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Music Media

The Future of Music Conference 111

Posted by michael from the windows-media-player dept.
wiredog writes: "The Washington Post reports on the Future of Music conference. A gathering of musicians,labels, music publishers, unions, lawyers and others. There's also an overview of the pay sites, none of which seem worth the effort of looking at." A good recap on the conference that we mentioned earlier.
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The Future of Music Conference More

The Future of Music Conference

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  • Musicans dont visit conferences (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward


    They just get on and do what they do best
    make music

    if feel its nothing but a drinking session for fat music execs rather than furthering and innovating their actual core product

  • I wonder if they really realize... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by maxoutrocketmail.com ( 525289 ) <maxout@@@rocketmail...com> on Saturday January 12, 2002 @04:05AM (#2827994) Homepage
    I can't help but think that they are really oblivious to the revolution going on around them. Unlike the VHS time-shifting evolution, going digital with music (and shortly after video) is a revolution.

    Most people out there wouldn't mind paying for quality music. But when you combine the watered down crap put out by the majors with the clearly adversarial attitude of the RIAA towards us music buying folks I can't help but think that they are getting what they deserve.

    Long live the free market. The genie is clearly out of the bottle.

    • The genie is definitely out of the bottle. I think the time is coming when people will simply not pay for the digital file containing music. The core product of the music industry will effectively become free: in fact, it could be said this has already happened.

      Yet people will still buy music-industry products, whether as merchandise, concert tickets, CDs with decent sleeve-notes, on-line fan clubs, whatever.

      People hand over a hundred bucks for a branded sweater made for two bucks in China because of the marketing/added value which surrounds the sweater, even though they could get a much cheaper one in the thrift store.

  • technology will be the death of music (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MathJMendl ( 144298 ) on Saturday January 12, 2002 @04:07AM (#2827997) Homepage
    That's right! Technology will end the recording industry and destory music! I read this article about some new gadget that lets people record and copy music! They can buy music from a store and make an exact copy for someone else. With this existing, those struggling musicians have no hope left.

    It was called the "tape recorder."

    Plus, used in conjunction with a pirate stream of music, called a "radio," you can record even more.
    • The fear of recording made disc jockeys learn to talk over the intro until the vocal started, then cut the ending short. This made a big difference when songs were 2:30 long. They are attempting to find the equivalent ploy now...like not having any new music worth recording...
  • Snuck in, right at the end of the article "Unfortunately, the overlords of retail and radio didn't attend the Future of Music conference, an inexplicable omission"

    Combine this with not having any musician representation and it sounds like a big piss-in-each-others-pocket kind of show. Not to mention pointless.

    And what about that old business axiom
    "The customer is always right " . The first one of these big companies with the foresight to involve all the industry players in a concerted effort to listen to consumers and give them what they want will be in for some success.

  • As usual... (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by mirko ( 198274 )
    ...They didn't explicitely mention Free Music mouvements, such as GNUArt [gnuart.net].
    Doing it for the pleasure instead of doing it for a living doesn't mean it's bad.
    BTW, we have professional who gave us some of their songs (not all) which helped their fame propagate.
    • I read a NYTimes article coverage of the converence, and the second line of it was, paraphrasing "How can musicans produce music in today's age, preferrably without getting a day job?" Now I'm sure that's the NYT's bent, *but* it's not a uncommon sentiment from the populous at large, as "we"'ve come to expect that there's garage bands and then there's the professional musicans. The concept of a band purposely doing work for no profit, just the fun of it, is very new for most.

      • The only ones I know that don't are relentless self-promoters... they generally run their own small labels, often supporting other, similar musicians. Music isn't something you generally make money at. Granted, most small businessmen would tell you that business isn't something you make massive amounts of money at either...

    • Re:As usual... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by linuxbaby ( 124641 )
      Eben Moglen, a professor of law at Columbia University and the general counsel of the Free Software Foundation, DID mention the Free Music Movements, and was scoffed at. It was a strange scene.

      LAST year, Eben Moglen was the hit of the conference, talking revolution and how copyright is dead, and we should make it all free, and the music lovers will pay for what they love because they want to, not because they're forced to.

      THIS year, the mood was different. People talking "revolution" and "entirely new way of doing things" were laughed at. Eben said the same things as last year, but this year was dismissed.

      It's pessimistic. The people with new ideas were sued into oblivion (Napster).

      The musicians don't believe anything can save them except slow, incremental, legal fighting against the arch-enemy: the RIAA.
    • Flamebait ? I must be dreaming...
  • If N'sync is mentioned ANYWHERE in the "future of music" I will shoot myself.

  • The brave new world, as a musician. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by crhylove ( 205956 ) <rhy@leperkhanz.com> on Saturday January 12, 2002 @04:29AM (#2828020) Homepage Journal


    There's alot disheartening about the current music world, from a musical point of view, if you observe the bikini clad n'sync britney fest that our musical culture has become, but in the end, history has been written, and will forget all of those people except for in novelty clubs of the distant future. Alot of really excellent things have come about in the music world, only in the last few years. this is only going to be more radical when virtual presence is a reality through higher bandwidth internet connections and lower cost audio/video equipment. Location will cease to be a barrier to musical collaboration.

    First off, the level of international collaboration between quality musical acts has been astounding. Anybody who's heard the chieftains, the gypsy kings, strunz & farah, or any of the "underground" world music that is in virtually every upscale boutique here in downtown riverside these days, can attest to a new pallette of global styles to work for that is now available to composers across the globe. The legitimizing of ethnic folk musics as a respected art form, elevated to almost classical stature, will hugely broaden the music that will be popular once the anti mtv-marketing backlash begins with generation y. Alot of it is starting now, as 16 year olds look back and are embarrassed as ex-clown posse/limp bizkit fans. These kids are getting into euro-trance, local punk, and a whole range of other more interesting and less polished venues. as they hit college and begin maturing as people and music connesieurs, the music industry will be picking up smaller artists and expecting less mega stars, and the diversity will expand and begin to become polished as well. I think this is phenomenal.

    Secondly, the post napster world means that people won't buy albums anymore, and will eliminate the pressure for artists to put out albums full of worthless studio time and one or two hits. every song will be given the quality time it needs, and maybe even "albums" will begin to disappear as artists release singles and then eventually collections, giving every song it's fair shake.

    Also exciting is the recording technology available today. small time artists are able to record stuff at a quality that was never able to exist outside of million dollar studios before. this new robin hood style music industry is going to mean alot of bands will make it on merit, at least the merit of popularity, and not investment hype. mp3.com is littered with well recorded/poorly funded material that has a very high fidelity.

    And then the obvious revolution, free music on the web. this is not going away. the implications are huge, predictions about how this will effect future generations of musicians and listeners alike will all be off as the landscape radically transforms in it's wake.

    Those of you who like to download mp3s (that means every single /. reader, i'm sure) should check out gnucleus, the open source gnutella client. the newest beta is able to download one song from many people at once, ushering in a new era of p2p file sharing and copyright obliteration. with freenet reaching stable beta, and guerilla networks proliferating in the face of ridiculous cable/dsl isp pricing schemes, there is absolutely NO going back. the RIAA and anyone else that thinks content protection is any kind of business should know this, and if they refuse to see it, they are no smarter than that branch of hominids that continued to eat shrubs and berries instead of learning to eat meat. they will eventually be bred out, at least financially.

    The funny thing to me is that the RIAA even bothers trying out watermarking and cd mod copyright schemes. They are playing music for a party that nobody wants to be caught dead at.

    RhY

    http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/194/communizt_va gi na.html
    • [RIAA] are playing music for a party that nobody wants to be caught dead at.

      LOL!!!! :-D

    • if you observe the bikini clad n'sync

      No, no, don't think i will, if it's all the same to you.

      ~z
    • Secondly, the post napster world means that people won't buy albums anymore, and will eliminate the pressure for artists to put out albums full of worthless studio time and one or two hits. every song will be given the quality time it needs, and maybe even "albums" will begin to disappear as artists release singles and then eventually collections, giving every song it's fair shake.

      Albums may not entirely go away, but we may see some bands going back to the notion of the album being a single cohesive piece of artwork (think Dark Side of the Moon), rather than just the medium they use to deliver a few singles.

      In my bigoted opinion, any fool can engineer a 3-minute single to be a hit. It takes true talent to put together a 50-minute album that is a single quality piece of music throughout, and there are still a few people out there that appreciate this ability in a musician.
    • Good post, but I'd like to take issue with your notion of the album dying. I, for one, would hate to see this happen. Bands who can actually put together a cohesive album get my money. Also, both the top 40 format, most other radio formats, and the size of music downloads, for the time being, precludes much more than the three minute single.

      Some singles are great. Hell, I'm shopping for a jukebox. But if I'm going to sit down for an hour or two, I'm listening to Rush or Pink Floyd (or many others with good albums). I would hate to see the format die.

      (OTOH, the album format is largely dead. Look at the plethora of 'Music NOW!' discs and so forth. Most 'albums' are just one or two singles with some hastily recorded crap to fill out 35-45 minutes.)
      • (OTOH, the album format is largely dead. Look at the plethora of 'Music NOW!' discs and so forth. Most 'albums' are just one or two singles with some hastily recorded crap to fill out 35-45 minutes.)


        This is the way it has always been. Read this review of Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Chirping Crickets


        Given the fact that most early rock & roll LPs were usually just two hits and 10 tracks of hastily recorded filler, the sheer quality of the Crickets' full-length 1957 debut is pretty astounding.

        from Amazon [amazon.com]

      • no ? whatsoever in my mind that the album as an art form has it's place... this is the exception though, rather than the rule. i mean, rush and pink floyd (two of MY faves, also) are definitely not your average RIAA bands.

        rhy
    • I am one of those poor musical types who worked for years to make a buck on some (at least we believed) pretty hot material and playing. Starved, got nowhere, a pile of no responses and rejections from the bleeding industry... Things could change. Maybe musical acts need to set themselves up like members only porn sites to get any cash, but as far as any sympathy for the industry...well, it's a rightous pain to copy a vinyl record onto digital... why don't the Majors go back to new releases only on vinyl?

  • If they say pirating is so bad... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tetrad69 ( 526053 ) <tetrad@gmail.com> on Saturday January 12, 2002 @04:30AM (#2828023)
    labels still fret that consumers will pirate great gobs of downloadable music and put them out of business.

    In that case I'm going to purposely pirate Backstreet Boys to make them go bankrupt.

  • Future of what? (Score:3, Redundant)

    by bartok ( 111886 ) on Saturday January 12, 2002 @04:36AM (#2828028)
    Kind of seems arogant to call it "The future of Music Conference". Music will always have a bright futur regardless of the *Music Industry's" futur. It's like saying that if it's not published by the music cartel, it's not music.
    • Don't be too hard on the conference organizers. There's a giant boundary surrounding Washington that prevents people from seeing the outside world -- it's called the Beltway. Since the world seems so much smaller inside the Beltway, Washingtonians are accustomed to making sweeping statements as though dictating the policies of the universe.

      I'm sure high school band students everywhere and people who sing in the shower will be watching this conference closely to see how it affects their leisure activities. Personally, I've installed a TV in the tree in my backyard so the songbirds that live there can stay abreast of whatever the conference attendees decide.

      Within the Beltway, however, the only real concern about this arrogance is likely to be found at the Kennedy Center. The Center's directors are surely miffed about losing the right to host "The Future of Music" to neighboring Georgetown for the second year in a row.

    • Well, if you had actually read the article, you might have noticed that the conference was held by a D.C. based non-profit organization by the name of "The Future of Music".

      So it does make kind of sense to call it the "The Future of Music Conference", not?

  • All Was Well in Ronin's World... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RoninM ( 105723 ) on Saturday January 12, 2002 @05:02AM (#2828046) Journal
    The blurb looked promising for a second. I thought it might be some sort of thinktank where actual solutions to actual problems were proposed to guide music into more fertile soil in the future...

    [...] unions, lawyers and others

    But, then again, maybe not.

    Any field which has a future dictated by lawyers, other than the legal field itself (and, maybe, politics), is in trouble. If the industry was interested in giving artists a fair shake, they'd leave their sharks and sheisters at home and deal with the artists as creative partners, not product to be bought, sold, manipulated, robbed, pruned, and dismissed. And that's such a fantasy I can scarcely believe I thought of it.

    The artists can't budge (what are they going to give up? They don't have rights to their music, their name, sometimes not even their own style of music. Most of them don't get paid. Many don't get much despite their success) and the studios beat strawmen to death (like Tower-fucking-Records is somehow to blame), never address serious issues, and have their cadre of bloodsuckers sitting at the table the whole time, just to say, "The future of music is the present of music." Nothing's going to change. I'd say it was a game of control, but, well, games have some competition, some odds for the other guys to win out. That's a fat chance, here.

  • We all remember the "Tragedy of the Commons" lesson back in basic economics class: the commons is an open green field (common property, hence the name) where all the residents of a village are allowed to graze their sheep free of charge, with no limitations. The tragedy of the title comes about when all the villagers, beholden to no one as to the use of the commons, blithely allow their sheep to overgraze the precious grass. Soon there is no grass for anyone, because everyone got too greedy.

    The analogy with the music "industry" is clear. The rich musical heritage of humynity is a common good, like education, public health, or the environment. In this "cyber" age, music is controlled more than ever by corporations seeking to hold this public good in thrall for private gain. A point illustrated by this statement from the article: (n)ow everyone is paralyzed, horrified by the idea that this online world will rearrange the portions and leave some people with less than they had before. Weapons are drawn. Lawyers have been retained. Nobody is budging.

    A conference about the future of music,music --everything from the simple act of whistling a happy tune, singing "Happy Birthday", teaching the ABC's song to a child, or contemplating the sublime accomplishments of Ockgehem or Poulenc-- is today nothing more than a massive multi-party lawsuit waiting to happen.

    The representatives of the recording and radio industries stand like villagers ready to bust each others' heads open to give their sheep the best oppportunity to graze the commons to the dirt. They care only about profits, and are willing to ever more intrusive, cumbersome, and expensive technologies to protect their precious bottom line. Compared with these soulless greed merchants, those strong, free souls who use peer-to-peer software to share .ogg and .mp3 files can be seen as latter-day Robin Hoods, living by their wits, using their tech savy to ensure that the public good of music is not depleted by the wealthy few.

    • If you sing "Happy Birthday", I believe you owe someone some money. "Public"? Hmm...

    • Half right (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pyramid termite ( 458232 ) on Saturday January 12, 2002 @06:14AM (#2828118)
      We all remember the "Tragedy of the Commons" lesson back in basic economics class: the commons is an open green field (common property, hence the name) where all the residents of a village are allowed to graze their sheep free of charge, with no limitations. The tragedy of the title comes about when all the villagers, beholden to no one as to the use of the commons, blithely allow their sheep to overgraze the precious grass. Soon there is no grass for anyone, because everyone got too greedy.

      The analogy with the music "industry" is clear.

      Excellent point, but there's something that should be made clearer. The reason that the limited land that was the "commons" was overgrazed was because the nobles had already taken most of the land from the people. Now make the analogy and it becomes even better. Corporations (nobles) have taken culture and turned it into a commodity, thus cheapening and plasticizing (overgrazing) it. They keep wanting more and more that once belonged to the commons; a few of the artists gather fortune and fame, while others are ignored and work at other jobs. Before all this happened, artists worked on a small scale for a small audience, and yes, they probably did something else for a living, but they were respected members of the community. Now they are either ciphers or hyped up false gods in the eyes of mass media.

      Mark my words, the real terrifying part of what the music industry fears is not song trading - it's artists connecting to the community without middlemen, without "the star-making machinery behind the popular song" (J. Mitchell). It's people deciding that what they download from Joe Blow's web site is as entertaining as what they could buy at Tower Records on an RIAA label. The industry is trying the same kind of freeze-out and trash talking tactics with today's real music and the way it's distributed that they tried in the 50's and 60's with that awful rock and roll and those uppity independent labels that were releasing a lot of it. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. Probably in the '10s they'll learn how to deal with the new world of music, but by that time, much of what they're used to will be irrelevant. I have news for the execs. The reason they can't make money on an artist before they sell 500,000 units is they spend too much money recording and promoting them, too much effort sterilizing and marketing them so they might, might be a big, big hit and make them zillions. Meanwhile, artists who record themselves and throw out their goods to whoever will listen to them often break even after a few thousand sales. They'll never be big, but they don't care.

      Gosh, if they have digital rights management on every digital device in existence, I sure hope that doesn't prevent people like me from recording our own music and distributing it for nothing, if we want to. Wanna bet they'll try stopping us?

      Yes, the thought that music should be free for the listener scares them. The thought that it should be free for the artist scares them even more.
    • Is that pronounced like "humidity"?

  • Emusic questions (Score:2, Interesting)

    by muleboy ( 123760 )
    I have been considering signing up with Emusic, but before I hand over my credit card there are a couple of questions I have:
    1. I know all their tracks are 128 kbps. This doesn't tell me a whole lot. A good codec at 128 sounds great, Xing on fast mode at 128 sounds terrible.
    2. I have a T1 connection. How quickly will I be able to grab an album? I'm assuming they have bandwidth throttling, but how slow is it? Do they crank it way down so you can't grab dozens of albums in an hour? Needless to say, the answers to these questions are not on the emusic.com web site...
    • Once upon a time, we all complained about how the CD standard was too low quality, and we were going to be stuck with it for a long time.

      Variable bandwidth was supposed to give us a way of choosing a reasonable quality level. Instead, it only allows us to fit way more over-compressed, shitty sounding mp3's onto a disc. I'm sure the musicians love that (the ones that care about how their music sounds).

    • As a musician myself, i would never rip anything at less that 192...256 is preferable...at 128 you rip out the frequencies that give defenintion to hihats and crash cymbals...they sound like crap.
      • When I rip CDs myself I use lame at 192 for rock, 256 or higher for classical. I should have said 128 kbps with a decent encoder sounds decent. I agree that it doesn't sound good. It's a shame that emusic uses Xing. I guess only a small percentage of people will even know the difference, but those are also the same small percentage of people they want to sell this service to!

    • Re:Emusic questions (Score:3, Informative)

      by AntiNorm ( 155641 )
      I know all their tracks are 128 kbps. This doesn't tell me a whole lot. A good codec at 128 sounds great, Xing on fast mode at 128 sounds terrible.

      I had a 30-day trial subscription to Emusic this past summer (didn't continue it because their selection wasn't as broad as I would have liked). If they haven't changed codecs since then, then according to EncSpot [guerillasoft.com], they are indeed using Xing.
      • They do have that nice feature where you can download an entire album at once. And you can queue those, too. So every night before bed I'd pick 10 albums, start them downloading, and go to sleep. Soon I had 40 GIGS of good mp3s from around the world.

        Highly recommended.
    • I've beem using Emusic since last summer. The 128 bit mp3 sound fine to me. I mostly listen on a portable player in a car or on a train to/from work.

      I find the downloads very quick (I have a cable modem). I can download an album worth of MP3 (10 or so) in less than 5 minutes.

  • Man I read shit like this and right away can only think how stupid the recording industry is - and just a few months behind the wall street investors.

    The bubble has burst, you're not gonna get 9.95 for X songs for Y month subscription.

    What's gonna happen when nobody signs up is they're going to be forced to give it away for free. After about a year or so, when they got alot of people hooked, they'll start charging again for some bonus software/functionality. Then the flock flees again. It's totally cyclical. They really just don't have a clue.

  • My view is that they make more money (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bryan1945 ( 301828 ) on Saturday January 12, 2002 @05:25AM (#2828072) Journal
    Probably OT- I really believe that music swapping increases CD sales (at least until Philips is done with 'em). Ancedotal- myself and several others just don't buy music anymore (could it be because current music sucks?!), unless we sample a few songs first. So we are now at the point were you download a few songs and (generally) buy the CD/DVD, or you just say fuck it.
  • "For a realm that was supposed to thrive at stunning speeds, the world of online music sure seems stuck in a kiddie crawl."

    How much of an empty statement is this?

    Yes, certainly the major players are virtually standing still on the matter but that is by their own doing - there is a saying "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink" which is pretty apt here as these major players are too afraid of the technology to even consider using it.

    The smaller players are moving at a pace that befits their limited amounts of available money, but they are moving e.g. bands releasing several high quality tracks through their websites which aren't on the CD they are preparing to launch.

    This is probably one of the best ways to meet the technology half-way - let people have a unique preview (ahead of time) of what they are getting if they buy the CD - and for free. If they like what they get and think that the CD will contain more of the same then there is no reason they should not buy the CD.

    However the only hole in this plan is that your bands must be;

    + of a decent musical quality to make people actually want to buy the thing

    + of a decent technical sound quality as otherwise its simpler to wait for it to hit the p2p systems and grab a quality copy from there

    + releasing material that will not be on the CD (as otherwise you risk wasting the best track, and once you do that why do I need to buy your CD?)
  • Has anyone investigated the release of music under the GPL? I mean, a copyright should still be on the music so people can't rerelease stuff you've made and take credit for it. But could the GPL be used in any way to do this?
  • I've been looking into the product placement aspect of new music. It turns out that the record compaines only want a limited number of albums per month. This year, there will be about 70 new top 40 albums if it was like last year. The length of time that an album will stay in the top 100 is much shorter than it was a decade ago. If you look at billboard's top albums, you will find that only two of the top 40 have been there for more than a year. A decade ago that number was 31 out of the top 40. I think that the music businesses methods to control their investments in unsellable stock, they have reduced the numbers of new products and the result is that there isn't anything decent making to the top of the charts.

    I'm guessing that Australia has about 6000 bands that have current tracks on CD's. Recently a radio station ran a contest where they got songs from 3000 bands from Melbourne (population 3.4m).

    I've started looking into this when I found out about a survey that was being propsed by a record company. They wanted to know if unknown bands thought they had any chance of making it big. I got the impression that the record comapines don't want the good unknown bands to give up because its hopeless and that they may need to spread around a bit more money to keep up a supply of new bands.

    Its obvious that the record industry is messing up their industry. I haven't bought a new main stram album in years. The albums I buy where recored years ago with the exception of local bands [ozmp3.com].
  • We at ibiblio [ibiblio.org] host several bands who freely share their music and they still make a living.

    We've hosted Roger McGuinn's Folk Den [ibiblio.org] project for about 5 years. Now Roger has made a CD, Treasures from the Folk Den [slashdot.org], which has just been nominated for a Grammy! Not bad for a rock star who told the labels to go jump in his Senate testimony. [senate.gov]

    We also host collections of tape traders, jamz [ibiblio.org] and tunetree [unc.edu], of bands that want their fans to hear their music (and pay to come to their shows).

    Eben Moglen is right (see NYTimes article on FoM); it's about love.

  • I like this segment of the article:

    ...through the magic of technology, the song vanishes and you hand over another $10. (For a rundown of online music services, see Page E12.)

    Web users can't turn to Page E12 to find this related information, and there is no indication of how to get from the current section (C, for Style) to the "E" section (Business). It would be nice if the good folks at washingtonpost.com would make use of "the magic of technology" by linking see Page E12 to the promised content.

    The online music services article appears here [washingtonpost.com], in a section so different it's branded to look like a separate site [washtech.com] through the magic of marketing.

  • This slip of the tongue came from Miles Copeland of Ark 21 records

    "It's not just music. If we don't have strong Intelectual Property Laws, nobody will invent new diseases so they can sell cures for them"

    (sorry, no link. this comes from memory.)
    • Another great line was Lester Chambers at the concert on monday evening introducing Time Has Come Today. " This is a song that made a lot of money for a lot of people, and me and my brothers got famous." As a commentary on the fact that he didn't receive any royalties for 22 years, has never been paid for any use of his music in over 40 movies, and the RIAA is licensing music of the Chambers Brothers that they don't have the rights to. (They can't have rights that didn't exist at the time the contract was signed) Thanks to Jonathan Tasini for that. BTW: the Licoln Mercury Commercial you saw recently did license Time Has Come Today.
  • Just checked this site out again today:

    http://www.artistsagainstpiracy.com/

    Now it's advertising for some ISP!
  • Here we go again- "The conference was organized by the fledgling Future of Music Coalition, a D.C.-based nonprofit group that lobbies and agitates for the heaps of musicians ignored by MTV, radio, the majors and any other entity that could market a band to fame and a large paycheck. The FMC is filling a big niche, since the number of struggling musicians far exceeds the number of Linkin Parks. Its heart is in the right place." (This neglects to point out that majors PAY MONEY to place tracks on MTV and the radio... they are not ignored- they are bedfellows!) Does anyone think it is a COINCIDENCE that there has NEVER been a grassroots groundswell that has propelled a truly indie (or self-released) artist into anything close to selling a half-million units (the threshold the major claim to require before THEY break even) ? If you really stop and think about it, labels distribute "image" as much as they distribute the actual music. Look at the landfill at mp3.com. Many of those artists have self-released CDs (actual CDs- not those mp3.com fake CDs) available at their band sites or they are on a niche indy label. Somehow it seems that a major label is still required if an artist wants a stamp of legitimacy (ie. Linkin Park sounds like a ton of other indie bands, and are no better or worse- but Linkin Park is what people buy- not the others). I personally am partial to UK d-n-b... especially the Bristol sound. Unfortunately, major labels have been unable to market the sound/image in the US. Like most electronic music, it is about the music- not the personalities involved... so we get stuck with bozos like "Fatboy Slim" who has been able to market his image on MTV. The bottom line- the point I'm trying to make: CONSUMERS themselves have created this situation by DEMANDING the N-syncs, the mass-marketed MTV top-ten, the manipulated Total Request Live acts... we can criticize the pre-fab cookie cutter bands, but we can't argue with their success. This "type" of music has been around since at least the 50s, so there is nothing new about it. Artists are to be blamed as well for seeking major labels and signing contracts. It blows my mind when artists claim to be raped by their labels when they "consented" to their contracts. Nobody forced them to sign their contracts. Finally, the "history of the intenet" seems to indicate people's reluctance to pay for digital content. Quality/compression issues aside, I listen to most of my music in my car... kinda difficult to stream.
  • As an attendee of the conference I have to say that it was an educational and eye opening experience. While there were some tense moments on a couple of panels, (Major Labels Panel and the Copyright Panel) The New Models panel was excellent, Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls and Daemon Records, David Fagen of th Rosenergs, And Ian MacKaye explained their business model, and how well it works for them and their artists. Partnership, no copyrights, and a lot of hard work.

    Artists and Musicians left with the feeling that "We can do this" and that sure the major label model may be fine for some, but most don't need it. A musician or band doesn't need to sell millions of records to make a decent living.

    One of my favorite moments came when Mark Cuban (yes that Mark Cuban) gave Cary Sherman a lecture on embracing file-sharing as a way to make money rather than suing them into oblivian.
  • (this is not a troll)

    have you seen www.launch.com [launch.com]? It's yahoo's new music site, and i think it's pretty good because:

    -you make a "radio station" by rating groups/songs/albums that you like.
    -there are preprogrammed stations if you want
    -you don't need to store mp3s, because it streams
    -the sound quality is very good
    -the licensing is legit and taken car of already
    -you can listen to your "station" from any computer

    drawbacks:
    -sometimes their audio server gets choked up
    -you can't pick just one song very easily
    -you can't copy the files
    -it's probably linked somehow to evil marketing schemes
    -their selection is pretty extensive, but if you listen to any station a lot, you do hear repeats

    that said, it's better than pain-in-the-tucus, not to mention shady downloading sites like audiogalaxy or kazaa.
    • Hi,

      I like Launch, and soon it is in the living room. See news worthy Philips message below. Saw the set at CES!! It is a great Audio System, broadband Internet enabled, MP3pro-CD playback a huge five line display for id3 tags / CDDB. One way or another they got the new Alanis CD as well...

      Cheers,
      Ramon.

      PHILPS TEXT
      Win a test-drive on the Philips Streamium MC-i200, worlds first broadband Internet Micro with multiple online music services. Don't dream it. Stream it!
      http://www.audio.philips.com/betatest.asp. You can
      subscribe from the 7th of January until the 17th of February.

      All 100 beta-testers receive the new CD of Alanis Morissette (http://www.alanis.com).
      "You like Alanis Morisette? We do too. That's why the lucky 100 Streamium beta-testers will also receive Alanis' brand new CD called "UNDER RUG SWEPT"! The CD contains her new single "UTOPIA" (http://www.maverick.com/alanis/). Not enough yet? Ok, we have more: 10 of those 100 CDs will be signed by Alanis! What are you still waiting for? Sign up...
  • mp3.com has a near perfect model. Here you can download a staggering array of songs for free, in whatever genre you happen to like, and a lot of it is really good. As long as you can get past the "I want to listen to what's popular" mentality that is shoved down our throats by radio (which cannot survive in its current state) and music videos (crap), mp3.com is a perfectly viable solution for listeners - you can find almost anything, and any Joe-Schmoe artist can put their music there. mp3.com actually pays artists who get lots of plays, using money they (presumably) make from advertisers. As a musician/composer/producer, I can honestly say that I believe that this is the future of music. The middle men (major labels, publishers, lawyers, distributors, retailers) have met their match, and will fall because they were so worry so much about "piracy" that they miss the big picture - up until now there has been just too much money in recorded music. There is only a finite amount of money that the general populus will spend on music, and thanks to Napster and mp3.com (very different models), they have discovered its true value: next to nothing. Because I'm good (yeah whatever), I plan to make only a small amount of money from people who listen to my recorded music. I see produced music only as a vehicle to gain respect and recognition, while live performance is what makes the big bucks. By big bucks I don't mean what Madonna currently makes in royalties, but enough to comfortably sustain my life as long as I choose to continue with this profession. Why would I listen to the latest crappy single from Destiny's Child on popular radio when I can go directly into the genre of music I like on mp3.com, choose 20 artists in a genre I like, stream them directly to my desktop, and abort playback on the tunes that don't interest me? Then I can download the ones I like and burn 'em to a CD or copy them into my iPod. There is no better solution for the discerning music consumer.
    • Right up until Vivendi/Universal came in and screwed it up. They started charging $20 per month to musicians who wanted to participate in the Pay for Play, reduced the Pay for Play to 1/2 cent per play rather than the 1 1/2 cents it started out as. In addition the DAM CD the artist now pays for, at $3.95 each, something that MP3.Com used to pay for as their part of the investment for 50% of the sale. They still get 50% of the sale but the artist pays the expenses. They also grabbed any money in artist accounts for pay for play that hadn't reached the required minimum payout amount. (It's still availble to use for artist service purchases such as placement ads, but not for payout, unless the artist pays them $20 per month.) Only 35,000 artists have signed up for the Premium service ($20 per month) leaving 135,000 artists screwed out of their earnings. Even if they are only owed $10 each thats $1.35 million they stole from the artists. It's not the best business model, its just business as usuall for the labels. You do the work You pay the expenses, we make the money....
      • Agreed. BUT - this is still a better scenario than trying to get a deal with a major. I use mp3.com as an example because it is the biggest site of its kind, however there are other, similar sites that don't treat the artist this way.

        I admit I don't get enough plays for payback, so I am not going to participate in their little scheme. Still I believe in the principle of their system, and I am not opposed to mp3.com - let them do business the way they have to, because they have to make money too. If you're getting enough plays to merit payback, then $20/month = peanuts.
  • Being a fan of music has caused me to be rather disillusioned. I've noticed how saturated rock became after the flood of boy bands. Though, I'm sure, being only sixteen, that I'm unaware of how truly saturated music actually is. I'm not knowledgeable enough to say something "interesting" nor am I clever enough to amuse anyone.
  • Slashdot fucks ass.

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