RIAA to blame for impoverishment of artists it's using as human shield in anti-streaming lobbying

boing
21

Here’s what I wish we’d see from boing and Cory, a more balanced approach and different voices who have been inside the walls of what is actually happening in the industry. I’ve seen a very different view into this myself coming from tech and now working in music.

When all this really began to go south, Cory and boing took the stance against things like DRM and rightly so. I have always been supportive of that stance and the principles of organizations like the EFF. But the reality of how that has played out is very different to what was imagined. We are actually back where we started, maybe even worse off.

  1. Instead of greater competition of ideas, we’ve seen a strategy where growth was directed at an exit strategy of big acquisitions. Few companies exist to build a business. So what we are left with is a bunch of tech giants who can bully any startup/starve them out of the market by their sheer numbers of both users and wealth.

  2. All the media power of tech is now really in the hands of about 8 or 9 companies, which reduces choices and opportunity for startups, who really have no other option than to get acquired. Whatsapp may have had tons of users, but they had no actual business, and could not indefinitely burn VC cash on a road to nowhere. What other choices did they have but to sell. Same with Spotify…what options do they really have if they can’t build a sustainable business? Their plan now is to be everywhere at all costs. That means new services in emerging markets have to go up against this new behemoth. On top of that they are slashing costs to win over the youth market, which again teaches the next generation nothing has value except convenience.

  3. I have watched for over a decade people talk about “adapt or die” towards the music industry. Well they’ve adapted and what that looks like is what is happening in tech as well. There are three major labels (excluding Merlin). There are only a handful of major publishers. Some labels have also consolidated their publishing as well. So you have companies like Universal who control around 40% (or more) of the music industry, and this has occurred because you cannot survive as a medium/small sized media business anymore. Majors have (rightly in their own interests) flexed their muscles against the tech industry to carve out more and more revenue and why shouldn’t they? They don’t own any real tech (distribution, marketing, sales, promotion are all based on tech they don’t control). Plus all the tech that makes sooooo much ad revenue (YouTube, Spotify, Pandora) is based on the content the labels own or create. Pull the media from all the three majors from YouTube and see what that site looks like then.

  4. Cory’s statement: “despite the fact that companies like Pandora already give virtually all the money they take in to the labels” is an interesting take on this because without music, there is no Pandora. Quite frankly all this effort on boing against DRM over the years and where are we today? Streaming is DRM in simply a nicer looking package. Years spent railing against DRM and here we are willingly going into that prison again because this kind of DRM works better than the past DRM. And now is boing taking the stance that we need to champion against media companies because streaming hasn’t been able to work out a viable business model…a model that’s a keener version of DRM?

I read a lot of comment boards and I see countless remarks about how streaming is too expensive and how people justify torrenting because they want immediate satisfaction and I just wonder, is it really so surprising that the music industry is digging in and consolidating power against tech? And users are caught in the middle. If the future music industry is 10 or fewer music services based on 10 of fewer tech/media giants, is this a model we should be defending if it can’t sustain itself, the artists/songwriters (and others) it is reliant on? Can we have a vibrant media landscape when Amazon throws in music streaming, video streaming, and free shipping into a flat yearly fee of $70 (or whatever)?

We fought for a future of “open” and this is where we are at, a consolidation of big media and big tech with a smattering of crowd funded begging. We got here because we didn’t learn to value anything because big tech taught us that we didn’t have to pay for anything because our eyeballs and personal information where just enough for the price of admission. This isn’t some sic-fi novelization of what could happen in the future…it has happened.

4 Likes
22

Did you even read the linked piece or do you know anything about major label practices? They are clearly “the bad guy” in that they routinely steal from artists with outrageous contracts and accounting gimmicks, and they’ve been doing it for decades. And they also routinely pretend they are protecting the interests of artists when its their own revenue they are protecting, especially in the case of the pre-1972 artists who are the subject of the OP, and who receive none of the money the RIAA is fighting to grab here.

There are good guys and bad guys in the world. Of course not every issue can be broken down that way, but this one sure can. And are we really supposed to assess the world through the lens of a Ben Stiller character in a movie? Seriously?

3 Likes
23

Times change, we must adapt. Jobs have vanished as new technologies emerge. And new jobs have emerged. Change or die, or at the very least don’t expect to make the kind of money you used to. That is the way of the world. We stopped paying telegraph operators a long time ago. Banks of operators connecting Mildred to Mabel no longer exist. Bands who choose to remain independent have day jobs to pay the bills. They continue to play and produce because they have a passion for it and enjoy the little extra money it sometimes brings. They are real people with real lives. Pomplamoose seem to be doing pretty well under the new model. They started small and worked hard and years later it’s paying off. It can be done but it won’t be for everybody. As for the hardworking people who support them, they’ll get their cut directly from the artists and if it’s not enough they’ll get a second job or start a new career doing something else. Now we who appreciate music have the power to give it directly to the humans responsible for it. I won’t ever give money again to globocorp for music.

1 Like
24

I think this ties into the concepts of enabling the mass populace to make choice about the entertainment options rather than the more 20th c. model of content being forced through very few consumer options.

Most people seem understand the inherent value in the recorded word (books) and maybe one of the reasons why that is is because of the amount of time we’ve had to get used to them being around. What were the ownership and exclusivity and monetary rewards of the Gutenberg era? In contrast, record sound as a mass medium hasn’t been around very long.

One of the reasons I see for the lack of sympathy going towards the tech side of the creative industry is that the tech people got paid, outright, for their skills at the time of production. The creatives involved got a loan against the potential of that product. Yes, the tech side now is suffering due to the lack of demand for their services (some creatives under the assumption that producing is an “easy” skill). The creatives also don’t seem to be very understanding of the history of their chosen path against the phenomenon of mass communications with narrow broadcast authority that most people call radio/records and the internet (not so narrow).

Why should a mixer on a recording get legacy rights when the artist hasn’t yet recovered their loan costs? (as one counter point might be made)

But let’s get into the concepts of the loan from an authority to make a recording in the first place… this just seems like a losing perspective vs. short term gains. Nowadays, if a creative so wanted, they don’t need that loan, and so the ecosystem build up around to use those loan funds withers and dies. Does this mean that the tech skills are invalid? No. It just means that as a speciality, it isn’t as healthy as it once was unless you’ve created a brand that is flexible enough to be paid on a scale (how some recording studios cost a lot more than others… how much did “Louie, Louie” cost to make again and how was it done?).

But my main point is that if we value a particular artists output, supporting them per project doesn’t make much sense. Creatives need to eat after the heat has gone away. The perspective is a long term investment in more than one project (depending on the medium) that enables individuals to cover at least their basic living expenses to give them room to creative. This means relative comfort and creatives may still have “day jobs” to increase their comfort. And funding can go away at any time, depending on demand. But this way fans can still pay, say… 10$ a month and hopefully those creatives can gain enough fans that 10$ a month / person is enough for rent and food and recording gear (and whatever else they feel like spending the money on, is the individual doesn’t feel they are getting value, that’s up to them… but at least the creative doesn’t have to feel a deadline pressure unless they like that sort of thing).

1 Like
25

Lots of industries revenue is not what it was compared to the 90s, I think that’s a poor correlation to attribute it to the change in technology/business models. If you look at it now, year on year revenue in the record industry is increasing, and yet the type of media consumption is going more and more towards digital and streaming, so where’s the correlation implied that there is some kind of loss caused by streaming?

2 Likes
26

Do you use any subscription/streaming services? How do you get your music? Somehow you are paying a globalcorp. Whether that is your ISP, telephony carrier, or music service…you are paying some giant corporation for music somewhere in the chain.

I would counter your argument to simply say the model you describe is a hobby model. People who have real jobs in the day and then hobby jobs they are passionate about. This directly affects the quality of the work. There is a large ecosystem driven by a professional level music industry. This includes advancements in technology we benefit from daily. Without a high level of professional music you’ll certainly see a drop in the quality of songwriting, production, etc.

I use to have a very clear view of tech versus music until I left tech and started working in music in the past year. I’ve learned to appreciate a more nuanced world where it isn’t simply cut and dry/black and white.

Everyone has some artist they hold up as an example of the new model, but the reality is that these are exceptions…unique moments. These are artists that are making it by hustling to do so, but are also very rare and only a handful of stories.

1 Like
27

I didn’t say there was a loss caused by steaming. I said the music industry is down about $20 billion in just over a decade, and that as the industry currently stands there is no way streaming is a viable alternative to sales in it’s current form. I’ve been working within the industry now for a year and I’ve seen every model and plan and license etc…and it isn’t a something that can stand on its own two feet. Right now everything in the music industry is subsidized.

  1. Carriers are subsidizing music plans and bundling them into their monthly fees.
  2. Spotify and others are providing freemium services in which royalties are lower, but the cost is made up via ad revenue (guess who doesn’t get the ad revenue).
  3. Spotify and other music services are predominantly propped up via VC money which means a lot of the royalties and licensing paid is borrowed money.
  4. Many services are cutting costs to users or bundling them into plans to attract users. They do this at a loss to their business because growth is more valuable to them.
  5. There is no truly stable and profitable music steaming service. That problem (shown by studies) is based on two things, royalties and paid accounts. Streaming services are having trouble converting free users to paid users. Paid users also affect royalty rates because royalties are higher on paid accounts. So if you are a) having trouble converting free to paid and b) aren’t passing on costs to users to cover your costs, you can’t c) build a sustainable business.
  6. The only growth model in streaming as a business is in offering new services. Companies like Spotify are not only going to have to convince users to shell out more money, but they are going to have to create new technical solutions that make using the service better. That doesn’t directly correlate to more royalties or money for artists. Innovations are not linked to royalties.
  7. The majors all own a piece of Spotify, and have a lot invested in seeing that it goes public. If Spotify fails to become a profitable business, we could see a collapse of the music industry, considering how many eggs are being put into this basket.
  8. Music startups have to compete with companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon (and Spotify). Apple sells hardware, so they can lose money on music all day long. Google makes money on ad revenue from all sorts of places so they can subsidize music costs all day long. Amazon wants to be your “everything” source for…well everything. They can take Amazon prime, build in music, video, shipping, etc all into one neat little package and just survive on sheer number of razor thin margins. Where does that leave everyone else?

Year on year revenue is increasing based on a shift that’s occurring between digital sales, physical sales, and streaming/ad markets. There is a cross over at the moment with a lot of overlap. Let’s talk in two years when the shifts have occurred and we’ll see if music revenues are increasing still. I’m working with these models and numbers every day and I don’t see a rosy future.

4 Likes
28

You know another interesting thing to add to this discussion is the idea of begging for money in the digital age. Also known as crowdfunding. All these services do nothing really besides provide a platform for asking for money and get paid a nice bit for that. Kickstarter, for example, makes I believe 5% for successfully funded projects…I think that puts them somewhere in the range of making $40 million-ish. But Kickstarter has zero risk in whether or not any project happens. After all it isn’t their money.

Now again…not defending labels, but the way it use to work is that labels did assume that risk themselves. They more often than not put money into acts where you never knew whether or not you’d see that money on the other end. It basically was the success of major acts that fueled emerging acts.

In the crowdfunding world there is no one but fans to assume risk for artists, and artists don’t get a lot of leeway to get things right. There is no label to say, let’s give them another shot.

In the past if an artist received $500k to record an album and blew it on fancy cars and trips, it was the label who lost the money. Now we’re directly asked to assume that risk.

I just have a lot of concerns about the quality of the crowdfunded, ad supported, carrier subsidized music industry of the future.

5 Likes
29

Ygret, obviously I’m not suggesting that film is an adequate moral framework for the world. I’m also not saying there aren’t people who do bad things.

I am suggesting that Cory consistently depicts the world in terms of heroic nonprofit techno-artist youths fighting the terrible forces of old and gray, and that this headline is a perfect example. It’s hysterical.

3 Likes
30

While many can produce a hit record/song (as if, fulfilling the technical requirements of whichever hit record/song one wanted to emulate), the masses accepting that product as quality has always been a gamble.

If the individual wants to gamble on a specific project by a person(s), they should be quite allowed to do so. But they should also be under no illusions of the risk involved. Managed expectations.

What other concerns do you have? Let’s talk about them.

Service providers (whether Kickstarter or streaming), should be looked at as, as you rightly point out, akin to the traditional model of a label. They provide a service to get a specific individual to a potentially larger audience than the individual could presumably generate on their own, otherwise, why use that service, right? This comes brings into play how those service providers want to recoup their own investment in the tech to allow those individuals to use a larger platform, and if they want to do that at all (but let’s assume that they don’t have limitless resources available to them and function on planet Earth).

Ads are a way of doing this, and as we’ve seen with television and radio, it seems to generate a lot of income for those service providers. The content generators, the creatives, on the other hand, what do they get and how do they get it? Well, in a finite ecosystem of limited high quality service providers, it seems to breed a dog eat dog mentality where the creatives don’t want to support each other in favour of their own short term gains. Does this matter to the discussion? Maybe.

But now we have a lot more high quality and easily accessible service providers who provide platforms for consumers and creatives alike. If the consumers ultimately decide based on a level playing field (give or take marketing and how much faith you have in it actually being effective for driving sales or even brand awareness) which creatives receive the most consumer funds (through crowd initiatives and final sales figures, which are to be made readily available to the public who put in funds to help increase trust in the process), why should we “feel bad” for the less that stellar of creatives. If every creative talent wanted to put content out there and could do so very cheaply (very few barriers), why couldn’t there be another Rolling Stones that catches the worlds attention and bring them all the relative fame and success of the originals?

We do see similar patterns emerge in the more specific Pop music world, but we’ve also studied how those Pop acts are managed and where the creative talents are. These are not bad things, just data.

I believe that creatives need a framework to survive within if we value their creative talents. Like any culture, it needs conditions to survive and thrive, otherwise, we see the results (good and bad).

1 Like
31

The vast majority of artist’s incomes has always been from shows and merch. Radio has historically paid $0 to artists and albums are famous for how little money goes to the artist vs. the record company.

2 Likes
32

For some of us at least, it gets us off our asses to create something new rather than to just profit off the creative works of those before us. Sure we are inspired by those who came before but if we could make our living just copying their work, why bother with the effort to make something new?

Whats to stop those of us who hold copyrights to use them as an endowment for charity like JM Barrie did? Then again if I do well, why shouldn’t my family benefit? Its pretty rare that I see the self proclaimed copy fighters complain about someone making their family fortune in real estate or building up a family contracting business to where it benefits their grand kids, why should us creative types not have that choice too?

Seems to be that power you mention has been around for over half a century or as long as small labels serving distinct tastes have existed. Chess, Sun, Motown and plenty others were all run by humans responsible for bringing music to audiences. Hell, I’ve done it on and off myself since the mid 80s. Before this fancy internet there was this thing called “mail order”.

THe subscription patronage model is just another begging bowl model from the point of view of some of us creators. Some folks are ok with busking or pestering their listeners to donate, some of us are not so OK with it.

On the other hand, I’m sure all the payment processors would love to see subscription/patronage take off. $10/month over a year from even 500 fans at 3% per transaction would be $1,800 per creator in their pockets. That aint bad at all!

It still works that way to various extents but it can depend more now on the nature of the contracts involved. In the era of artist development you refer to, it was far less likely that a minor or band owned label would have put up the development money and then do a licensing/distribution deal with a major but these days that is a more viable option. Even ten or twenty years ago some labels I ran or worked with could put up a bit of development cash into musicians. Sometimes that was even just making sure they ate or had a couch to crash on but more often it was paying for studio time and session musicians as well as other costs like manufacturing and distribution in the hopes we’d recoup on sales. Unfortunately there just isn’t any money at the level I operate to do that any more.

Going out begging every time I want to fund a new release for myself or someone else just isn’t something I or anyone I work with chooses to do. From what I’ve seen it turns out to be double the work for promotions because you have to promote your begging campaign then start all over to promote sales of the product if you begged enough money in stage one.

I’ve seen this said many many times here but never seen facts to back it up and it distinctly contradicts my own real world experience and that of many I’ve known.

33

Really? There are no good and bad people, huh? Well I guess that’s news to the billions of people down through history who ever been beaten, raped, robbed, enslaved, and murdered for fun and profit. The world is full of bad people. In fact most people are bad people which is why the world is such a fucking disaster. They’re atavistic, stupid, selfish, and myopic - much like yourself. Grow up. Learn some history.

34

Then I guess by your seeming rationale, if a creator wants to be an independent producer, they must raise all the funds themselves before they release their product, right? Which I’m okay with. But it seems a lot of content producers want a distinct ROI from the get go to make it worth their time.

35

Oh yeah, all those poor ol’ mufti-millionaire artists are so hard done by and clearly need our help. Go take a look at the Forbes list of top grossing acts for 2013 and the billions they’re collectively raking in. Fact is, most PROFESSIONAL musicians actually make a very comfortable living, if not outright lucrative. For the high school dropouts in a garage band that’s not really my problem because that’s their choice. Yes, RIAA are fucking scumbags but spare me the whole starving artist bullshit because it’s exactly that, bullshit.

Same thing with farmers. I live in farm country. Spend an hour driving in any direction and you know what the vast majority of these farmers live in? Mansions. Literal mansions.

I’m so sick of these myths people propagate about certain sectors of society that are so hard done by when it’s the exact opposite. The people who need real, actual help are the wage slaves out there. So how about a little sympathy for the devil and do something to fix that? You know, a living wage vs. minimum wage. A real War on Poverty. Etc.

I’d hire a violinist to play the world’s tiniest violin for musicians but I can’t afford their rates - and neither can most other people.

36

Some years ago NPR did a program on the royalties the artists are suppose to get. At the time Ted Nugent was on a list of artists that couldn’t be found to give him his royalty check. It was at this sameyear that Mr. Nugent had started his reality TV show and was flooding the market with his endorsed hunting gear. And yet the lawyers claimed they couldn’t find him.

2 Likes
37

But there are thousands of radio stations and only a few internet streamers.In terms of reaching the population of the United States, radio as a whole paid a lot more.

38

Same thing with farmers. I live in farm country. Spend an hour driving in any direction and you know what the vast majority of these farmers live in? Mansions. Literal mansions.

Allow me for a second to educate you on your driving trollies comment.

I grew up not only in farm country but on a farm. I watched as large corporations, like Kraft (who controlled and manipulated the milk prices), came in and forced not only my family’s farm under, but also my family’s cheese factory. After they forced the farms under, the corporate farms started to come in, where they would buy up many small farms and now all of the independent farmers were gone, replaced by wealthy businessmen who have done exactly what we are seeing happen in other industries…consolidation of power and money at the top. Those are the mansions…homesteads replaced by the decimation of the average small family farmer.

You see when the large company comes in that controls the distribution of a product (like music or milk) and undercuts the value and price for that, it becomes nearly impossible to compete and then the small indies end up selling to the majors to survive. It happened to farming, publishing, music, you name it.

The average gross EMI of professional musicians is under $40k a year…I wouldn’t call that lucrative. http://futureofmusic.org/blog/2012/12/04/putting-common-assumptions-about-how-musicians-make-money-truthiness-test

The “mansion” my family lived in was a homestead that had been there for four generations and in the last generation we grossed about $300k a year, with a yearly profit of $10k.

I now don’t live on a farm but I am working with the music industry and I see struggling artists who are not millionaires every single day and if you really want to fix the idea of living wage vs minimum wage then you need to look at the overall problems endemic in our society, like the fact that we’ve created a system where we don’t place any value on craftsmanship or quality…no we want everything cheap and easy and even cheap isn’t cheap enough these days. Today we also want it free.

3 Likes
39

I presume you’re responding to agraham999, but I’m on a phone at the moment so who knows who anyone’s replying to.

40

To some extent many content producers have already invested in production just buy buying their instruments or gear. Pretty much everyone I’ve ever known or worked with has put their own money into their career at one point or another.

If you go into making music expecting a distinct ROI you are highly likely to be disappointed.