Beyoncé could never sell another recording or make a single cent on royalties and she would easily still pull down about $100 million a year. Her lifetime concert revenues are approaching $1 billion. She works her ass off
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Ah, the RIAA and the MPAA - otherwise known as organized crime: Suing people for hearing and seeing things without paying them.
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Yeah I don’t get why so many people seem to think professional musicians don’t actually do “real” work or why the world is owed their talents for free.
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eMule is 1000x better than eDonkey.
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1000x0=0 
I believe musicians work very hard. I know a few.
Being entitled to make money from a live performance is certainly fair. BUT - Being entitled to an endless revenue stream from that one song you made 30 years ago? No way.
If I do work, I deserve compensation. I do not deserve to derive endless income from a finite work.
Copyright laws are hopelessly corrupted in favor of companies that don’t actually make content anyway, they just “own” it.
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Nah. The eD2K network simply has a different purpose than Bittorrent. It’s still possible to find rarities there, you can find nowhere else, although it’s far less popular, these days ^^’ . There’s also the advantage/DISadvantage of it largely being “below the radar”, these days, with the RIAA/MPAA staying away, but also legit law enforcement largely ignoring its glaring child porn problem =/ .
I definitely agree, however, that most folks won’t have much use for it.
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The only thing that’s being “killed” is a monopolistic cartel whose industrial model is the literal root of “cliché”, i.e. mechanistically reproduced cultural forms. The middle 20th century proved to be a perfect environment for this mode to flourish between the large relative imbalance of the ease of mass-communicating - on the one side; and the accessibility constraints on the means of re-production/distribution of songs on the other. That situation was always going to be a temporary anomaly, but bottlenecks generate concentrations of power - in hydroelectrics as in mass-psychology.
Humans everywhere have created music for a long time and I fully expect they will continue to in ever-new and wonderful ways regardless of whether it is in an industrially viable format.
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I looked it up once, and -at least in the Netherlands- the artist receives only somewhere between 10-20% of the retail price of a CD album (before taxes). So whenever artists whine about not being able to make a living off of digital music because the platform takes all the money, I think they’ve been reading the receipts wrong.
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I would have never met Wattie Buchan from the Exploited without drum machines and sampling, so I am going to call bullshit on that.
Music didn’t die, your soul did.
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I definitely agree with you on this one. Range compression has really screwed up music in the sense that, unlike those other (stylistic) things, it distorts music in a way that shifts it away from what the artist intended.
Range compression isn’t the problem, it’s pushing it to it’s limits so that there is no difference between quiet and loud. No range compression can lead to blown speakers, especially with something like the 1812 Overture.
What we want is sane range compression, with quiet bits and loud bits, but the difference isn’t so great that you have to listen with one hand on the volume control.
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Nothing kills music… stuff just gets in the way of music being heard.
What music are you talking about?
Yes there are dubious production techniques, but nothing, but nothing kills music.
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I have to politely disagree here. In my view, she spent endless hours honing her music, taking voice lessons, learning to dance, all so she might have a shot at recording an album. Time and money spent (and time IS money), none of it guaranteed to be reimbursed. She invested a huge amount of her life merely for a chance… and now that she earned it, there are some who want to limit her profits? Plus, talking about Beyonce ignores the tens of thousands of little known artists who do the work by giving up their free time. Not to mention the other arts that are impacted by this idea that copyright law should be ignored or torn down who have zero chance of making money by touring or t-shirt sales (writers, poets, etc).
Copyright exists to entitle creators to benefit from work they’ve already done WITHOUT PAY that has no guarantee of ever making money. Work that they’ve spent thousands of hours and, quite often, thousands of dollars producing. You get paid at the end of your pay period, not years later (if you’re lucky). You get paid at least minimum wage, not one cent per copy sold. Yes, folks have problems with the corporate control over creator content, and I get those arguments. I agree with them. Corporations exist to suck profit out of everything, and work hard to minimize the rights of consumers AND the pay they have to give artists.
But arguing a person who did tons of work to get good enough that we’ll notice and consume their entertainment product isn’t worth the relative pittance it costs each consumer to enjoy that content doesn’t strike me as reasonable. Many artists don’t like to perform (XTC’s Andy Partridge famously suffers from social anxiety and can’t tour). The idea that artists should ONLY profit from touring isn’t feasible. Tours for most aren’t profitable. And if they can’t profit from touring, and can’t profit from music sales… they’ll do something else. Or maybe some just prefer the indy scene where artists do it part time for fun? I can see that. I also think that resigns artists to being performing monkeys for the masses with no chance of being able to focus on the career they love.
Some people may not like the copyright system, but it’s the best attempt humanity has made to ensure artists get paid for their work. We can debate and argue over corporate control, or over copyright length, but telling artists “I shouldn’t have to pay for a recording” feels wrong to me.
EDIT: edited to reflect these are my opinions, not a personal indictment of anyone else. We all have to decide what we are morally and ethically okay with when it comes to this topic.
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I agree woth your defense pf artists’ right to earn money for their work, but I see some internals inconsistencies there. Beyonce the money machine is a brand, not a person, and the Beyonce brand is a product of music industry royalty ( as in kings and queens, not royalties as a compensation structure)
Beyonce the person is a pretty important part of that brand, and is a certainly talented and hard working, but the connection from her to starving artists is pretty tenuous. If anything the Beyonce brand represents the worst impluses of music as industry to concentrate all investment into a single lucrative brand and just keep pumping that stock.
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I’ve already allowed for corporate use of copyright as being flawed. But using that as a reason to ignore, flaunt, or weaken copyright law impacts far more people than corporations. When you focus only on Beyonce, you ignore everyone else who benefits, top to bottom. Yes, the starving artists have to be part of that conversation because there are a LOT more of them.
Whether or not she represents “the worst impulses of music as an industry” is neither here nor there in relationship to this discussion. That’s a personal opinion (one I share, too). But plenty of people buy her stuff, so I can’t honestly say a corporation is dumb for building a model based on that to derive profit for themselves and the artist. That’s what corporations do. Reigning in corporate excess, stopping market consolidation, ending usurious contracts that end up costing artists more than they derive in profits… that should be the focus there.
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Right? There is no “correct” way to make music. Electronic instruments just gave us a new means of expressing ourselves… There is nothing morally superior about acoustic instruments.
Who probably don’t get a cut of the royalties for Bey’s IP? They get paid for their work as they produce it, but it’s her IP, so she gets the royalties from that (or at least I’m assuming she owns her IP… would be weird if she did not.
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I am all for creators getting fair compensation for their work, but not endless royalties. I see where you are coming from - take the royalties away and they have nothing left but touring, and sometimes the royalties aren’t even all that much to begin with. But I would assert all of this is merely an artifact of the current, and very broken, system. I believe that a world without copyright would still afford creators ways to make money - through live performances, personalized pieces, contract work, and even crowdfunding. Honestly I think if all movies were crowdfunded, we’d see much better quality than most of the dreck that actually gets made.
Not everybody who copies music is also a revenue source. Some copy without purchasing.
Goes without saying, but they are broadly part of the customer base. Suing them signals an attack on consumers.
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