Robbie Fulks

sorry for the font fun, all cut & paste, eh ...
The Supersuckers, Corb Lund and the Hurtin' Albertans, The Weakerthans, Hank Williams III,

Luther Wright and the Wrongs (ya gotta hear their remake of the wall), the sadies ,

The Reverend Horton Heat

Th' Legendary Shack Shakers,    

Rufus Wainwright

Rufus Wainwright

D.O.A.
Bob Wiseman

Debrewguy? You know you can edit a post, right? Instead of making news posts with just one name in them, I mean.

Teaflax wrote: Yet, nearly all niche genres have seen a resurgence and greater overall market share since the advent of file sharing. The amount of Prog released in 2008 easily dwarfs the entire output of the genre from 1970-1975, I would wager.

This might be true (I very much doubt it) but the number of units sold is miniscule by comparison. The number downloaded illegally can never be known for sure but there is no doubt in my mind that it has hit sales considerably.

As a (retired) professional mathematician, I'd love to see the data and methodology from the studies you quoted which demonstrate that file sharing has actually increased sales because it goes completely contrary to all my own gut instincts and the evidence of the musical fraternity. Of course these are highly reputable institutions but they are not immune to errors!

And the thing is, after reading about all these indie acts that are working their asses off to maintain their career, Martin & Nick's complaints come off as if they believe they are somehow entitled to success. Martin pointedly says that he won't play small pubs. Yet a lot of the groups I mention are able to play across Canada (of the U.S. for the american groups), based upon pulling in 400 people in most of the places they play. And sometimes they don't get that.
 Touring means you go out and play for people who will pay to see you. They cannot download a gig.Yet, Martin doesn't see a way of making money on the road. Why won't IQ fans spend money to see them ? Or is it that there are not enough real IQ fans to make it profitable ?

Saga, at this year's FMPM, had trouble filling a 400 seat hall. In their home country, in the prog capital of that country. How can that be related to illegal downloads ?

debrewguy wrote: And the thing is, after reading about all these indie acts that are working their asses off to maintain their career, Martin & Nick's complaints come off as if they believe they are somehow entitled to success. Martin pointedly says that he won't play small pubs. Yet a lot of the groups I mention are able to play across Canada (of the U.S. for the american groups), based upon pulling in 400 people in most of the places they play. And sometimes they don't get that.  Touring means you go out and play for people who will pay to see you. They cannot download a gig.Yet, Martin doesn't see a way of making money on the road. Why won't IQ fans spend money to see them ? Or is it that there are not enough real IQ fans to make it profitable ? Saga, at this year's FMPM, had trouble filling a 400 seat hall. In their home country, in the prog capital of that country. How can that be related to illegal downloads ?

Dean wrote: If their digital library has 5,000 titles and they've only paid for 4,000 of them, they have gained and the artists have lost 20% of their sales, there is no other equation

Perhaps true, but not the most important aspect, sometimes. If at the beginning, they had 1 album from an artist (for simplicity's sake), downloaded illegally, liked it, and bought the whole discography (5 albums) minus that first album, I'd say the artist should be happy they got a chance to have a new fan who bought 4 albums. So then, it's rather that they gained 80% of their sales, than lost 20%. It makes no difference unless you look at what would have happened. But in truth who knows how many people do this? Let's face it, the only people who are really keeping CD sales (and to a large extent all music sales) alive at all are people who really care about music, a dying breed if there ever was one. I think it's might be the case that even if we managed to put the cat back in the bag now, most people don't care enough about music to buy it anymore, and the bands now still would have little to gain.

As far as the supposed advantages of illegal downloading as a way for a band to gain new fans, I think it's a wash. Yeah, there are people who download one album, then buy the rest of the discography. And there are some that download an album ,and if they like it, they buy it. And yes, many who download don't buy anything. But many of those wouldn't have bought much in the first place. So I think that in the end, apart from new indie acts, no one gains or loses much by having their music downloaded for free. And once more, I repeat - there are a ton of factors that weigh much more heavily in the collapse of CD sales. Our own passion for music does not drive others to keep buying CDs despite their interests in other products.

Oh, btw, we haven't touched on the skewed sales figures for the 80s & 90s. When CDs were being bought by the truckload to replace LPs. When MTV , radio, and print media could push sales of a music product. When new trends came along every year or two to keep the party going. And before a panoply of electronic gadgets came to take their slices of the pie.


As far as touring the U.K. ... well, you work with what you have. If it's not feasible to play unless you can get 400 paying customers, what happens if you can't get 400 paying customers in the first place ? Martin doesn't seem to want to answer that question. You can't download an actual gig. So why wouldn't IQ fans want to pay to see the band, either in the U.K. or on the continent ? No matter what we think of their music, it still seems like there's simply not enough demand for their live shows to warrant a tour of decent size halls. And again, illegal downloads don't affect that. IF it was the only reason, no one would be touring the U.K. . Hell, I've seen pics of Budgie playing small pubs. Iron Maiden did the same. We have gold and platinum selling actsfrom days of old  here in Canada that tour 500-800 seat bars every year or two. But not all of those old fogeys can. Buck 65 can play 5-6 gigs in the Maritimes and do well. Snow can't even do a show in the Maritimes Rap capital - Halifax.

And financing the tour from CD sales is like saying we make money on selling albums to cover our losses on playing gigs. Bands all over North America are selling small runs of LPs and CDs that barely cover costs and still manage to tour regularly to make their living. Indeed, most of those acts that I mention depend on the gigs to survive. That's where they make money - tickets, merchandise, albums even ...

But I have no use for people who preach "P2P" is great for everyone because blah blah blah. It's more complex than that. It is illegal.

But to hear musicians state that illegal downloads are the only reason they can't make money ... well, let them explain to me why they weren't able to generate enough money for major labels to keep them or want them. Back when the industry was booming. That they went indie is great. That they still didn't manage to make enough, even though they were doing that before Napster just stinks of self serving B.S. .
Like it or not, as great as the music may be (or not), if people aren't spending THEIR money on it just means that you find yourself a new line of work. This is not suffering. This is the reality of the workaday life for most of the rest of us. No entitlement due to being an artist.

P.S. a local prog fan could have booked Three Friends here in Moncton. But he need to get 400 people at $20-30 a head to cover it. After consulting with local music freaks, their consensus was that 300 would be a stretch, assuming a mass promotion campaign in all the local indie shops, media, etc; and that there were no other gigs in the Maritimes. And even with that, it was a big maybe. Gentle Giant at their peak, played in Moncton in 1976 at the coliseum. They drew 680.

Yet, Gojira, a heavy metal band has two local 500 seat venues considering booking them. Bad Religion played the Agrena at the Coliseum last fall. Drew over 2000. A band that's been around for ages, and has never had a platinum album. That has been around longer than most of its' current fans.

P.P.S. so you see, Nick & Martin's anger just seems like sour grapes. Others in far more challenging situations are doing it. And most were never part of a nationally prominent music trend in a compact country media wise (the U.K. vs the U.S.) ...
P.P.P.S. Maybe Martin can play piano for the Old 97's. Can he play honky tonk ?


Here in Canada, the obstacle is distance. 400 miles to the next big town or half decent sized city. Where the only reason why you accept to  play to 150 people is that it's on the way to where ever else you're going. You hopefully break even, and pick up a few fans.
In the States, you do have bigger venues. But they don't book a thousand seat hall for you just because you don't want to play a small 150 seat club. If a promoter can make money off the gig, he'll book you in whatever place you want, as long as you can sell enough tickets. But in the States, their big challenge is the sheer mass of people in the place. To play everywhere takes a long time. So you have local, regional stars that take the occasional trip outside their base. SOmetimes they grow the audience, sometimes not.

Hercules wrote: Teaflax wrote: Yet, nearly all niche genres have seen a resurgence and greater overall market share since the advent of file sharing. The amount of Prog released in 2008 easily dwarfs the entire output of the genre from 1970-1975, I would wager. This might be true (I very much doubt it) but the number of units sold is miniscule by comparison.

Probably true, but my point is that there's obviously something about the way the playing field has changed that has allowed for a greater number of niche acts to get their product out there. That they're not selling like Genesis or Yes at the time is sort of irrelevant (especially since that really was an historical anomaly of monumental proportions)

Yes, some of that is due to recording costs dropping sharply in the last decade, but it's also about how the free flow of information has allowed people to garner information about music they would otherwise not be aware of. To me, whining about supposed losses due to illegal file sharing is the very definition of looking a gift horse in the mouth; the net has created major opportunities for smaller artists and allowed useful things like ProgArchives to spring up. You can't have your cake and eat it too. The one and the other are inextricably linked.

As Dean said above, casual fans are far less likely to spend money on an artist, so the logical conclusion is that art that touches people more directly, that is less of a mass-market product, should see gains from the growth of online and digital culture. I can't see that as being a bad thing at all.

Read manager Don Bartlett's email here for an example. What's needed to succeed today is to move away from a product model to a service model. And incentive to pay for something physical doesn't hurt. NIN sold out of the the 2,500 copies of the Ultra-Limited Edition of Ghosts I-IV at 300 dollars a pop in less than a week. Even assuming manufacturing costs of 150 bucks per, that's a tidy profit of 375 000 dollars.

Go read Techdirt's series on the economics of abundance and the lack of scarcity. (BTW, the system of having to manually remove the http:// from each link created on this board is insanely dumb and annoying) It makes some very  interesting points and even mentions your gut feeling below.

the idea that this whole concept of the economics of abundance makes no sense because it means the creators of content make no money and they have a right to make money for their creative output. It makes for a compelling emotional argument, but it is wrong on two major points. First, is the idea that it means creators of content can't make any money. In fact, nothing can be further from the truth.

Hercules wrote: As a (retired) professional mathematician, I'd love to see the data and methodology from the studies you quoted which demonstrate that file sharing has actually increased sales because it goes completely contrary to all my own gut instincts and the evidence of the musical fraternity. Of course these are highly reputable institutions but they are not immune to errors!

Google should be your friend in finding out how the conclusions were arrived at. I'm fairly sure Harvard, The Swedish Royal Technical College and the Norwegian School of Management have at least some of the numbers up online. It'd be odd if all of those institutions, plus the Dutch Government and Danish Music Rights Board have made errors that all make them reach similar conclusions (odder still would be if they falsified the results, as Shawn implied before he slunk away).

It becomes increasingy clear to me as I have this dicussion, here and elsewhere, that most of those who think that filesharing is a terrible danger have not really read up much on the issue, but instead just react on gut feelings and anecdotal evidence.

It's a fascinating, often counter-intuitive subject and it is a vitally important one, because it feeds into the arguments made around the many current strong pushes around the world to control and curtail the internet. So it has much larger implications than just whether artists can make a living doing what they love or not. I think people should learn to be wary of carrying water for those who would hobble the internet in the name of creative artists they never seemed to care much about before (and still don't - 20th C Fox still routinely violate subtitler's intellectual property rights, even as they crow about how important such issues are).

A sadly necessary disclaimer: I am deeply opposed to what I call immoral file sharing, i.e. enjoying people's works without making sure that they get some form of remuneration.