't see why they would, we can expect to see more of them in the near future.
Man, I wish music recommendation systems were social and crowd-sourced like they used to be before internet streaming. These "intelligent" recommendation and scrobbling systems are tiresome.
And that's why it's a hoax. It's a tool with limited use cases just like every other tool, but the industry has treated it like an all-encompassing revolution in the way companies will operate moving forward.
It absolutely is a hoax, because a number of companies are doing shady things like:
- Selling products based on AI capabilities that do not yet and/or will never exist in the product
- Adding "AI" to the name of product lines with very little core functionality based on AI
- Rebranding non-generative algorithms as AI (e.g., SQL queries and if statements == AI)
- Changing the name and/or domain name of the company to imply AI capability
I look at companies with heavy trend-based advertising like C3.ai, who changed their name from a previous trend (C3.IoT), and then IBM that rode marketing waves related to Watson/Watson Health, IBM Blockchain, and now AI, and these are companies who are part of the disingenous "hoax" companies.
It's funny how they think internet archive is the only place where "linux ISOs" are stored which tells me how out of touch these lawsuits are. There are thousands of private trackers, usenet indexers, etc whose sole purpose is to provide an insane and gobsmacking collection of "linux ISOs"
[1] https://relisten.net