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RE: Dinosaurs Will Die
Hm. I agree that what these folks are doing is a good thing, but I think your logic is all wrong.
I don't think it's really an "act of bravery" for Radiohead or Prince or Madonna to dump the RIAA - they've already gotten the one thing the RIAA brings to the table: name recognition. It'd be far more brave for someone who's last record topped out at #142 to go this route.
Nor do I think the music industry is suffering primarily because of P2P file sharing. They want us to believe that, but I think that it's more a convenient scapegoat. The reality is that the so-called "music industry" is nothing more than a distribution channel. They managed to create an industry were they could treat artists as if they were a kind of indentured servant, which allowed them to continue to extract money from the system long after they stopped adding any real value to the products it produced. It was inevitable that the industry would collapse - it's basic economics. If you aren't adding value to the distribution chain, then eventually you'll be cut out of it.
Saying that Napster killed the music industry is like saying Gavrilo Princip started WWI. Yes - his assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was the critical event that started the chain, but if that hadn't done it, something else almost certainly would have - the situation was simply ripe. So, too, the music industry - they were holding onto a precarious position and something was bound to have collapsed their bubble.
I think the bigger problem with the record labels is that somewhere in the last several decades they lost sight of what their role in the process was. Originally, they performed two functions: First, they were venture capitalists, lending fairly large sums of money to relatively unproven musical acts that enabled them to cover the costs of producing an album which was the only way to get the music to a wide audience. Second, they were the distribution channel - they did the physical production of the media and delivered them to sellers.
The combination of these two roles meant that they exerted enormous pressure on the artists - if I loan you a million dollars, you'll damn well use the producer I say, and record in the studio I choose, and so on. Of course, the record companies also owned the producer and the studio and the "and so on". This gave the record companies pretty complete control over musical culture, just at the time that musical culture became such a powerful influence on the young. Prior to "rock and roll", the demand for music was nothing like it's been since then.
During this time, the music industry forgot that they were just the money and the guys with the record presses and they started to think that their product was nothing less than American culture itself. They came to think that it was entirely their right to decide the future direction of that culture.
When P2P finally triggered the inevitable landslide, the mechanisms by which the record industry exerted its control were all part of the collateral damage. Their role as venture capitalists has far less value - anybody with a couple thousand bucks can build their own professional quality recording studio and produce CDs ready for sale with tracks ready for download. What's mostly left over are the tattered remnants of their illegal payola system.
It ain't about some sappy "bonding" between artist and fan. What's happening to the record companies is the same thing that happened to the lamplighters when everybody switched to electric street lights.
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Dinosaurs Will Die
These musicians are sending out a powerful message with their acts of bravery. They truly know what music is about: connecting with people. Contrary to popular belief, it's NOT all about the Benjamens, unless your a business man rather than a poet.
It's unequivocal. The music industry is suffering because of the movement that Napster sparked. However, a phenomenon as explosive as file sharing did not come about because of the denegration of morals or because the youth of America is an especially criminal group of people. The popularity of file sharing communities like Napster came about as an inevitable result of the greed and hubris of the music industry. CDs have become outragious in price. Everything orbits around the appearance and promotion of the musician, the album art, achieving a marketable sound which might fit into a genre that happens to be hot at the moment. Put quite simply, music has ceased to be music. The big wigs at Sony BMG, Universal, and other top record labels have taken hold of a relationship which was never meant to be theirs; namely, that between the musician and the fan. This new approach to music distribution is a step in the right direction.
It's a scarcely known fact that popular bands and musical artists actually make more money by touring than they do selling their music. This is the case at least since the arrival and impact of file sharing. Word Magazine editor Mark Ellen writes, "Five years ago people toured in order to sell records and called the name of their tour after their recording, and probably lost money in order to promote and extend the life of the album. That balance has shifted and now people put out albums to justify going on tour and charging more to go on tour." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6897178.stm)
The artists who complain about losing money, such as Lars Ulrich of Metallica (who have sold 90 million records worldwide, acc. to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallica), have an all too apparent problem with their priorities. The industry has lost sight of the bonding power of music.
In some ways, this paradigm shift allowing us to return to the musical spirit of the early industry where, as blogger Ben Hudson puts it, "it was all about the live show and radio was heavily leveraged to bring in those patrons." (http://www.musicdystopia.com/2007/07/touring-vs-album-sales.html). The new system would indeed be more profitable for the artists themselves as well. In the end, with any hope "the balance is being shifted back to the artist," i.e. where it belongs, and as NoFX puts it, "Dinosaurs will Die."
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