[SATLUG] OT: RIAA being sued/countersued

[John Champion]

Don Wright wrote:
> On Sun, 08 Jul 2007 11:46:14 -0500, John Champion <satlugacct at jchampion.com> wrote:
>   ...
>   
>> the one thing that the Internet has been very good at is removing 
>> middlemen. the riaa and mpaa members are just that...middlemen. they add 
>> little value and act as a marketing arm mostly. commercial artists like 
>> pat green and metallica had their audiences set before they ever signed 
>> with a label so they go primo deals but to unknown artists who have to 
>> build a career the hard way...the labels give them diddly and expect 
>> them to like it. each artist gets .17 cents from every cd sold. the 
>> pressing and the manufacture costs are around .83 cents per disc. the 
>> rest...goes to the label.
>>     
>   ...
>
> Here's another story from a working musician that states explicitly how much she got in
> royalty checks as a successful artist, and what really drives sales.
> http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html
>
>   
if you want to see the level of greed these companies are acting 
on...read this...
http://www.floridatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070708/NEWS01/707080343/1006
to sum up the article; the licensing arms of the various groups involved 
in licensing are beginning to target clubs offering music if that 
band/performer is not performing original songs only.

so yes..of all people janis ian would know best. i agree with her spin.

let me also add this...20-30 years ago...we would pop into the record 
store, buy a new album or tape of a supergroup...say styx, rush, zz top 
and we'd play that tape until we'd wear it out. we'd let our friends 
borrow it too, of course, and sometimes, the friend wouldn't return it.

that meant another trip to the store and a second purchase of the same 
material.

in 2007...this is no longer happening. what is happening is that smart 
people, like me, make copies of our cd's the minute we get them home. 
the master stays at home and the copy goes to my office, in my truck, 
and whereever i please. when i scratch it, wear it out, whatever...i 
don't run back to the record store and buy another one. i open up the 
master and make another copy.

this is one part of their problem. the other part is not sharing, that's 
been around for a long while. nope..it's that the manufacturers missed 
the boat. digital media took off and left them stretching back at the gym.

they are losing their shirts, not so much because people are downloading 
music for free, but because they did not have a plan to deal with 
digital media. artists and their managers were getting it...in the 
mid-to-late 90's many icons of the music game re-released digital 
versions old analog recordings and added material. sometimes it was a 
song or two...sometimes it was video, graphics, and other toys to show 
their appreciation.

look..artists don't make their money on record sales. artists have 
always made their cash on concerts. the artist foots the bill for the 
tour, the stage, the whole shooting match. if your tour 
collapses...you're out of that cash.

take a look at the artists who have been making boat loads of 
money...and you'll artists with very strong fan bases who attend 
concerts, buy merchandise at those concerts and show their support for 
their artist. they may download the artist's music for free but the only 
people being hurt by that are industry employees, unknown pop acts who 
may look good but sound terrible without electronic help (hello...paris 
hilton or jessica simpson's sister?), and some private investors who got 
hornswaggled into thinking that investing in music was a smart idea.

as i see it...the metallica's, van halen's, and stevie nick's of the 
world are not being harmed by file sharing. those $1,000 royalty checks 
are nothing to them. it's as if someone gave you $20.

but to artists like janis ian, that is a lot of money, but as she points 
out in her article, it's money that she'll never make if her catalog is 
no longer in print.

and that is why the original napster was so great and why everything 
else will pale compared to it. the original napster brought back 
recordings from artists that are no longer published. the labels felt 
that it just was not cost effective to keep offering those tunes but 
there is and always will be a market for them. sure it may be one or two 
people but that's still a market.

it means that artists like jazz bassist jeff berlin, cannot even 
re-issue some of his older cd's because the issuing label died in the 
mid-80's and the purchaser of the rights to the catalog, does not want 
to mess with re-issuing these. conversely...two of my favorite cd's that 
someone stole years ago are now gone and cannot be replaced.