Either way it isn't up to you to decide who will pay for what, and your assumption that every artist is a drunken freeloader is clearly false. Most working artists also have to hold down a job and will get very little in return for their efforts.
They aren't providing nothing, and very clearly people want what they are providing. It takes time, effort and opportunity costs to produce music and to expect that it be given to you for nothing because you think it's frivolous is ridiculous.
Do you pay for DVDs? Pay to see movies? What about the artwork on your clothing, or the design of your car? You pay for all of those things directly or indirectly and they could all be considered frivolous in one way or another, yet someone worked hard to make it happen and people are willing to pay for that.
EDIT: Let me elaborate in regards to ehnto's argument. DVDs, clothing and cars are all physical items I am paying for and therefore I am happy to pay for that. I am also happy to pay to see a movie because movies could not exist prior to being able to film. Movies are the end product that I want to see.
All of these are different to music. Music existed well before the ability to record it did. All that recording did was make it more accessible. Back when you had to purchase a record or CD there was a physical item you ended up with to listen to that music. Therefore something that was worth paying for. I bought a lot of CDs. The music is not the end product. The live show where I go to see the musician perform is.
I don't get paid for people to use my work without any involvement from me past the fact I created something. Why should a musician be paid for you listening to the music they created. They aren't putting in any hours for me to hear that past the original creation. What are they getting paid for?
This is why I love artists like Hoodie Allen and Chance the Rapper. They release the majority of their music for free. Hoodie Allen was unable to release one of his albums for free on iTunes, so he charged the minimum. He was constantly on social media telling people they can download his album for free from multiple locations and that they didn't have to buy it on iTunes. People still paid for that album like crazy.
On that note... fuck the music industry.
You do not have a right to access that content without paying whatever price it is the artist has decided to charge.
If any artist WANTS to release their music for free, they can. If they do not want to release their music for free, they can also do that.
But it is their right and choice. Not yours.
If you want to be an anarchist, great, but stop picking on creators of intellectual property.
Artists should be supported, but I can't see any sane justification for letting them dictate the terms for how a society may interact with its own culture.
What about recoupment contract terms and similar unjust practices?
You are effectively saying to artists, shut up, you have no right to sign contracts or have your voluntary agreements respected because you are too exploited to know what's good for you. And now step aside and let me download all your stuff for free until we have sorted out all the warts of media business models, capitalism and the universe in general.
We all face constraints and we are not completely free in the choices we make. That doesn't mean the choices we do make can simply be discounted.
You're essentially excusing slave trade where people sell themselves to become slaves "because they could choose not to", when they actually in the real world couldn't see any other viable option for survival.
And while at it you're blatantly ignoring (or perhaps obscuring) the other option, of targeting the other side of the equation and banning such exploitative contracts, requiring that they offer reasonable terms instead. Are you claiming it is impossible for them, who keep making record profits, to afford to be fair?
Because you are talking over artists' heads like they were little children unable to understand how enslaved they are.
If an artist says, I feel enslaved (and some probably do), I take that seriously, and I would have a very close look at those contracts.
But if an artist says I am acting voluntarily and I demand restrictions on free music downloads, and a consumer of music such as yourself says no you are being enslaved and therefore I feel entitled to free music downloads in the name of fighting big bad media companies, then that is too obviously self-serving for me to take at face value.
How can't you understand the effects of that? Are laws against lies in advertisement also paternalistic?
And why in the first place do you even believe that piracy is a problem that can be solved legally? Why do you believe it even should be solved using the law? Why should the mere request of the media companies be sufficient to put people in jail!?
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe...
I'm not defending any particular contractual structure. I'm not arguing against banning specific types of contracts. I'm not calling for excessive punishment for copyright infringement or for a surveillance state to enforce copyrights.
I'm saying that artists can be trusted to understand their own situation and act in their own interest, possibly with the help of lawyers or organisations that support them.
If some of them come to a conclusion that is different from yours, you can't just go ahead and declare them mentally incapacitated. That is what I call paternalistic and it is actually a rather moderate way of putting it.
Artists are not enslved imbecils who need to be protected from themselves. They may need to be protected from others, but that is something they need to diagnose themselves and make demands accordingly (some certainly do that).
Our societies are moving pretty quickly in a direction where we take away people's freedom to enter into voluntary agreements with other adults based on the claim that they are in a forced situation and can no longer be trusted to speak for themselves. Just look at prostitution, smoking, gambling, foreign currency loans, variuos fetishes, assisted suicide, etc.
Yes there are situations in which people need to be protected from themselves and their inability to grasp their own situation. But these situations are exceedingly rare. There should be a very high threshold before coming to that conclusion.
I'm saying this indeed is wrong in 90% of the cases because the big media companies are intentionally deceptive, and control the message that the artists are getting. Try reading a bunch of blogs of musicians getting fed up by the companies - they're easy to find, and most of yet stories are very similar. They're promised everything and get nothing.
> possibly with the help of lawyers or organisations that support them.
I'm saying this is a necessity with independent organizations that actually care about the individuals, because right now they don't have that kind of support.
And what makes you so uniquely positioned that you cannot be deceived and the information you have access to is not tightly controlled by these supposedly omnipotent media bosses?
I haven't heard anything from you that makes me believe in your superior insight compared to the people who signed the letter the NYT is reporting on.
Artists talk to each other you know. If 10% knew some super secret truth about the media business, the other 90% would quickly learn about it.
I'm afraid you'll have to accept that there are different opinions out there and not everyone who disagrees with you has had wool pulled over their eyes.
Has it occurred to you that the reality may be more nuanced so that reasonable people can disagree? Or that media conglomerates and their business models may be one problem that artists have and copyright infringement on a massive scale another one on top of that?
http://musicconsultant.com/how-to-make-it-in-the-music-indus...
Looking up recoupment in the music industry is infuriating on its own, it isn't far from modern day slavery. Control over PR budgets is another one, and shitty royalties is a major one.
If you spend a few hours looking up those leads, I sincerely doubt you'll still think I'm misguided or not educated enough afterwards.
I have a problem with the principle of disregarding someone's express will based on a claim that he or she is manipulated and unable to speak for themselves.
That is dangerous for a free, democratic society based on the rule of law. If you disagree with someone about what is good for them, you need to convince them, not ignore their will.
And that has nothing to do with the extent to which I agree or disagree with your opinions on the subject of media contracts. We may well agree on a lot more than you seem to think.
That's a very limited view of music. Tons of music/audio workers out there neither sing nor play live instruments. Songwriters, composers, electronic musicians, recording engineers, mixers, Foley artists, etc. To them, recording is their only product.
That's that person you go see at shows, like you know, famous rappers and pop stars and rock stars.
These are professional entertainers.
Beethoven was a musician. So is Aphex Twin. So is a guitar player in a bar cover band. Each have a work output that take very different forms.
Many musicians are composers whose work ONLY exists as a recording.
I don't know how it is possible for you to hold such strong opinions about this topic without understanding these concepts.
If their work is only a recording they can make money off of donations. This is how it works in my example of Hoodie Allen. He was directly telling his fans they could download his album for free and they were still paying for it.
I truly don't see how anything you have said here detracts from what I said.
> I am also happy to pay to see a movie because movies could not exist prior to being able to film.
I am happy listening to records, because records could not exist prior to being able to record. See, some album music is really unique in its own right and could not be easily reproduced live. The same as some movies could not easily be translated to a theater play.
> I don't get paid for people to use my work without any involvement from me past the fact I created something. Why should a musician be paid for you listening to the music they created.
Isn't it a bit the same as with software? When I buy some software, the developers also aren't putting any hours for me at the moment I'm using it. Still, most people are ok with paying for software.
Hey, how much of all the music you listen to you listen live? One percent perhaps? Don't be hypocritical please. Without recording you wouldn't get a chance to hear the best musicians from around the world.
Also a lot of people don't see or don't care about the difference between recording and live performance. For them music is the end product.
No. Just no. Concerts and merchandise are lame excuses for people who prefer not to pay for music. You don't decide what the artist is selling.
In most cases the album is the actual product. You may see it as an advertisement, but it has a very real price tag attached. If you don't want to pay for it, fine - but please don't feel entitled to it because you attended a concert or bought a shirt. Furthermore, do you realize that not every artist is a rock band? An ambient artist releases intended for home listening, may have a hard time a) selling t-shirts to a mature audience that isn't all that interested in colorful prints on hip shirts
b) filling anything but the smallest venues since the music might be less suited for clubs and stadiums compared to that band you probably had in mind
> I don't get paid for people to use my work without any involvement from me past the fact I created something. Why should a musician be paid for you listening to the music they created. They aren't putting in any hours for me to hear that past the original creation. What are they getting paid for?
I can't believe how naive this sounds. You probably don't sell any kind of digital good, do you? Would you say the same thing about software, apps, books? The artist put a lot of hours into the original work and that's what you pay for. Do you think you paid for the medium or the distribution process back when you bought CDs? That was a fraction of the price.
> On that note... fuck the music industry.
The music industry is much more than the handful of major labels. There are countless small, caring and niche labels that absolutely have the interests of artists and listeners in mind in everything they do. Your view is very narrow in that regard.
1. No. 2. No. 3. What "artwork" on my clothing? Everything I have is for work, white or blue collared shirts. Occasionally I'll be really wild and do something in plaid! 4. Don't have a car and I won't support the consumer vehicle industry. I use mass transit, thanks.
Wow. That's depressing.
How is that not artwork?
For that matter, most of my shirts don't have artwork--I like casual button-downs for everyday wear; but I look for striking colors, interesting fabric patterns, etc. I'm not pushing any personal style in particular, but it's a shame if there's nothing in your closet but work clothes.
The system is sometimes convoluted but eventually the money comes out of the consumers pocket. The point I'm trying to make is simply that at least some of those dollars should make it back to the creator.
In theory that's what copyright is designed to make happen. I don't have as much of a problem with people getting stuff for free, they probably wouldn't have paid for it anyway. It's more about those who are making money off the artist without giving any back, and you could argue that Youtube does that if a musicians music is available for free and they are generating indirect revenue from advertising across the site.
If I know I can get a song on YouTube, I'll hit their home page, get an advertisement, then go to the song. They have profited from hosting the song in that example. They don't advocate or allow it, but it happens and the artist gets nothing for something while Youtube gets something for nothing.
Actually no, it doesn't have to come from somewhere. It's quite possible that we'll go back to a world where musicians aren't generally paid, except for a few who are paid up-front by rich patrons. That's pretty much how it was until the 20th century.
When you write that it doesn't have to come from somewhere, you are just arguing that costs (time/money) will be born by the musicians themselves. Basically a donation to society.
The other option being they stop making music.
I make all sorts of cool art for free. No money, comes from nowhere, sometimes I pay for materials or prints. The printers aren't the creative ones (if they dare I'll take my work somewhere else next time). Then I give them away (because birthday presents are hard).
And sometimes I make music but you can't give that to people, which very neatly describes the whole problem in a microcosm: You can give someone a performance but that's ephemeral, a one time thing (and only if I were good enough that'd be passable birthday present and even if I were a rockstar, after a while you gotta ask yourself wtf you're doing and why). You can give someone a recording but that's worthless because it's just information which has near zero value--and IMHO it's completely ridiculous to expect people to pretend otherwise (unless that's the art but then it's not music and let's not get into the art of pranksterism right now).
The other option is they stop making music--haha! Seriously, who is going to make them stop?? Some wise people once said it takes a nation of millions to hold them back (maybe they meant something else, but they also meant this). Another wise person once said that we are nothing but the sum of our parts and that which we give away for free.
So there's music that is not going to be made if you don't INSERT COIN. Then there's music that builds from divine pressure (wise person said "can't touch this") and forces its way out no matter what. Cry me a river if we lose the former, thanks to technology, it'll just create space and breathing room for the latter.
It's not clear they want it for any price, though
to expect that it be given to you for nothing
That's not what the GP said, he said he wanted to see these artists go under, which is another matter. I feel the much the same way about artists who lobby for insane surveillance and trivially abusable laws because they feel they aren't paid what they're entitled to.
But I think of : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomplamoose so I disagree very much.