[quote author=“AnnaLogue”]
and what do you think is the ratio here ? an example: some time ago i was in Berlin when Anna 014 Poeme Electronique The Echoes fade (Remix) was played in a club. to my surprise there were like 50 people dancing. at this point i was not even sure if i had sold 50 copies at all (exaggerated, but you get the point). then i WAS there, actually selling the record, but ‘no-one’ did .... so where did they know it from….. if feel like being parasited on (and also the band doesn’t deserve this).
I get your point, Marc, but about 15 years ago, when I was still into gothic music, I danced the whole night on every kind of black music. Not because I had all these cd’s in my collection but just because I liked the music. And no, I didn’t steal this music from one or another website. I didn’t need to know the artist or the title of the song to dance on it. (my critical opinion about new wave parties of today, but that, of course, is another discussion).
While morally, of course you’re right, it shouldn’t be up to the bloggers, what I’m trying to say is, the bloggers are there. And rant as we both might, they won’t go away. So in fact, it is up to them.
Of course, it’d help if the labels who make the physical releases, or the distributors for ‘legal’ digital releases for that matter, could get a compensation for their work somewhere down the line. I mean, I cry no tears for the britneys of this world if the kids download their stuff instead of buying cds, but down in the undergrowth, illegal downloading might ruin people.
But again, it seems there’s little to be done about it, other than to release product of such high standards that people will think it worth buying - and hope the downloading will have all the positive side effects that were mentioned in this thread and not so many of the negative…
i think it is a double-edged sword, and maybe i do ddistinguish between old/unavailable and new/available. indeed i think it is a good thing when releases are completely sold out/totally unavailable, and/or expensive - but who can find a defintiion/threshold for this ??? no-one .... but anyway, nowadays i think it is stupid to spend a three-digit-sum on a single vinyl record. at least, i have better ideas on what to spend my little money, a personal example: animal welfare. but okay, that is another story…
With records being sold for three-digit prices, it is not surprising that most people settle for an illegal download. And with prices like these, it isn’t surprising that we have bootlegs popping up every now and then for just a tenth of what you would have to pay on Ebay for an original… Here’s a three digit example:
[quote author=“ton”][quote author=“AirCrashBureau”]With records being sold for three-digit prices, it is not surprising that most people settle for an illegal download.
I know a lot of things in this world that are sold for 3, 4, 5, 6 etc. digit prices. Therefore it is not surprising that people are tempted to steal things.
Does that also mean it is justified ?
music is art, not just a commodity. is it stealing if someone views a reproduction of a valuable painting? is it stealing if someone photographs a sculpture? listening to an mp3 or a radio stream is not the same thing as owning the record or cassette, i think everyone here knows that. just because someone can’t afford 200+ dollars for say, the radionome compilation, does that mean they should never be able to experience or appreciate that music? that smacks of obscene classism to me. i think it’s a problem to essentially equate this music to yachts and caviar, the privelege only of those who can afford it.
[quote author=“ton”][quote author=“AirCrashBureau”]With records being sold for three-digit prices, it is not surprising that most people settle for an illegal download.
I know a lot of things in this world that are sold for 3, 4, 5, 6 etc. digit prices. Therefore it is not surprising that people are tempted to steal things.
Does that also mean it is justified ?
Ton
No, that doesn’t mean it is justified, it isn’t, but I can see why certain people choose to steal and use lame excuses to justify it. It is people’s attitudes, not ridiculous prices that are the problem.
[quote author=“ton”]Furthermore I am not sure why some people in this forum got the idea that they have the right to hear everything they want and so every action to achieve that seems justified.
Ah, this is very much to the point:
Technology gave them that idea.
Again, while morally you’re spot on, technically, they have the possibility to listen to music they don’t have access to otherwise. Wrong or right, well, wrong anyway, the issue is, can we do something about this, what can we do, and do we wish to suffer the consequences?
Perhaps we only have a handful of fans
As in, devoted, dedicated followers: Maybe. But does it not count for anything that many more people like some of what you’ve done, or as T2Die said, like it but don’t have even the slight sum to pay for the reissues and a turntable?
Now something I have been missing in this thread is a stronger stress on the rather special situation we have with the rare old stuff.
If I remember correctly, the way it normally works is that you hear a song somewhere, you like it a lot, you go out and buy it at an affordable price.
Now our stuff is so obscure nobody even knew it in the 80s. It got virtually no airplay or promotion in general and had it not been for the treasure hunters it would have remained hidden from the world.
If we follow Ton’s line of argument, the only acceptable way to get to know it would be that a friend plays old gold to you at his place or you hear it in a club. Well, the chances of that a rather slim, unless of course you live in a major city and have a lot of collector friends there.
So basically what we have is great music not available for legal download that - if it available at all - often goes for big bucks beyond the wallet of the normal music lover. And unlike with a luxury car, you can have a digital replica that costs you nothing, and if they’re not selling their old stock themselves, the artists don’t benefit from monster ebay prices anyways.
People are people so there will be mp3s circulating around whatever you think of it.
From the artist’s point of view, I’m also not sure that everybody is completely against getting a bit of post career fame thanks to the internet. As already mentioned, some bands are more “famous” today than they were in the day and the digital distribution of their work paved the way for today’s re-releases.
Now as they can neither fight nor control the illegal distribution of the work of their artists, for the labels the way to go is to keep making special releases on high quality vinyl with great artwork etc. If some effort has gone into it, chances are far greater that people will buy it. Funnily enough, for the buyer it is even commercially interesting to buy these releases, if I check prices of current releases I bought most of them are more expensive today than when they came out. The Reminiscent box for instance goes for a whopping Euro 130.- these days.
Regarding the number of fans and sales figures: as a general remark, the ratio rarely is 1:1 (unlike with Trio, who sold 1 million copies of Dadada back in the day :wink: )
There’s always a mental threshold between liking something and actually buying it (independent of the existance of mp3s etc.).
I guess hardly any of the labels started out with a businessman or businesswoman sitting in front of a laptop thinking of a lucrative business model. Instead, some of them are artists themselves who might be adapting to the commercial side of things as they go along.
From a commercial angle, the sad fact however is that minimal synth/wave releases are niche products and will remain so until the genre goes mainstream - which is somewhat unlikely to happen.
But I guess it is safe to say that there’s a lot more people out there who like the music than buy the records.
this represent the shitty effect i was talking about
i personally ripped this album, the seller was also using my blog description, i said him to remove and he did..but somebody bought for this crazy price
im seriously think to stop to rip and to share the things only with some persons, but it is also shitty cause like this the ‘file sharing’ sense goes simply to hell.. :cry:
[quote author=“peter_m”]this represent the shitty effect i was talking about
i personally ripped this album, the seller was also using my blog description, i said him to remove and he did..but somebody bought for this crazy price
im seriously think to stop to rip and to share the things only with some persons, but it is also shitty cause like this the ‘file sharing’ sense goes simply to hell.. :cry:
I’d almost say you are beginning to feel guilty and see where it all leads to… :!:
[quote author=“AirCrashBureau”][quote author=“peter_m”]this represent the shitty effect i was talking about
i personally ripped this album, the seller was also using my blog description, i said him to remove and he did..but somebody bought for this crazy price
im seriously think to stop to rip and to share the things only with some persons, but it is also shitty cause like this the ‘file sharing’ sense goes simply to hell.. :cry:
I’d almost say you are beginning to feel guilty and see where it all leads to… :!:
don’t be retarded please, it’s not the illegal aspect of file-sharing that made this record so expensive. so we shouldnt be sharing rare great stuff with anyone anymore? that’s the only way to keep prices down on the original, no matter how many legal reissues of a record there will be.
besides that, i find this an incredible tiresome debate that doesnt proove anything but the fundamental juxtaposition of the interest of the artist vs that of the music itself [as a cultural meme].
Spartak,
pardon if I’m wrong but the point of view you apply to “the artist” was voiced by only one artist here - Ton - while the others have been people who own labels, people who run blogs, people who listen to music…
I have talked to dozens of Norwegian artists or ex-artists about this, and most of them have a very grateful attitude towards the technology that has made their music survive.
I’ll give one example out of a myriad: Jan from Blue Mathue told me that after I contacted him, and told him he was famous on the internet, he googled his band (Mathue being a very good name for that purpose), and his reaction when he found his music was all over the internet was tears of gratitude!
So where you get this conflict-between-the-artist-and-his-art business I do not know, but it’s definitely not from Norway!
In fact, I know there were many reasons to make music back in 1984, but it was certainly not so that I could sell reissues of it 25 years later!
i could have used the word ‘some’, but legally one would say all artists exercise authorship over their work, whether the artist in question would like it or not. the nonvoluntary nature of those rights are what basically bans filesharing. besides that legal representation, many artists have acted in a way that harms their work, through destruction of the master tapes, backstock or perhaps by simply deciding to ignore and sentence to oblivion that brilliant piece of music they just made. i say let them burn in hell for that! :twisted:
i havent told anybody anything they should or shouldnt do, just pointing out interest of artist != interest of work of the artist. and in case of a group of authors it only becomes more apparent.
not sure why you keep beating an already dead horse ton, those blogs are there to stay. at best you might get snowy to remove the dedicated forum section. besides the questionable legal aspect of it, it doesnt really add anything to the forum anyway.
[quote author=“Spartak”]
besides that legal representation, many artists have acted in a way that harms their work, through destruction of the master tapes, backstock or perhaps by simply deciding to ignore and sentence to oblivion that brilliant piece of music they just made. i say let them burn in hell for that! :twisted:
Hi Spart,
Bit over the top, that statement, dontchathink? :wink:
An artist can do whatever they like with their work simply because it’s THEIRS. And unlike with a cure for AIDS or cancer, I fail to see some sort of moral obligation to share their work with the world.
The situation only changes once something has been released with the artist’s consent. Then you can say the artist wanted the world to hear it.
And then this debate starts.
Here, I’d still like to add something to the “theft” bit. I think it’s the right term if something can be bought officially today. However, if somebody just released a tape back in 1982, I find it hard to argue people are “stealing” from them just because they’re listening to some mp3s. I think we’re closer to “abandoned property” here than to theft, regardless of the fact that the artist holds the intellectual ownership to their work for eternity.
It’s always a matter of perspective. “The music industry as such is evil” is an attitude very popular with many people and they use it to justify their own illegal actions. On the other hand, if someone starts a label and they manage to get it going, all those non-sensical industry statements like how many gazillion dollars get lost through illegal downloads sometimes start to make sense to them.
So again, the best way to go for the labels is to keep making high-quality releases to counter the growing perception of music as disposable “0s” and “1s”.
