red and i are hijacking a thread, and this is a topic i like, so i am moving to this new thread, and continuing here: many, many articles, were written by the same people who wrote the articles for the other encyclopedias. anyways, who wrote the articles is not really relevant, the point is that knowledgeable people volunteer information for free. if you steal encyclopedia brittanica, and that puts them out of business, so what, the service they provide is no longer necessary. if it needed to start from scratch it would be done for free. besides, unix was writen a long time, ago, and much more effort has been put into modern versions of linux. if unix never existed, a free OS would be written anyways. therre is an army of geeks worldwide who love writing and collaborating on code. and the open source methods are better anyways, they can be fixed more quickly and are freely adaptable. that is why ibm runs so much linux. i do not care. if i like then maybe i will pay to see them play. once i wrote a really funny joke. after i told it, everyone who heard it took and stole it from me. where is my protection? the joke was stolen! too bad for me. it is the same thing with music and movies and encyclopedias and information in general. information should be free, and when it is, it benefits everyone. same reason linus torvalds works on linux. same reason people write wiki articles. for the fun of it. if i was talented, i would damn sure perform music for free. it is fun. kids that pick up guitars do not do it for cash. they do it for fun, and for the ladies. a good friend of mine went to russia. he took some photos. after he returned he noticed a wikipedia article on an obscure place he visited, it needed a photo. he gave them his, it gets a creative commons license, it looks great, the world gets it for free, he doesnt care. he was happy to do it. see where this is going? information isnt scarce like gasoline. if gasoline could be replicated infinitely and distributed for free and produced by volunteers, i wouldnt pay for it either. i dont steal potatoes. if i did, farmers would go out of business, no more taters for me. they do not grow potatoes for fun. music, movies, information, this is different. musicians will not stop the rocking. you cant stop the rocking. music was made before it was sold, and will be made after. if the model for making money with music shifts to performances, so be it. record companies are marketing and distribution machines. i need neither of those services. they market mass appeal crap anyways. if they all go out of business, no big loss. distribution of information doesnt cost like it used to . no trucks delivering cds are necessary. no store is needed. the whole music distribution network is outdated. stealing, music, we democratize the system. music isnt shoved down our throats, we pick what we want. so what if capitol records cannot afford to plaster posters of the latest boy band everywhere. dont need it. the future of information is free, collaborative and unrestricted. no longer will information be protected behind technological or government-enforced monopolies.
How then are musicians compensated for their work if they are not receiving royalties from record sales? What is their incentive to continue to produce music for us to enjoy?
thank you for asking 1. performances make money. 2. people enjoy making music, they will do it for free. music is like sport. if you abolished the NBA and no one was paid, people would still play at the park. it used to be you needed expensive studio time and distribution to be a musician. not anymore, anyone cam mix a good album, and anyone can distribute it worldwide for cheap.
I'm glad you used this analogy. Basically, we could still get music but since the incentive to make money is no longer there the quality would drop drastically. Not because of a lack of studios or equipment - it isn't the courts that make NBA players look good. It's their dedication & work, which is a result of incentives provided by the possibility of compensation.
i disagree, people are motivated to create information for free. and unlike tangible goods, you only have to make information once. you only have to record a song once and you can supply it to millions of people. this is why wikipedia exists. this is why thousands and thousands of people have worked on the linux code. are these things not quality? does the lack of profit motive dissuade these people from producing information? is linux apache web server software inferior to microsoft because the coders were not paid? of course not, it is superior. do you think quality music is created with profit in mind as a goal? i do not. fame maybe, girls definitely, but money? creativity exists or it doesnt, and it doesnt cost anything. musicians want to create good music no matter what. i bet if you ask bob dylan or jimi hendrix if they would quit playing if there was no money in it, they would definitely say they would continue to rock. before recorded music, did musicians not make masterpieces? they knew there would be no record royalties. and yet they still wrote brilliant symphonies. besides, if you really rock, you will get very rich filling venues and performing. record companies make music worse, they force feed the public music based on the least common denominator. if we all steal all our music, we might kill the record companies, and that would not be bad. information wants to be free, and allowing free distribution of info does not make it unprofitable to produce information. michael moore was not upset when sicko was online weeks before release. it still opened bigger than almost any documentary ever. when "lazy sunday" was all over youtube, it helped SNL, it didnt hurt it. when people post daily show clips to the web every day, it helps the ratings of the show. the law is behind the times. i have heard an anecdote about the daily show. the producers of the show are uploading the show, knowing it is free publicity, while the lawyers are taking the clips down, doing their job for the network, who doesnt get it. today a band can make it without any record company, just by giving away music. the most pirated tv shows are the most watched and successful shows. it doesnt take money out of people's pockets, it does the opposite. when i own a piece of music, a bunch of ones and zeros, i do not like to be told i cannot give it away to others. i will not keep the ones and zeros secret. i am happy to buy a cd and give it to the whole internet. you cant stop me from distributing information. and if you are a musician, you should pray i give your music away as much as possible, and increase your popularity.
It is not that cheap to make a good song - instruments & studio equipment & all. There is a cost to every product, whether it is tangible or not. Wikipedia articles cannot be cited in a paper - there has been plenty of faulty information posted on there which took a long time to come down. Linux is not an easy program to use, and while it offers some advantages of Windows, it is clearly not superior. You are deluding yourself. Some artists would play regardless, some wouldn't. The ones that chose to continue to play probably wouldn't have as good of producers as they did, though which means the quality of their music wouldn't have been as good. Just because creativity exists does not mean that it will express itself. I can draw decently, but not well enough to make money. So, I don't draw. If I could draw really well, but there was no money to be made I still wouldn't draw. If I waste my time drawing, that is time that I could be working & making money. There is a choice to be made & most people will chose money first. Sure, they may still make music on the side, but if they aren't giving it their all then you aren't getting as great of a product as you could've otherwise. And what about groups like Aqua, with Barbie Girl and other one hit wonders. What would the Superdome be without the Baha Men - Who let the dogs out? And when I feel like Partying all the time, where would I be without Eddie Murphy? Would Wilson Philips fill out a venue just for people to Hold on for one more day? Where would one-hit wonders find a home in your world? re Without the music industry, which you seem to despise for force-feeding us stuff, there would be no rock stars & fame (that you mentioned above), at least not to the extent there is now. Most people aren't like you, martin. I actually like not having to listen to 1,000,000,000 songs before I come across something I like. I don't mind having other people preselect what they think is good or not because it narrows my choices. If I care enough to find something different, then I can. Information doesn't want to be free. People want it to be free. But you know what? People want everything free. Too bad, life doesn't work that way. Clips, but not the whole show. If people can watch the whole show with no commercials whenever they want for free, they have no reason to pay for cable to watch the same show with commercials only at certain dates & times.
the cost of producing music is next to nothing. a friend of mine has a 3 thousand dollar digital recording rig, it is spectacular, you can do anything with it. anyone can make recordings that are comparable in quality to studio recordings. this only becomes more true as the tech gets better. the internet is running on linux servers, they outnumber closed-source software. most pages you see on the web were served by linux servers. giants like google and amazon run on linux. and they could sure afford whatever they want. i do not despise them, i just think they are dinosaurs. i dont need em. i wish em luck, but they are done. the wisdom of the crowd will choose for you. the collective intelligence of the masses. not the guy in the office at the record company. people will preselect stuff for you, just like they do now. but now their choices will be based more on merit than what the marketing squad at jive records decided would sell. information isnt like other things. it is unlimited. i can make a joke and give it to anyone who wants it for free, it costs me nothing. it isnt like a tangible item. the key is scarcity. information isnt scarce. it doesnt run out. making one costs the same as making a billion. we already can watch the whole show, every day, for free, without commercials. i have an rss feed in my torrent client that will auto-download any show i want, every new episode, the night it comes out, in HD. but i still watch the broadcasts, with the ads. i dont mind. the more people watch it for free, the more buzz is created. the more people will bother to turn it on and watch it on tv. i often steal the sopranos to watch on my laptop. i still pay for hbo. i can download basically any movie i want. i could have stolen die hard. instead i called my homies and met them at the theater and paid 11 dollars to watch it. i cant replicate the movie-going experience. i am not buying the movie, but the experience. anyways, my experience is that movies are good or bad independent of money. if the studios cannot afford to make any more pearl harbors, good. if i have to watch more clerks and more reservoir dogs and less titanics, fine. and if they cant afford to pay tom cruise 20 million a movie, too bad. he sucks anyways. plus, with the way computers are getting, any jerk with a mac and a copy of final cut can make a movie that kicks ass. the lesson: steal any information you want, it helps humanity.
Let me focus in one thing I should've expanded upon. If the only way for musicians to make money is by selling out venues, then the artists aren't making any money until they are already famous. If that is the case, they will have to get jobs in order to get bye. Jobs mean less time dedicated to music, which means we aren't getting as good of a product.
This is a fantastic discussion, and I tend to ride the fence on this. I am a firm believer in intellectual property rights (including medicine, to reference another thread), as they CAN encourage development and innovation (again, per medicine thread, that's not entirely true.) However, the music industry has brought so much of the piracy on themselves that I struggle to find pity. In their quest for big, big money, they've pushed mediocre talent down peoples' throats at ever-increasing rates. They've also perpetuated the myth that you need big budgets to be a big act. That could not be further from the truth. Consider metal bands. They generally make a name for themselves via touring and other grass roots efforts. Oh, also by making albums that contain more than 2 songs that someone would actually WANT to pay to listen to. A good example is one of my favorite bands right now -- DragonForce. They play comically fast metal, with grandiose themes and '80's sounds, yet are somewhat successful. Sure, they're not on my Super Sweet 16 (a la Yung Joc), but they're appealing to a different audience. These guys tour, and tour, and tour, and tour, which is really the only way the VAST majority of artists make much money anyway. I heard of them because they were touring with Killswitch Engage (who I only knew of via Internet sources), since I never watch MTV. The real money is in promotional junk and songwriting royalties. PERFORMANCE gets most artists very little. Consider Whitney Houston, one of the all-time talents of American Pop music. She's got minimal sustainable income, as she wasn't the songwriter of her biggest hits. So she (and others) primarily make money through touring. Pirating such music won't stop the music. Rather, it will redistribute the source of talent away from large budget operations that feed to the lowest common denominator. There are countless genres that reflect that, well beyond my DragonForce example.
another examle of informatin given away for free is firefox. it is clearly superior, free, and we all use it. the mozilla guys make bucketloads of money. when you type a search into the google window of firefox, and click through on some ads, firefox makes money. so they are not using the traditional methods, but they are doing just fine. if we all pirated windows, and put microsoft out of business, it would be ok. we have firefox, and open office, and even the gimp (photoshop) and whatever else. i am not sure, but isnt apple now giving away safari? the model is changing. the point i am trying to drive home is that you can steal any piece of information you want, and it doesnt kill the supply. for whatever reason, there will be people playing music, writing code, writing the wikipedia article on string theory, whatever. and maybe the guy selling music and software and music and such, he isnt psyched. but think of the utility the world gains from having free access to all this information. i know it has enriched my life to have free wikipedia articles on everything i can think of, from particle/wave duality, to mythbusters episode guides. all free. bad news for paid encyclopedias, good news for everyone else. and if we all steal movies, they might have to find different ways to pay for hem. product placement might get to be even bigger than it is now. and thats cool with me. i see all the transformers are pretty into some american car maker. i noticed the fantastic 4 really love their dodge 4mobile. maybe in the future some movies will be freely distributed, anbd paid for through ads. i do not think pirating is bringing down a system that cannot be replaced with a differnt model. dragonforce is a great example. a friend told me about them. i have only seen them on youtube. the marketing machine didnt select them for me. if they come to town, i would be happy to see them. i didnt need a idiot music PR guy to tell me that dragonforce is awesome and wil rip my face off. i think cparso is incorrect about the music industry providing him a service of selecting out the quality for him. it is the public that is doing this. as of now, i am only willing to apply my free information ideas to music and media and stuff, not necessarily others sorts of intellectual property. and i do not condone reselling information. just freely distributing it. i think maybe the law should be that only the owner/creators should be able to sell the info, but everyone can freely distribute it. that way, even if we steal the plans on how to make zyrtec, we cant make and sell it, and they still have motivation to do r&d and production of medicine. stealing information doesnt have the same consequences as stealing banans or motorbikes. the laws shouldnt apply the same. we should be able to take what we want.
