While it claims to be “the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry. Its mission is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members’ creative and financial vitality” the reality is – as is clear from its list of directors – that it represents the interests of a handful of millionaire corporate executives who are, frankly, shitting themselves at the collapse of the industry they’ve built around the distribution of physical music product.

So the RIAA – rather than looking at new models for distribution, or acknowledging the benefits of downloading for artists getting the word out – now prosecutes college kids to the tune of $22 THOUSAND… per track!

Since when was a single MP3 worth £22K? What percentage of single songs online have made $22K total, let alone can be proven to have LOST that much through downloading? Had Joel made anything from this? nope. Has anyone been damaged? Nope.

It’s pure greedy, nasty, anti-music legislative BS.

So, I’m making 3 of my albums available for free on last.fm. I was going to make them all available over the weekend, but CDBaby administers a few of my albums on there, thanks to last.fm being one of their ‘digital partners’ – maybe I’ll find some other way of giving away more music.

Whatever, the RIAA are scum. Filth. Pondlife. If I was signed to record label that were represented by them, I’d be turning up at their offices with a NOT IN MY NAME banner.

The major labels are dying. They age of charging $15 for a CD, paying 50c of it to the musicians, and keeping them in debt are over. It’s the age of the indie. So fuck the RIAA. Give some music away this weekend.

Here’ s the links to the 3 albums:

Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline Pt 1
Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline Pt 2
Lessons Learned From The Fairly Aged Felines.

Q: How nuts is that? $600,000 for downloading? Is there a single comparable area of legislation where the punishment is so insanely out of proportion to any impact the action may have had?

I’m not sure it’s ever been ‘bad’ at all, to be honest… CD sales are declining, but digital music costs so much less to manufacture and distribute that the crossover point between lower sales but increased profits will hit eventually. Hard copies are still a desired way of ‘showing allegiance’ to a band, over just downloading. Merch is doing well, gigs are doing well, and the potential for new acts finding an audience without gambling a fortune is marvellous.

It also seems to me that the decline in bit torrent traffic for music may actually be that a lot of the early adoptors have filled in their catalogue with all the stuff they wanted to start with… Anyone wanting to ‘replace’ their vinyl collection may well have downloaded gigabytes if not terabytes of music to get all the Led Zep, Queen, MJ, Abba and Beatles they ever need – check out last.fm’s charts for more on how much music listening is ‘legacy’ based…

So, there are a whole range of ways that people find music, replace music, download music, pay for music things. They’re all happening, it’s mostly good news, and we can stop worrying, yes?

But, there’s no indie stuff there, largely because none of us manage our own catalogues on there, so can’t change prices at will – CDBaby or ReverbNation or whoever did the deal, and we don’t get the vary it, generally.

However, we do on bandcamp, on cdbaby itself or on our own self-hosted MP3 sites.

SO!

This thread is for the posting of links to indie MP3 albums, which have to be under £3 UK or $5 US.

Here are the rules – read them or I’ll delete it. This is not a thread for FREE DOWNLOADS. It’s a sale-bin. If you’re on bandcamp and have pay-what-you-like or whatever, that’s fine, but if it’s just free, it doesn’t qualify… for now.

Add the link, a small description, then go and pimp the thread, so we all benefit. Hurrah!

I’ll kick things off with my 2004 album, Grace And Gratitude – it’s lots of people’s favourite album of mine, and is currently only $3.50 on CDbaby.

Click here to head over there and download Grace And Gratitude for £3.50.

Now it’s your turn… (after you’ve bought G+G )

“Virgin and Universal have signed a deal that will give the ISP’s customers access to “unlimited” music.

For a monthly fee, Virgin’s broadband customers will be able to download or stream as many MP3 files as they want.

As part of the deal, Virgin has pledged to aggressively police usage to stop the MP3 tracks turning up on file-sharing networks. ”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8100394.stm

So we pay a flat fee if we want to download music & that goes to the record company who, I’m sure, will pass it on to the musicians, presumably like subscription radio.

I can see a few problems with this, especially as artists are using the big companies less & partly because downloads aren’t exclusively saleable content but it might be a way forward.

In one of your recent posts you wrote

Hopefully it’ll finally kick me into action to make some decisions
about the kind of record (or whatever passes for a ‘record’ these
days ) I want to make.

which kind of kicked off an idea I’ve been playing with recently.

You often write about music but generally it’s about a narrow genre, that of pop & jazz. Not that it’s surprising nor in itself a bad thing as your thoughts are very insightful, and you are not alone in that way of thinking. Most people ignore the classical tradition when talking about how to market music in the modern world. Considering the smaller market, the difficulty of the works, the lack of simple tagging etc, etc “classical” music seems to be ignored by many in the press even though it spans a good 1000 years and a myriad of genres & styles.

The thing that makes this interesting is that the model used for selling & creating music before the advent of the record might now become relevant again now that music is so readily and fluidly distributed. As a record buying public and record producing musos we have become to believe that music comes in 40 minute (or with CD, 70 minute) bundles. This applies to all genres, e.g buy a 30 minute symphony and you will get a couple of filler works to pad out the CD; or recently I heard a discussion decrying some musician who had only put out a 30 minute CD & he was ripping off his CD customers for selling them short of the expected 70 minutes. This is as insane as buying a picture by it’s size or colour scheme but it wasn’t always like this was it? Before the record your budding composer would write a concerto (3 movements @ 5 minutes each) or a song (3 minutes) or a whatever took his fancy or more pertinently what he was commissioned. And this is what brings me back to your statement, perhaps the distortions of the last 50 years will go by the way as you release a song here, a suite there and are no longer bound by the recording format.

FWIW my record collection is now all on a computer and every classical CD has been broken down to the individual works as they were written, I am no longer constrained to listen to all four Mozart horn concertos when I only want one. I can pick a track from one of your excellent works or create a random play list & this is surely far more in keeping with how listening used to be (only better).

While the drift of this argument is mainly about recording/writing the models of the 19th century might equally be relevant to the way people interact with live music, after all concerts were popular, there were superstar performers but there were also well programmed concerts with a variety of music. Nowadays the music industry has programmed us to only accept the artist as a whole package that we find it hard to accept diversity. Maybe the future technology & business models will release us & you from that slavery.