The Culture of CD Burning

An anonymous reader points to this "good article from the Boston Globe about the culture of CD burning, and how hard it will be for the RIAA to stop it. Some interesting quotes: 'There's a "sex appeal" to burning CDs, says [Sheryl] Crow, adding that it is a social event for young people, just as listening to 45s was once a social event for their parents.' An interesting one from Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people." Seems like at least one musician thinks his A paper is being peddled all over town.

RIAA lies

[rgmoore]

Of course the big point that's missed in all of this is that the RIAA continues to mislead people and lie outright about the legality of copying. Non-commercial duplication of CDs is specifically allowed under current copyright law, and the CDs used in stand-alone CD copiers even include a royalty payment in their cost that goes to the RIAA. But Hillary Rosen continues to make it sound as though copying for your friends is illegal. But the mentions of the fact that it actually is legal gets only a short mention down at the bottom of the article.

This is the dilemma

[dipfan]

Yet even [Elvis] Costello acknowledges that, at least in terms of the big record companies, ''They've loaded the game so the house has been winning for a long time. Now it's time maybe for the house not to win for a while. Maybe they have to take some losses.''

Actually it looks like they are taking some losses now - there's a very interesting (but long and a bit heavy on the piracy angle) article from the Observer newspaper in the UK [observer.co.uk], that used a net monitoring company to track how many downloads of music and movies are being done through KaZaA and similar. The article has a table of the top 10 downloads: number one was Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory with more than 5 million in a month - that's how many copies the album sold retail last year in total. You may not like the music industry, or agree with their tactics, but they gotta be hurting. Get ready for copy-protected music CDs, coming soon to every store near you.

From the article:

Top 10 downloaded movies
1 Black Hawk Down 169,000
2 The Fast and the Furious 168,000
3 The Lord of the Rings 165,000
4 Ocean's Eleven 154,000
5 Harry Potter 147,000
6 Monsters Inc 146,000
7 Collateral Damage 134,000
8 American Pie 2 126,000
9 A Beautiful Mind 125,000
10 Ali 100,000

Top 10 pirated albums downloaded last month
1 Linkin Park -Hybrid Theory 5,300,000
2 POD - Satellite 2,800,000
3 Creed - Weathered 2,600,000
4 Sum 41 - All Killer No Filler 2,500,000
5 Britney Spears - Britney 2,000,000
6 Nelly - Country Grammar 2,000,000
7 Nelly, et al - Training Day Soundtrack 1,800,000
8 Creed - Human Clay 1,600,000
9 Usher - 8701 1,500,000
10 Incubus - Make Yourself 1,500,000

Salon Article, JWZ's DNA Lounge position

[Raetsel]

The Salon article is quite interesting...

1. Joseph Byrd records two albums in the late 60s
2. They're released on vinyl
3. They're re-released on CD
4. It's 35 years later, and he has yet to receive any royalties on it!

   (Part of the trouble stems from a missing contract.)

   Sony, having bought out Columbia Records ignores his requests for sales figures of his material -- no denials, no "we're looking into it," silence!

JWZ had this interesting little bit

• "In case you're unclear on how RIAA, ASCAP, BMI, etc. work, it's like this: everyone who comes anywhere near any kind of music is expected to pay them. They'll sue you into oblivion if you don't. Then, regardless of what music you were playing, they take your money, keep most of it for themselves, and then divide the rest statistically based on the Billboard charts. That means that no matter what kind of obscure, underground music you played, 3/4ths of the extortion money you paid goes to whichever company owns N'Sync; and the rest goes to Michael Jackson (since he owns The Beatles' catalog); and all other artists (including the ones whose music you actually played) get nothing."

Re:Stop, thief!

[fishebulb]

they dont go looking for the unknown guys, they MANUFACTURE another boyband, or find a rock band with one good song knowing they will be a one hit wonder

Re:Duplication Device

[Lumpish Scholar]

Imagine that there was a "duplication device" that could clone whatever you put into it - a watch, a TV, a car, whatever. Imagine it only cost $.20 per use....

Interestingly enough, there was a science-fiction short story published in Analog ... exactly along those lines... some alien race dumped a matter duplicater and the plans for it on the human race, with the apparent intent of causing human society to self-destruct. Instead, the humans worked out the obvious solution: since anything could now be duplicated, the only thing that has value is unique originals, and the way to make a living is to design and create unique originals of things.

Ralph W. Slone (writing as "Ralph Williams"), "Business As Usual, During Alterations", Asounding, July, 1958. Great story.

Title 17, Chapter 10, Subchapter D, Section 1008

[broter]

Sec. 1008. - Prohibition on certain infringement actions [cornell.edu]

No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings

Burn all you want, either way the artist loses...

[MsGeek]

Need I remind you of this:
Salon: Courtney Love Does The Math [salon.com]
And the essay that inspired the speech:
Negativland Official Site: The Problem With Music by Steve Albini [negativland.com]

The only people whose ox is getting gored from "the culture of CD burning" are the Five Families of the Record Business and the RIAA. The artists already get it up the butt, with no vaseline and definitely no reach-around.

If Sheryl Crow and Elvis Costello want to see more return from their music, then they should go indie and set up a site where people can download their music legally for a fair price. Unfortunately it's not so easy to get out of a record contract...it really is like indentured servitude at the moment [recordinga...lition.com].

So yeah, let Hilary Rosen, Vivendi, Sony, AOL-TW/WEA, Bertlesmann and EMI weep in their beer all they want. I have no sympathy for those bastards.

I will continue to buy my music used because I don't want them to make money off my musical tastes. If I want to rip my own mix CDs from CDs I bought, then that's my own damn business. I don't do P2P...I am naturally paranoid about my network and am not into opening up holes in it lightly.

Until artists get the fair shake they deserve, I do not see my actions as hurting them. They are suffering enough as it is at the hands of the same people who cry buckets of crocodile tears about "the poor artists" in the media.