Quote:
Originally Posted by jmarkham  To my thinking, I would say that we have a perfect example of what
happens when you don't take steps to protect your intellectual
property from theft and mass illegal distribution. It's the business
that we work in .. commercial music.
The combination of an unprotected high-fidelity source format and a
relatively high-speed worldwide distribution / dissemination medium
made it possible for the "bad apples" to make it easier to obtain
and use the media without license than it did to go to Tower Records
(or wherever) and buy it legally.
The result has been the near devastation of the commercial music
industry. To me, while we can lambaste the studio system for its excesses,
it has hurt nearly everyone in the business. Every time I hear of another
studio closing, or some very talented people getting out of the industry
altogether, it is a direct result of illegal file-sharing.
Now one can certainly argue that the industry did not respond quickly
enough to create franchises like iTunes.. but that eventually did happen...
but you still have rampant illegal file-sharing that continues to depress
the overall music market.
The fruits of this practice are ubiquitous. Listen closely to the stuff that's on the radio or wherever. The quality
of the product has gone down significantly. Not everything has suffered,
but the mean of the music product sounds significantly worse than the
pinnacle of the studio system (pick your date between 1977->1990).
Everyone, including the listener, has been compromised by this practice. |
I have not been compromised by any such thing. I don't listen to much if any commercial music. Because, it was made first to make money and be readily marketable en masse, it was never the best music available. Consistent & pervasive Lowest Common Denominator. The forces that dictate such a situation began, let's take a look at what, your golden age which is now tarnished, I think 1978 is a fair enough marker for around when the industry had shown it wasn't taking any chances on anything, and the music business wasn't as creative as the shoe business. That's all pervasive and existed for years before it began to be too unwieldy, like a dinosaur, it will cease to be a viable force, there just isn't enough to sustain it, it sapped the resource pool. The mean of the music *product* sounds the same now as it did to me then, without a doubt.
The product is by intent and by definition disposable, it was meant to move units in the marketplace. That is a pervasive mass psychology. That's what's the deal we're dealing in.
Now, I cannot fail to note, you've a vested interest in your argument. It's a suspicious argument, it's not different in quality to a congressperson's views on health care who accepts money from the health insurance industry.
First of all, you seem to believe no record company person ever put a load of records in the back of a truck and wrote it off, or ever took advantage of the artist in the most flagrant abuses in the fulfillment of contracts... I could go on for paragraphs here, it's been pandemic for decades. The start point in your golden age, this music was just as crap as it is now, with better production values maybe. This era is one of the more shameful chapters on unethical practices by record industry executives. You want to just sorta slide by all the excesses of the industry. You're the industry, I guess, your interest is vested where it is, I suppose it's normal to do. Not everyone is so stupid as to accept it as anything but what it is, bogus and suspect.
The artists have been indentured servants in the music industry forever. "Everybody is hurt", when some schmuck manage to get something without paying for it one measly 128bit download at a time. Nonsense. On the scale of what the industry has taken from the culture vs what it provides, it's a wash at worst.
The times they are a changin, and most of the how and why you choose to ignore, and have a facile one dimensional answer to something subtle and pervasive in a culture, which has as a symptom a system that's been broken forever.
To use this bogus half-baked go at an argument in favor of dongles, good lord man, get effing real.