today.reuters.com — CANNES (Reuters) With global music sales down for a seventh straight year, the talk at an annual industry meeting in Cannes, France, has become heated over how to develop digital sales against competition from the dreaded F word -- free. Global sales are expected to be down again for 2006 despite digital sales almost doubling to $2 billion...
Jan 22, 2007 View in Crawl 4
brikjJan 23, 2007
I have two comments I'd like to make. Well a question and a request. First, can anyone explain why someone should get paid today for work they did 20 years ago? The constitution uses the word "limited" in the clause about copyrights. I'm sure that there are plenty of laws and court rulings about what "limited" really means./sarcasm Second if there is a good reason, I, having expended considerable intellectual capital as a member of the military that as provided a safe and secure environment for all commerce in the United States, am asserting that everyone must pay me royalties for using that freedom. And don't say taxes already cover that because they go to the Government not me. /sarcasm
pointandclickJan 23, 2007
@geekeeI think that was part of randovaro's point. The distribution of songs over p2p networks provides publicity for the artists. I think everyone has realized that today music can be produced and distributed by a small team, if not the artist themselves. I believe that the claim that the second part of the equation, publicity, can still only be provided by big labels with deep pockets is slowly becoming out-dated just as recording studios have. Sites like Pandora and Stage.fm are providing outs that new artists need. The labels haven't totally lost their place yet, but it's becoming a reality.In the past we were basically told who was great by the record labels. As more artists are given the opportunity to get their work out there, we will be able to decide for ourselves.
brianbowdenJan 23, 2007
That's not true. Popular music is horrible. The music industry changed and that's what hurt it. There's a lot of great bands who aren't on the majors, however the music industry shot itself in the foot. Remember the days when the Record Label bigwigs used to give so much credit to the average listener. "The kids can smell a fake, etc." And they signed bands that people were already listening to. ie Nirvana, Pearl Jam, etc. As there's innovators and there's emulators everything becomes emulated at some point. So once that music movement began to grow record labels began to manufacture their own bands. They unloaded craptastic bands filled with studio musicians emulating the new sound such as Garbage, and Bush. Then along came the Spice Girls, Hanson, and the NSYNC generation, in which the music industry intially boomed teaching the music industry an unfortunate lesson. MTV transformed into TRL and Real World 24/7. The younger demographic whom this music was aimed at grew up leaving the music industry scratching their heads. Here we are in a time which is very confusing for the music industry, because while they're profits are down, the simply blame piracy, and not their shoddy business practices. This has been my personal take on the state of things, but it'd be interesting to hear all your viewpoints.
mrfleshJan 23, 2007
20 years?! s**t I think they go back 50 or 75 years now. And no they shouldn't still be getting paid. It makes zero sense. If you were to apply this to any other proffesion nothing in this world would be affordable. Should a bricklayer still be getting a cut of a house's values he worked on? How bout a bridge? how bout the guy that builds airplanes cars..........it's assinie patent and copy right should be done away with. A one lump sum for your creative juices and that's it.
Closed AccountJan 24, 2007
So what your saying is that any binary data is worth 0$. Only what is tangible and can't be copied for nothing is worth something. So binary data is only worth the cd it is printed on and the cable lines used to transmit it.
nakaniJan 24, 2007
"Contemporary music may suck to me & you but there is always a new generation coming along that thinks it's great. That's just part of growing old and irrelevant."_Popular_ contemporary music sucks to you and me, but a lot of us are listening to some of the illest hiphop beats, incredible new electronica that is pushing the envelope, powerful new folk music, etc. Basically a newly-enlightenment wave of independent musicians are putting out work as incredible and maybe better than ever before. Of course, I just find almost all of my music on the internet, and most of the time I struggle to follow conversations about musical pop culture, simply because I've never run across them!f**k the giant-slug music industry. ADAPT or DIE!We want a global orgasm of art... unrestrained, massive amounts of music flowing without any arbitrary restrictions.