Brazilian Pop Music Scene Thrives on Piracy 211
langelgjm writes "When people talk about the failing business model of the traditional record company, they often only offer vague suggestions as to how things would work otherwise. But a concrete example of a music scene that thrives on piracy is to be found in Brazil, in the form of tecnobrega. From the article: 'While piracy is the bane of many musicians trying to control the sale of their songs, tecnobrega artists see counterfeiters as key to their success ... Ronaldo Lemos, a law professor at Brazil's respected Getulio Vargas Foundation, an elite Rio de Janeiro think tank and research center, says tecnobrega and other movements like it represent a new business model for the digital era, where music is transformed from a good to a service.'"
Re:Brazilian Pop Music Scene Thrives on Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, actually. The cat does "got my tongue." (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Brazilian Pop Music Scene Thrives on Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
I, for one, welcome these overlords: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:tecnobrega , is it for everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish I could just sit back and let everyone who read my specs pay me a royalty for the favor of doing my job. Instead I have to produce new content. I could do this by charging per document I PRODUCE, but I choose instead to be an employee. Doesn't really change the model, though, to remain an employee, I must continue to produce useful work. Otherwise they'll show me the door.
Being and artsy fuck doesn't exempt you from needing to contribute.
Re:tecnobrega , is it for everyone (Score:3, Insightful)
And this is bad because? If your already successful and you can fill the biggest venue in any city then more money is the difference between a Rolls Royce or a Maybach. You can always set up endorsements for more money, sell media with added features, private shows etc... When your struggling to start any hand up will help. Right now it's a lottery mentality, 100 starving artists to each journeyman who lives off the industry. With a more distributed model there would be more people who can make a living off of music and less of a lottery. I'd imagine with more people making a living at it this would increase the amount of creativity.
Re:tecnobrega , is it for everyone (Score:1, Insightful)
Before it was a good it was a service (Score:3, Insightful)
Proof positive the copyright regime is misguided? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Piracy is the way to get established and get your name out. There's no way to stop it, so we're using it to our advantage," explains Gabi Amarantos, who frequently appears on Brazilian TV on the strength of bootleg sales of her CDs (from which artists don't get a cut).
Technically, there is no copyright infringement involved since the artists themselves allow their works to be duplicated.
What is however interesting is that this technobrega movement severely undermines one of the arguments frequently cited by the RIAA in favour of stricter copyright laws, which is that piracy undermines the ability of the music and film industries to invest in the next generation of local talent by lowering revenues from current sales.
Also from the article
The original intention of copyright as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause/ [wikipedia.org] was
Given that the tecnobrega movement has shown that copyright protection is not necessary to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, isn't it time to reconsider the whole basis of copyright law?
Re:Brazilian Pop Music Scene Thrives on Piracy (Score:2, Insightful)
Illegal does not necessarily equate with unethical.
Legal does not nessesarily equate with ethical.
It is illegal to sing happy birthday in public without royalty payment. This is not an unusual example. Copyright is long enough, where even when all authors are dead, some corporation is there to collect.
Currently, legal bribery by corporations plays a large role in forming laws. It should be no surprise that monopolies of many kinds are protected by the government at the expense of citizens.
RIAA,MPAA bought laws to extend the copyright monopoly to 95-120 years.
Drug companies would like to extend patents to milk every possible penny out of a discovery, even at the expense of human health.
Industrial farm companies, like ADM have extended patents to cover biological life, and would like to push things like terminator seeds for profit at the expense of humans.
Microsoft enjoys a unchecked monopoly granted by software copyright monopolies that last 95 years.
Software companies patent the most trivial algorithms, with these granted monopolies often slowing innovation.
Even with 95 year monopolies, media companies would like to further restrict media, by using DRM to encrypt media. The DMCA was bought by the media companies to protect DRM.
The release of expiration of copyright monoplies into the public domain stopped in 1975, and will be dark until 2018. At 95 years after media publication, the majority of publications are likely lost. I regretfully expect RIAA,MPAA to try to extent the copyright once more in 2017 fully to 120 years to beyond 2043.
Yes, there is a theme here. Government granted monopolies that last 20, 95 years are bad.
Re:Brazilian Pop Music Scene Thrives on Piracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Proof positive the copyright regime is misguide (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not so much that it undermines the argument, as it underscores it for what it is -- a business model they insist is necessary for the production of music, but which probably isn't.
Artists who embrace this self-publishing method don't need investment from the RIAA et all -- they make music, engage their fans, and help people to find and listen to their music -- then they coax them out to a show. They probably make a modest amount of money, but they don't have as much overhead, and they don't have middlemen to pay. They'll probably never be mega-stars either.
For the RIAA to invest in local artists, they need to find acts they think that they can sell, set them up with all sorts of help in producing something that is up to 'professional' standards, and then marketing it to as wide of a market as possible. In the process, the music tends to migrate to a boring degree of sameness, and the artists become beholden to the recording company, and has to sell a bazillion records to overcome the "losing money math" used by these companies.
They're not interested in groups which are locally marketed and have a good following. They're goal isn't to put music into the hands of people looking for it so they can actually hear good music. They're looking to find a group they can market to a very large amount of people -- ideally, conforming to whatever niche market they already have good marketing channels to get exposure to; take Clear Channel for example. Everyone, in every market, hearing a selection of songs chosen to maximize the commercial successes and sell records to the same established fan-base.
The RIAA doesn't care about artists who want people to hear their music and come to a live show in a local venue -- they don't make their money off live performances from what I know. The RIAA is making their money off the already recorded stuff, and to do that, they need to convince us that if it weren't for them, there wouldn't be any recorded music worth listening to. They just don't want you to know that an artist can make and distribute good music without their help.
There's a busker in the city I live in (Ottawa, Canada). He plays in the summer at an open air market. He's got a great whiskey-coarse voice, and plays some of the best steel guitar blues I've ever heard from a young-ish white guy. He sells his CDs out of his guitar case for 10 bucks a pop, and gets good tips for performing. I suspect he does alright for himself, because he always has a crowd, and always gets tips -- because he can sing, and he gives an earnest performance for the crowd. He may even actually play some club gigs as well, I've no idea.
I suspect these Brazilians aren't really all that different from local bands all over the place who manage to eke out an income by actually getting their music into the hands of people who otherwise wouldn't hear it. Unfortunately, the RIAA et al are trying to convince us that all of these "alternate distribution channels" are piracy so they can make people believe that any music not provided by them in a secure, DRM bundle must be illegal. They'd have us lock down any mechanism which they haven't vetted -- even to the exclusion of self-published artists who are encouraging you to give copies of their music to your friends.
Cheers
Re:"vague suggestions", my shiny metal a$$ (Score:3, Insightful)
Giving away CDs and downloads as promotion for your live shows seems like a good idea to me.
Re:Brazilian Pop Music Scene Thrives on Piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
It may hurt your head, but some laws are passed in undemocratic ways, or have consequences that harm democracy. For those times, you might need civil disobedience.
Other times, laws like copyright enforcement just simply go against the grain of human nature and will be broken regardless of government action.
Re:tecnobrega , is it for everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a shame you can't get your head around the fact that some performances take years of prep and production work, and involve poeple who can only come together in the studio or in some other collaborative manner. Such recordings have plenty of audience interest, and involve material that can never provide income for the performers as they tour bars or concert halls selling t-shirts and getting a cut of the beer gross.
There ARE people who want to purchase a compilation of recordings from over time, or ensemble pieces that involved many studio sessions to create. They WANT the artists to be able to dedicate their time (and thus derive their income from) sales after the fact of doing that hard work. I don't want your desire to have that recording for free to prevent me from being able to purchase such recordings. But the sentiment that such recordinds should be fair game for ripping off because you'd rather suck down smoke or stand in line to take a piss at a concert venue is a false dichotomy. If you think a band can make a good living by giving away their work, and charging you for tickets and bumper stickers, great. I'm sure you can persuade them all to pursue that approach. But that has nothing to do with whether or not its up to YOU spread a studio work around to 100,000 of your very best personal, and completely anonymous, friends.
Don't like musicians and filmakers who choose to work FIRST and entertain their audience afterwards? Then don't do business with those people. Why are you ranting? Just do business with people who don't want to charge you any money for their studio work, and you'll both be happy. Leave the people who want to see films made or other long-term projects evolve do what they want. You can just ignore it. Except you can't, because you want those things too, you just want to be entertained for free.
Re:Freeloaders ahoy in Brazil (Score:2, Insightful)
Historically, Brazilian music has always come from your so called "low-wage freeloaders". Samba is one of the best examples, it was born in the slums and no one can deny its contributions to the music scene in Brazil and internationally. Brazil "is" Samba.
You think people are poor because they want to be poor? Do you really expect people to pay taxes when the minimum wage is 150 dollars a month? (And don't say living costs are much lower too, because while it may be true for your basics like housing and food, everything else costs a fortune, cars cost 2 times more, [The simplest Civic Model costs us $34,000, while in the US they pay $15,000] and look at Brazil's position in the IPod-Index, we pay $369.61 for a $150 worth 4GB Nano)
It is true, the middle class carries the burden of paying huge taxes, except who said that the middle class isn't also to blame? Most of the middle class are constantly applying for public jobs, which in Brazil basically means you can't be fired, you will get paid and get raises and promotions even after you retire and on top of that, you have all sorts of social benefits. And we have millions upon millions of people employed by the government in jobs that we don't need.
I do agree with your "The leftist corrupt government caters to these people, giving out more government aid and tax-cuts, because then they vote for them." comment though, but what is the middle class doing about that? Nothing, they are applying for public jobs, leaving the country or just quietly complaining complacently.
Anyway, I'm not trying to make this a debate about economics and politics in Brazil, but what you are basically saying is that since they are poor and freeloaders, what they do have no value. Just because they don't have money to buy CDs that cost 10% of their minimum wage each ($15), doesn't mean that this whole distribution system is unrealistic. We should follow their lead here instead of bashing them and dismissing their contribution.
As a matter of fact, I think this model would work even better with mainstream music, where the target audience has Internet access and is willing to pay $50+ dollars to attend a concert.
Maybe the social gap in Brazil wouldn't be so big if people were looking for ways to unite instead of dividing us.
Plus, people like you suck. Real bad.
Re:Pompous bollocks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pompous bollocks (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is that his observation about whether and how you can make certain types of recordings/images at home has nothing do to, whatsoever, with whether it's reasonable for someone else to rip off that work afterwards. If you want to give it away to promote your other ventures, that's fantastic. But that's up to you, not the person who simply wants it whether you've put a price on it or not.
Re:Pompous bollocks (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop? Why? YOU'RE the one that's bringing up the issue of producing something first, and then collecting money for it after the fact as people enjoy it, and saying that's a bad thing. A film could be shown millions of times after it's been produced. So what if YOU will pay for that. You know perfectly well that plenty of people who rip of music rip of movies, too, for exactly the same reason: they want it, and don't feel like paying for their entertainment. Are you saying that someone who spends millions of dollars to make a film should only be able to earn their money when the film is played in a huge, ugly, energy-inefficient building which you have to drive to in order to use, but that if the film is ripped off and played on a 60-inch plasma in front of your couch, then that's just too bad for the film maker?
There's simply no way you can be so intellectually dishonest as to think there's any meaningful philosophical separation between a laboriously created audio recording and a laboriously created film. The fact that you're pretending there is shows how craven you're being in defense of being able to rip off music.
Re:Pompous bollocks (Score:3, Insightful)
Like I said in another spot here, its not about what you think is intellectually honest, I'm speaking to the economic realities these companies/performers should deal with. If they don't, they'll be bankrupt. Just because its wrong to copy music/movies doesn't stop people from doing it, so you need to monetize your business in a way that others cannot easily provide themselves.
The basic numbers of cost/benefit analysis make copying music/movies worthwhile even given the court judgments that the MAFIAA have gotten. As long as that balance remains, the artists need to deal with the economic realities and adjust their business models. The road is littered with businesses who didn't change their models to deal with reality.
So wax philosophical all you want about what's right and wrong, all the while these companies are wasting their money screaming against the market forces that are quickly showing them to be outmoded. Innovate or die.