I've just been to see "Shaun of the Dead", an immensly hilarious (well, I think so) film about zombies going on the rampage in Wandsworth in London. I was rolling about in my seat, and I suspect the rather straight-faced Dutch audience in there at the same time was beginning to wonder if they had made a mistake buying tickets for a showing with the Madman in row 5.

Just before the film started, up popped one of these patronising, threatening messages about copyright and so forth that have started appearing recently.

(Loosely translated) "Enjoy and support creativity - Don't Steal it!"

Sheee ite.

For some reason I sat there in the cinema as if I'd been struck by lightning. It was as if that message had been aimed, in all it's patronisation, directly at me.

Well, I'm so 3ffing sorry, Mr. 3ffing MPAA and Mr. 3ffing RIAA and all the rest of you Better-than-Thou smug baskets who are slowly taking control of the contents of my underpants, but I am feeling just a tad, yes merely a TAD hacked off about your message, directed specifically at me.

In fact, I'm a little bit upset, to tell you the truth. Before the film has even started, I'm having legalese that has not been tested or can even be shown to be valid under international law shoved up my nose. In fact I'm being bullied and threatened after having paid to come into the theatre with heavy, nefarious threats to my health and welfare, and that of my first-born son. In fact, if I read between the lines, I am a criminal in waiting.

All my life, I have paid up front. All my life, I have stuck to the rules. Stuck to the speed limits (and watched morons go past me at 100+ and curse the Poliss for never being there, except when I try to do 100+ and instantly get a ticket).

All my life, I have done what people have told me what I should do for my own good. All my life, I have put considerations for everyone else before my own needs.

So what have I got?

I have nothing: I am losing my kids, I have been hammered through a vicious divorce, I have big debts, a crappy car that is falling apart, and I can't even live in my own house. I have to pay ridiculous prices to watch a film: pay excessive taxes for little return: my teeth are rotting in my head, and my once prize-winning body is turning into sloppy, beer-gutted jelly.

I have always paid my dues, and I am being acused (don't shake your head here) of not having done so, and in fact I am robbing the poor artists. I am taking the money out of their mouths, and those of their starving children.

I have been buying music for over 30 years. I have been buying movies since it has been possible to do so, somewhere over the last 20 years. I hesitate to record: if I do, I either wipe it afterwards or go out and buy the original. I feel guilt when people offer me MP3's I don't have the original of. I never pinched stuff off the sweety shelf at the local shop, in fact I was (and probably still am) a right boring fart, really.

Well, f*** it. Yes, f*** it. I am sick of governments I don't vote for, or governments from other countries I have f*** all to do with telling me, via the government I have, what to do. What is it with these spineless s***es that they bend over backwards and surrender the rules of their local democracy to a foreign power?

Well, the gloves are off

Woah! I wonder how you would have reacted if you had to see some of the ads we have to sit through here. They all have the same theme: "don't steal movies because it's not just the big actors and studios you're ripping off, it's the little guys too." The one I see most often is with a stunt man, telling us how he puts his life on the line to make a great movie, and because I'm downloading it, he's starving.

First, I have a lot of respect for those guys. Stunt work is impressive.
Second, does the salary of people like stunt men actually have anything to do with the sucess of the movie?? I doubt it.
Third, these commercials claim that some insane figure, like tens of billions of dollars, are lost due to downloading. Come on, I'd be willing to bet that the piracy in Asian countries, which has been going on for far longer than P2P, makes up more of the percentage than people downloading am in-the-theater copy of Spiderman 2. Hell, one of my mom's best friends lived in Malaysia, and she would buy dozens of films a month, at $2 a pop, from the local guy-on-the-street selling Acadamy screeners of Fellowship of the Ring.

Anyway, it's disturbing that these lobbying groups now have power over your government, and they decide that this is the way to go, instead of shutting down larger targets of illegal distribution. That's the thing that's bugged me in all this.

Oh, and I can't wait for Shaun of the Dead. I've been wanting to see that for a long time.

I have always paid my dues

As have I.

Up until about 18 months ago, I was adamantly against music piracy. There was *nothing* in my player that I didn't have a paid-for original source sitting on my shelf at home.

Then the RIAA came in with their heavy-handed, fascist enforcements and their preposterous claims showing that every year the recording industry lost more money through piracy than the gross domestic product of the entire planet.

Screw 'em. Thanks to the RIAA, as much as 2--3% of the music on my player is now pirated -- "borrowed" from friends (never downloaded from the internet, the quality is too indifferent) without my paying a dime for it. Of course, I also have perhaps a dozen CDs that I never would have purchased had not someone sent me a track from one or another of them that I liked enough so that I went out and bought the rest of them.

I think RIAA is their own worst enemy, and have probably contributed to more piracy than they have stopped. I know that to be true in my case.

Regardless, I think it is a moot point. I believe that the record industry as we know it today will be gone in five years as more and more artists sell their work directly on the internet, bypassing the record labels entirely. An artist who sold his songs for a dime apiece on the internet would probably put more money in his pocket than if the songs were being sold at $18 per CD by the record labels.

tanstaafl.

Subtitled - this was why the audience wasn't so sure about me, I suspect: I got the joke instantly without reading the subtitles while they were still reading.

There came a point where they were waiting for me to laugh before allowing themselves to let go "Well, the weirdo is laughing, so we can too! HA HA HA HA HA" etc.

In the States, it seems that, all of a sudden, there is this huge label on 90% of the CDs out there labelled "FBI Anti-Piracy Warning", or some such, with a poorly rendered seal of some nature (maybe the FBI's seal), followed by some annoying text about, basically, how it's illegal to copy the music off the CD. Very irritating. Makes me want to pirate it all the more, despite the fact that I wanted to buy these CDs.

Here's the text that accompanies it:

Quote:
The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and punishable by up to 5 years in a federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

Notice that it doesn't exclude the fair uses expressly permitted in the copyright code. In fact, "unauthorized" makes it sound like you have to get the express written consent of the president of RIAA.

Bravo!

Quite frankly (and I KNOW this is going to make me unpopular), I have ZERO problems with music piracy, with rare exception. If the music can be purchased directly from the artists, I willl HAPPILY pay for it. A successful example of this concept can be found at Gridlock's website .

However, for everyone who "want to buy" music (and Bitt, this isn't referring to your comment), let's see where your money goes:



Hrm... I can't remember the last time I wanted to give the record store $6 as thanks for letting me shop in their store. Nor do I feel that I should pay the record company for something I neither want nor need (the physical media).

I would be more than happy, however, to send the artists their royalty directly. I just need an address. But I refuse to pay the prostate-raping prices the American music machine wants to charge me. Especially when I don't want them shipping the CD from Japan anyways. Just let me pay a FAIR price for the music, then give me my FTP username and password, RIAA. I'll download it, thank you very much. Until then....

Another thing to consider is that while many people say "Download music without paying for it is WRONG!", they seem to have no problem paying pennies per MB to pull it from quasi-legal sites in Russia. (Which I must admit have VERY good selections.)

Like I said, I know this may probably make me fairly unpopular here, but I'm not going to lie and wring my hands and say "Oh, the poor record execs!" just for the sake of being popular.

Of course. You don't expect the LABEL to pay for anything do you? They already take a cut of the profits. What do you WANT from them?!!?!

there's some TV show, I think it's called 'cribs' or something. it's a show about the wild homes of the filthy rich pop stars.
I shed a tear each time I watch it knowing deep in my heart that they could have afforded a third swimming pool had I only not DL'd the mp3s.

Interesting. This is the first time I've heard of a theater-shown movie containing a copyright-protection message at the beginning. I'm used to the FBI and/or Interpol warnings at the beginning of videos, but not on a ticket-and-popcorn theater film. I didn't know they were starting to do that. I have yet to see one.

Honestly I don't see how such a message is going to change anything. Those who wish to pirate are going to do so whether there's a message on the screen or not.

That's an interesting pie chart, Dave. I hope it's true, actually, because the "Royalties to artist and songwriter" slice is a lot larger than I was led to believe by Courtney Love et al.

I have no problem with giving a retail record store that much of a markup. Retail markup is part of business, it's the only way retail stores can exist. And the marketing/promotion engines are the way we learn the record exists, so they're a necessary evil in that system.

I foresee and am actively wishing for a system where the retail record stores and the marketing/promotion engines are no longer necessary. The technology is there, we just need to stitch all the pieces together so that the technology works for us as a tool for finding new music that we'd like. We're inching ever closer to that day.

(Rousing, sustained roar of approval and applause)

I'd like to argue with that chart.

Quote:
36.7%: Retail Markup
19.7%: Company overhead, distribution, and shipping
12.7%: Marketing and promotion
11.7%: Royalties to artist and songwriter
6.4%: Signing act and producing record
5%: Co-op advertising and discounts to retailers
4.4%: Pressing album and printing booklet
3.5%: Profit to label

While I'm sure these numbers are reasonably accurate on average, do you think they spend as much money promoting the new Sparta release as they did the new Britney Spears release? I'd say that the vast majority of promotion goes to a few big acts.

"Signing act and producing record": How are these two things related? For one, in most cases, you've probably got one underpaid A&R guy competing with no one in order to sign a lot of bands. As opposed to teams of them courting Britney Spears. And how is producing a record related in any way to signing the band? IMO, the money they pay to producers and engineers should almost be lumped in under royalties; after all, I've purchased albums based solely on those guys. Of course, that's not to say that recording studio time isn't expensive. Of course, as pointed out before, it's taken back out of the band's royalties. I think they may be why they're lumped together -- so you can't figure out what the band's real profit is. If you subtract the $1.08 from the $1.99, that leaves $0.91 in profits, not taking interest into account. Of course, this is still on average, and the massive royalties made by those top artists are likely to significantly skew the statistic.

"Discounts to retailers": What? How does discounting cost money? Sure, it could eat into profits, but it's not like it costs anything, and they list profits separately. Of course, this is just their way to hide the fact that they're dumping to WalMart and BestBuy for reasons that escape me. Maybe they don't like independent retailers for some reason.

"Profit to label": This is here to make you think how little money the label gets. But this is money free and clear that they get to put in the bank. All the huge salaries of the record execs are bound to be in the euphemistic "Company Overhead" category. I wonder why that section is so big? And all the other employees seem to be covered in other sections. This is pure profit.

"Distribution and shipping": This is here as if the retailers aren't paying for shipments. I'm sure that all the distributors and labels are happy to eat the costs of shipping. Right. And pigs have wings.

"Royalties to artist and songwriter": I wonder if this includes the money from public performances? If so, none of this money gets to anyone but the top charted songs. It's not as if when The Mars Volta gets played publically, they see money from it. No. The money gets remitted to the royalties organizations who redistribute it based on chart positions, which means, yet again, Britney gets all the money and none gets to small acts.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.

And, to add just a bit more fuel to the fire, what about acts and bands that are no longer around. Sure, those percentages may reflect a current artist. But what about the sales of older albums? I am sure that anything older than, say, two years does not fall into that same profit pattern...

Oh, I didn't mean to argue with you -- just the chart. In fact, most of my arguments are intended to point out that the record company and big artists are making more than it shows and that the small artists are making nothing.

Unlike you, I do want the CD, if for no other reason than the backup. I certainly think that that's worth $0.75 to me. But that's a non-issue, really. I also have worked in the retail industry and understand where the money goes there. While I'm not too happy about distributors making so much money, I do think that having a retail establishment is important, especially to people who want a physical copy.

However, I do think that the recording industry is screwing both the producers and consumers. It's another Enron and has been for a long time.

In the best of both worlds, they would press CDs and sell them as usual (hopefully with some reform in the industry to lower prices somewhat) and also sell them online. Ideally, the artists would retain control of the recordings and music and they'd get all the profit from the downloads while the industry would get money from the CDs, with royalties still going back to the artists.

So guys, what would be the best way to distribute music without the record compaines? Download or purchase it off of individual artists' sites or some other variation where you are essentially paying the artist directly? If so (and I like this plan as it seems good for both the artist and the buyer), how to bands get their music out where people can find it? How does the common music fan (not the net-savy geeky kind most of us are) hear new stuff that they might like to buy? Even if the radio stations were open to playing non-signed artists, how would they find the best music amid the thousands of independent artists who can book some studio tiem and cobble a song or two together?