And now for something really different… those of you interested in the battle of musicians against the RIAA may be aware of the good fight songstress Janis Ian has been carrying out. She’s fired off another broadside in the LA Times.
Janis is giving the RIAA fits because she is exposing the Big Lie: that RIAA has any interest whatever in the welfare of the average artist. Anyone who has worked in the lower echolons of music knows what sleazy bastards they are. If you complain, people assume it’s just “sour grapes” because you are small fry. But Janis and other artists like her are a very different matter. They’ve seen it all from the top and have come out of the closet to tell us it isn’t any different there either.
The Sony’s and Times Warners of the world are simply out to rob the artist and the consumer blind. They cook the books, they lie, they cheat… and as Glenn Reynolds has often said: “They may be vulnerable to a RICO.”
I look forward to the day it happens.
Oh, yeah… go visit her website and buy something. The lady has to make a living if she’s going to keep on fighting for Truth, Justice and all.
Dear Dale
First off, Janis Ian was and still is an extremely talented artist and a very lovely lady. Karen Krattenger (AKA K2) one of my dearest friends managed her for many years until last year.
Let me qualify what I’m about to say…… This is a very brief look at some of the issues raised however it is merely a skim at a very complicated business.
Though I agree with some of the things she & you state, there are a few seriously interesting points that require further examination.
1). Nobody is forced to sign a recording contract. Indeed most artists want to do this more than anything else in their careers & they pay many thousands of pounds to music industry specilist lawyers to advise them before they do so.
2). All artists have the right of audit on a record company. Many artists do audit their record company from time to time.
3). Unlike a publisher, manager or agent, a record company takes tremendous risk every time they sign a new artist. Commitment to a new artist on a major label is now well north of £1.3m / album. This dice roll is taken by the record company for every time they pick the option up to make the next album & each piece of product (song) therein. Then they have the cost of taking the single to radio, generally £250,000 to £350,000 each single + video £60,000 to £150,000.
Most of these signings fail. The profit has to be made up somewhere to pay for this since this money is not returnable, even in part, by the artist.
Risk / Reward is nothing new to libertarians surely?
4). Record companies have a duty to their shareholders like any other business. They are driven by profit and market forces.
5). Record companies are now making far less money than they used to due to cd piracy (not mentioned here but still huge) & internet downloads. The trouble is that these acts of piracy have hit “the big artists” more than the small ones. When that happens, the profit centre for the record company is hit while the unprofitable or less profitable “growing artists” are left unscathed (un-pirated). Result……. no profit,……… no investment in new “true” artists. Short termism takes over…. Please welcome a string of boy bands etc.
The above will continue to be a problem until solutions are found to net & cd piracy which in turn will allow record cmpanies to return to their core A & R values rather than marketing the hell out of trite pop crap.
My honest prediction for the future is as follows:
1). By August 2004, internet piracy will be eradicated except by direct connection (MSN ICQ etc). Each act of attempted piracy will be turned into a potential sale. Yes, I know something that you don’t.
2). CD piracy will be reduced by 50% by 2005 in the EC.
3). Record companies will be gradually getting themselves ready for some truly interesting releases early 2005.
I won’t go into the real tragedy of the internet here. Suffice to say that during the net’s heady days up until about a year or 18 months ago; I managed the top 20 artists that had been spawned from the new medium of the internet. They accounted for over 120,000,000 downloads (legal) each year. Each of these artists was making a decent living without record company, publisher, merchandise or touring. (They had a anagr of course 🙂
Let me tell you, if you thought the RIAA was bad, some of the internet companies were even worse.
I’ll tell you about it another day maybe!
Best
Simon Austin
Simon Austine: By August 2004, internet piracy will be eradicated except by direct connection (MSN ICQ etc). Each act of attempted piracy will be turned into a potential sale. Yes, I know something that you don’t.
If I were a betting man, I would say you probably do not know anything I don’t know about the various plans to ‘stamp out piracy’. And if I were indeed a betting man I would bet that you could not be more wrong about it ever being effectively eradicated.
I for one look forward to the day when the music ‘business’ is largely a thing of the past, its business model made as obsolete as the buggy whip business. I have gone from being a 40-50 CD’s per year purchaser to having not purchased a CD for almost a year. I find mp3’s from unsigned bands more to my taste musically than the crap I hear on offer for the most part.
I think you’ve got the business model all wrong. mp3’s are nothing but a loss-leader these days. Bands make their money on tours and merchandising. More and more people I know are not interested in “major” contracts. They’ll be lucky to see a pence before the third or fourth CD, if then. And yes, I’ve friends who are in the position, particularly in the trad sector. The only ones making money off the CD’s are the ones who are writing and performing the CD’s and getting their PRS or IMRO (ASCAP/BMI over there) and MCPS (mechanicals). My tech company’s finance director is a music industry accountant, which is how I met him. He helps bands avoid the industry swamp and do it themselves.
Right now I buy a large number of CD’s. I started doing so when I realized I could store them all on a hard drive and make up my own random or organized play lists any way in which I wished. If a CD doesn’t load onto my drive, I return it. If all CD’s start failing, I will go back to the situation of a few years ago: ie, I won’t be buying *any*. Like the previous commenter, I’ll simply forget the industry catalogs and start downloading direct from band’s own web sites. If your new RIAA initiative to sue people randomly for downloading even from those sites, then I’ll just get CD’s from band’s that I got to see.
I’m not at all alone. The industry as it exist is in a free fall because it no longer matches the times. You’ve got the 14-15 year old girl market sewn up and distribution in K-Mart’s and have done and end run on payola with fixed playlists on all the top 40 stations… but it won’t help. You’ll keep the young impressionable (and stupid) market for a long time.
But you are losing the rest with your industry’s complete failure to adapt.
You put shoes on horses and fix carriage wheels when the rest of us use jet aeroplanes. You (the industry) are obsolete.
I doubt that record companies are really very hurt by piracy. I buy about 1-2 CD’s per year, and also copy CD’s off of my brother who buys about 100 CD’s per year. Before I got a CDR drive, I bought about 1-2 CD’s per year. I have about 4 artists that I really like, and I buy their albums whenever they come out. Most others are so uninteresting to me, that I’m only willing to pay about $0.10 for them. $15.99 is a bit much…
I agree about the price point. Most of the 50 or so CD’s I buy per year are in the £3-9 range. I will very rarely buy one priced at £10 or higher. There is practically no music worth that much unless it is the complete works of a major artist in a multiple CD set for £15.
It’s a market thing. If you don’t offer the product I want, at the price I’m willing to pay… I don’t buy.
I figure a track is worth about 10-50p to me. (Unless I can’t freely move it around and play it on my Linux workstation, in which case the value drops to negative. Negative because it is not only useless, but it takes up space where I could keep something which *was* useful, whether physical or digital.)
That’s why the industry is currently supported by the barely teenage girl market. They are more likely to fall for the hype and the cute guys and make their parents pay for the CD’s. It’s probably also why the sales tail off with age so rapidly. It’s hard to justify spending your own money on product which is so seriously out of whack with it’s market value.
Dear Dale
You are largely correct in your presumption re: touring & merchandising.
If you think that I am from a record company, you couldn’t be further from the truth….indeed I’m from the other side of the fence.
However I do believe that I am correct in what I have said from an industry perspective.
Nothing will right itself until the piracy of copyrighted is stemmed.
Kindest regards
Simon
Good to see Ms. Ian getting wider coverage for her arguments. Happily, a UK music industry publication for which I occasionally write (Music Publisher Pro) was able to beat the LA Times to her views last year, when it ran a lengthy and well-argued piece against the RIAA and its Neanderthal policies. I never did hear how UK music publishers reacted to it.
Having kicked around the fringes of music business for the past couple of decades, I can only endorse what she and Dale Amon are saying. I have lost count of the ripped-off artists I have met who, while they might have signed contracts, did so because it was their only way of getting their music to a wider public. It was no choice at all.
The record business as we have known it has finally been rendered redundant by technology. It’s a shame it wasn’t sooner.
In response to Mr. Austin’s comments, a few brief points.
1. Recording artists do indeed have the right to audit their accounts. And those audits invariably (I belieive it was 8,999 out of 9,000), as the New York Times recently reported, reveal “mistakes” that are in the record companies’ favor.
2. Though record companies are victims as well as perpetrators in this, the payola system (illegal, but as a series of reports in Salon have made clear, very much alive) means that independent artists are largely frozen out of commercial radio.
3. Record companies recently settled a major price-fixing suit.
4. There is general agreement that the quality of commercial releases is much weaker than it was in the previous decade. That — plus the growth of independent artists via Internet exposure — may explain why CD sales are disappointing.
‘Nuff said.
Music piracy/distribution will continue as long as the industry wants £15 for something which can be sampled through a pair of microphones from a £20 stereo. If an a4 black and white newspaper was £15 then a similar level of copying would be seen.
Does anyone know why the music industry thinks it can sell ‘super high definition’ uber cd technology while everyone in the real world is sacrificing quality for size with mp3?
Actually there isn’t even that much reason. With the proper settings during wav to mp3 conversion, a sound quality level can be attained that even expert ears are barely, if at all, able to detect.
Such tests have been run by a group of audio experts.
There is simply no reason you can’t stick 10 or more hours of high quality music on a single CD…
Except: horse shoe-ers wanna shoe horses and dunno nuttin bout them jet aereopplane thingies… Yep, back when they were kids, people used horses and recorded on was reels like man was s’posed ta.
Funnily enough, Zack Mollusc, I’m working on an article about that very subject right now (errr… when I’m not busy reading this blog, that is). Thus far, it looks to me as if the real reason the record companies are so hot for this technology is because they think they can apply so much copy protection that it will enable them to go on screwing the public with impunity.
I’m taking bets how long it will take some smart kid with a PC and lots of spare time to work out how to crack these products wide open. Best estimate to date: 15 minutes.