Martin Orford August 2009

I'm a man of law and INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS AS PROPERTY AS REAL STATE OR A CAR, SO GETTING IT WITHOUT A RETRIBUTION FOR THE AUTHOR IS STEALING, AS SIMPLE AS THAT.

TGM: Orb wrote: Well, no it isn't. Potentially taking away potential and unproven sales is not comparable with taking away a physical product, which can then no longer be sold. Now, I'm not suggesting copyright violation is OK, but calling it 'stealing' is essentially incorrect, or at least, misrepresenting it.

the label does the grunt work of selling an album, they make money, the artist makes money, if the album is downloaded instead of stolen, then the label goes out of business (SPV) and the artists retire (Martin).  simple economics, no grey areas.

the RIAA are idiots, it really pains me to what them bumble around, I've even talked to them to try and show them a more intelligent way to approach it, but these people are full on ludites.

sorry, I must have missed your question.  The problem with eMusic or any "all you can eat" type of service is you pay a low flat rate for virtually unlimited access and that gets split up with every artist you purchased from.  The first time I saw a digital says report with payments of even less than 1 penny, so of course it is rounded down and you get nothing, they seem to play a trick where they do the rounding on individual sales instead of all your sales, so say you had a cumulative $10 in profits, you'd get nothing because they were all a fraction of a cent.  Part of this applies to places like MySpace that monetize your songs that are playing by having ads on your page, but you have NO control over what they do.  I had them override my 2 minute song sample with the entire song, I can't change it and I don't want the entire song on there, my only option is to opt out entirely.

Services like my Mindawn pay a 75% royalty, this is to whoever put the material up, the artist or the label, obviously the more middlemen you have, the less you get.  Take iTunes as an example, you have an artist, the label, a propogator and then iTunes, everyone is getting their piece of it, so the artist doesn't see a whole lot, however there usually aren't expenses to recoup from it, so it's nearly free money.

Why do people end up on eMusic?  Because the sign up with a propagator and don't pay attention to the details.  I'm pretty certain those types of services will go away as more people notice.

I thought our album price of $8.99 for a lossless, DRMless recording was pretty good, I've seen more and more people copy us.  The whole thing is a balancing act between what is fair for the artist and for the customer.  Mindawn has a slew of prog material you simply can't get on any other download service.  My other problem with the typical model was they would charge the same price for a song, regardless of the length.  Is it fair for Echolyn to get $.50 for Mei for example?

As a reward system though, Mindawn has "Mindawlers" where you basically earn points back like the Discover Card and are able to get free albums after a bit.

yea, I'm glad too that it has been more educational than "I you you are but what am I" type conversation.

I'm a technologist at heart, I've been writing software since the late 70's, I spearheaded all the major development at every company I worked for and have had my own software company the past 10 years.  I even designed an on demand video download system in the mid-80's that sadly couldn't work due to storage and bandwidth requirements that just didn't exist at the time.  So I watch the market pretty closely, which is why I built Mindawn 5 years ago as part of that.  Right now though, we are in the middle of a sea change with digital and broadcast radio and various other forms of media consumption.  How this shakes out is going to take a few years to tell for sure.  The bottom line is you have to get eyes on your product, either by ads, reviews, live, viral videos, what have you.  A lot of these tools have only really come in to play in the last couple years, look at how fast Twitter exploded this year after being around for a while with little interest (I find it creepy myself).

You see a resurgence with Vinyl lately, this tells you something about "quality" consumers of music.  The problem is kids today only hear low quality MP3 files on earbuds, they don't know what high fidelity is.  Games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero have had an unexpected impact in introducing younger kids to music we enjoyed decades ago (my son became a huge fan of Clapton, Eric Johnson, Kansas and Heart to name a few because of it).

So that's a long way of saying we're at a stage in development that makes it pretty impossible to predict, all we can do is watch and react quickly or take the lead in some cases.

the used market is an interesting situation, it's an issue with books, DVD's and Games (especially games, this is a HUGE issue for publishers and stores like Game Stop).  Thing is with a used copy, there is only ever 1 copy and 1 owner.  The band and label got paid on the sale of that copy, in at least 50% of the cases they are probably loosing out on the sale of a 2nd copy because someone bought it used, but you very rarely have an item get sold a 3rd time, so the damage isn't nearly as bad as one person buying it and putting it online where theoretically a couple billion people could download it.

I think the sh*tty mastering has died down, everyone was obsessed with being "louder".

let's see if I can lay some truths here
1 - taking something without paying for it is stealing.  No reasonable person denies this.

2 - the "market" usually determines what price it will pay for a product. IN this case, many, but not all, music fans have decided that the price is free. No matter what anyone else says, even the artists. This is not to say it is right or not. It is to point out the reality. And after ten years arguing about it rather than trying to get paid for your work in other ways ... well ... I don't know of any musical act that has managed to increase their revenue by complaining about it, eh. Again, not to say it's right or wrong. Just to say that there is a reality that has been in place for some ten years. Spotify anyone ?

3. If it costs Martin 8000 to make an album, is there any reason why he doesn't think that there would be at least 800 people from around the world who would pay 10 for a quality download. You say MP3s are not high fidelity. Hey, there's FLAC, Ogg, among others that are lossless codecs. You get CD sound, you can include the artwork in the download, you don't have to worry about selling out a manufacturing run, and your fans can access it right away.
Add to that, the act can always record just one or a few songs as the inspiration hits them. I bought the Voivod album Infini for $10.88CAD in FLAC format with complete artwork cover & inserts. I burnt it onto a blank CD, and so it cost me $11.30CAD. Next week, the New Marillion album.

3 - Marillion has managed to make a go of it. Martin, what are they doing wrong ?

4 - Always deny the validity of any studies that disagree with your opinion. Always refuse to recognise the continued failure of all manner of proposed measures to stop the activity in question. Never accept that there are , nor could even be, any other reason(s) that might actually explain the problem.

5 - re : the above. Was IQ competing with the XBox, PSwhatever, Wii, DVDs, the internet, PCs and a host of other entertainment options that now take up parts of people's budgets ? Once you've filled your IPod or computer with 4000 hours of music, what are the chances that you don't buy a lot more when you're never going to be able to listen to everything you already have ?

6 - take this new version of reality - the music fan has a ton more choices. Could it be that I prefer to support a dozen local acts rather than one "name" international act ? IF so, isn't  that another piece of the pie to share ? Remember, music fans are no longer limited to the (often) dross that labels want to peddle.  I truly believe that there is the same percentage of crap music to good music to great music as there always was. There is just so so much more of it out there. Labels as filters ? Commercial concerns as esthetes ?

7 - Explain why cable TV is able to make money ? Is it that many paying a little actually can generate decent revenue. Again, see Spotify.

8- Explain how major chain bookstores like Chapters in Canada allow people to read books (for free, my god, blasphemy !) and still sell enough of them to make it a viable commercial enterprise ?

9- Why do Jam bands like Phish or Dave Matthews continue to make mega bucks year after year despite not  pulling in multi-million selling albums ? Why is Hardcore punk band D.O.A.  able to still record regularly, tour (they have just come back a tour of China), i.e. make a career of it with all these illegal downloads ?

10- Why was Josh Freese able to put out a solo album and cover the costs within a few months ? Oh yeah, unique promotions aimed at his true fans. I.e., no relying on the casual listener ... hmmmm

11 - if a musician is supposed to be a creative person, why aren't they trying to create a way to financially sustain their career ? Or are they not aware of small & medium acts that do so ? Therefore preventing them the excuse to ignore the fact that they have no entitlement to fame or money just because they think so. If you're not able to make money one way, then your time is better spent finding ways to earn what you need to learn. Nobody here is bemoaning the fact that Glen Benton from Deicide lives in a rusted trailer in deep Florida.

12 - And in the end, the question that most blind themselves to - could it just be that the market is no longer there ? Whether it's just them, or the whole scene ?
Could a music industry lesson be helpful ? SO as to remind people what it was like pre-1965 for every musician who was not a star. You know, selling LPs out of the trunk of your car, or from the stage. Those that you had financed with a loan or using the equity from your house or borrowed money from friends or family ? 300 shows a year, in every dive that would book you. Just to make a living doing what you want.
No wait ... things changed with the Beatles and the advent of mass reach media like FM radio & TV. Things can't change again. Things are or were too good.

13- God help us, but is it possible that there is only a certain market for an album or artist, and to expect more based on happenings ten, oops, twenty years ago is like GM planning on bringing back the Buick ? Was illegal downloading the reason why IQ wasn't selling that many albums in the U.S. or that Stompin' Tom couldn't tour the U.K. ? You know , back in those halcyon days of the 80s.  Whoops, Stompin' Tom was around in the 70s... Came back in the 90s, and is still recording and touring today.

I now await the vehement rebuttals ignoring the reality and thinking that arguing about the morality of things will change anything more than it already has. And so another ten years wasted before someone starts thinking about what you can do today with the tools you have at your disposal.

So keep up the good fight. God only knows that there are musical acts out there actively seeking to make it work for them in TODAY's world. And they can't be but helped by the others bands and musicians who waste time trying to roll back time to 1999.

Now, how much was that Marillion download ? At roughly $10 a pop, I think there's a few albums I haven't gotten yet .  who knows, maybe I have money left over for another impulse purchase like Ostara? Oh, and i gotta pick up that one EP that I'm missing from Fear of Lipstick. And Mark (drummer for Eric's Trip) at Frank's music was going to get a hold of some albums that he did with Purple Knight in the 70s.

P.S. God Damn those people who buy used LPs & CDs.  Don't they know that the artist is not getting paid for that. How dare the thieves who loan a CD to their friend ? or Horror, bring an album over to their friend's house and listen to it there . What are those people thinking using IPods ? That gadget is not made for playing ! It's made for copying ! That the music may have been paid for by the user doesn't matter ! Also the ones who don't buy the re-issue CD. To Hell with those who don't buy 100 albums a year. Even if they don't download illegally. Let fire & brimstone rain down on all those amateur musicians that are stealing sales from me by issuing local releases. I am an artiste. They are mere dabblers and take away money meant for me. ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME !

P.P.S. who needs reality ?

P.P.P.S something must be wrong ... i'm not getting paid to do what I want to do. why do other people tell that I should stop whining and find a job that CAN support my family ? Oh, because the horse carts makers are telling the auto manufacturers to smarten up ? Because postal services are learning to deal with email competing with their snail mail ? Or email is now up against texting and tweeting ?
It's impacting my income. ME ME ME ME ME ME ME

er, why is the proice I pay for coffee causing poverty half way across the world ? What do you mean those trade tariffs, import taxes and such mean third world inhabitants worry more about what they're going to eat than what they're able to download


Edited by debrewguy - September 29 2009 at 18:18