| respect Yes, there is a huge problem in the music industry. Payola, lulling passive interest of listeners, artists willing to sign prohibitive contracts, etc.
If an artist cannot earn a living from his art, he must take a day job. By working a day job, he cannot devote himself fully to his art, which will in turn suffer.
Quality of art, and quantity of quality art decline. It has been documented in history, as recently as a few hundred years ago. Copyright protection offers an incentive to those who bring art to the masses. If you don't create, you may not understand this concept. If you do create but don't want to charge money for your art, that doesn't mean you get to decide for every other artist in the world (or even ANY other artist in the world).
Yes, it costs less than a dollar to duplicate a CD if done in large volume. This doesn't account for the cost of a recording studio, an engineer and producer, musical instruments and equipment, hired musicians, art work, and anything else that went into the creation of the recording.
Simple minds use simple excuses. The cost to duplicate the CD is not the issue. If somebody creates a CD how does he get anyone to buy it?
He pays $80,000 to shoot a flashy video for MTV for the ADD consumers. He pays $200,000 for recording studio time and an engineer and producer. His label will pay to be on commercial radio with medium to heavy rotation. Radio promotion is probably the highest cost in any music marketing campaign. (this can range from $100,000 to millions of dollars)
Then after someone has heard it at least a statistical 8 times, they begin to like the song (don'tcha love science?). After a while they consider purchasing the song. They don't call it radio programming for no reason. By this time, the costs associated with the creation of the music and the marketing of it to the consumer, is astronomical. This is the problem that needs to be fixed.
I read an article from Shania Twain's former personal manager that claimed that radio promotion costs for just one of her top ten hits was several million dollars. This was for a six month period of time.
Ever since payola was declared illegal (as if anyone needed that explicitly stated) the business has found a way around it, which needs to be stopped. They use "independent promoters". An independent promoter will approach a radio station and offer to pay them for the right to provide them with all of their new "adds" (additions to the play list). They pay a large fee to the station, in return for exclusive rights to independently promote them. They will bill a record label for every song that is added to the radio station play list, and the fee is described as "promotional costs" in order to be "legal". If the record label doesn't pay, the song is dropped from rotation, and doesn't get played. The independent promoter will bill the record label even if he had nothing to do with the song being added to the play list.
The record labels both love and hate this. It makes things much more predictable, and easily manipulated, but at the same time it makes any kind of large scale marketing promotion very expensive.
www.salon.com has several great articles about Clear Channel and how they have perfected this process.
So, the cost to duplicate CD's isn't really the issue. Record labels lose large sums of money every day because they try to play the game rather than report illegal behaviors and practices. An artist on a major label is considered a flop if he only sells 500,000 copies. If an independent sold half of that, he would be a huge success.
And the creator of any intellectual property is the only person with the right to decide what to do with his creation. No matter how badly someone else wants it for free, it will never make it right. If the owner decides that he wants to give it away for free, then so be it.
Streaming music technology was created in order to allow people to preview music in it's complete form (not just part of a song). It is a perfect tool for an artist to directly connect with his audience and let them preview before buying. Then someone has to come along and try to get something for nothing, and ruin it for everyone. If the excuse was true that people only use P2P to listen before buying, then internet radio streaming is the perfect solution to respect artists and publishers rights, and simultaneously allow the listener free access to new music previews. But that isn't really the case now, is it?
Considering the huge number of computer users that use P2P, nobody knows what "most of them" do. But people are ready to quote statistics that prove P2P helps sales, or that most P2P users only use it to try before you by. No real research study to prove it, not by scientific standards at least. But if someone provides statistics about negative affects of P2P, nobody believes it. Even if there is independent research studies.
Open minds have not decided yet, we listen to all the facts and decide later, if ever. Only accepting facts that support your current beliefs, and disregarding everything else is very dangerous. |
