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Regular Non obscure music
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IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Edited Oct 04, 2013, 12:50
Re: Regular Non obscure music
Oct 04, 2013, 12:35
stray wrote:
You really don't like the idea of netlabels, or Creative Commons Licenced music at all do you ? You never pass any comment on it when it's raised.


This is a conversation for the pub but it is not a question of not liking. It is a question of dealing with practical reality as ethically as possible.

What I do for a living is help artists (mainly established and some not) who want to own their own publishing and masters and still be in the market place in a meaningful way without having to dance with all the various devils that are waiting for them.

I got approached by representatives of the main advocates of creative commons about eight or nine years ago and was asked if I could talk to one of my better known clients to see if they might throw their independent catalogues into the creative commons pool for the good of you know ... society.

The conversations that ensued convinced me that the advocates of this approach had not the first idea of what in a practical sense goes into the making and selling of music. Ignorant to an astonishing degree.

I find the idea of people with tenure at an Ivy League college telling musicians (of all people), who are scraping a living out of the bottom of what's left of the barrel, how to live really nauseating. It's using artists to beat the music industry with. However venal that industry it's the wrong tool and I don't see Lessig giving his books away on Amazon.

At the crucial moment the debate around file sharing became co-opted by those who would use the music business as a wedge into capitalism as a whole. What was needed was a concerted effort to shame record companies into splitting digital revenues 50/50 and zeroing all un-recouped balances so that even those owing their labels fortunes would be paid out on the digital side. That would have helped everyone. Instead a whole generation saw free music as a right and were encouraged in that by both the RIAA and Lessig and co.

That said I think creative commons has a lot of conceptual merit. I just need someone to explain to me how art that needs forces greater than a bedroom studio is going to get made and at the same time the infrastructure existing and the artists and other contributors not starving in the process. That for me is the unanswerable question while capitalism prevails.

Right now we have a lot art that is being widely exposed that is being made by the youth of the upper middle classes because they are the only ones who can afford to hang around along enough unwaged while waiting to get noticed. Not paying creators is not helping that situation one bit.
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