Art and Commerce

[andrewducker]

One of the things that occasionally annoys me is people complaining about those evil music companies and the terrible way they treat their artists - how musicians make a tiny amount of the money paid for each song and how they wouldn't mind paying 10p a time to the artist themselves, but paying all of those leeches in the middle is just completely unreasonable.

Now, there's no love lost between me and the music industry - I believe that copyright ought to last 10 years and then works should enter the public domain and that the current system is tending towards an infinite length of copyright, to no end but to fill the coffers of huge companies stocked largely with lawyers.

However, when it comes to bands producing new music, nobody forces them to sign the rights over to a corporation, or to pay a percentage of their royalties to them - they choose to do so of their own free will.  Certainly, some of them are so star struck they'd sign their left arm away if it meant an appearance on MTV, but most of them realise that music publishers actual provide a vital service.

Unless, that is, they want to record, produce, mix, press, design the artwork for, package and ship all the CDs themselves.  

Oh, and publicise themselves, organise concerts, deal with security, arrange radio airplay, or any of a hundred other promotional aspects that mean that they reach a large audience.

Most musicians, of course, don't want to have to worry about any of that - they want to record music, play live and then spend as much of the rest of the time enjoying themselves.  They're happy to let other people deal with all the mundane nonsense that's necessary to get the music from them to their audience.

Of course, there are numerous unscrupulous people out there who will happily tie people into unreasonable contracts, there is bribery and corruption involved in airplay time and there are all sorts of dodgy accounting practices designed to make it look like an album sold five million copies and still didn't make any money.

All of these are things that need to be dealt with, and if people concentrated on them then they would be.  But that would require actual understanding of how  the music industry works.  It's much easier to assume that everyone barring the guy holding the guitar is eeevil.

Capitalism in general and the music industry specifically aren't going anywhere, because when you get right down to it, they work.  If you want them to work more fairly then you have to get involved and find a way of making them do so.  Standing on the sidelines and sneering just doesn't cut it.

Comments

It's distribution.

[substitute.livejournal.com]

Whether it's books or music, the evil in the media industry arrives at distribution time. At least in the U.S., distributing your CDs or books or magazines to the country requires trucking, which is where organized crime is involved. Eventually, to get your magazine on a newsstand or get your CDs to the record store, you have to cut a deal with some criminal.

This is why MCA Records had a made man from the mob in a corner office in their HQ in the 80s, and how they funneled money to political candidates illegally. This is also why they treat musicians the way they do, and why people hate them so much. They're a retail branch of organized crime.

And that's why they hate electronic distribution so much. Suddenly there's no small sums of cash, no Teamsters in trucks, and no guys in cheap leather jackets laundering drug money through the cutout CD racket.

[cx650.livejournal.com]

It would appear from a recent news item on TV that the production cost of the CD itself is about 20p. This is much cheaper than it was ten years ago (approx.60p) and also less than the ten years ago cost of producing a vinyl album (approx.30p). The complaint I have with the music industry is that the retail prices of these items do not satisfactorily reflect the production costs in that CDs cost pounds more than albums, not pence. Also, how do they account for pricing differentials in different countries, ostensibly for an identical product. Is it that the British buyer is regarded as a mug, and will pay what they can afford rather than the true value? This seems to be so in other market sectors such as the motor industry. The government have seen fit to intervene in this particular area, why not in recorded music sales too?

[andrewducker]

Part of it is down to labour costs - in that staff in the uk are more expensive than staff in South Korea.

And part of it is down to a non-global market, which is wrong in some ways. But on the other hand, if albums were £13 in South Korea then nobody would spend a weeks wages on one.