No Future For Dinosaurs

When I was a kid the music business was really simple. Labels discovered artists, artist made music, shops sold music, we bought music.

Things have gotten complicated in the last 15 years and if you’d like to get a handle on why, there's a book and a film could shed a lot of light.

In Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age Steve Knopper does a fantastic job of recasting the recent history of music as a page-turner whodunit of epic proportions. ‘Epic’ referring to epic greed (with a complimentary side order of monumental stupidity). The ‘who’ of course are the major labels (and the RIAA) and the ‘it’ that they ‘dun’ is killed the record industry.

Yes, they did it.

Anytime any new technology appears from CDs & DAT to mp3 players and, yes, of course, Napster, they try to sue it or kill it. Examples abound. Here’s a few of my favourites.

1981-82. After a presentation to executives what they could expect from the new CD technology, they throw it open for questions. Jay Lasker, head of ABC-Paramount records asks why his cable TV picture is sometimes cloudy.

2007. Doug Morris CEO of Universal Music Group explains in an interview with Wired magazine why the majors were blindsided by the digital revolution.

“There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist…It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?”

The interviewer replies,

“Personally I would hire a vet”.

The sad thing is that Universal did have amazingly talented technologists, like Albhy Galuten, working for them already. They were just overlooked and ignored. They should have been easy to spot. They were the ones wearing Napster T-shirts.

Speaking of Napster the labels had their chance to buy it or make a deal with it. As one artist manager said later, in Napster there were 30 million music users in one place on the net, ready to be sold music, advertising whatever. But the industry killed Napster, Grokster and every other –Ster including a few they created themselves.

Eventually they were left with only one option.  

Steve Jobs struck a deal whereby he would get 22 cents on every one of their songs in return for the labels making 0 cents on everyone of Steve’s iPods. And because the labels had already killed off the bricks and mortar record stores the only real record store in town was (you guessed it) Steve J’s online emporium.

The examples of greed are too numerous to mention but on fact above all others should make every self-respecting musician want to grab a handful of dirt to throw on Sony’s (et al) coffin. When CDs replaced vinyl the retail price jumped $8. Artist’s royalties increased by 6 cents.

If Appetite for Self-Destruction looks backward at what the industry has killed, Brett Gaylor's film RiP: A Remix Manifesto has feet firmly planted in the present and does a great job at looking at what amazing new genres and music media the present copyright-heavy culture is stifling. The journey takes you from mashup artists to Walt Disney as an uber-remixer (who took previously created art from fairy stories to Buster Keaton films and created something new) to the Disney Corps, who are committed to stopping anyone having the freedom to do what Walt built his career on. It ends in South America where we get a glimpse of what a whole culture built on remixing is like.

What was really interesting was the interview with mashup artist Girltalk who has made a whole career of infringing copyright to make some amazing new music. His day job is in medical research where he comments that copyright on medical procedures and even genes could be holding back the pooling of resources which might lead to a cure for cancer. He say "I think  eventually everyone's gonna realise it's beneficial to share ideas". 

I’d really recommend both.

(Amazon Links)
Appetite for Self-Destruction
RiP: A Remix Manifesto

Links to this post: NicholasTozier.com/words

Related Posts: Thru-You and the thorny problem of airspace
Copyright mythbusting

Free songs by Matt Blick


[If you're subscribed to this blog via email, you will have to click on the post's title to watch any video content (the link will take you my site).

Copyright Mythbusting

The music business giants are constantly appealing to the argument that if file sharing is allowed to continue, musicians will stop getting paid and will stop creating.

Here's a few facts to consider

A great wealth of music was created for thousands of years before musicians received any income from recordings of their music (whether printed, analogue or digital).

The vast majority of musicians creating music today do not receive any income directly from their songs.

Most of today’s greatest artists wrote their breakthrough albums/song (often their best work) before receiving any income from writing.


Here are some myth busters about where the present income goes


When you legally download a song from i-tunes for 79p (99c) the artists receives 4p (9c). Apple recently stated that if they were forced to raise this to a whopping 7p (15c) they would shutdown i-tunes.

When an artist records a song for a record company THE RECORD COMPANY, NOT THE ARTIST, OWNS THE RECORDING

When an artist signs a deal with a publisher THE PUBLISHER, NOT THE ARTIST, OWNS THE RIGHTS TO THE SONG

Recording advances are recoupable from record sales and the master tapes remain the property of the record company.

Don’t understand?

Your bank gives you a mortgage to buy a house.
You pay off the mortgage plus interest.
Who owns the house?
The bank does.
 
That’s the way the record companies do business.

True Story.

Thru-You and the thorny problem of airspace

Stop Press: Kutiman goes viral on Lessig and 43 Folders.

In 1946 an American farmer, Mr. Causby, attempted to sue the US air force for using his property. What were the USAF doing? Flying their planes overhead. The farmer reasoned that as he owned the land he also owned everything above it.

Contrary to popular opinion the farmer won, leaving the way open for endless wrangling about exactly how much air he owned, under what circumstances the air force would be allowed to use his air and how much the use of his air was worth.

A similar debate has been raging for the last few years over who owns sound recording (vibrating air you might call it). The recording industry would have us believe they do and, like Mr. Causby, the courts are on their side. They would say that file sharing is ‘killing music’ and if allowed to go on unchecked will result in artists not being properly renumerated, forcing them to stop creating and go and find regular jobs to support their families. All music creation will stop - killed by a legion of 12 year old Limewire users.

My belief is that the present copyright laws, not file sharing, are killing music (or at least attempting to throttle the life out of it). What kind of creativity could be unleashed if we stopped trying to figure out just who owns each particular piece of airspace?

Maybe this is a taste of things to come.

Ophir ‘Kutiman’ Kutiel, a 25 yr old Israeli funk musician and producer, has posted a project called Thru-You on the web. It's an album completely made up of samples taken from YouTube and re-engineered into new pieces of music.

As one site says

“They're not just patchwork assemblages, they're sample-based original creations that could hold their own on anyone's album…It's a work of next-level genius”.

So who owns this music?

Kutiman?

Every single artists who’s music contributed? Every last church organist, guitar teacher, 80 year old session drummer, 11 year old trumpeter and even the guy selling his synth on ebay??

The publishers, who doubtless own the rights to some of the songs performed ?

YouTube itself?

Me (and everyone else who listens to it)?

I don’t know what the answer is. But what I do know is that my life is richer for the being able to hear this remarkable music and I’m glad Kutiman didn’t let the question of who owned the air stop him from creating it or sharing it.

Watch it here

Download the album here

Kutiman Biog (Wikipedia)


And here's another of the more uptempo tracks followed by a short video of Kutiman talking about the project