"And if the record company bosses don't take the money then the internet people are going to take the money, somebody is going to profit off of this.  And if it's not the artist, someone is profiting illegally off of this."

If the music industry is dead, no was at the funeral.

The problem is no matter how much the music industry suffers, it doesn't seem to bother the consumer. If an oil industry stumbles just a fraction of a percent, the whole world feels it. If the music industry is 1/5 (what is the number these days?) the size it was 10 years ago, nobody outside is music is really noticing.

The music is forever. Once it is published, it is out there for good, so it piles up and up and up. The state of music, the number of tracks and the "quality" what is out there, never goes down because of this, only up.

And there is so much of it, even if no music was ever made again - there is already too much to listen to. We see that old music is increasingly taking revenues from new music. This harms people who make new music further.

the only point you make I disagree enough with to reply is that the quality of available music goes up and up.

My guess is that there are loads of underground musicians who settle for home recording techniques rather than ponying up for studio time because of the daunting economics of investing in studio time. I think the marketplace is flooded with amateur and semi-amateur recordings of lesser recording quality for this reason. In the past, the prospect of investing in studio time to make the money back on record sales seemed a bit more feasible.

If you are looking at quality as a ratio (quality / num of tracks), then yes. But quality is more of a sum, because good quality music doesn't disappear because crap is being made. When you look at quality as a sum, then it is always increasing.

further thoughts on quality...

so there's quality of the recording (1) and quality of the music/message (2).

i think at the top of the game, recording quality is up and up. and i see your point about this always increasing. ironically, it is also at the top where music/message quality is often ... questionable? or recycled? i.e. at any given moment in megapop music there are records of cutting-edge quality whose content is all about cheap sex and intoxication. i'm not necesarrily mad at that -- they do good business, i suppose, or they would change the message? of course, the tail wags the dog as well in this age of media super-saturation.

at other points in music, the music quality may be epic, timeless, classic, or prescient but the recording quality is subpar due to low budgets and a tough marketplace ....

wrong. the quality can absolutely go up and a million dollar studio has nothing to do with it.  

keep studying or pay me to tell you how. tired of these hobbyists chiming in. 

Multi-tracked recordings can now be done just about anywhere, and sure, you aren't going to get the cream of the true high-end stuff of the past, but you can get to the middle tier of recording quality in the past, IF, and this is the big if, there is someone who knows what they are doing, and that's where the ball usually gets dropped.

A similar ball is being dropped on the development side, since DJs are history, and stuff is just thrown out there against a wall, with noone gatekeeping, not on the corporate side, but the critical side.

Still, the power to record at home is great, and someone with talent can become a pretty good engineer and mixed in a couple of years, which means a youngster can be good while still young.

Of course, then we get to the talent side, and how original, or how stuck in their influences an artist is. That's about the same as it's always been and what separates the famous from the sea of wannabes.

This is actually why, on the pop side, 'artists' like Katy Perry and Rihanna and Lady Gaga, aren't producing and writing all their own material. They're not capable of handling all those sides of the equation, and that's where the adults are still hiding in the wings, collecting the last truly fat checks in the biz.

DIY is rarely as it seems. Even the Clash, Pistols, the Beatles, and many other rebels in music needed and found help. If bands suck more today, it's because there's no accepted structure in rock and band music today to assist.

Great Minds Think Alike? Story From Nov 20 on The Trichordist

http://thetrichordist.com/2012/11/20/lars-was-first-and-lars-was-right/

Coincidence??? Or perhaps a coordinated RIAA public relations strategy!

Ulrich and Lily Allen were pretty much alone. And there's no doubt it was tough back then.

But something's brewing at the moment.

Artists are becoming aware of the incredible amount of power and access they have if they unite.

What we need is a coordinated initiative, tailored for this decade. And I think it's coming.

The open letter from Rihanna and all these guys was just the beginning...

Lily Allen?

She's one of the few who had the guts to stand up.

Result:

Torrentfreak.com and other sites with strong connections to organized crime harassed her like there was no tomorrow and tried to ruin her life.

One of the few who came to her rescue was Elton John. Respect.

Fortunately, times are changing and more and more artists realize that pirates are not fans -- just common thieves.

Do you have anything to substantiate anything you're saying about the "changing times" or the need for this "coordinated effort?"  You think the open letter was a victory for artists because why?  You seem to have offered little in the way of provable fact.

PAYPAL gets it, and others will follow. All it takes is a strong leader like PAYPAL to set precedent.

http://torrentfreak.com/paypal-bans-usenet-providers-over-piracy-concerns-121121/

Paypal is a leader? :) Of what?

paypal is a leading of stopping the flow of money to criminals.

All you need to take care of piracy is some rope, a platform, and a big enough ditch.

What a terrible waste of natural resources.

Turn pirates into a source of income! Sue the suckers!

How about making soap?

It's not just about the money for me, I'd like to see pirates suffer for their crimes.

OK, I no longer think you're a torrentfreak, they're not that creative.

But you do give copyright nazis like me a bad rep.

It's a bit ironic to see that ALL of Lars predictions have come to pass.

He was demonized and thrown under the bus just for the simple task of telling it how it is.  We need more champions like him.  Shame on those who turned their backs...

We need a coordinated approach!

This is a fact: All professional artists & labels want to stop piracy. If they tell you anything different, they lie.

What we need to do is to communicate that fact to the public.

We can learn a lot from the ISPs approach to 6 Strikes: Verizon or Time Warner couldn't have done it alone. But they can do it together.

And so can we.

...and this is why whack-a-mole will continue in perpetuity until a new strategy emerges.  The problem isn't that anti-piracy sentiments haven't made their way to the public, it's that a large part of the public doesn't give a shit.  For a creative community, many artists -- though, I wholly recognize a lot of their interests are being represented by business entities -- appear wholly uncreative in their ideas to fix this.

I didn't say that communication and education alone will do it, though both elements are crucial.

The most important things will always be to sue individual pirates and lobby against the commercial Piracy Industry.

As for 'whack-a-mole': That's just pirate speak...

Lars was and is absolutely right. 

It's never too late to turn the tide.

- V

...and now is the time to do it!

6 strikes and a wide range of other initiatives are rolling out as we speak. Pirates are panicking all over the place. Artists are standing up against abuse.

We should do what we can to support and reinforce all the good stuff that's going on right now.

What is there to actually learn from this? The industries are build up on consumption. When you think of cars, airplanes, computers, alcohol, or drugs, you realize there is a real artifact to be. You can fly planes with binary codes, nor can you drink or eat any of those albums, that can be downloaded.

CD's and LP's are cultural artifacts. They are in the cycle of consumption. However, the technologies have changed. The sizes of harddrives, servers etc. are not what they used to be 20 years ago, and music industry should have really figured it out at any point during the past decades. Some of the companies and artists have challenged piracy by giving out freely. They have realized that even though there is a real cultural artifact behind MP3 files, MP3 itself is non-existent. You can't consume it.

There is also a business, that have gone on with the idea, and started to capitalize MP3's, selling them through their homepages, and services. I do not really know how much artists get from that, but I think it's minimal. However, taking out freely what is out there, in fact can itself challenge piracy. If there weren't songs available on Youtube, or P2P's, I would not probably buy a single fresh albums anymore. I want to know what I'm buying, and I do not feel like going into record stores for several hours anymore to have a chance to prelisten the tracks, and make my choice.

So I don't really know who is the losing side in all this? I think in the end, the score might be quite well balanced. But the industry wants more, some of the artists are wanting more. So, is it any wonder, that some of those artists are blamed to be greedy? In fact, some of them are, so what might be the big issue, saying the things as they are, also vice versa, from consumer-side. The fact is that someone surely profits from all this, but if we calculate every single thing in our lives through profit, we won't probably end up anywhere else, but in a big mess.

It will be well balanced when creators are compensated.

Great.  Quantify that.

when artists are paid for distribution of their work on sites like the pirate bay, filestube, 4shared and every other site illegally monetizing the distribution of content with advertising - and when cyberlockers pay artists from the subscription and access fees they charge - all legally licensed and negotiated with artists and rights holders. 

I can see commerce solutions whereby Advertisers, Ad Networks, ISPs and Payment Processors work with rights holders to enforce artists rights through voluntary cooperation. No goverment intervention required. No one can claim censorship (not that it ever was anyway) if this is done cooperatively and outside of legislation.

buckle up.the truth is obvious this is about money and profiteering by illegally operating businesses, and that's where the focus will be.

"I can see commerce solutions whereby Advertisers, Ad Networks, ISPs and Payment Processors work with rights holders to enforce artists rights through voluntary cooperation."

Sounds nice, I really hope you're right.

And I can see why the ISPs may wish to cooperate. Most of them will probably be content providers in the not so distant future.

But what's in it for the Advertisers...

Don't worry, we are winning the battle.

Police arrest 9-year girl for attempted piracy; confiscate her winne the pooh laptop:

http://torrentfreak.com/police-raid-9-year-old-pirate-bay-girl-confiscate-winnie-the-pooh-laptop-121122/

With the inevitable $2 million dollar fine for her parents, maybe they won't be able to buy her food anymore and she'll starve to death. Finally, justice for artists!

lol, go away torrentfreak.

Here you are again.  Change your handle to something other than visitor and identify yourself, instead of hiding behind "visitor".  You are the lamest and most violently outspoken user on this website.  It needs to stop.  Championing lawsuits is pathetic, plain and simple.

Offer these forums a solution or shut up.  Enough already

Isn't it pretty obvious that I'm a 14-year-old guitar player in a garage band with little-to-no understanding of basic business, economics, history, or consumer psychology?

I'M GONNA SUE EVERYONE HERE!

"I'M GONNA SUE"

That's good to hear!

Suing thieves is not exactly my favorite activity, but unfortunately it is a necessity in the real world...

>>>>Isn't it pretty obvious that I'm a 14-year-old guitar player in a garage band with little-to-no understanding of basic business, economics, history, or consumer psychology?I'M GONNA SUE EVERYONE HERE!

>>>>

hehe, nice answer.

But something like this should be added

"I grab money from mom and dad , so basically, i never really worked, nor paid taxes, nor had to maintain children, nor have I been ever confronted with the realities of life, but it doesn't matter, because this pocket money is due to me and I know better than you old schmucks because i am a rebel and like rock n roll, so i am cool, eventhough that attitude will get me slapped in the face by reality the hard way when I am older, I don't see any reason why i should think about it because its not cool at all, and cool is everything, dumbass" (ass some insults to mothers and remarks about size of other people penis that is smaller).

or something like this, lol.

Geez man, the number of people posting under the nick 'Visitor' must be at least 10-15! Ask the site owner if you're interested...

As for the torrentfreak who posted the 'we are winning the battle' thing: He's obviously trying to portray the evil copyright nazis from his dreams. :)

Back to business, suing pirates is definitely the solution -- you know it, I know it, and I can assure you our torrentfriend here knows it...

Okay, I'll identify myself.  

First let me acknowledge Torrent Freak for their consistency and professionalism in consistently supporting the viewpoint that piracy is actually good for music and film and the litany of rationalizations produced to support that postion.

Having said that, I very, very rarely agree with their viewpoint and there is a certain Fox/Murdock like obsession to make a point and pile on the pain at all cost.  

Winning at all costs is a strategy that leaves a mess in its' path and stories that defend corporate profiteers like Kim Dotcom and thinly veiled news stories like the recent study on how the loss of MegaUpload has actually hurt the film business would be laughable, if only the pain and misdirection of wealth was not so palpable for artists, who actually create the stuff he pawns.

This little girl story though is really kind of a low for even Karl Rove.  

Post that garbage on your site, but don't show your ignorance in making a point to this crowd.  Cause frankly, I find it insulting that you believe you can't actually make a point with that garbage.

Yours, Will Buckley, founder, FarePlay

I'm not against artists getting paid, though to be clear, we are talking about copyright owners getting paid, but can the pro-litigation posters provide facts to support their claims that such a strategy is effective?

You want proof that legislation works?

Really?

Litigation and Legislation are different things. Litigation has only proven to stop those you sue, not those you do not. Legislation has not stopped anyone apparently, it is already breaking the law.

test

It's hard to say what would have changed if music fans flocked to Ulrich as the spokesman of anti-piracy.

  It is interesting to recall though how during the height of the dot com boom (when the words "open source" were first introduced to the non programming public) how people reacted to Ulrich.  What captures the Napster / Ulrich moment in time (1999 or 2000?) for me better than anything else is the Camp Chaos Video - Napster - BAD!  Ulrich was portrayed as an entitled millionaire who doesn't give a damn about his fans.  This type of message was also echoed elsewhere.  South Park had a file sharing episode that showed a dejected Brittany Spears getting on to an airplane while the narrator explained how due to file sharing she could not afford a new G5 airplane but had to settle for a G4.

No one seemed to be talking about smaller artists and the effects this would have on them of if they were it didn't reach my ears.

It's not like certain people and companies weren't in agreeance and fighting back in spite of the lack of support from the music fan.  Labels did take steps to combat Napster and perhaps this was the problem-- They chose combat rather than some kind of partnership.  To be fair, it's a hard thing to hire the thief who robbed you as your new head of security (even though he would likely be very good at it). 

It is easy now to look over your shoulder and laugh at the labels' attempts to thwart Napster but even at the time you had to scratch your head at some of their ideas.  One new media department at a major label proposed (and I believe actually built) a Napster competitor that they charged money for that allowed you to trade only that label's music files.

Anyone who tried Napster knew that there was no going back to listening to music the old way.  It was the listening experience we always wanted but didn't even consider as a possibility.  Pandora had stolen the key from Epimethius, unlocked the box and unleashed all kinds of "evil" into the world.  In the original myth only hope was left slightly broken at the bottom of the container.  Back in the real world I guess we have Spotify... 

 Was Ulrich right?  Yea- he was (IMHO).  Why was he vilified?  Maybe because people didn't want to admit to themselves that the shoplifted candy tasted sweeter and were looking for something or someone to justify their behavior.

It's all about communication.

And the paradox is that artists -- communicators by trade -- shied away and let the commercial Piracy Industry fat cats write all the stories.

Look at it from the perspective of the consumer:

Piracy Industry: Here have access to all the world's music/movies/books/games for free or really cheap! Download all you want!

Music Industry: Given your monthly allowance, I'll let you have maybe 50 song a year. Average middle class person you can have maybe a thousand songs, but you can't go on that cruise you wanted to go on over the summer. Also I want to monitor all your private communications to make sure you aren't sharing my music, and if you are, I might sue you for $2 million dollars.

So it's not suprising who is winning the "communications war".

The perspective of a mere "consumer" is trivial and base, by definition.

We are not consumers; we are citizens and supposedly full human beings. That means we are not mere consumption machines who should only care about getting as much as possible for ourselves without consideration of wider consequences. Society entails respect for the law, individual integrity and responsibility, ethics, and consideration of the effects of one's actions on others.

- V

Yes if that was the case Africa would have no hunger or preventable diseases (obviously this is a more serious problem that the blight of the music business). People care for #1 themselves first. Don't believe anyone who claims otherwise.

"Also I want to monitor all your private communications"

Oh please... that's tinfoil hat territory.

And if consumers wanted new copyright laws, they would vote for their local pirate party.

But they don't. Because they're not criminals. They're not anarchists. And they're not stupid. They know they can't have things for free, copy their own money, etc., though it would be awesome.

But they do need education. See, twenty years ago, they didn't have to know the first thing about copyright law. Only professional communicators had to read up on boring stuff like that.

But today, they're publishers.

And with that title comes a lot of responsibility.

so heres the thing.. (and I am going by memory here, so feel free to CITE the parts where I am out to lunch)

I was pretty sure that even before Lars went public about the issue that Napster was begging for the labels to allow them to do it legally.. What they WANTED (Napster) is basically EXACTLY what we ended up with.. (DMCA etc)

What I am curious about, (and I wonder if it can be Googled some how), is the original rate Napster was offering per stream or download..  I would just find it ironic if the rate proposed by Napster was equal or more then what it is now, (IE: if the labels had negotiated something back then, how many illegal downloads would have been prevented?)

What Lars was trying to do VS what the Media made it out to be.. is two different things..  if it had been approached differently maybe the public would have backed it more..

"downloads bad!".. thing is.. the downloads werent bad.. the problem was the public didnt like being told they were only allowed to play their music via the shiny disc.. Itunes has proven that the public will pay if their usage was not restricted..

My point is;

sure.. Lars was right..

but was it a self fulfilling prophecy ?

What if the labels , instead of keeping a death grip on the idea of "unit sales" via CD's, for another decade.

had decided to embrace the new technology (and maybe instead of waiting for Itunes and Spotify & bittorrent to rule, did the deed themselves , giving them control)

I wonder what the landscape would be like now?

just sayin :-)

If I recall, Napster never offered a per stream rate. I think their final offer was $150m per year.

The problem with the thought that the labels might have made some accomodation with Napster is that the labels were locked in a fatal embrace with physical retail, which at that time was responsible for something like 90% of revenue.  Physical retail wasn't willing to commit suicide a few years in advance of what we now see as physical retail's inevitable crash; alienating physical retail would have made the revenue falloff of the 2000's much faster and steeper.

After years of pondering it, I have concluded that the events since the Napster era were unavoidable, unless the industry could have gotten legislation to ban the Internet.

That's not true at all, there was nothing inevitable about what happened.

iTunes priced itself outside the consumption habits of most downloaders. No one converted to iTunes from Napster, iTunes only appealed to people who's consumption habits still reflected the scarcity of music (that is to say people who purchased CDs). So iTunes began a slow cannibalization of the physical cd market, only offering a la carte downloads which lead to many less song sales & exacerbated the growing revenue problem. And piracy continued to grow, aided by the free publicity offered by any media outlet covering the lawsuits.

Everything that the industry did in response to Napster was wrong. Dead wrong, even. What would've been reasonable would have been for the industry to take a sober look at what the value of music had become, based on the new rates of consumption, & started their own store that was more convenient than downloading illegally. Maybe the best plan would've been to created a tiered offering... if you're a heavy downloader, you pay $15/month for 100 downloads at $.15/pop. If you're not, you pay $10/month for 20 downloads at $.50/pop. This keeps low consumption fans from switching over for peanuts, but pushes them towards more discovery & higher consumption levels, ultimately paving the way for streaming services.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but the events of the 90's were anything but inevitable. The people who made the decisions over the course of that decade were idiots. There is no two ways about it.

jw wrote:

"What would've been reasonable would have been for the industry to take a sober look at what the value of music had become..."

"The industry" really wasn't capable of taking forward-looking collective action, especially if that collective action was going to require amputating portions of the industry (specialty retail: Musicland, Tower, the indies, etc) and starving other portions (songwriters, performers, executives).   The recording industry was/is built from a morass of competing legal claims and business relationships, and every player was out looking for #1, and too many of those players had effective veto power.   (Look at how many times one part of the industry has sued another part over digital music issues.)

Also:   too many people in the recording industry believed that a technical or legal fix to piracy was just around the corner.   Once the magic bullet was found, the good times would be restored. (SDMI, anybody remember that project?  :-)   )

Respectfully yours....

Why NOT amputate portions of the industry? Isn't that what business is about? What are executives there for except to make those tough decisions, to guide the company into the future & to ensure that the ship stays afloat? You're acting like their hands were tied, like the ship's course was set for a decade. And I understand that this is what the executives thought, themselves, but that's not the way other industries operate. That's not the line of thinking that led big box retailers to shrinking shelf space for music. I mean, if that's really the case, what the hell are these people getting paid for? What is their job description?

The songwriters, performers, and executives wouldn't have been starved if the new price was set to reflect increased demand, & accounted for different rates of consumption... this would satiate modern (high-consumption) consumers without gutting the (low-consumption) system in place. That should be an easy sell to everyone involved. It really & truly just comes down to numbers.

If you're suggesting that forward-looking collective action wasn't possible because executives were deluded and loyal to the wrong people, I agree, but that's my point. It's ultimately someone's responsibility to chart a path & convince all involved to fall in line. And if some people just plain can't be convinced, that's one thing, but I've seen no evidence that anyone in any key position 1) knew their ass from their elbow when it came to any of this stuff & 2) was making any effort to move the industry in the direction in which it needed to move. And that's not what we saw, we saw the key players resisting change at every juncture.

It's not like any of these moves would've been drastic. It's not like cds would've ceased production immediately, or that specialty stores would've been left empty over night. And it's not like lower priced digital downloads was an outrageous idea... for christ's sake, they were rights restricted, compressed to hell, & void of artwork & liner notes. How can anyone argue that those things were worth the same amount of money as a cd on any grounds? But it was a transition that was necessary for everyone involved.

I guess my point is that if everyone, physical distribution chain aside, were really looking out for #1, they should've been easily convinced of the right direction in which to go, collectively. There just wasn't any leadership connecting the dots.

In the early '00s the top record companies all did get together to try to create a legal downloads store - this would have been a great solution.  Trouble is, it would have been considered a cartel and against competition laws, and most governments politely informed them that it would not be okay for them to create such a monopoly on the creation and selling of music.  Apple must have been rubbing their hands together.

no.. A Cartel would not have worked cause as you mentioned "monopoly"

BUT

what they could have implemented in conjunction with software and hardware manufacturers is a new standard digital format.

instead we had multiple competing formats (AAC, WMA, MP3, etc etc) and Mp3 (with no DRM) ended up being the most popular for the simple reason it was usable on the most hardware..

The problem with trying to force companies to implement DRM and NOT have a standard format, is it made digital purchases proprietory, restrictive and very unpopular..

The DRM was not the problem, the DRM IN CONJUNCTION with multiple formats was the problem..

If the industry worked harder in the 90s to ban the Internet it probably could have happened. Nobody really knew about it back then.

Now they face an uphill battle for that sort of thing, as I think even politicians will say that the Internet is more important than an existence of a music industry.

To put this into context, ownership of digital media, which is to say local storage, serves a single purpose which is immediate subsequent playback. A user invests the time up front to download a song so that he or she can listen to it immediately on any device he or she places it on in the future. When Napster was created, local playback was essential due to bandwidth constraints. This was true to the degree that, even though the user was investing time up front to download a song, songs STILL had to be compress to 128- or even 96kbps (a very noticable sacrifice in audio quality) in order to reduce the time investment of downloading to something reasonable. (Storage constraints also played an important role in the compression of digital audio during the Napster era).

More than a decade later, I can stream 320kbps digital audio (which is indistinguishable from cd quality to the average user) anywhere I go via my phone. I've ridden from Memphis, TN to Athens, GA & back several times streaming music with no interruptions. All of Napster & more (excluding a few hundred piss poor quality Dave Matthews Band bootlegs) is available at triple the quality, with immediate playback, consuming no permanent storage space on my playback device, & King Harvest's Dancing In the Moonlight isn't even miscredited to Van Morrison. Hallelujah.

DOESN'T ANYONE REALIZE WHAT THIS MEANS? Ownership of music is obsolete.

ob·so·lete adjective \ˌäb-sə-ˈlēt, ˈäb-sə-ˌ\
1 a : no longer in use or no longer useful <an obsolete word>
1 b : of a kind or style no longer current : old-fashioned <an obsolete technology>

There is a greater narrative here, which is the continuous evolution (or technological march, if you will) towards a maximum convenience/maximum quality balance, which began with cassette tapes overtaking vinyl records as the consumer's choice of format. This dictates that the era of digital downloads would be short lived. And it has, in fact, come to an end. What we are experiencing right now (as I type these very words) is the death of the download. You do not have to sue anyone. If you want them to stop downloading, just send them an invitation to download Spotify. (Or rdio or deezer or xbox music or whatever your poison happens to be.)

We've reached the end of the evolution, which is streaming services. There will not be one winner, there will always be multiple services (same as there is Wal-Mart, Target, K-Mart, etc), but the invisible, oderless & tasteless format of streaming audio is the end of the line & there will be no piracy in the future unless bands refuse to license their music to streaming services. As bandwidth increases, audio quality will increase. And as new devices are created, software will be written by the services we subscribe to to support streaming audio. This is not the future, this is now.

Now here are some thoughts specifically about litigation.

This race towards maximum convenience/maximum quality, supercharged by the perceived anonymity/mobb mentality (whichever you want to call it, it's the same thing) of the internet, supercedes respect for copyright. This is not a new thing, there was NEVER respect for copyright law by the consumer. Prior to Napster, it was simply more conveneint to acquire things legally than illegally. This isn't a new concept, & it's not an age thing. If you asked people in 1989 whether or not they would accept a dubbed cassette of Van Halen's OU812 from a friend, the only people who would say "no" are probably hall monitors or DLR loyalists. The results wouldn't be any different than if you asked people if they thought downloading the album on Napster was ok in 1999.

So when technology made it more convenient to acquire content illegally than legally, the ONE AND ONLY SOLUTION was to make it MORE CONVENIENT to acquire content legally. What were the options? Buy Napster. Start your service (all you had to do was match the right artists with the right songs & you've got one up on Napster). Just do SOMETHING, but the only option was beating Napster at their own game & no one in the music industry lifted a finger. But AudioGalaxy did. And Morpheus. And Kazaa. And Soulseek. Etc.

Litigation actually did more to PUBLICIZE file sharing than anything. The RIAA quit suing downloaders. HOW CAN ANYONE IN THIS DAY OF AGE THINK SUING DOWNLOADERS IS A GOOD IDEA? It does nothing to curb illegal downloading. It never did. Any study that says it did was fixed. End of story. All of you who are suggesting it are wrong &/or stupid.

When iTunes launched selling songs at $1 per song, it priced everyone who had been downloading music illegally for years prior out of the game. Why? Because their rate of consumption had changed & so the value of an individual song had changed. And just because they were downloading more songs & listening to individual songs less often didn't necessarily mean that they had or were willing to spend more money. By that time the storage technology had advanced in iPods setting a standard for a large music collection that would cost nearly ten times what a large collection of cds would cost. If the music industry was ever interested in actually selling money to the modern consumer (which is to say consumers who had adapted their listening habits according to what was afforded by technology), they would've taken the average amount these fans were spending on a music collection prior to Napster (which was likely much more than the average consumer) & divided it by the amount of music they were consuming illegally, & they would've landed somewhere between 10 & 25 cents per song. If the price had made sense & if the service was more convenient than downloading, THE PIRATES WOULD HAVE CONVERTED. (This will be proven with streaming, though the transition has been made much more difficult by each & every choice the industry has made over the last decade related to digital downloading.) This, of course, excludes children with no income, but that's another rant entirely.

This strategy of selling bulk for less would have kept the ecosystem controlled & would have offered a quick & painless transition to streaming, completely eradicating piracy. But, instead, digital downloads were priced so that they only appealed to people who were consuming at the rate of the 90's. This means that digital downloads actually began to caniballize physical cd sales, only offering a la carte downloads which exacerbated the problem, while piracy continued to grow at unprecendented rates, accellerated by media coverage of RIAA lawsuits. Proving that they're even dumber than we all thought they were, the industry even RAISED the price of digital downloads. A legal product was never consistently offered to the modern consumer until streaming services became available. And so all of the litigation in the WORLD was never going to do any good.

Any & all positive steps are going to have to be taken in the direction of streaming services. The only thing that matters is the ratio of free to premium streaming service users. Piracy is irrelevant. iTunes match is irrelevant. iTunes itself is on it's way out because it offers a product which is obsolete. Physical cds are relics of a former age where people listened to the same ten songs over & over for a month or more. The agreement structure between labels & streaming services HAS to change to something that is more fair to artists. The sentiment of artists towards streaming services HAS to change. Garth Brooks & Tool & De La Soul & Metallica & the Black Keys need to license their music to Spotify. The quicker conversions happen, the quicker people will realize the advantages of premium subscriptions to these services (which will be made more evident with technological advances), & the quicker the recorded music industry will begin to grow again, & all of those profitting on the piracy of music will be left for the film industry to deal with.

Recognize.

Make that "If the music industry was ever interested in actually selling music to the modern consumer..."

a very legitimate question.

But there is music, the "problem" (if that's one) is that the packaging has become the most important asset to the product, to appeal consumers.

It can makes you think: do people buy "music", or do they buy "entertainment" ?

I think it is the second option that prevails, in terms of sales, music is only a vector, entertainment is the product.

Since I've removed all of my songs from Spotify, my iTunes sales are up.

I look forward to the new iTunes streaming effort. iTunes has shown itself to be more than fair with compensation for the labels and artists.

That's good to hear.

I think our present-event bias is often in effect in these dismal reports about music....

things money-wise (and maybe not culturally either?) are not as good as they were in the heyday of the 90s....

but Spotify,YouTube, and Pandora, whatever their shortcomings, signify progress from sheer, rampant, constant, pervasive piracy that was the norm of the Napster nadir

(yay for three n's in a row) and two p's

pay me

Always listen to the drummer!

to pick up on "ownership is obsolete"

maybe we are actually back to square one; you walk aroud the cave sing your melody, the guy nextdoor hears it and sings it to his wife...and you get F-all for it 

..best you can do is go down the cave club and sing for your supper

the end

All I can say is I've been through these ripoff scenarios on the photo side of online 'licensing agencies' and I'm done giving any of these mutant ripoff losers any more of my content. They can come to my list of domains. I'm not going to them. ORgs like ITunes that provide proper tracking and a reasonable percentage are the winners. Other of these criminals that think they can just set the payment based on what they would like to take home in pay some month are going to see no contributions from artists with brains, who are most of the ones they'll want to see in the future.

Anyone who signs with a label that uses these services is a fool.

Stick to college radio, YT videos, iTunes, live shows etc, and sign with noone. Keep all your merchandising, and stipulate every outcome to a label, but honestly, there's no point in signing to a label until you're already strong anyway, and then give them the worst terms imagineable.