The truth about music industry

[Wiz]

Found this article on DIGG today, might be old or have been posted somewhere else on this forum, but I felt like its importance was worth a double-post

http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html

Btw, I don't think this concerns musicians who own their own label, but those are quite few.

 

[jaredowty]

Ugh. It's definitely an ugly world out there...

 

[The Dark Wolf]

The music industry has changed a LOT in the last 7 years. It's a dying beast in many ways. Spin magazine just had a great article talking about it. In fact, Tower Music is closing nearly 90% of their US stores.

That old model of sign a star, make a hit single, promote the heck out of 'em, well... it's falling by the wayside.

 

[Rick]

Man, that's messed up.

 

[Wiz]

Well I know for sure that my teacher told me that he really doesn't care if I pirate his albums, and most musicians out there don't either. He said that most artist are on the contrary happy to be pirated because ultimately a much larger audience gets familiar with them and they benefit more from it, than from playing it conservatively. Royalties are embarrassingly low and you're only taking money from the labels who do not do any of the artistic work and simply milk artists.
I do agree that they have a role out there and that they should be making some money after all, but I don't agree with the "you're stealing money from your favorite bands!!!", because it's not true. Those are labels trying to save their greedy asses.
A few bands out there already decided to make their first albums available online as mp3s for free. If you really like their music you can buy a CD off them, and in the majority of those cases they get the money directly with no intermediary.

Btw this topic is incredibly similar to the Publisher-Developer relationship in the video-game industry where companies like EA make the insane bucks without putting in anything besides initial capital, and the devs pretty much have to file for unemployment every time they're done working on a certain title.

 

[angusyoungwanabe]

didnt read all of it, but am pretty familiar with it. yea, i thougt it was interesting when my mom told me the the #1 album right now is the dreamgirls soundtrack, but its only sold like 600,000+ records, since downloading albums (even from iTunes) isnt counted.

 

[Lozek]

didnt read all of it, but am pretty familiar with it. yea, i thougt it was interesting when my mom told me the the #1 album right now is the dreamgirls soundtrack, but its only sold like 600,000+ records, since downloading albums (even from iTunes) isnt counted.

That'll change, The British chart rules have just changed to count downloads from sources like i-Tunes.

 

[Makelele]

Wow, is that text really written by Courtney Love?

 

[Wiz]

Yeah honestly there's no way Courtney could have written any of this unless she secretly holds a phd in entertainment economics or stuff like that
Definitely a detractor for the article, which is very well written.