**HEATED DEBATE ALERT**
Lol, bring it!
If the cartel setup their own sites available to download music from with ad driven support to generate income FOR THE ARTISTS then thats a good thing.
Never happen, the cartel are not Google and for them to setup anything that will come close to matching youtube for plays would be like trying to spear a falling turd - impossible! The best they'd get is a fraction of the plays that youtube has and a fraction of the revenue.
And exactly who's fault is that? The cartel have been snails, they have insisted on sticking to the old CD format whilst the whole world moved onto digital downloads. The signs where they for all to see in 2001 when after several years and incredible growth Napster was shut down. With the HUGE budgets they have at their disposal you would think an enourmous gloabal music store ad driven or even paid (at sensible prices) would have been obvious? After all youtube didnt come along for 4 more years, a period that of course saw the cartel sueing everyone in sight instead of moving their own business model forward.
if you pay a website designer to build you a site, should you then pay him a % of any profits it makes you?
Of course not... and its the wrong analogy. How about this... Youre a photographer, you ask a web designer to build you a gallery style website. He builds you a site you've paid him for it therefore its yours to do what you want with! If a random web designer builds himself a site and then starts displaying your photography and making money from it then damn right you should get a cut! Its your intellectual property!
Actually thats not a fair analogy at all, if another designer took my work and generated the global interest in my work i was to lazy or too stupid to create then i should be:
1. delighted at all the free publicity im getting helping me sell out my worldwide gallery tour making me milllions.
2. delighted someone else is busting their butts to promote my work and all the while PAYING ME A LICENSING FEE ( ala prs!)
You keep saying that Youtube is a great way for artists to promote themselves as its a great way to get their vidoes and music in front of millions of people but what you dont say is how they turn that promotion into anything that pays their bills? Youtube is great promotion for big groups who can plug a tour or a t-shirt but 99% of musicians arent in that category and all they get from youtube exposure is more youtube exposure.
Actually, ive told you many times how artists make the money, its from the HUGE tour revenues they make, concert tickets, merchandise etc. The problem is Matt, you are dealing with 2 entities under 1 banner and not making the 2 distinct, let me explain.
Artist - creates and/or performs the music
Record company - does very little except some promotion, yet take most of the money from CD sales
Record companies make not only "their cut" on the sale of a CD, but also most of the "production costs" such as pressing the CD's, cover design and production etc are also going to the record companies as the own the CD pressing and cover companies. So basically artists earn relatively little from CD sales.
Now, you can see why the Cartel are trying to stiffle online sharing and sites such as youtube, cause they are missing out on a big peice of the pie, in fact almost all of it, as with digital music, they cannot make a cut on the artwork, and the CD pressing. In fact they are finding it very tough to justify their earnings at all, as artists can self promote now using sites like youtube. This is why the music cartel turn to sueing people, creating fear, illegally DDOSing consumers connections, illegally searching innocent peoples houses without a warrent, etc. They are out dated, artists need them less and less and they are doing everything they can to cling to an out of date business model. The biggest issue they have got now is, CD sales are dropping and they have missed the boat, and frankly good ridance.
If you took (stole) a load of my music, put it on one of your sites and started making money from the ads with that music then you are using my property to make money. Fair enough, the "pennies per play" license is the wrong way to do it but why cant youtube start giving artists (or PRS - im not getting into a debate about where the PRS collections go coz thats not the issue - they are supposed to be collecting it and giving it to artists so lets assume they do that) a cut of the money... why cant i make money out of my own youtube channel?! There are sites (ive forgotten that big one?) that do that so why not youtube as well?
Ok, lets look at it another way Matt, lets say your own personal music site gets 50 visits a day, and you make £10 a day in sales a day.
I like your music and decide to put it on my site, which is a much higher traffic site, very soon, i am getting 50,000 hits a day on pages containing your music. Very soon, MTV are knocking on you door asking for interviews, your getting 10 calls a day from agents wanting to manage you, sooner or later to take one on, who grabs you some good celebrity invites and its not long before you are playing the Brixton acadamy and other such venues, 5000 people a night paying £15 a ticket, plus all the spins offs. Next thing you know, David Beckham is on the phone offering you £100k for a 60min set at his next celebrity party and from there the skys the limit. Now i understand this is a little simplistic, but you get the idea.
Now, whats it gonna be? sticking to your £10 a day, or would you like some free publicity?
Bottom line is, the space between artists and their incomes is currently being hogged by a bunch of greedy dinosaurs, and its time they are squeezed out, lets make one thing very clear, i am ALL for ARTISTS getting paid, just not the useless fatcats in the middle. If you look around the p2p news and other music and tech sites you will find there are many artists who are very very annoyed with their record companies, we have already seens some high profile artists telling the world so, some even going it alone.
February 28, 2007, 08:35:02 PM
