Double edged sword innit. If labels believed that people weren't going to
rip off their music if they put it up as MP3s then they would. [well, the
numerous independent labels I work with would]. Unfortunately that's not the
case. MP3=piracy is a stigma which exists and which concerns a lot of labels
and artists.
This is niche music we are talking about, not Pop. We should be trying to
encourage it to behave in a better way, rather than getting caught up in the
politics of major labels. Fuck thinking that way.
When you buy a CD, rip it, and return it it costs the label money. Ever
think of that? Most record stores don't re-stock them [if they are of a
decent calibre] instead it is returned to the label and disposed of. After a
certain number of returns [allowed for faulty goods] they are no longer
written of, and so the label has paid for manufacturing and distribution on
an item it's not made any money on.
I'm all for previewing of music [I've done a lot of work with labels
encouraging it] but if a label [such as Warp or Ninja Tune] provides 2
minutes of RealAudio of 1/3 of the tracks on their releases then why do you
need to get MP3 versions to 'preview' it?
Encourage the labels to provide previews in a more accessible format. Then,
if you are honest, you don't need soulseek for 'previews'.
I know I'm going over old ground, but all that happens with MP3 trading is
that you piss off the people who are genuinely trying to get new,
interesting music out into the world. There is always going to be a balance
between those who feel they can give away what they produce, and those who
want to make money with it. If you have a problem with this why do you think
it is fair to take control of their decisions into your own hands.
How do I hear new music : I listen to Radio, go and hang out in shops, go to
clubs and ask DJ's what tracks are, and have friends into the same music. It
works pretty well for me as I'm not a totally compulsive record buyer any
more. It seems like there are a lot of kleptomaniacs on this list.
I know the argument that the album format is dead, and I concur. I don't
like spending £14 on a CD which has 4 tracks I want on it. But I make a
value judgement and think "Hell, not everything I do is perfect, but I still
get paid for it". Are all of you 100% grade students or something? If those
4 tracks are 90% good, and the other 6 are 40% good that gives me an average
of [fuck, maths, ugh (90*4 + 40*6)/10] 60% good. Which is a pass in most
books.
I mean, what gives you the right to think that you 'deserve' music. As BOC
said "Music has the right to children". Children can only be brought up with
the right nurturing environment. Spoil a child and it grows up greedy [like
the major labels], but don't give it enough and it won't achieve anything.
There is balance in between.
And no, I'm not a proponent of Copyright, or the pricing policies that
record labels have. I believe in the creative commons [
http://www.creativecommons.org for those who don't know about it, check out
the flash animation, it's really nice and enlightening ]. I'm about to try
releasing my own software works in a new form, which should enable a lot of
the things to happen that I want.
I'm actively trying to change the way it works, for small independent labels
because I know how hard it can be for them to survive. These are
marketplaces where 100 sales make a big difference, and where manufacturing
limited runs is only practical because of cashflow, because the major
players have been on the playing field for a long time and they've mashed it
up so it's all uneven and slippy for the smaller labels to get used to
playing on it. All that things like soulseek are doing is making the divide
bigger, and making it harder for new small labels to survive.
I mean, who's going to contemplate giving their lives to promoting new
interesting music if they can't afford to eat?
I'd like to look upon soulseek as the new radio, something where people do
use it to find out about new music and then go off and buy those releases,
but experience has shown that record sales for the labels that soulseek
tries to support have gone down. There are many many many reasons for this,
and P2P software may make an easy target, but to say it has not effect is
stupid. It has an effect, and we can't tell accurately what that is. What is
assured is that none of the money that is contributed by people for the
software makes it back to the artists who produce the majority of the music
downloaded on it. Is this fair?
If you are tech savy enough to know how to rip audio and stuff maybe we can
all do this ourselves. Maybe we should each approach a record label we know
and say "Hey, if you give me your CD's I will encode the first 2 minutes of
half of the tracks an put them up on a web page for you, so people can
preview them, and direct them towards you for sales." It wouldn't take much
of your time, and you'd get the CD's in exchange for doing something for the
label.
Fuck it, I'll even build a CMS to manage the upload of this audio if you
enough of you can get on board. I've got half of it in place already. A web
orientated contributed musical resource for the promotion of new music.
That's what soulseek should be about, but because it doesn't involve the
labels actively it's not favoured. It can then be P2P'd across servers on
the internet to provide a resource, but kept out of people pockets so the
labels don't think of it as 'giving away' there music.
There's an angle in this somewhere.
Troll over. Not that I want a fight.
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