copyright

Over on the Phree Musique Blog¹, scrivener (a friend and also the genius behind SpiritOfSalt and the Song A Day project) has started a multi-part analysis of the disintegration of the “record industry.” In keeping with his honorary, self-appointed title as “visionary” he eloquently and completely lays out a little history and the opportunities the industry missed in their zeal to keep their “plastic disc” retail business model viable.

Part 1 is a prologue to his arguments and starts off by quoting at length from a recent speech by longtime U2 manager, Paul McGuinness where he lays out a dreadful future “solution” for the industry that consists of ISPs spying on user’s activities and becoming the copyright cops. I think scrivener makes an astute observation about the initial sentence from Mr. McGuinness speech:

What I’m trying do here today is identify a course of action that will benefit all: artists, labels, writers and publishers.

Hmmm, who’s missing from that list of interested parties? I won’t spoil scrivener’s answer, go read the post.

Part 2 begins the meat of his analysis. This part laments the fact that the industry has never considered the fan in any of their calculations. In fact, some corners of the industry actually write off all fans as thieves that artists must be protected from.

Check out the series. It’s a very well thought out and written opinion piece that puts the DIY ethic in stark contrast to the big label way of doing things.

1. Full disclosure: I am participating in an interview with the Phree Musiqe Blog about DJ Edna today [↩]

Mr. Albini is an independent and corporate rock record producer of such bands as The Pixies, The Poster Children, Superchunk, and Nirvana just to name a few.

He has written an excellent narrative of how a band is lulled into acceptance of an artist-unfriendly contract by record labels. It lays out in a spreadsheet where all the “hidden costs” add up to the band making “about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11.” Oh, and they no longer own their own creative copyrights which means that if their music succeeds on the long tail, they’re out of even more money that would have been theirs had they had the guts and initiative to DIY.

With emerging artist-friendly software (like DJ Edna), the commoditization of hosting and credit card processing services, coupled with Moore’s Law, there’s really no reason this kind of tragedy needs to happen anymore.

The music industry game has changed forever in favor of the independent artist. Some day we’ll look back on the old recording industry business model in the same way we look back on how the meat processing industry was run at the turn of the century. The next generation of artists will simply shake their heads and wonder how the need to distribute small plastic discs ever led to such industry greed and artist misery.

Following up on my last post about why artists should, in most cases, simply ignore most violations of their recorded music copyrights, here is a site that bills itself as “A Clearinghouse For New Ideas About Copyright.”

This post in particular is an excellent summary of who copyrights actually benefit (hint: it’s not the artist).

Another interesting article that explains why artists shouldn’t worry about copyright violations of their recorded music. Unless it’s a big time ripoff where the violator is making a ton of money off your work, don’t sweat it. And don’t expect all the web 2.0 companies you’ve put your content onto to look out for copyright violations either. That will only raise their costs, be ineffective, and reduce the number of players in the market. That, of course, will result in fewer choices for you, the artist, and cost you in the end.

So, what’s the moral of the story? Just distribute your own material yourself (using something like DJ Edna). If someone is ripping you off to the degree that you should do something about it, you’ll know (because if you don’t, chances are it wasn’t popular enough to matter anyway) and be able to hire a lawyer to go get your money. Or, for free, you can publicly shame the violator on your artist blog.

As with all things in life, fear can make you do silly things.

Lots of interesting Music Industry 2.0 news today. Here’s yet another article claiming that the RIAA has gone too far in their claims over music copyright. In it, the author advocates reducing the duration of a copyright from the current, ridiculously long term of 125 years to 5 years. Although I believe that this one move would alone set the industry straight and get them to focus on innovation rather than litigation, I don’t think it’ll ever happen. Certainly not while Disney is lobbying congress.

Instead, I believe that the inevitable change in the industry has to start with the artists themselves. No changes in law are necessary for artists to simply deny giving major labels artistic copyrights to protect in the first place. The music industry won’t change until the artists themselves decide to change it. After all, the artists are the most powerful force in the industry, not the labels. The major labels simply parasite off that forfeited artist power and use it for their own ends.