Will piracy kill off prog rock ?

Dean wrote: If a 10,000 people stole

Sharing is not stealing, with downloading you actually make your own personally copy (copying is multiplying rather than taking a physical object away).

Dean wrote: But if 100 people steal from (say) Pseudo/Sentai that's a different matter, they are not on their way to selling 37 million copies of their CD, so that's $500 missing from Greg's bottom-line. And that's not fine at all.

Dean wrote: Record companies are not monsters, they are a business. The purpose of a business is to make money, selling music is how they do that. A record label is not a public service, it is a factory for making a product. You may not like the idea of "Art" as a commodity but that is how it has always been, you make something and sell it, simple commerce - that's how it works, it worked for Mickey Angelo, it worked for Johnny Seb Bach and it worked for Billy S Burroughs - even worked for Vinney van Gogh who would barter paintings for a bowl of bouillabaisse at the Café du Tambourin. If you can sell your art you can eat.

Art is about self expression,.not about just selling products.

Michael Angelo worked for hire and got paid once for each thing that he made, not again and again.

John Sebastian Bach had several day jobs (kapellmeister, organist, music teacher, if you couldn't improvise he wouldn't have you as his student), making his many compositions (of which presumably only a quarter survived, the manuscripts were divided among his surviving children of which only one was careful with them).

Vincent van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime and the buyer bought it out of pity.

He lived for a big part off his brother's money.

The business-side of music exists for about a century or so.

Before that composer were employed by the king, archbishop, pope etc and they were paid one (and only once) per composition if their employer liked it.

A bunch of composers in the past (and most likely in the present) still have a job to pay their bills and in their spare time they write their music.

Gustav Holst was a music teacher and Charles Ives had his own insurance company.

Erik Satie was a bar pianist.

Neurosis have a day job.

Dean wrote: The way music companies works seems unfair and in some ways it was, but not in every way. The label funded the recording and production, it paid for the manufacture and distribution and recouped that outlay on sales. If the record didn't sell they lost money... the company lost money not the artist, who invariably kept the advance (ie a loan in advance of sales) the company paid them. That lost money came from the profits they made on all the successful albums they also made.

If the band can pay it back, the label recoups their investment, if not, the band is let go.

In the meantime the big bulk of any profits has already entered the deep pockets of the record label.

Especially the big labels (of which there are now about 3 or 4, used to be 6 a few mergers ago) do all they can to screw their artists any way they can.

So the band gets to pay for the recording of their album but the copyright of that album is for the record label (Kudos to Robert Fripp for standing up against that).

Indie labels like InsideOut will be much fairer and several of the bands on that label have their own studios in which they record parts (if not everything) of their albums.

Dean wrote: Today it doesn't work like that because we broke the music business, now the music business couldn't give a flying fart about esoteric music and niche markets like Prog because we broke it. Now the artist has to pay for everything, up front and out of their own pocket, the modern equivalent of the record label (Bandcamp, Soundcloud) pays for nothing. What do we get for that? Artist integrity? Think again. Every musician needs to eat  Prog on, Sign in, Log out

In 1977 Warner Brothers had a problem with one of his songs (Punky's Whips on Zappa In New York) which resulted in a bunch of lawsuits which FZ won and thus he won back all the rights on his albums included all the tapes (which in turn resulted in whole bunch of really crappy releases of his stuff in the 80's and 90's).

Sure, musicians may make money off their music but the natural right to share (not to mention universal humsn rights like privacy) should not be thrown out of the window because of archaic, outdated business models.

An insane sense of entitlement (“I'm the great so-and-so and I used to be famous 40 years ago so I still deserve a yearly income of some ridiculous amount of money”) should not be rewarded by bad legislation.

unclemeat69 wrote: < ="text/"> Dean wrote: If a 10,000 people stole Sharing is not stealing, with downloading you actually make your own personally copy (copying is multiplying rather than taking a physical object away). Dean wrote: But if 100 people steal from (say) Pseudo/Sentai that's a different matter, they are not on their way to selling 37 million copies of their CD, so that's $500 missing from Greg's bottom-line. And that's not fine at all. Where does that $500 missing come from? Is that a 'lost sale for every download'? That crap has been debunked already.

Only in your head it has.

Your argument is a fallacy designed to appease your own conscience, it fools no one. This line of thinking isn't even smart enough to be classed as specious. If something is sold for a price and you take it without paying then that is theft whether there is a physical object or not. There is no physical money in my bank account but if you hack it and transfer everything to your account you have stolen my money. If I write a book and send it to you to proof read but you then take a copy and publish it under your own name before sending back you have stolen from me. 

If I make an album, burn it onto a 50¢ CDR and sell it for $10 do you then demand that CD for 50¢ as the music therein has cost me nothing to reproduce? 

If all you wanted was the physical object then you could go to a hardware store and buy a CDR for 50¢, but that is not what you want is it.. you want the music not the physical CDR and if you want it you will pay $10. 

So now if you steal that CD have you stolen $10 or 50¢? Obviously its the $10 because the blank CDR is only worth 50¢ and we've already established that if it was only the physical object you wanted you could buy that for 50¢ at a hardware store. 

But what if you take that CDR, copy it and hand it back, what have you in your possession that you didn't have before? My music of course which, as we have already determined, is worth $9.50 to you because you would have happily paid $10 for a 50¢ CDR, so my music must be the $9.50 "value added" to that 50¢.

So lets now remove the 50¢ CDR from the equation. You want my music, it's going to cost you $9.50. If you take it without my permission you now have something in your possession that you didn't have before. It is theft. there is no pretty way to justify it, there is no excuse you can make, there is no justification you can use. You have something in your possession that you did not pay for.

I cannot be arsed to reply to the rest of your comments, you opinion is based upon a flawed premiss so does not interest me.