The Culture of CD Burning 820
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.
Re:1.1 billion CD's doesn't mean 1.1 billion copie (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Artists (Score:3, Interesting)
Peer-to-peer in profit [progressiv...ishing.com]. Feel free to copy it if you think it will give you an A.
Phillip.
Burning CDs = Making tapes (Score:3, Interesting)
What's the upshot of all of this (other than trying to get laid)? I've discovered a whole lot of new music from tapes others have given me. Sure, a huge chuck of it gets listened to once or twice, but a lot of the time I end up discovering something special. And I figure the same thing happens to people to whom I give tapes to.
Now, the record companies can do their best to squash this, and in a very abstract way I can see their point of view (lets ignore the fact that they screw over artists and want to destroy fair use in the country), but in the end they're just going to hurt themselves. Casual sharing of music (as opposed to outright, high volume piracy) I think is a bigger marketing tool than radio and MTV combined. How did Metallica (or the vast majority of bands who aren't marketed to the hilt the second they're signed) get so big in the 80s/90s? They had little to no radio airplay, no presence on MTV, and as far as I can remember no huge push from their record company? I'd wager mostly from social sharing, whether it be listening to it in your bud's car, or a tape your friend threw at you that he made. I know I've bought just as much (if not more) music due to stuff I've heard on small webcasts, friends apartments and mixed tapes as I've ever heard from commercial radio and marketing.
Re:Personal Investment? (Score:2, Interesting)
This is the article. [salon.com]
Re:Artists (Score:4, Interesting)
(I couldn't get the paper... must be slashdotted)
Similar to the "donate $1 to odd todd."
Is it time for a nonprofit recording label?
Or perhaps it's time for a complete shift: News publishers, who already have mass market distribution mechanisms and brands for digital media (e.g., NYT, SJMN, etc.) could easily "publish" local bands and provide a payment mechanism for them. The cross-marketing possibilities and cross-selling of products becomes interesting, and most local metro papers already have people familiar with the local music scenes, so the best artists would float to the top more democratically.
An important consideration (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Downloadable music/video/software/games
2. The freedom to burn CDs
3. The freedom to share (to a certain extent)
4. The freedom to switch formats and time/location shift
5. More reasonable prices ($.25 a song or so)
and so forth, that the people who enjoy this music/software/games/video etc. respond IN KIND and don't take that opportunity to deprive musicians/developers of the means to make a living by refusing to pay under any circumstances.
I think the loosening of the current restrictions is probably very likely. I also think people are basically honest and are willing to pay a fair price for a good product. I also think if people were able to do business on-line reliably enough to support themselves, we could very easily see an unemployment rate of 1%-2%, and an economic advance that would make the dot-com era look like the mid 70s, but without the bubble.
I certainly hope the net doesn't just become a warez wasteland, or we will have insulted the potential of the Internet and in the process wasted a spectacular opportunity to improve a lot of things.
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:4, Interesting)
Kintanon
They're missing the point... (Score:2, Interesting)
"The amount you have to pay for CDs is horrendous".
The obvious solution is for the record companies to stop raping the consumer at the checkout counter and charge something more reasonable for a CD. The market has determined that the price is too high-- thus the "scourge" of ripping and burning copies. Find a price that still covers the cost of manufacture, distribution and artist compensation, but is more palatable to the consumer. You reduce the prevalence of illegal copying by reducing the demand for it.
(20+0)/2=10
I don't want to pay $20 for a CD, and I don't want to steal it, but I wouldn't mind paying $10 for the real thing. But if I'm forced into a choice between $20 and $0, what do think I'm going to choose?
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't bother me that they get an easier start for their projects. It doesn't bother me because I learned a lot preparing my paper. It's not going to teach me any more sitting on my hard drive.
Are they shortchanging themselves by taking my paper? The professor knows they've seen my paper. She expects them to "carry the ball a little further". Then I get to see my project continued in a way I couldn't.
Perhaps this is off topic now. I just don't think Hilary Rosen knows how to share in an academic environment. Bad analogy.
She was probably the kind of kid who hid library books so no one else could get the information she was using so she could blow the curve for the rest of us.
Re:I don't want anyone to read my A paper!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
No, the difference is that if you steal my car you deprive me of it. If you make an unauthorized copy of a CD of my songs, I am no worse off.
Yes, artists should be compensated. But copying is not theft, and pay-per-copy is no longer workable. Time for a new paradigm.
I suggest something based on the same idea as songwriter royalties - I can sing "Rockin' inb the Free World" in the shower, or at a party, all I want; but when I sign it at the bar, Neil Young gets paid (via BMI or ASCAP). Drop the notion of "Copyright" and replace it with a right to royalties on for-profit use.
"Ironic" (Score:4, Interesting)
this just shows how out of touch these people are.
1. I didn't pay $1,000 for a hard drive, I paid $200.
2. I did it because the Hard Drive is a good deal. Selling us shitty music at $19.99 is not.
Re:Boston Globe Author Seems Niave (Score:2, Interesting)
This has long been my complaint. The record companies/stores are simply pricing these albums out of a market. How many of us are willing to experiment several times a month with $15 to $20? Not me. However, you cut the price of those albums to $5 and I'll be out there buying 10 albums a month. Likewise with concert tickets. I used to go to 8 concerts a summer when the tickets cost me $20, but now with each show costing 4 times that, forget it.
And on top of it all, of that $18 I spent on an album or the $75 for the concert, the artist receives a mere pittance. I have no problem supporting artists, but I'm not going to support those damned executives living fat off the art of the starving. You want me to happily pay $18 for a CD? Give $15 of it to the artist.
~~Galen~~
Destructionism (Score:5, Interesting)
Destroy, indeed. It would fundamentally change our society, but that's a far cry from wholesale destruction. Firstly, why should I cry about stores going out of business because we no longer need them? Because of all of the poor workers who don't have jobs any more? If they're the ones you're worried about, let me ask you, why would any of these poor people need their jobs any more? They'd use the machine to get what they need and want, just like I would. We'd all have to find jobs that don't involve manufacturing or transport (of goods), or we'd need to restructure society to compensate for not needing to make anything (although unless you had a REALLY BIG MACHINE you'd still need labor to build things like houses and cruise ships and spacecraft and such), but I can't see that as a bad thing on the balance. I mean, Porsche wouldn't make any money selling Boxsters any more, but people would still need the roads maintained, and there would always be a need for teenagers pumping gas. To extend to the digital music world, no artist would be able to sell CDs, but there would still be a huge demand for concerts (which is where the real money is in the music industry, anyway).
> Why doesn't the same logic apply to digital music? Sure CD's are way over priced, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go steal! Sorry to rant but I'm tired of people trying to justify what they know is not right!
The same logic does apply to digital music, but that's tangential to my problems with these people. The uses to which I wish to put my content are completely legitimate, but still I run afoul of their howling complaints that I'm stealing food from the mouths of these artists' children. For example, I want to watch DVDs on my high-powered Linux box. I bought the DVDs from my local Best Buy, and I don't copy them, but I'm not allowed to create, buy or use a DVD player for Linux because of the DMCA. For another example, I own a very high quality CD jukebox, which is attached to my multi-thousand dollar sound system. Because they say CDs need to be protected, they produce CDs which will not play on my CD player (note, not a computer, but a friggin' CD PLAYER!) and don't bother to warn me that they won't play, and won't let me return them if I should buy one and find that it's a coaster. For a third example, I can't play said same CD in my computer, but they provide digital tracks for computer use. Only, if you'll remember, my machine runs Linux, so I still can't listen to the tracks, because they require Windows Media Player. Again, finding my way around this so I can listen to a CD that I bought legitimately has been outlawed by the DMCA, so I'm stuck.
I'd be very interested to hear how any of this qualifies as justification for doing something wrong. It seems a lot more that a bunch of record companies and movie studios got together and decided that they could make a lot more money by enforcing a badly outdated business model on me, without any real concern as to whether they're screwing me in the process.
Virg
Hillary Told Us to Rip Music. (Score:4, Interesting)
She's assuming that music listeners want to be moral when they're being entertained. They don't. Much music is meant to help people unwind, or even bring out their darker feelings that they accumulate in life, where it's taboo to discuss. The same goes for movies, video games, Slashdot, and other entertainment. Entertainment often glamourizes theft, sex and murder, so it should be no surprise that so many music fans enjoy the much milder crime of CD ripping and burning. Yet if she tells her artists to make morally correct music, she'll lose her customers.
Re:Outdated model. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, it seems that less and less people are willing to buy them. And why is that ? Because there are ways around. It's called a market.
The fact that the income-per-copy market economy of music used to work was because the technology was such that there used to be reasonable ways of enforcing copyright laws. Because making quality copies of media was a complicated process with high added value.
Well it's just not hte case anymore because of the digital age. Digital technologies makes making perfect copy a trivial action, and hence render the copyright laws unenforceable.
Those who made a living from these laws, not hte artists, but the middle men, are fighting to defend their arbitrary privilege.
As a parent post noted, there are many, many other ways to reward intellectual creation and performance. What is impossible is to cling to a technologically obsolete system (the copyright, a legally enforced arbitrary monopoly on an action that is as simple as breathing), and what is impossible is to come up with blueprint-style systems. It has to come naturally to a new point of balance.
Re:Social Events (Score:3, Interesting)
To what? If it's zero, bye-bye content.
Again (and again.. sigh...), I am not defending making $50M on plastic disks. I'm advocating the same thing that everyone else in this debate is advocating: compensating the artists, writers and developers fairly.
If the Internet is allowed to turn into the warez network, then these self-proclaimed supporters of the artists will have done nothing of the kind.
I think most people will pay a fair price for a good CD or book. I think those same people should frown on people who don't pay that fair price.
Re:Of course they profit (Score:2, Interesting)
Lets say I have a CD with some incredibly expensive software on. Say it's worth $200,000,000.
Now, say a 16 year old kid borrows it, and copies it.
Has the kid suddenly made $200 million profit? No.
Has the company selling the software just lost $200 million? No.
The problem with making assumptions as to the *actual* money lost by the music industry is the fact that you make two flawed assumptions:
1) That for each copy made, the person copying could have afforded it in the first place
2) That this person would also have actually *bought* it, even if they could afford it
Do you honestly think people with hundreds of gigabytes of MP3s would have bought all that music if they couldn't pirate it for free?
Of course not, they would've done without. So hang on, who has lost out here? This isn't stealing. This isn't theft. This is copyright infringement. The original is intact, and no-one has lost out on anything.
Lets say you *could* afford it, which most can't, would they have bought *all* of those songs they downloaded? No. If you paid for songs, you'd be a lot more picky about what songs you add to your collection.. What's a few minutes wasted on an MP3 it turns out you don't like - it's just time. I don't know about you, but I don't go around buying armfulls of CDs in music stores to see if they're any good..
Yes, there are some cases where the music industry is not getting sales they would otherwise, for example counterfit CDs - where the end buyer thinks they're getting a legit copy. Yes, this should be stopped, and is totally wrong.
I also object to people selling on music/software they've downloaded. That's also morally (and legally) very wrong. However, 9 times out of 10, that MP3 they just counted being copied on the net, or that CD bought (and that's assuming all CD-Rs are used to copy their music!), is a sale lost. This is simply NOT TRUE.
And why is this wrong? (Score:2, Interesting)
I admit to having used "this sort of rationalization". So I'm wondering why she doesn't proceed by explaining to me what's wrong with it. I know of course why it's wrong in the sense of the law, but it seems to me like she's appealing to my sense of morality?
My morality tells that if I have to pay 20 dollars for something, it has to be worth 20 dollars to me.
Example:
A couple of years back I bought the Americana album by Offspring because I thought I might like it. I'd seen the hit video (pretty fly) on MTV and thought it was cool. I have listened to that album less than 10 times since I bought it, and it has not been worth the price I payed. Today I'd just download the mp3. But as matters are I feel like I've been cheated.
Example 2: I collect Nick Cave albums. I would never dream of just downloading the tracks or get them burned on a CD at a friends. To me these albums are special--collectors items so to speak (even if they're not rare). They are easily worth the price I paid for them.
Hmm. I hope this made sense. I'm not used to writing in english and so it may not be as clear as I would like it to be. And anyway this is the first time I've ever posted.
-- Adam.
Re:1.1 billion CD's doesn't mean 1.1 billion copie (Score:2, Interesting)
$2-$3 per CD is generous. A very good series of articles on Cosmik Debris [cosmik.com] written by music lawyer Dina LaPolt gives an inside view to what the artists have to deal with. The artist has to pay packaging fees, the producer's royalties, "CD reduction" fees (CDs are considered new technology!)... all told the artist comes away with around $1.37 per CD. Then they get to start paying back the record company for advances, promotion costs, marketing, etc.
Add to that the highly unfair grip [cosmik.com] the record companies have over release schedules, and we start to see who the real pirates are.
Re:For the last time..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Project Pitchfork:
-"Eon:Eon"
-"Daimonion"
-"Chakra:Red!"
-"IO"
-"Alpha Omega"
-"The Early Years"
Absurd Minds: "Damn The Lie" (Waiting for "Deception" to arrive from InfraRot [infrarot.de] in Germany, great folks!)
Covenant: "United States Of Mind"
VNV Nation:
-"Empires"
-"Praise The Fallen"
-"Futureperfect"
And I have many more, of course. And I discovered all those artists by using Shoutcast Internet radio and file-sharing programs (Napster [before it was crippled in early 2001], Audiogalaxy, and Kazaa mostly). But I also buy lots of CDs from those artists, and I would not have known about them had it not been for Internet radio and file sharing, which are so maligned by the RIAA.
But then again the RIAA and its members aren't making a dime off of me since the CDs I am buying are from independent artists, and Internet radio and file-sharing caused me to buy those CDs from those non-RIAA artists. They want me to buy CDs, just not those CDs.
So yeah, instead of buying one or two CDs a year from RIAA artists I bought about 20 from non-RIAA artists, which means they lost money on those 2 CDs I didn't buy from them. And since file-sharing and Internet radio caused me, and many other people, to buy from independent artists instead of RIAA artists it is bad for the recording industry the RIAA represents and thus file-sharing and Internet radio are illegal.
And then there's CD-burning which allows people to spread around music from those independent artists around (usually in a CD with a mix of the artist's work, rather than an album, or a mix of artists) and cause those people who recieve the CD-Rs to eventually buy from those independent artists. That means less sales from mainstream RIAA artists' CDs and since that pinches their pocketbooks CD-recording is also illegal since it undermines the sales of RIAA artists' CDs.
Sorry for the long rant, but hopefully this will put some more ammunition in the "downloaders are not thieves" argument and the fact that some of us really do buy more CDs as the result of the music we discover online.