A musician speaks about acquiring music without paying for it

[firecat]

A professional musician writes about why free music on the Internet isn't really free, debunks some myths about how and where pro musicians get paid (e.g., most don't make much money on touring; Spotify pays musicians almost nothing), and describes some charities you can support if you end up deciding that you did a wrong thing by downloading free music, or if you just want to help pro musicians.

http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

I don't agree with the implication that it's a particular generation of people who are primarily downloading stuff on the Internet in violation of copyright. People of all ages do it.
I also think there are huge problems with copyright law and with the way corporations sometimes go about protecting their copyrights. And I support transformative fanworks, which often involve working with copyrighted material. It's not a simple issue. And I take digital stuff without paying for it sometimes, so I'm not shaking fingers at people.

This issue is also relevant to all sorts of other artists producing material that can be digitized. I find it interesting what justifications people give for their choices. And it's interesting to think about what the availability of free copies of digital stuff means, going forward, in terms of how art is made and who makes art and who can make a living at it and how people get access to art.

Comments

Meandering Musing

[jesse_the_k]

Indeed, I remember a fascinating panel re: copyright at WisCon some time back. There I learned (from the fabulous Laura Quilter) that there was a financial setup that predated Western copyright (i.e., the ability to control who copies your artistic efforts and who benefits from its sale). This was artistic patronage. If you were fortunate, you found a very rich person who was willing to pay for your artistic productions -- painting, music, sculpture, plays. They'd display your work in one of their many houses or palaces. Maintaining a happy relationship with one's patron ensured one's livelihood. There weren't any galleries or public theaters or "music in the schools" programs.

I wonder if the iniquitous privatization of all levels of government has played a hand in the current mess. If the most important metric is transforming every government element into an "enterprise," and squeezing the most money out of it, to boot, then we grow up without knowing how to make our own music and plays and art. I think humans need art, desperately, and so we take it.