Will piracy kill off prog rock ?

Davesax1965 wrote: One from npinho73 -  "<span style="line-height: 14.3999996185303px; : rgb248, 248, 252;">Of course bands soul less records than a few years ago, but they have more concerts and more people talking about them now and it´s because of that. </span><span style="line-height: 14.3999996185303px; : rgb248, 248, 252;"> "</span> <span style="line-height: 14.3999996185303px; : rgb248, 248, 252;"></span> <span style="line-height: 14.3999996185303px; : rgb248, 248, 252;">Er, no. Beforehand, you recorded albums, and the sale of the album funded a live gig. Now, you can't get the working capital to do a live gig, it's incredibly expensive, you have to generate sales and interest, hire venues, PA's - then five people and a dog turn up as it's "prog rock" and not mass market. Established bands can just about get away with it, but they only just break even, making money from sales of merchandise. New bands ? - can't even afford CD or vinyl releases. Sorry to have to mention this but I'm a musician, take it from the horses' mouth, honestly. </span>

I hear you Davesax,
Good point, even when a musician manages to self fund the cd production, it is very difficult to sell enough to break even with the costs. Not easy, most do this for the love of music while having another day job.
Hugs    

npinho73 wrote: No. In my opinion "piracy" make prog rock reach to persons who don´t have the possibilites to know a gropu or album in other way. I gave you my example, if wasn´t for "piracy" i almost for sure never have listened to Van Der Graaf Generator, or Flower Kings, and maybe never had the chance to know Riverside an others. So in my opinion "piracy" is good for prog rock, in fact is good to all kinds of music. Of course bands soul less records than a few years ago, but they have more concerts and more people talking about them now and it´s because of that.

Piracy is no excuse for that nowadays, there are lots of legal streaming services you can use to discover music before buying them, and even if they don't receive much from it, it's still more supportive than illegal downloads (those three artists you mencioned are on Spotify by the way)

How much more prog concerts do you see in our country?

rogerthat wrote: Not to mention that the price differential between CDs and tapes was massive.  I know a lot of Western art music snobs look down on tapes but they were popular in third world countries precisely because they were so affordable.  Music at some price is better than no music at all, at the end of the day.  We could get brand new cassettes of film soundtracks in India for no more than a dollar at most in the 90s but the CD version of the same would cost at least $4-5.  That was too much of a premium, no matter the superior performance delivered by the CD. Today, CDs are sold for as low as $1.5 or $2 at the most.  And that's without taking into account inflation so that tells you how costly CDs were in the 90s.  Costly mistake.  First pirated mp3s came into the market, offering the same songs for a much lower price.  It was until the late noughties or so that music labels here responded with legit mp3 CDs but by then, it was too late.  Today they release soundtracks on Itunes simultaneously with the physical version but it takes a big name composer like Rahman to guarantee healthy sales.

Yep.  Western music CDs are around $10 or more generally.  Sometimes can pick them up for as low as $5 if they have been in stock too long without takers. 

I'm curious to know how many people have a copy of the Beatles 'White Album', or better known as the Esher demos, on a bootleg of some type?

You can be curious but you cannot ask (Rule 5)

Honestly I think it's a sort of dark ages for artists right now. Prog or otherwise doesn't matter.
Established names can keep going because they have a fanbase who'll reach for their pockets anyhow.
But honestly, do you think we would have seen Opeth, Porcupine Tree and others become what they are now if they hadn't been so lucky to pre-date illegal downloading by just a couple of years?

They may not have made much money in those early days but somehow they garnered just enough interest for a record label to believe in them and keep them going.

The newt PT and Opeth of the last decade? I haven't seen them. Maybe they are out there, maybe they are even better, but how can they break through now? how are they supposed to sponser a decent recording?

Spotify and Bandcamp? Sjee.. I won't repeat what Dean explained so profoundly.

For myself, downloading / streaming / youtube has been really good for me myself and I.
At the end of the 90s I was fed up with buying (disappointing) CDs that I bought based on one track heard on the radio or a quick listen in the recordshop.
Around 2000 that changed entirely and since then I am a happy buyer of around 50 cds a year, nearly all of them after thorough listening to the availalble channels.

15 years later it looks like this has been a very short-term advantage...
If there are new artist there worth my time then I'm not finding them and when I do by chance I only get frustrated as they get virtually no sales/attention/money meaning they'll probably give up years before they could have developped into something really fantastic.
In case of PT and Opeth we might have been stuck with their first two albusm or so, imagine what a waste of talent that would have been)

PS. If you don't like PT or Opeth, feel free to substitute with Dream Theatre, Radiohead, IQ or whatever makes your day.



Edited by Bonnek - October 02 2014 at 11:18

Windhawk wrote: I'll be tossing in a few numbers here, pulled from the publication "Recording Industry in Numbers"- an annual publication by IFPI documenting the economic health of the music business. These numbers are from the 2012 edition, covering sales years up to 2011. I'll use 2011 as the selected year, and select a key number from three specific nations for comparison: Sweden (home of Pirate Bay), Netherlands (where downloading for personal use was legal until earlier this year) and Belgium (next door neighbor to Netherlands which should be directly comparable to the Netherlands due to that). The key figure I'm looking at is the average amount of money spent per person on buying music. Which is a figure that should be fairly relevant when talking about the effects of piracy. And the figures are puzzling. Sweden: 16,3 US dollars Netherlands: 14,3 US dollars Belgium: 12,9 US dollars In the "pirate friendly" nations the revenue per person on music is actually higher than in the control country that isn't as pirate friendly. All three countries are on comparable levels in terms of Gross Domestic Product per capita as well, ranging from 37600 for Belgium to 42300 for The Netherlands, Sweden in between with 40600. One would expect the situation to be rather different, that the "pirate friendly" nations in general and Netherlands in particular to have a substantially lower amount of money spent on music per citizen as long as downloading was actually legal in that country in 2011. Does anyone have any logical explanations for these numbers?

Meltdowner wrote: I have to agree with him to one point: the prog selection here is lousy. I've never seen a VDGG or Rush album on any record store I visited; not even a Supertramp album (only single compilations). Sure we can buy them on-line (and that's pratically the only way I do nowadays), but it's more difficult to get into prog when you can't find anything localy

Edited by Dean - October 02 2014 at 12:27