The Music Industry can be pretty pathetic. At least in terms of the corporations that make billions, increase their revenues and complain about file sharing.
Don't know about anyone else, but I don't buy music, I listened to it on the radio, I stream it on my computer, and don't like more than half of it. What I do like are bits here and there, rarely full albums. Does the music industry lose money from me when I record/swap a file?
According to them, they lose millions.
According to me, I wasn't going to buy from them anyways.
They don't have what I want, the way I want it, at a price I'd be willing to pay.
I have found albums that I liked and bought them. Not like I was never a customer.
Don't think I'd be one ever again.
To the individual artists, I apologize, because I like some of their work a lot. But supporting the music industry itself is no go.
Independents, sure.
That is just ridiculous. I can't abide people who make millions of dollars whining about lost profits. And they do make millions, well the record companies do. Don't be fooled, the artist only gets a small portion of what the company rakes in and even less so if they do not write their own music. grrrr. It makes me so angry to see this.
I remember seeing an article on the BBC of one company who was willing to allow their songs to be downloaded at a cost. Where you could go online and download the songs you wanted, at a reasonable price. I prefer seeing companies do that nested of suing people left right and centre. It just leaves a bad taste in most consumers mouth, making it less likely that they will buy from them in the future.
Posted by: munin on Abril 4, 2003 12:01 PMIt reminds me of how the english tried to reinforce their hold on ireland during the late 16th century. :) Yes, it does. PLEASE bear with me -- this is an inordinately long post & I'm afraid I am paraphrashing (freudian typo!)and synopsising most horribly:
The colonisers had a crop-based economy, which meant they would come in, take over your land, then give it to their solders/settlers to farm & defend. If the colonisees had a crop-based economy, then at that point they were effectively conquered.
But the irish had a cattle-based economy, which meant they could roam around the countryside with their source of sustenance & revenue, and thus their civil and political structure, intact.
To make a long discussion of humanities short: this irritated the english no end. So they declared it illegal to trade cows outside the cities they had established. (The rural cow trade, they claimed, supported the criminal element.)
This really blew my mind. I'd always thought that being declared illegal was reserved for something that was, well, intrisically immoral in some way.
But this was clearly a case in which a law was created, not because the behaviour in question was in and of itself bad, but because the behaviour threatened the economic interests of people with the power to make laws.
And that's why the music industry reminds me of english colonisation. :) Ta da, QED. *grand sweeping bow, exeunt*
Okay, I'm not making a case that one is exactly like the other; I'm sure I'd be nailed by any 6th grade debate team for that. I'm just explaining how they remind me of one another.
I can do that without breaking any intellectual property laws now, can't I?
Posted by: edgar mousehat on Abril 4, 2003 01:51 PM*shamefaced Edgar* Paraphrashed, indeed!
Dang, wish I could unpost at my leisure what I posted in haste. I could've sworn my teacher taught me that the draconian laws proposed by edmund spenser in A View to the Present State of Ireland were actually imposed, but that is not the case; perhaps what I remember is his indignation that such policies were proposed at all.
I can't find anything to support my claim that the english actually outlawed the trading of cattle outside their jurisdiction; I can only find the reference to the suggestion of it.
So my pseudo-comparison of english colonizers to the modern music industry is even more spurious than I intended.
Mind you, they (the english) DID institute the statue of KilKenny (to prevent the english from becoming "more irish than the irish"), and the penal laws (for the "suppression of popery"), and The Cattle Act (which restricted/prohibited irish export of cattle, and which they renewed three times, in 1663/67, 1671, and 1681)... so...
...so, perhaps a comparison *could* be drawn between modern-day Intellectual Property Laws and the ethics/methodology of Colonialization... but it should be done by someone brainier than I, as I am, it seems, a Mousehat of very little, and very Paraphrashing brain. :(
Posted by: edgar mousehat on Abril 4, 2003 05:55 PMif the music industry execs had a decent brain between them, they'd embrace the fact that file trading is a fact of life, and find ways to deliver a better product, more entertainment value for the money, and new technology. they had this same hissy fit when cassette recorders became available, saying they'd go poor because the whole world would buy one album and make copies for each other.
from the standpoint of public relations, everything they are doing confirms the image that they are greedy, evil, & probably kick puppies too, it's a p/r disaster, & that, along with the fact that corporate homogonized pasteurized music sucks major hiney, and they haven't done a new thing for what twenty years? c'mon folks we can do way better than CDs these days.
they could turn a blind eye to the filesharing and focus on developing things that their customer base wants to buy, and offer it at a price not quite so ridiculous, and have a thriving viable business model, generating a huge amount of good p/r and general warm fuzzies in the marketplace, but instead they're busting college kids.
so they're greedy, evil, *stupid* puppy kickers.
Posted by: @feckless on Abril 5, 2003 12:55 PM