This is a conversation I had on a forum. It’s a little disjointed because you’re only seeing my half of the conversation. I can’t find the rest of it.
FBM posted:
“In Canada, that’s not happening and it’s not happening because we have a culture here where people just assume it’s free. People are simply abandoning the marketplace altogether, and they’ve made the decision they’ll just [steal] the music and worry about how the artist gets paid later.”
But to a Canadian music _is_ effectively free. You listen to it on the radio for free, you listen to it on the TV for free, you listen on Youtube for free, hear it in the elevator for free and you can download it for free. Someone in the industry knows that people are getting paid behind the scenes for all that, but to a regular Canadian, the value of the music itself is zero.
People always assumed that the money you paid for the album was for the album itself. Or the money you paid at a concert was for putting on the show. The idea of something untouchable being worth something doesn’t make a lot of sense to many people. Especially if they are copying the ‘property’ and giving it to a buddy with no money changing hands. If indeed the artist deserves a percentage, what is 50% of zero?
You can’t stop people from downloading. They don’t want to. They have these crazy laws in the U.S. and it hasn’t done jack. I know if you are an artist, the idea of people downloading your stuff and not paying you seems unfair, but that’s the reality and no amount of legislation is going to change that short of the death penalty. Do you really want to live in a society like that?
I think instead of pulling out the legislation bat, I think artists and the record companies are just going to have to dream up new ways to extract money from their fans.
This is sort of for Ryan.
I know this musician guy, J Brian. One man show. No record company. Plays in bars and at weddings and stuff. When I first met him, I think he was charging $300 for a gig, maybe more, and he was doing them three days a week. $900 times 52 is $46800. This isn’t counting the CDs of his stuff he flogged at shows. One year he even was asking for tips so he could get some fancy new speakers or something. He exceeded his fundraising goals.
Even if we assume he was having to expense $7,000 on professional gear and fuel, $40,000 a year isn’t too bad, better than a lot of Canadians, and pretty good for just playing in small venues like bars.
He owned his house, his own car, went on vacation for a few weeks of the year. Basically an average Canadian. If he wants to make more he could try bigger venues, but I think he just likes the small scene.
I guess the point I’m trying to make that one can make a living as an artist without help from a giant media company. There seems to be this attitude some have that music artists are all supposed to be rich and it just isn’t true. If you are the kind of artist who can sell a million albums and pack 50,000 in a stadium, well fine, but the notion that a record company is required to have a career just isn’t true.
For Ryan.
That J. Brian guy I mentioned writes plenty of original stuff and some of it is quite catchy. I’m pretty certain he’s a member of SOCAN, I just don’t think he’s ever been interested in playing large venues. If anything, he’s read the market he’s got access to correctly. Pay on par with the service.
Only in the IP market do people think that one creative or innovative work should be a jackpot for the rest of their lives. You think Michelangelo got paid for every time someone gazed upon the Sistine Chapel? He did the job, he got paid for the job. This is what most of us in the world do.
The downward slide in the perceived value of music began when it started to be treated less like a work and more like a product. Naturally, people want to get the products they buy at the best price possible and free is that price, which is what the Internet is giving them.
Don’t misunderstand, I know darn well artists gotta eat too. But perhaps this whole idea of forced payment for merely possessing a copy of someone’s IP is the wrong one. Up until the 20th century, musicians were paid by patronage, by the job, ticket sales to shows and by asking nicely. People basically paid what they thought it was worth.
I will throw this out there, however. What the CRIA is doing isn’t right. People copying my stuff and giving it to their friends is one thing, but re-marketing it for profit is quite another. I know that sounds sort of hypocritical of me to say, but if you see music as a work then people sharing it free is just people sharing culture. I don’t think this is a behaviour which should be punished. If a publisher thinks he can make a buck off it again, as if it were product, the honourable thing to do is give the artist a cut and the contracts should be negotiated to reflect that.
Ryan does raise a good point. Being a session player or a cover guy is a way to make a living, but if you want to get your original stuff out there and make some decent money, it’s hard to pull that off alone. Not every great artist is good at promotion or even knows how. Large scale sales, the organization and promotion of large concerts is not something a guy can do alone.
A change in record company business practices is maybe what’s needed, because I think they’re going to die in their current state. Part of a problem is they are still organized like a thing with produces works on physical media, a market that’s rapidly becoming niche. Another part of the problem is I think they now see themselves as more intellectual property companies instead of promoters because they have become used to the idea of owning the exclusive rights to music works.
Maybe U2 gets the royal treatment from their label, but most musicians signed to a label seem to be getting treated as employees rather than clients. You hear stories of artists cranking out half-baked albums because they are desperate to fulfil a contract they don’t like (Nirvana) or artists who sell zillions of units but wind up with nothing (Bay City Rollers). No one benefits from that.
These things could be fixed. If the record company never owned the rights and behaved more like a marketing and services company with the artist as the client, I think the both could do nicely. Artists who think they’ve got a great song to sell could hire as many firms as they want and drop firms who didn’t give them what they wanted. I think the record companies would have to shrink to accommodate this, but since that’s happening anyway might as well try something new.
In the wake of the attempted bombing of a plane Christmas day, the Canadian government (along with the U.S., Britain, The Netherlands, etc…) have announced the installation of full body scanners at airports. So if you like to fly, now is the time to get that gym membership, because they are going to see every little bit of you.
