Via Jamie at Duck And Cover I found some interesting chat from 50 Cent (no, really!) about -- well, basically, about the future of music distribution:
Before getting up on stage at a club in Oslo, 50 Cent gave an interview. In it he denied taking coke on live TV in Zagreb and then dropped a file-sharing bombshell: "What is important for the music industry to understand is that this really doesn't hurt the artists!" Wow. No-one cares about the coke now.
Particularly interesting, this is, in the light of the battle going on at Deleted Scenes, Forgotten Dreams about, among other things, one of mine own albums.
Howard Stelzer is not just my friend and collaborateur in this particular musical endeavour, he runs the label that put it out on (a very nicely put-together, if I may say so myself) CD last year. So when he writes, as he did in the comments on the blog...Hi, I'm Howard Stelzer. You must take this down. I am trying to sell the CD! It's very much in print and available for $10 to $12 from Forced Exposure, Mimaroglu Music Sales, RRRecords, Revolver, Aquarius, Metamkine... PLEASE support independant music and independant record labels by BUYING the CDs! I put so much money and time and years of effort into each of my releases, it kills me (and my little label) to have them available on blogs for free. Honestly... $12 is not a lot of money. You can do it.
That said, I appreciate the kind review. This particular album took Seht and I a long time to finish. Mike Shiflet designed the sleeve, which looks beautiful and compliments the music nicely. The photos were taken by Seht. You can see them when you hold the booklet in your actual hands, and open its pages.
... you get to see the argument from the exact opposite point-of-view.
The waters get even murkier when you consider that for every album that is helpfully uploaded "for preview purposes only" (read: free download), some dodgy Russian mp3 harvester and on-seller is going to grab it and offer it for sale. For actual money. Not that -- for example, in this case -- I nor the label that released the album are going to see any of it.
These sites are everywhere now. There's no point trying to contact them with any kind of "cease and desist" request/order. I wouldn't expect to hear back from them unless the possibility of their not being able to sell your tracks would cause a serious bump in their income streams. No one here is selling on that kind of scale, so.... welcome to the future. And if I take my label-owner hat off for a minute I say just encourage the pirates (the mp3 blogs, the file-sharers, the fans, and so on) and kill the mercenaries (the goddam Russians).
Anyway, anyone buying this is pretty stupid since they could get it from here for nothing. Although $0.45 is pretty good for an entire album.
This story is just kinda beginning......
...
Amon Duul II - Archangels Thunderbird (2.57 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)
2 comments:
Yikes. Murky waters indeed. On one hand you can view P2P mp3 sharing (and therefore the tracks themselves) as advertising which helps raise your profile, thus increasing the size of your audience when you play live. On the other hand, you have the fact that you (seht) don't play live. . . which kinda shoots the first hand in the foot, to mix metaphors. It's an ethics debate to some extent: while I support P2P, I chastise blogs like DSFD that offer (for free download) an entire album of an independent artist. "Share nicely" indeed. (warning: shameless plug ahead) Incidentally, we never give away free downloads without artists' permission at Duck & Cover Music. :-D
I've been thinking about this. I can get how an established artist such as 50 Cent or Justin Timberlake can live off tours and merchandise sales, but how would this affect an up-and-coming artist?
It takes ages for an artist to build up a reputation and an audience, and in that time, someone's gotta pay the bills.
Would a record company take a punt on an unknown if they weren't guaranteed at making a lot of money on album sales, but with the future potential of tour sales?
And, of course, the need to pay the bills is even more acute for those bedroom artists who don't have a major label backing them.
Maybe you need to get yr sewing machine out and start making some Seht T-shirts.
P.S. That interview with 50 Cent sounds like it's been neatly translated from a Norwegian translation. It's far too neat to be Fiddy's own words, y'all.
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