of Music Media
 

The internet has made viable illegal access of songs, free access of media, and essentially a removal of the NEED to pay for these things.

Yes, both iTunes and Napster are now offering 'buy online' deals, with tracks for 99c and albums for 9.99. (i mention the prices because they're identical). iTunes is better known, wheras Napster is allowing five free listens of a song without paying (like free samples in a music store.) and a 'napsterlinks' service. iTunes also grants the artist only 11c of the 99 that you pay for its songs... I don't have data on napster for that particular.

The question, however, has nothing to do with either of them specifically.

Will online legal music sharing - from artist to label to site, losing money all along the way - become accepted modus operandi, or will it be - to the dismay of failing artists, or artists who are fine now but who will rely on royalties to support their lifestyle (children, etc) - pushed out entirely by free downloads? Or will something entirely different happen?

Things like BitTorrent and Grokster are difficult to destroy, because they don't rely on a middleman to work Of course, will even they fall through when made only as a hobby-only occupation?

And what will that mean for the music quality? Will it get better, because it's easier to get private music and demand increases for privately-created music? Or will it degrade, due to a lack of funding towards specialized artists? Or is there another way to deal with it that hasn't been publicized much yet?

I think it's fast becoming the standard. I loved the MP3 craze and downloaded like mad, but even I am coming around to the idea of buying music online. I'm not sure how much I've spent in total, but I pay $10 a month for Napster and buy songs here and there on iTunes. Only once have I purchased an entire album online, however. It's quick, convenient, and cheap enough to sometimes entice me away from tracking songs down myself (especially if I want to piece the entire album together from various sources).

Hmm. So for you, the convenience of finding songs using pay-to-download services is enough to make downloading less of a problem? That's an interesting way to do it. I wonder if they can make their music libraries all-encompassing enough that that's always the case.

I find it's really a toss-up. In some instances, you just can't find a good, high-quality version of what you're looking for without paying for it. Other times, the music is too obscure for it to be sold at all. There's no universal rule, in my experience, as to the best way to find obscure music.

It's really a matter of knowing what you're getting. If I knew everytime I used LimeWire I'd come away with a high-quality version of what I was looking for just a minute later, I'd probably buy less, but sometimes the file is mislabeled or (more often), it simply takes awhile before the song is finished downloading. The pay-per-download services are always lightning fast and generally have the clearest version of the song available. Sometimes, that's enough to get me to throw a buck at them.

Sounds like a mix of convenience and quality is what you're willing to pay for, more than the music. What's interesting about that, of course, is that it sort of makes music less the product and more the *sell* for a service.
Odd :P Nevertheless... Interesting to know.

It's all about the music; so much so that I'm willing to pay for a high-end version, as opposed to accepting a mediocre version for free. Or am I misunderstanding you?

No, I think I'm just being confusing. What I mean is that the service you're paying for (as opposed to a service you wouldn't normally pay for) is the quality and speed of the music file - if you could get that quality and DL speed free, you wouldn't bother.

So essentially, while what you're *paying for* is the music, the reason you're paying for it has to do more with the service.

I don't think ou have heard of newsgroups...

Sign up to Newshosting.com and you get unlimited access to their newsgroup servers for less than $10 a month. Sign up to something like www.newzbin.com and you can search the newsgroups for anything you could ever want.

DVD rips are available from the newsgroups that are exact retail copies with full DTS surround sound. Every album imaginable is available to download and often it is in a lossless format.

Well, in my opinion there're many excellent solo artists and bands out there who haven't been signed by a label. I'm not an advocate of illegal filesharing and believe that signed artists should be paid a fair rate for their work and the "middlemen" their share for promoting and investing in those artists.

That said, peer to peer technology has allowed me to obtain music I would never be able to before, everything from San Francisco underground Indie-rock to Mancunian thrash and London ska. When a label take on a new artist they have to be sure of their mainstream success, which means either subtracting elements that might turn off the average listner or adding elements to draw them in. Which makes most mainstream music, at least for me, rather bland. So it works out for me because I've now got about eighty hours of music that isn't commercially avaiable, the non-label artists because I can get their music without them having to pay for bandwitch (and I go out of my way to promote them if I like them and donate if I *really* like them) and the labels because I'm not freeloading of their investment (unless you count a loss of potential earnings by not buying their music because I've found something better).

Of course, in a wider context music piracy hasn't been all that bad. Before the Napster albums were ridiculously expensive, the labels were really putting the squeeze on us. When the first filesharing programmes started appearing, the album prices suddenly dropped by a significant amount. Also it most likely forced companies to adopt downloading music far earlier than they would have if CD's had remained so profitable and probably keeps the price of .MP3's down to boot. From the label's point of view this also has the upside of a pre-existing market for people willing to buy downloaded music who felt bad about piracy (whether out of guilt, ideology or fear of the law) but liked the convinience, and decreased their overheads in the long-run by avoiding expensive CD-printing and distribution costs.

So, I suppose everyone's a winner -or at least hasn't lost that badly- I have my hard-to-aquire Scarlatti Tilt and when I needed to buy my 10th anniversary copy of The Holy Bible I paid a lot less for it than I would've before filesharing. And even if it has caused Ms. Lopez to be short a few 100k, she really wouldn't have spent it in an imaginative enough way for me to feel sorry for her.

I just hope when they finally beat Peer-to-Peer it won't be a blanket that stops people distributing legally.

There are two main effects of p2p and internet, myspace and other forms of internet distribution, one fairly positive, the other overwhelmingly negative.

The good news is that it has helped break the stranglehold that less than 10 corporations (Viacom, Infinity Broadcasting, Clear Channel and the six major record labels) had on essentially the entire distribution network. The result is that there's a real visibility for bands and genres that were too far outside the mainstream to have been given any real exposure in the pre-internet days.

Unfortunately, the flip side of the internet revolution is oversaturation by artists that have absolutely no reason to be. Digital recording technology and internet distribution mean that everyone can not only have a 'band,' but can flood the marketplace with their 'music.' We're basically going to have to relearn great lesson of the punk burnout of the 80s: just because you can do it yourself, doesn't mean you should.

The problem with the flood of mediocrity isn't just that the worthwhile artists get lost in the background noise, but that it creates a situation where people have a social incentive NOT to differentiate between the good art and the ****. This has already happened in some of the underground niche markets (like black metal, which is where I have the most direct experience), where seemingly everyone has a dog in the fight to one extent or another. If they're not in a band, they own a 'label' (pressing **** bands on cd-r). If they don't own a label, they run an e-zine. With everyone emotionally and socially invested in the 'scene,' it becomes socially difficult or impossible to establish any sort of discrimination between that which is worthwhile and that which needs to trundle on to creative oblivion. If that happens, a whole lot of people and their syncophants would have to admit that they just don't quite measure up. And so, to avoid that eventuality, the scene overhypes **** bands and goes to great lengths to tear down the ones that create something meaningful. They'd rather all have a nice, 'equal' underground where everyone is a loser then let the cream rise to the top and admit that most artists are failures.

End result: the talented people mostly just give up because it's a waste of their time.

Great post. I agree compeltely. All in all, when you slam the two together, I think it comes out as a net positive, though.

I think we saw the same thing in regards to websites in general and, more recently, blogs. But as the dust has settled there, something at least resembling a meritocracy has begun to form. Mechanisms for seperating the wheat from the chaffe gain prominence, in much the same way spam filters help us screen out the email we don't want. I suspect the same sort of thing will happy, albeit gradually, with things like music and home videos.

Well, underground scenes tend to go through a creative phase followed by a long twilight where socializing becomes more important than art. The internet has only exacerbated existing structural weaknesses anyway.

I suspect the answer will be a few artists and a small fanbase breaking away from 'scenes' entirely. That's usually how it works, and now, it can work and still get some exposure. We'll see.

You could also see it like this.. The premises for true art, as some people see it, are that it's non-commercial. The last years developments within the music industry and on the Net have made it possible for a lot more people without money to invest or with no commercial interests to create music and make it available to the rest of the world. It's healthy. What you are basically saying is that people with real talent are escaping "the scene" because they are not able to make themselves heard, but I don't think that's the case. Instead it's now, more than ever before, possible for talented people to produce and distribute their own art without involvement, or with minimal involvement, by profiteers. These profiteers instead stick to the allready big major artists and leave "the underground" alone to develop. I also totally disagree with the elitist view that people don't know what is good for them or that not everybody are entitled to perform arts. Who decides what is art and what is not, what is fine art and what is crap art? Would Daniel Johnston, for instance, qualify as real true art? There is a lot of music out there and most of it is mediocre at best. So what?? Pick out the raisins in the cake and enjoy them to the max! You can't at least complain about good music being harder to find nowadays.... You don't even have to drag your ass down to the record store anymore.

Yup. (I like to roll them round my mouth incidently)

I think there is an issue of 'swamping' going on on the net right now. The cake's got bigger. There are more raisens, but they're 'further apart' - or clustered in weird places.

Sifting them out (to take the metaphor, erm, back in time) has become trickier in some ways, but you know they're there. The bottom line is that, if you're interested, you'll keep looking and seek this stuff out, as you say P.

There's something to be said for that. On the other hand, it more than ever puts artists at the mercy of the social 'scene' in terms of making a mark, and the scene has a vested interest in making sure that no one stands above the rest.

Which of course explains how George W. Bush was twice elected President of the United States of America.

Who said anything about entitlement (or lack thereof)? I'm just saying that there's a lot of people recording music these days who contribute nothing creatively speaking, and that the social pressures the DIY attitude create has the effect of driving away or holding back the real artists.

The net 'scene' is so diverse that the only inhibition to expression is that your wailings might never get heard.

That's no 'vested interest' in silencing others (coz that's not feasible - all material is far more accesible than ever it was). Feel free to wear a hair shirt tho if you want.

There is no 'net' scene. The scenes are still genre specific, they're just oriented to web distribution.

Yeah, damn those search engines, and their 'find your death metal here' links.

Regardless of the changes in distribution, music still exists independent of the net. Superior artists want to be paid, and they sure as hell want the recognition, even if only within the underground, that their superiority demands. The net mitigates againt both of those, so it has the effect of driving away the cream of the crop. The idiots with nothing to say rarely want anything more than the ego trip of being in a band, so they're satisfied with the new status quo. Result: less good music, more generic crap.

Sure there is. Scenes tend to coalesce around art, but they are sustained by socialization, the internet and the associated DIY ethic has altered many scenes to the point that socialization is dependent on mutual validation - everybody has to be equal or feelings get hurt, and the scene's social reason to be is undermined. The pressure is to turn against and devalue those who step above and beyond the rest of the scene, which, in the underground, is a death sentence.