Especially with database-driven apps and SaaS products, distribution (hosting) is still most of what you're paying for. If someone leaked the back end source code for Github or Dropbox, of course there would be people who would host them for themselves and avoid paying, but I can't imagine it would cut into their revenues at all.
But with music, as soon as it's released in a digital format, anyone with an internet connection has near-frictionless access—the music creators are no longer offering any value from distribution other than the convenience of online stores like iTunes or the artwork and collectibility of a physical CD. The music industry and smaller musical groups/labels are certainly figuring this out, and experimenting with ways of offering something of value. Removing DRM was a big win because DRM did nothing except ruin the supposed convenience of online purchases. Cloud and subscription services (both pay and ad-supported) offer convenience and even better immediate availability than piracy.
These days, that compromise is, in some ways, probably tilted too far towards producers (or some categories of producers at least), but with no intellectual property at all, that would tilt things too far the other way.
I think we'll see amateur music and free/open software quickly fill the gap left by professional musicians. And people will keep finding ways of financing their love (playing music). In fact, I don't know many of my favorite musicians today who make a living from their music. They all work day jobs. Music is their passion. If anything, they lose money from releasing albums.
I think this new cultural line of thought of "in this day and age with the tools we have why would you need a full day job support for ..." (replace ... with making music, running a blog, developing games, etc) is pure arrogant bullshit. Yes, you can have hobbies, and side projects, and some might excel at doing them for a while. But doing your craft as an actual full time job is the only way to reach, and maintain, your full potential.
I just don't see a realistic turn of events where suddenly everyone is paying for CDs again. I also don't think creativity will stop because the money does.
Also, I think you are the one spouting pure arrogant bullshit when you completely dismiss amateur production. Just because you can't squeeze in hours of practice time outside your work schedule doesn't mean other people aren't doing it, right now. In fact there are tons of hugely talented musicians out there who aren't making a living off their music.
edit: Oh, I think I misread your intent with the "pure arrogant bullshit" thing, sorry for turning harsh. We don't really disagree, I completely agree that having to work a day job to support a music "career" is crap. On the other hand, I don't really see how it's ever been much different, except for a few lucky people who made it huge the golden eras of vinyl and CDs.
I don't care so much if you in specific endorse it. i do care about how it's a line of thought that we hear more and more often.
Also, I think you are the one spouting pure arrogant bullshit when you completely dismiss amateur production.
I dismissed amateur production? are you sure you hit reply in the right comment?
In fact there are tons of hugely talented musicians out there who aren't making a living off their music.
no kidding! you just blew my mind. now think of what they could do if they made/played their music as a full time job.
Lots of people pay for Spotify.[1] CDs are dead, but because of the medium, not the concept of paying for something.
[1] http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/02/09/spotify-second-large...
What a nightmare. You mean I have to do this job I hate for the rest of my life because I should want to do the thing I actually like for free? Is there really no value in it at all?
People who make products we want badly enough to need one of our own should be compensated for their efforts. They should not have to go out and play it in clubs, or sell you a t-shirt. If you want a copy of their song, you should compensate them. There are always going to be 90% of artists whose art is not popular enough to earn them a living. The problem we're discussing is that of the people whose music is very popular, but is being taken illegally without their permission.
Face it, we're not born with a burning desire to buy Metallica albums. You grow up listening to radio or watching tv, getting exposed to certain types of music (typically between 2 and 6 minutes, most on 4/4, with accompanying lyrics sung by one or two artists) and that's the music you'll end up wanting "that bad" -- pure coincidence?
Artists who succeed following traditional models (who, incidentally, are the most supportive of draconian copyright laws) are the ones who marketed themselves more heavily and got more access to traditional media: they went on TV, did interviews and concerts, paid for airplay... -- without any of that, they wouldn't be "popular". To do this, they had to borrow a lot of money from their label, and often will see very little financial reward.
So why they should not have to go out and sell you a t-shirt, instead of borrowing from a label to buy (increasingly more irrelevant) airplay? What's the big deal ?
The argument is essentially that piracy is okay because 90% of artists are never going to earn their living from music. 90% of artists do not create a product that appeals to enough people for them to earn a living selling that product. 10% create something popular enough that they might be able to earn a living at it.
How those products came to be popular socially is completely irrelevant. You're saying, let's not compensate them for being great musicians who created a recording I want a copy of. Let's instead require them to be in the business of selling clothes because I respect the value of a t-shirt more than the art they created that made me give a shit about a shirt with their name on it.
So I'd rather compensate them for being great t-shirt sellers, it doesn't really make any difference and it will probably guarantee them more cash.
Sometimes (maybe mostly). Other times it's because the artist is actually good and people buy their stuff just by word of mouth (Metallica is actually more an example of this). I think it's easier to tell in hindsight which is which. Milli Vanilli vs. Led Zeppelin, for instance.
The traditional role of the record company wasn't to manufacture music and shove it down our throats, but to be the filter--find the good musicians and sign them up. While I agree that there is a lot of manufactured crap out there, I do think that you can't dismiss all pop music because there are actually artists out there that are good and popular.
Incidentally, I think the real revolutionary thing that napster did was stop the record companies from being the filter, at least in our minds. Being able to try out any weird music I liked was liberating and when I found some bands I liked I could look at that user's whole library and use it as a primitive recommendation engine. I was able to find way more indie stuff and it effectively gave some of the filtering controls over to me.
At the same time, I don't think you can say that we'll only get Rebecca Black in the future, you can't know that. Mozart had a lot of factors playing into his level of success (timing, the right parents, innate skill, etc). At the same time, Mozart lived before albums or musical copyright, and worked under the patronage system. It's possible we'll see a return of that as well, if the current model completely breaks down.
Also, with software we can empirically look at the history of IP law and see that a huge amount of software that is fundamental even today was created before any sort of software patents were awarded (and presumably, before those people ever even considered monetizing software through government-protected monopoly on distribution).
I think it requires a naive and backwards view of human psychology to assume that money is the sole or primary incentive to create quality music or software. In fact, I surmise that anyone capable of producing top notch content would discover a way to do so without current IP protection laws.
When will you make it? In the evening when you're off from work? What about my marriage? My kids? They all have to suffer because people think they have a right to my effort for free?
Meaning that they probably have day jobs and don't produce as much music as they could if they were able to work at it full time. This may or may not have anything to do with piracy, but I think the point of fewer digital goods being produced is one to consider.
The same digital technology that makes piracy easier is what made it possible for baddox to find them in the first place. It is hard to imagine solutions to the problem of music piracy that wouldn't also make it harder to find these musicians. After all, music piracy has become easy because music is easy to copy and distribute... which is also why it has become easier to find the niche musicians you like.
Suppose you're right (though I don't think you are) and we successfully clamp down on music piracy so that these musicians can more easily monetize their small fan bases and spend more time making music. Does baddox care about this music if, in this alternate world, he never discovers them?
And this is more true of software than anything else, and there is a good reason. The most important ingredient of software production is not 'incentivization', not money. It is other software, other information. That is because it is leveraged unlimitedly by being copyable: a single sum of money can support a single piece of development effort, but a single piece of information can support any number of development projects.
The more completely you have and enforce copyright, the more you destroy that leverage.
Hopefully in time we'll see a lot less fart apps for $5 and the umpteenth song about a weekday from people who see it as a quick way to make cash and not something they have a passion for.
If both of these industries were about passion and not money then piracy wouldn't be such an issue.
There is nothing stopping those 148,194 people from going and pirating those games, but they haven't because people will pay for a product.
Positive some of those people won't even play the games but donated just to support the idea. (I am one of those).
And yet there are many people that actually do this already, otherwise how would you be booting your linux box? I know I program in my spare time...
> Just thinking about it is depressing. The parasites will walk around happily listening to their free music in their makerbot printed mp3 player (from pirated plans)
I don't know, that sounds kind of cool--everything would be different, that's for sure. I think there will always room for really good programmers. Also, never bet against people trying to find a market somewhere--there's always one somewhere, it just might not look like the ones we have now. Don't fight the future, embrace it (or starve).
Piracy stopped them from collecting the social security check and live the wealthy life of the unemployed pirate.
It's like saying that authors can still make money through public readings when pirated ebooks are everywhere, <cue famous example here>. Or that games can just have unpiratable multiplayer. That's all true, but it kills off whole genres.
To clarify on the fairness, buying software and music almost feels like a donation already. And I have been surrounded by anecdotal evidence in my youth who happily cracked "silly" casual shareware games, which just felt awkward to pay for, then played them for months. Yet when their favorite brand's AAA game was released, they bought it, played it for three days, then proudly put the box on top of their shelf and claimed that they do buy software -- but only when it's worth it. I can easily see the same thing happening for higher-profile vs lower-profile bands.
The development community has a great solution: app stores. But these only work if the people who run the app stores are willing to help protect the products of those who sell in that store. I think this is what the post is mostly about (and has little to do with the music industry).
To pirate work on the net... Whatever.
To pirate work by placing it in the same app store that your product is sold. That is just messed up.
The analogy between music and tech suggests that the two hits-based industries selling digital goods are not so different after all. But why would our morality in one case be so different from the other case?
If anything, this allegory seems to suggest to me that the recording industry has committed one of the biggest public relations bungles of our lifetimes. People who wouldn't think to pirate a mobile app would pirate music without a second thought thanks to widespread lawsuits, pay-for-play, price fixing, and of course, ease.
It sounded to me like the message was supposed to be "it doesn't sound so awesome when you see it from the other side of the looking glass, now does it". (It felt like it was targeted at people who can identify with developing mobile apps)
"The point of the article is that making that choice for someone else is wrong."
It's my feeling that in this article at least, the author does not really care about the rights and wrong of copying, piracy, intellectual property, etc. He is scared by relatively few people on the internet being both lawmaker, judge, party and executioner when it comes to the monetization of a digital product, and the reason why he is scared is that these few people are not even potential customers.
The problem of someone taking copyrighted content and making it available for others is a small one. The big problem is the many millions of people who take advantage of it. If everyone recognized that they're not entitled to anything except their basic human rights, none of which have anything to do with access to MP3s, then others posting that content online wouldn't matter.
The hope with this article was a little empathy from a community that often leans toward not caring about copyright law as it pertains to music. While many chose to go the route of poking tiny holes in parts of the analogy, plenty didn't realize it was an allegory and talked about how messed up it was. Many of them the same people who fight music copyright tooth and nail.
It's just sad to think that everybody enjoys music, just like they enjoy software, and so many other things that can be easily taken, and yet don't care if the people who create it see enough benefit to keep making it for them. It's short sighted and will result in fewer people having the time to become experts in these crafts, which is a loss for everyone. Sure, quantity is at an all time high, but in art that hardly matters.
We need to figure out fair solutions to these time & money issues in order to void the piracy problem and make devs and artists feel better. In the mean time, well... there are concerts, donations, advertisement, register-only services, drm... crappy stuff(1) compared to the real deal if you want my opinion (that of an independent android app dev), but eh, tough times.
(1)except concerts. Live music is awesome. Horribly expensive and probably really hard to setup, but extremely enjoyable.
Precisely. Many millions of people take advantage of it, and the overall good is greater than if they didn't. If the cost of distributing some good falls down to zero, you can't make a living by distributing these. Find another way; for instance provide a web service through your app, that unregistered copies can't access.
> It's just sad to think that everybody enjoys music, just like they enjoy software, and so many other things that can be easily taken, and yet don't care if the people who create it see enough benefit to keep making it for them.
For the tremendous majority of professional musicians recorded music never represented a significant source of revenue at all, if ever. Most musicians get paid for playing, and nothing else. That people swap mp3 around have absolutely no influence on their life -- except when it helps them getting known.
People already use lack of easy access as their excuse for piracy. Now you want them to make some hard to crack app just for people to be able to listen to it? How about people just stop taking what's not theirs and treat artists with respect?
And in regard to your last statement, it's not your right to determine whether exposure alone should be the reward of their hard work.
If you swallow a cost of 10, but that 11 people gets 1 from your contribution, the society as a whole wins.
> How about people just stop taking what's not theirs and treat artists with respect?
When something that used to be hard becomes totally simple, obvious and costless, there is absolutely no sense trying to stick to the previous state of the matter. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, what used to be a complex, tough and expensive endeavour (copying books by hand) instantly became worthless. Too bad, but the net gain for the society as a whole was immense.
Similarly, the net gain we could enjoy from being able to copy, transfer, duplicate, mix, rehash, transform existing digital goods is world-changing. Some will lose at some point, but they'll have to get over it. Nowadays large parts of the copyright laws are only manacles impending progress, defending soon to be dead practices and business models.
> And in regard to your last statement, it's not your right to determine whether exposure alone should be the reward of their hard work.
Did you read me? As a musician composer and arranger, I've earned a living by teaching and live performance, but a net loss on recordings; and it was back in the 90s, when CD-R was unheard of.
The hard true fact : only artists aired on radio and TV make money on recorded music. They are a minuscule minority of musicians. Same goes for actors, painters, etc.
It sounds to me like you're saying "so long as society sees a net gain, it's ok to exploit other people"
Those wanting the crash-course could start with the very real difference between actual human rights and artificial privileges. They could continue their educations by developing some appreciation for the (very substantial differences) between tangible and intangible goods. And they could demonstrate their commitment to civil society by NOT supporting the development of law in ways that would - inevitably - lead to an astonishingly omniscient police state.
And that's not something that any artist worth the name would be okay with.
If the only way to consume a good is to obtain it illegally (and there is no loss of the orginal owner - I'm talking about digital copies) then moral offsetting is the only slightly moral way to consume/acquire the item.
It's not that I think music piracy is justified, but let's not understate the reality of merchandising and touring prices in the music industry.
When people feel they're being ripped off, they're probably going to be more likely to not feel so bad when they return the favor.
Maybe I'm used to reading "easy" articles that provide a problem and possible solution to it. I haven't read the allegory of the cave since college so I'm not used to thinking this hard... (laziness on my part I guess)