Open Invitation to Music and Musician Bloggers – Group Blogging Event on April 16th
**Update – April 16, the day has arrived! Please visit the central post where you’ll find links to all the responses.**
MusicianWages.com, Music Careers at About.com and KnowtheMusicBiz.com are organizing a group blogging event for all music and musician bloggers. MW recently received a comment from a reader concerned about her teenage son’s file-sharing. We believe that this is a topic with as many answers as there are musicians and invite you to join us in a synchronized response.
If interested, please write a response to the following question and post it to your blog on April 16th, 2009. Send an email to webmaster@musicianwages.com with the URL of your response and we will post a list with links to all of the participating blogs.
Suggested title: To a Mother Concerned About File-Sharing
I have a teenage son who tells me his pirating music is no big deal. Since he is a musician himself, I point out to him that someday that’s going to be his money people are stealing. But he remains unphased.
He tells me the record sales make money for the record label, not the artist. He says that the artists make all their money from touring and live concerts. He thinks the pirated music promotes the concerts and therefore helps the artist make more money. I still don’t allow pirating in my house.
But tell me what you think – as artists out there having your work “shared,” are you just glad to have it being enjoyed, or does it bother you? Admittedly, he is stealing music that is recorded by major record labels, so maybe its different than the independent musician working for his living. But I’d still like to hear what you think.
Thanks,
Valerie
We look forward to your posts!
About the author
Wooo! This is going to be fun! I’ll definitely post a list with all of the participating blogs on my site as well. Looking forward to lots of good debate on this topic. Awwww yeah…
4/9/2009
Just send her to Andrew Dubber to get really confused – ‘Free music is not a business model, it’s a strategy!!’ :)
This is a really cool idea. I think it will result in a really broad and interesting cross-section of ideas.
Cheers,
Adrian
4/9/2009
Great idea, great topic and perfect grist for me mill! Count me in!
I’m really looking forward to the other posts as well.
4/9/2009
For me, pirated music is why I love music in the first place. I look at my cd collection of 300+ Legal CD’s and think that not one of them would be purchased if I had not first downloaded and gotten into the arist first. Like wise I would have never seen so many artists live. In my case, downloads have made more money for the record companys and Artist than if I had never downloaded to begin with.
4/11/2009
I think as artists we have come to accept that in todays uber-consumer society our music will be copied illegally. No matter how hard we try to protect our digital assets, there is a technology somewhere designed to exploit it. How we handle that is the question. Do we get really heavy about it? (…memories of the whole Metallica case come back to mind). I’m not a professional musician, but I take my music seriously and I love my art. I will take any opportunity I can to promote legal filesharing and for genuine fans to buy my CDs and downloads, but the music business has changed beyond recognition and we need to move with it.
4/11/2009
Piracy doesn’t affect the novice signed artist. The most common label contract here is the new artists getting only 3% on the Declared Distribution Price (DDP). This DDP is usually 33% of the retail price. So, if the record company is really getting only the 33% of each sold CD -and they are not lying- the artist will get a 3% of this 33%, which is a 1% of the retail price. But this doesn’t end here. To that 1% of the retail price of each sold CD that tha the artists gets, the record label discounts promotion costs (gifts to radio and TV executives, escorts, vacations, first row tickets to the artist’s concerts, gift checks, dinners, etc., to get radio, TV and film airplay and “boost” the artist’s record sales). These promotion costs take away 33% of what the artist gets. So, in the end the artists only gets 0.3% of the CD retail price.
When their contracts expire, established and successful artist negotiate a new deal with higher gross points and royalties fees. So, artists like, for example, The Beatles get a better share from each record sold. Still, Apple Corps., The Beatles’ company, recently won a suit against EMI/Capitol because the label group had lied about Apple/Beatles record sales so as to pay less royalties. Apple Corps. won because it hired excellent lawyers and managed to prove its accusations against EMI/Capitol. Small artists or novice signed artists usually aren’t able to prove if their label is lying about record sales.
The artist also signs a second contract giving away up to 50% of the performance royalties -paid by BMI, ASCAP, etc.- to the record label. So, in the end the artist receives little of each CD sale, and any legal mechanism created to provide the artist with royalties by means of Copyright Collectives are intercepted by record labels to allow a percentage of these royalties (actually a right of the artist, performer or composer) to stay with the record company.
In my country, Argentina, because of the CD record sales failing to music downloads and piracy, music downloads record companies are now also signing concert managing contracts with their signed artists. These concert managing stay that the record label will arrange for concerts and gigs for the artist -usually festivals or shared gigs with other artists of the same label, thus cutting costs in security, venue contracting, concert publicity, sound systems- and the artist will give away up to 50% of their concerts income. This means the record labels are now also taking part of what the artists gets from their concerts. So, in the end, even when the artists are gigging more thanks to the gig managing they are making very little money for each record or each concert.
Regards
4/11/2009
The notion that file sharing doesn’t affect an novice signed artist is not necessarily true.
Agustín, one thing your explanation doesn’t mention is the artists’ advance paid by the record labels after signing a contract.
The advance is exactly what it sounds like, an upfront payment of royalties. The artist won’t make any royalties, regardless of the rate, until after the record label has recouped the cost of recording the album, manufacturing the CDs, marketing the album, and the advance. I think it’s fair to say that most artists who sign record deals try to get as large of an advance as possible because they never expect to make any royalties.
So it’s not like artists signed to a record label aren’t getting paid at all, it’s just not for each individual sale. If a record does not sell well, for whatever reason, it’s unlikely the label will make another album with that artist.
I’m not defending the current (or old school) record label business model, rather I just feel like over-generalizations lead to ignorant excuses. Naturally, we want to feel better about not paying for something so we ignore some of the facts. I look forward to reading everybody’s responses because I think it will show many different perspectives of the facts and help fans make better educated choices that really help support their favorite artists.
4/15/2009
Reality: Learn something about music history.
Professional musicians have always “cribbed” music. I bought my first Fake Book at age 17 for $15 under the counter at a music store. Musicians simply could never afford to BE musicians if they had to pay for all that music.
The puritanical, right-wing “morality” promoted by the record companies and publishers is laughable to professional musicians, who are regularly ripped off by companies that hardly seemed headed for the poorhouse.
Airplay and exposure are worth more to musicians than a few more pennies from other musicians. Dump your misplaced moral outrage, and leave the kid alone.
4/16/2009
It’s so nice to support our artists and be supported by the sales of our recordings knowing we are paid mostly for playing live in some of the cases like mine. Royalties maybe ok for Elton John, Mick Jagger or so on if we are on the celebrities but most of them know as well the importance of give to others our music further than just selling records or playing in concerts, pubs or whatever. I personally think of piracy as something legally prohibited but the legal border of “stealing” music maybe as subjective as artists or lawyers are complaining as well as consumers are doing what’s well known to be not allowed.
What I mean is that the distribution of benefits has been for long slightly balanced to the music industry but on the culture industries as well. It means in my opinion that consumers have a general idea of what they are going to listen more or less, for instance, the sound of electric guitars, the tessitura of some voices and many more general features known for long in the collective unconscious. To get that big picture, many of those implements have been a gift of the nature as it gets to us by the senses, and music is somehow a communication phenomena since it’s been made of culture as a part of a complex of social processes in a big machinery working in pure categories (Time and space) 24 hours a day for hundreds of centuries now.
I suggest respect for the fine work of creative people but none of us can deny the tons of knowledge that is an absolute most for educational basis of human being as no one of us is strange to communication, mass media and cultural contexts so money making is just a part of the social process itself and I recall the need of making adjustments to the changes done.
It’s not new that the internet society is a risk society and not for many things other of the changes experienced in the way that traditional life took over the decades previous to the internet itself. That’s what James Tully calls a more “democrative communicative action”. (See Communication and Imperialism on http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=508 ).
One of the characteristics of the internet is the relaxing of the international legal action and we, as networkers are part of paradoxical developments between freedom, knowledge and ethics and new social organization.
I think that downloading P2P music files is not a big problem if it’s used as a demo concept for personal educational purposes and if that does NOT provides you the only source of getting music. I agree that by listening and enjoying an mp3 file may let me know for the first time of the artist that lead me to buy his original album but, otherwise, I had get very rare music that I could never have get in a music store. Maybe the piracy would be the hypothetic case that someone who has downloaded an mp3 song from P2P computers tries to make his own business from illegal material not made for sale.
Roger Leos
4/20/2009
yes its true that most signed musicians dont make money from record sales. But it still affects bands and musicians in different. When record companies are not making so much money they are alot less likely to sign new bands. some people prefare it this way due to the fact that a band can make more money if they are sucessful with an indapendent releaes. however, if theres nomoney upfront tomake an album for bands from record complaines, then we might start to see a trend of album qualitys dropping over the next few years, at least a bands first or second album. For me this is a shame when you think of bands like Oasis whos best work was there first two albums, or the stone Roses who only had two
4/28/2009
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