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

[ironed_orchid]

springheel_jack wrote a really good response to that piece where he says that Emily White works for a college radio station, and one of the reasons people work for college stations is access to free music that the labels send them. Also, that exposure to more music is a good thing, and questions some of the figures in the Lowrey article.

I think there are some good points in David Lowrey's letter, but he doesn't seem to engage with the problem of copyright in a critical way.

Also, he says that touring doesn't make much money for artists, but then he suggest buying stuff directly from the artists. One of the reasons I go to see touring acts is to buy the merch at the concert to support them more directly than through retailers (online or otherwise). Online, I love Bandcamp and CD Baby because they with artists for artists.

One other thing that occurs to me is fair use. The last album I downloaded was David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which I love. Now, in the past I have bought the very same album on both vinyl and cd, but through years of living in shared housing, they were lost or rendered unplayable or given away during an interstate move when I was poor. I kinda feel that fair use should extend to getting a digital copy of an album that I have already paid for twice.

[firecat]

I posted a comment over at springheel_jack's post...I had to laugh, because I worked for a college radio station for three years, and I have four cassette-length mix-tapes to show for it. It's not like I was being ultra-respectful of copyright -- I don't remember its even occurring to me to make copies of the albums there. (This was in the days of vinyl, so it wasn't quite as easy to make copies.)

[amadi]

I recall in my college radio days, we routinely had duplicate copies of things, promos from the record companies, and stuff that was culled from the collection. They were dropped in a bin and free for the staff to take. I wonder if anything like that happens any more.