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Musing on Sydney's news
22 September 2003
RIAA-p off
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The RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) has sued a 12 year old girl for downloading nursery rhymes from a peer-to-peer file sharing network. They've already sicked their lawyers onto college kids for file sharing on their campuses. This action, they claim, is designed to protect the copyright of their artists' music. They claim that young people who use peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa are "thieves" who "have no concept of the value of music". I would suggest that kids have a precise understanding of the "value of music". They understand that blank CDs cost around $1 each. They understand that the record industry sells CDs for $30. They understand that squillionaire bands like Metallica who were the first to chuck a heavy mental about file sharing networks can afford to miss out on a few sales. |
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They understand that a multi-squillionaire like Madonna can afford to miss even more. Some may understand that many self-indulgent artists waste hours fiddling around in studios, racking up outrageous costs. And they understand that middlemen reap massive profit margins.
Since when has the record industry cared about artists' profits? As a former musician myself I remember when the old vinyl LPs cost $6 each, of which around 10 cents went to the artists. They have exploited musicians for as long as I can remember, which is (sadly) a long time. The pressure to create high production "outputs" comes from the companies more than from artists. The consumer pays for their inflated profit margins, marketing, behind-closed-doors deals, and the cartel status a few of the majors enjoy.
We pay for the marketing of overproduced mediocrity
With the advent of CDs, electronic background music and programmable mixing desks, production is potentially so much cheaper and easier than it was in the old days when an engineer would have to place a dozen mics around the drumset, and then work on getting guitarists' amps tuned properly, and then twiddle themselves to a standstill till the wee hours of the morning trying to get the mix just right.
Listen to this (free and legal) MP3 of one of my old outfits - Heart on Fire.
It sounds ok, doesn't it? Not quite pro standard, you say? Of course we were basically amateurs, semi-professional musicians who played the traps and made modest pittances from our live gigs. As well, the recording was dubbed from a tape of a tape of a master tape that was finally converted to a WAV file, then to an MP3, degrading quality even more. And bear in mind that the cassettes are now 16 years old, so the magnetic tape has lost even more quality.
The song was a second take performed live in the studio with a few dubs, with around 9 hours of post-production mixing on a 16 channel desk. It cost around $1,000 in studio time. But it is still satisfying listening for those who like that sort of thing.
Now you tell me why our latest crop of pop heroes and heroines have to spend millions of dollars in the studio, passing on those costs to us (and leaving artists millions of dollars in debt to record companies).
They marketed it that way, didn't they? They conditioned us to respond to over-produced sounds designed to distract us from the uninspired songwriting and ordinary performance of their hand-picked dolly-birds and pretty boys. Remember, these albums ain't exactly Sergeant Pepper. Then they want us to pay through the nose for it. Does it take millions of dollars in production costs to make great music? Emphatically no.
The Sex Pistols and most of the other punk bands never really did it for me, apart from The Clash and The Damned (and God Save the Queen was fun ... hehehe), but I'm starting to wish that those with their attitude came back in vogue. Not the aggro or disgustingness, just their anarchic "I don't need to pay a zillion bucks in production to make music" attitude.
More than ever now we need an indie music backlash. Grassroots music played by people with passion.
If you strip away the marketing brainwash, we - the long-sufferring consumers - want music that's relevant to our attitudes and lifestyles, with a good sound, good singing, a good tune or a good beat. We want inspiration and creativity. We want feelings and passion and talent and mood and spontaneity. We don't need this over-produced, formulaic shite that's marketed onto us.
The sad truth is that many kids have been conditioned to salivate over Beautiful People playing scripted narcissist games in no-content videos and multi-million dollar advertisements. They've become Pavlov's Puppies. We're paying through the teeth for manufactured demand and inflated profit margins, but with little of substance to gnaw on (to push the analogy).
Ok, so we're being manipulated by multinationals, what else is new?
Around two decades ago record companies decided to make CDs and phase out vinyl. I bought thousands of dollars of vinyl music but now I can't play any of my old records because you can't get replacement styluses or record players since they now cost the earth and are harder to find than a genius in the Top 40.
However, if I want to get some of those old songs back (that I paid for) using a peer-to-peer network, then I'm branded "a thief". But I paid for the copyright to the music years ago, didn't I? Should I have to pay for the right to have that music again because the multinationals phased out my technology? Why should I have to buy it twice? Who's being immoral here?
Napster started in early 1999 and just 10 or so months after its inception it was being pursued by the moguls. The multinationals displayed the same lack of creativity and vision then that have always done, obsessing over with the bottom line and disregarding innovation as too risky and too expensive.
In 1999-2000 they had the chance to join in the innovation and to see that that downloading MP3s online was the inevitable way of the future. Instead they chose their tried and tested Luddite bully ways that had served them so well in the past. The record company executives let the grass grow under their feet, maybe because they smoked too much of the stuff in their baby boomer youth.
What REALLY affects CD sales
If these guys had even one iota of intelligence or morality they would have realised that people were sick of spending a fortune on CDs with inflated prices with only one or two quality songs and a load of trashy filler tracks. Didn't it make sense to offer MP3s as a way for kids to selectively access their favourite songs at modest cost? Maybe the profit margin wasn't high enough.
Parents are struggling financially, bowed under the weight of house payments more befitting Buckingham Palace than the dog kennels you can buy for $300,000 in Sydney these days (God knows what American and European property prices are like). Parents work overtime to survive and they aren't about to shell out $30 every few minutes for overpriced CDs. That's the main reason why CD sales are falling, not file sharing networks. Serious music buffs and hi-fi fanatics with high disposable incomes will always buy "the real thing". The ones who are doing most of the downloading are those who wouldn't buy CDs anyway because they're too expensive.
Further, times have changed. People are more busy now and don't have the time or inclination to bury their heads between the speakers as people of my generation did. It's a less music-oriented world. We watch DVDs. We surf and chat and email online. Boys play Nintendo and computer games. Buying a CD isn't the big event that the old LPs were with their ornate covers, with inserts, lyrics, photos, artwork and various other gimmicks to amuse the fans.
The whole litigation game played by the record companies - bullying children with their expensive lawyers - is a furphy and no matter what they do, their profits will continue to decline for all of the above reasons.
If the multinationals get in step with the modern age and call off their lawyers and try to build a little goodwill with their audience with gratis offerings (the secret to doing successful B2C business on the net) they may make up some ground. Not that that's likely, given their insatiable hubris and greed.
In the end there will be only one winner of this fiasco. The lawyers.
Surprised?
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