November 20, 2003 - 3:33 PM

Music Business: Screwing the Corp, not the Artist

Let’s say there’s this guy named Theodor Geisel. He’s spent a lot of time writing and drawing this book called "Horton Hears a Who". His publisher has spent a fair amount of money printing it up and marketing it. Now, this being his first book, he’s all excited, hoping that it does well. One person goes out, and buys the book. Excellent. However, this person makes 10 color copies of the entire thing. It’s not quite as good as the original, doesn’t have the same hardback cover or the thickness of the pages, but still, it looks nice. He gives the copies to 10 friends. They in turn make copies and give them to their friends. This goes on and on. Imagine that 100 people bought the book and did the same thing. Instead of making sales on thousands, maybe even millions of copies of his book, Mr. Geisel is instead sad to see that he OWES his publisher money. Why?

Well, because his publisher, when they signed Teddy to a contract to make a book, gave him money up front, saying “here’s some living expense, equipment, and research money to tide you over until we can turn a profit on the book,” like a bank loan. Since they are in a business, the publisher must of course cover their own costs of manufacturing and marketing while paying their own employees. Once the book has sold enough copies to recoup those costs, the company is now making a profit, part of which goes to Ted since he was the creator of the book. BUT, before Ted can see one red cent of those profits, he has to pay back that loan that the publisher gave him when he was creating Horton. All fine and dandy if the book is making profits, but not so good when it only sells a few hundred copies. After a while, the publisher says, “Ted, we, uh, we gave you money to live on while you wrote that book, and we’d, uh, we’d like you to pay it back. Or else, you can, just, you know, write a couple more books for us, and we’ll see if we can turn a profit on those to make up for our losses here.”

Now let's pretend that the people who made those copies instead scanned them into their computers and put them on the internet, reaching a much larger audience. You see what I'm getting at? And don't forget that there are laws protecting the copyright holder...you know those laws...they say stuff like "all rights reserved, including the right to reproduce or distribute this book/album/movie in its entirety or portions thereof in any form except as permitted by U.S. Copyright Law or with the written consent of the author." I think that there are allowances for copies to be made if they are for educational purposes or for personal use. So, yeah, it's ILLEGAL to make copies of copyrighted material for the purpose of giving/selling them to other people without getting permission from the copyright holders.

Would you care to translate this example into a musical milieu? Bingo. The thing is, we still have to touch on the unique nature of songs and albums. Each song on an album has two different copyrights. The songwriter and publisher share the publishing copyright for the song itself, then the entity that pays for the recording of the song owns the recording copyright for the actual physical recording of the song. The publishing copyright must be paid to the owner when a song is printed as sheet music; when a song is recorded or covered by anyone, as an allowance for the usage of the song; when a song is sold via an album, a single, a compilation; or when the song is played on the radio, on a tv show, or in a movie. This is a huge part of where artists/songwriters make their money, and if they don't garner lots of airplay or sell many albums, they have to rely on touring to earn their living. As for the recording copyright, usually the Record Label who financed the recording holds those rights, and they will share royalties with the artist only after recouping all expenses, like in the literary example above. In the case of Sarah McLachlan's third album "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy", it wasn't until they had sold 450,000 copies before the label broke even and started to see a profit.

So, ripping music onto your computer and making it available to the general public for free mass consumption on sites like Nutella or Limewire is illegal and it DOES hurt the artists, the songwriters, the labels because no one is getting paid. Now, I’m not condemning downloadable music. I do believe that it is a great tool for increasing an artist’s fanbase, whether that artist is independent or major label. Someone gets a taste of a band that maybe they never would have heard about by grabbing songs willy-nilly from friends or according to genre, and maybe the band now has a new fan who will spread the word. Or perhaps someone has heard a song by a singer and they want to sample the rest of her stuff before making a purchase, much like a listening booth at a record store. If they don't like the other songs, they delete them from the computer; if they do like them, they go out and buy the album. Wunderbar.

But I also believe that there are MANY people who download music with no intention of buying the single or the album, with no intention of paying the royalties on the songs to the songwriters and the recording copyright holders. Some of these people are of the mindset that 'hey, it's free, and it's convenient, and it's just me, I'm not hurtin anyone." Uh huh. And my butt smells like roses. However, other people take to ripping and downloading music because they feel that the Major Record Labels have screwed the pooch on keeping the prices of Cds manageable. The labels have messed up in sticking to an outdated paradigm in terms of putting music out there, starting from signing the artist, to making the album, to marketing it, to selling it. The fact that these companies are eating each other up while mutating into multi-faceted mega-conglomerates (Time/Warner/AOL, Universal/Vivendi) seems to be a frightening display of greed that doesn’t keep in mind the consuming public.

And I totally agree. Yes, Record Labels have turned the making and selling of music into a business, and they've done it in an absurdly idiotic way, where they've been throwing money at whatever might stick, then praying that 1 out of 10 artists breaks big and covers the expenses of the failures. Instead of keeping costs down and promoting each act in a small roster, with an eye towards creating a steady fanbase that will help the artist break even, the Labels stumble, bumble, and fumble, jumping on bandwagons and letting too many cooks handle the stew.

Then there’s the Federal Government. Yeah. Your government. Passing legislation that allows companies like Clear Channel buy up radio stations and live music venues everywhere, so that they can feed the same rotation of music to every market across the country. This makes it harder to sample a wide spectrum of music, and pigeon-holes the Labels to cater their services to the one or two acts who they think have a shot at making the radio playlists to the detriment of the rest of their rosters.

The music business is fucked.

Anyways, go ahead and screw the big corporations, they deserve it. But don't screw the artists. They're providing music that you love and consume.

All this is a roundabout way to say that I'm happy that my friend Chazz made me a copy of Sarah's "Afterglow" that was compressed and crappy sounding, because it allowed me to listen and determine whether or not I'll buy the album. I believe I will, even though I'm not too impressed by what I heard; I'm just willing to give it time to grow on me. Even if the copy that I received was pristine in sound, I would still go out and buy the album; but the fact that there are crinkly sonic artifacts as a result of the compression that grate on my ears is also a big contributing factor.

Shit, this was a boring entry, wasn't it?

Now Listening To : Kim Fox-Moon Hut
Random Thought : I signed up for the CBEST. I'll be taking the test on December 6th. And i've forgotten how to do math.

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