Trent Reznor Says "Steal My Music" 637
THX-1138 writes "A few months ago, Trent Reznor (frontman of the band Nine Inch Nails), was in Australia doing an interview when he commented on the outrageous prices of CDs there. Apparently now his label, Universal Media Group is angry at him for having said that. During a concert last night, he told fans, '...Has anyone seen the price come down? Okay, well, you know what that means — STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin'. Because one way or another these mother****ers will get it through their head that they're ripping people off and that's not right.'"
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Going indie (Score:3, Insightful)
Then he would have to pay an advertising agency directly to market his stuff. I doubt they would charge more than 5% of what a standard label would charge for a successful album, but he would be taking the risk that the album did not make any money.
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, he might not have said these things back when Pretty Hate Machine was about to be released, but that doesn't negate what he's saying.
Promoter vs Artist (Score:5, Insightful)
Artist makes contract with "BigCo", and "BigCo" agrees to a % of the "sales" as they define them, and then "BigCo" sets the price of the movie, book, or music where they want to get their profits they want. That was the way of the 20th Century.
In the 19th Century, artists of all types made money on direct sales, direct live acts and there was little other than a shop that might sell works for a % of the sale.
Now I wonder if the 21st Century Artist is not moving back to the 19th Century methods, where the artist controls things more, since it is the Artist inspiring the viewers, listeners, readers of his work that counts for quality artistic expression. If Artists have something hot, that your subset of the human race likes, the Internet allows those mutual groups to find each other in lots of ways.
I think the Internet is leveling the playing field, and artists are likely to see a resurgence of interest...provided they have quality work.
Re:And then (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Concert, not interview! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're conflating violent crimes with civil infractions again.
Someone call the folks at "Intervention" (Score:5, Insightful)
Face it Trent, you've still gotta make a few records for them. Do what Prince did, paint 'slave' on your face and release a few "best of NIN" albums and then do whatever you want on your own label or just sell your stuff online, we'll buy it.
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:2, Insightful)
Musicians make all of their money from live performances and merchandising. Reznor may earn royalties from other musicians albums he has producer credits on, however.
Also, I seriously doubt that Trent Reznor is "very rich" or even "rich" by first world standards.
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having been in the biz I know why he said that at a concert; he gets NOT ONE DIDDLY PENNY for those CDs. nada, nothing nyet! that is the way it works. All your uber stars get nothing more then a screw job for the recordings which is why they go on tour. Life on the road sucks but at least you DO get a percentage of the concert take. Remember that band from the 60s you loved? They are playing the county fair in Backwoods Iowa today and may get 20% of the gate or if they are lucky car fair, and a straight grand or so for a week's performances. Music biz is a reality check; The record companys get the other sort of chequeues.
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anytime you see the term 'IP' used in this context, think 'Illusionary Property' because that's exactly what it is. The whole fiction of IP being somehow property that can be owned, sold, stolen, or otherwise equated with real hard goods is a fiction created by lawyers and corporations to extract more money and control for themselves.
Re:One out of one Trent Reznor agrees: (Score:5, Insightful)
And, on topic, what about the big fuzzy gray area where the creator of a work still has free expression to say things like "steal this book" or "my agent is a dick nose and I want out of my contract?"
Broken Logic (Score:2, Insightful)
That is not right (Score:3, Insightful)
The correct thing it do here is vote with your dollar - do not pay the prices if they upset you. That said, stealing the goods instead of paying for them is not voting with your dollar, it is stealing. See how that works?
Re:And then (Score:3, Insightful)
This is one of the standard
Now, you can argue that person does not deserve to be compensated for copies produced by others and so the law should be changed; but that is a different position than "anything I can take without cost to the owner is not theft and should be legal."
that position, of course, means the GPL cannot exist - because you can take the code without cost from the original owner and should be able to do whatever you want with it regardless of the creator's wishes. To use the corollary to the "It's not theft argument" - "I would not have bought it anyway so they aren't really losing money" - if a company would not use GPL code unless the code modify it without redistributing the source when the distribute the resulting code they would not make nay changes so your not losing any enhancements since they would not do them if they had to comply with the GPL.
Do I think copyright law is out of date and needs correction? Yes, but silly not theft arguments detract from the real issue.
Re:Especially since (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:4, Insightful)
NiN is a Big Deal & could easily start their own label and do whatever they damn well please. So, by suggesting he renounce royalties, the GP is saying that Reznor shouldn't just say "Fuck the Man", he should actually stop taking money he's earned through the system he decries.
Re:One out of one Trent Reznor agrees: (Score:5, Insightful)
Pfft...who needs judicial orders or legislative rulings when you can have wild speculation?
Off-topic, but.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I know this isn't really your point, but I just hate seeing this fallacy repeated over and over again. The cost of creating the physical media IN NO WAY represents the full production cost of the product. That's like saying that the cost of software is just the cost of creating the installation CD.
Re:Someone call the folks at "Intervention" (Score:3, Insightful)
Then he has announced his scheme:
$4 for a digital album (lossy compression)
Additional $$ for tangible media (CD) and more $$ for artwork. You buy as much as you want, but you start with $4 for the songs - which can be processed/transacted on the cheap. He stands to make way more money at $4 an album than he does at $15 with the record company.
Re:Promoter vs Artist (Score:3, Insightful)
The promoter is generally pretty effective at what they do. Look at all the people who insist on downloading pirated versions of songs that these promoters have convinced them to like, even though there is plenty of music available for free without resorting to pirated copies.
There are probably a bunch of Britney wannabes trying to get people to listen to their music, but the promotion machine convinced everybody that Britney is what they wanted. Even with all the recent stuff, polls show a majority of people would still buy her album.
The already popular artists it would seem would have the best luck going independent once their contract expires, but how many have done it and stuck with it? Why did Trent sign with a major label? Why does Prince keep signing with major labels? I think there is some significant inertia to overcome.
Re:Going indie (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe.
Re:Off-topic, but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
At this point pretty hate machine and the downward spiral has already recouped all those costs several time over.
My pulled out my ass $0.10 tried to account for what you mentioned. The actual disk is $0.01 to produce in large volumes. Cases are similar in large volumes. The other $0.08 is what I figure the cost of production, distribution, and promotion are amortized over the number of disks made. I might be off. It might be $0.80 per disk when other costs are included, sold at 2.60 to the distributor, sold for 8.00 to the retail chain then sold as $24-$45 to the end customer. Still a bit much of a mark up all around.
Re:And then (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Concert, not interview! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're comparing apples to oranges.
On one side, you have a CD: It has a more or less fixed (for any given project) initial production cost, and costs a tiny amount per copy to make virtually limitless amounts of copies of it. On the other side, you have a concert, each night an individual piece of work, with hard-capped supplies for tickets. Of course the prices for one and the prices for the other shouldn't be held to the same standard. It's sort of like expecting oil paintings to be held to the same pricing standards as mass-produced posters.
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:5, Insightful)
In a society where rights are evaluated on economic issues, particularly given that the issues that concern IP are business-based, they all function as property rights.
Property is not "things you can own." Property in the law is ALL artificial. Property is the right to exclude, in the simplest of terms. There is no legal relevance to or association with any tangible object in ANY kind of property law. To say otherwise is an extralegal fiction perpetuated by an anti-IP crowd.
Intellectual Property doesn't refer to a "fiction that it's something to be owned." The fiction is the unstated premise that "property" actually refers to a "thing" at all. It doesn't and never has. Real property isn't a thing. You can't own land. You can only own rights to that land guaranteed by the government. There is no difference. The only reason the name "Intellectual Property" exists is for convenience--it flags people as to what specific fields are involved. Real property law is a special pursuit, separate from plain-old vanilla property law, separate from personalty.
People in general don't know what property means, and they don't know what "real" means either, and instead they decide that somehow "Intellectual Property" causes people to think in false terms, as though it has any consequence whatsoever on the legal community. This is why Slashdot's arguments about legal terms of art are spurious at best. Property isn't a thing, and Intellectual Property doesn't imply a thing to own. The thing is the right itself. It's not even a little misleading, contrary to what RMS spoon feeds you.
Re:Off-topic, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The cost to record an album continues to fall. In 2007, it is more of an investment of time than of money; most musicians today can make quality recordings at home with only a couple of thousand dollars worth of equipment.
Granted, you will get an appreciably more pristine sound from a big-bucks studio with a top-notch technician and the finest gear, but the cost of entry tends to be "sign this recording contract so we own your soul for 20 years and let us master all of your work to -4dB RMS."
Re:Concert, not interview! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Going indie (Score:3, Insightful)
If you forget to lock your house when you leave for work, do you deserve to have your TV stolen?
Re:Maybe I'm missing something here.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's called P2P (Score:3, Insightful)
And as the label owns the music outright, you need their permission.
So this is still a copyright violation. What a world
Re:And then (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Copyright law, at least originally, was all under title 17 of the US legal code. Criminal actions are kept organized in a completely different section, Title 18. So the congress drafted our most basic federal laws to say copyright violation was not only not theft, but not criminal at all. Some parts of CV have become criminal of late, but they are still not all properly incorporated into that part of the code.
2. Copyrights expire. There is no such thing as an object becoming old enough that it is no longer theft to steal it. So long as the constitution says "for a limited time" copyright violation is being treated as automatically not theft by the U S Constitution.
3. There is still a non-criminal class of copyright violations, including 'violations' that are not even torts because of fair use. 'Non-criminal theft' is an absurdity. If copyright violation = theft, then there can be no fair use, as stealing even part of something is still theft just as much as stealing the whole thing. CV=T means no quotation of even a small portion without permission, and makes negative reviews illegal.
4. All copyright law in the US is federal, and the courts have ruled it cannot be delegated to the states. If copyright violation is theft, then the Federal government has no legal grounds for prohibiting the individual states from passing laws to prohibit theft taking place within their borders.
Now, you could argue that the U S Congress, the Justice Dept., and the Supreme Court are all wrong on various points, and the Constitution itself needs amended. Maybe. But I have yet to see any of the persons who are yelling "CV=T!" on Slashdot accuse their congressman of pandering to thieves, or demand a recall of the Supreme Court because they are misapplying the constitution so egregiously, or even lobby their state to pass its own copyright laws that make CV=T locally, and fight the court decisions prohibiting them. The CV=T! crowd seems to love calling typical slashdot posters thieves, but until one of them stands up in the capital rotunda and applies their very same logic to the congress, I'm assuming they either don't really believe it, or are too cowardly to speak truth to power. (That's very much not directed at you, OK?)
On the same note, I've been repeatedly called a thief, just for making these very same points before. Since I have never either uploaded or downloaded music (except downloading by fully legal methods where I have paid properly for every track), I think I can safely say I am not a thief, even by the strictest CV=T definition. So, if the CV=T! shouters are right, and "the law is the law, its all so simple, there are no other factors and only a crook would think otherwise", I know 15 or so Slashdot posters who have committed Libel. I don't see anyone posting to these endless copyright threads with "What you've just said = Libel" when this comes up. None of the CV=T! people seem to give a damn about whether a crime is being committed against me, just against the RIAA. They come off like they live by the George Orwell phrase "Everybody's equal, but some are more equal than others.", and I suspect that's why a lot of people are fed up with them. Personally, I'd rather let them insult me than complain - their lack of rational behavior will eventually make it clear what they really want is very far from justice for all.
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't compare the popularity of NIN or Reznor with the Beatles or McCartney. They're on different scales.
Also, McCartney was recording for an independent label (Apple Records) at the height of his career. That makes a big difference. He also owned the copyright to some of the most popular songs in the world, which he sold for a substantial sum. There aren't many songs that a collector would pay to own the copyright to. It's not a great business proposition.
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:5, Insightful)
No more so than the idea of anything, including "real, hard goods" being property that can be owned, sold, or stolen is a fiction created to extract more money and provide narrow control to a favored subset of the population.
Property is a social construct, not something with any kind of natural essence. This as true of tangible personal propert and real property as it is of intangible personal property like stocks, bonds, copyrights, and trademarks.
Legitimate arguments can be made over whether any proprietary rights should exist in some things and what kind of proprietary rights should exist in each class of things to which those rights are ascribed, but the idea that proprietary rights in anything or something other than a social construct designed to facilitate the extraction of value and wall off things from the general use is a wildly inaccurate starting point for any such argument.
To Show My Support (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, wait
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:3, Insightful)
he should write a song about that!
You speak the truth, sir... (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't anything new either, it's been going on since at leat the 70's. The web is full of stories about major artists who disbanded because they ended up owing money to the record companies.
I remember the day I first showed them Napster and they laughed out loud because they knew it would be the end of the record companies.
What should artists do? First set up a web site. Next, go and talk to somebody like CDBABY - they garantee you at least $6 per CD sale (minimum!). Link to them from your web site.
What should the public do? First watch the movie "Before The Music Dies". Next, steal from the RIAA like Trent says but buy direct from the artist or through people like CDBABY.
The record companies aren't just ripping off artists they're also stifling innovation and killing decent music. The sooner we get rid of them the better.
It's a sham. (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile, the story gets out and more people hear what a rebel Trent Reznor and NiN is. More people download the music... and at the same time, more people go to the record store and buy the over-priced CDs.
It reminds one of the way Microsoft pretends to hate piracy, but knows full well that the more people pirate Windows, the more people buy it. The big labels must be realizing that the more people pirate their music, the more people will buy it.
Culture is somewhat analogous to platform.
Re:Off-topic, but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the sales from those albums do something other than cover the production costs of PHM and TDS. They help cover the costs of the tons of unprofitable albums the labels produce.
If you want albums *that* cheap, you will have to live with the labels in question not signing and working for promising artists that will probably never be popular.
For every platinum album produced by a label, there are 100 albums that don't cover all their production costs.
Re:Tickets to his show run $89 for two !! (bad arg (Score:3, Insightful)
But then, I tend to go to more underground shows in small venues, and pay around $8.00 to $20 for a ticket, and all the bands I know survive (literally) off their merchandise sales at the shows. If they sell well, they eat, if they don't, well... they don't.
Stealing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One out of one Trent Reznor agrees: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's what he does. (Score:4, Insightful)
You signed a contract with a performer who features bondage, torture, humiliation, S&M, and extreme interpersonal conflict.
I think the record company should feel fortunate that they are only being humiliated from the stage, and not in Reznor's basement.
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:1, Insightful)
What does if mean for one number to be three times less than another? I know what it means to be three times more. 3 times more than 15 is 45, sure. But what the hell does three times less mean? Three times what? It seems to me that three times less than 45 should be -90.
Re:Concert, not interview! (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably not. But there's no inconsistency there: the scarcity of the commercial good involved in selling admission to a concert is not an artificial scarcity, it's a scarcity imposed by physical reality.
Now, things like audio and video bootlegs of concerts, though ... he hasn't got much reason to complain about those.
Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And who the fuck does it affect ? (Score:3, Insightful)
"I reside in the great nation of Canada, fuckwit, where downloading music is still legal due to the levies we pay on storage mediums like blank CD's which go to the CRIA."
It goes to the copyright collective; the majority of it ends up going to SOCAN. The whole "record companies evil, artists good" thing falls down in consideration of the fact that SOCAN represents the composers and lyricists. They represent the artists in the way that the CRIA represents the record labels. I point this out because if you are to defeat your enemies, you must first understand them.
Either way, I agree that the Canadian levy is wrong because:
Social programs can work great... socialized medicine, social security, and so on. But Canada (or any country) doesn't need a socialized music program. Music isn't a rare and precious item; new CDs are around $12 here in the US and you can always find free, legal music (the radio being an excellent source). But the biggest problem is that it penalizes everybody. I pay for my music, thanks. I would not want to pay twice.
Re:Going indie (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Has he put his money where his mouth is? (Score:3, Insightful)