Tom Petty Is Pissed: And he's got plenty of good reasons [well actually only one or two]

[ejdrapes]

Found this on a newsgroup...don't have a source for it...

[freedom9]

Good tunes

[Morose Musician]

Thanks for posting it. It is an interesting article. Tom Petty addresses so many issues that it's hard to respond to just one.

CD prices are indeed too high for a lot of teenaged kids' budgets.

Despite my efforts to educate my middle school students about copyright laws, virtually all of my kids regularly download song files from the internet and burn the digital recordings onto CDs.

When they have a choice between spending seventeen dollars or virtually nothing for the music they want, they do what makes sense to them.

They do not yet have the foresight to figure out the eventual consequences of the wholesale disregard for intellectual property rights.

I hope the recording industry, as Tom suggested, will try pricing albums more reasonably so the temptation to download and burn will be less enticing.

[Dallas]

Screw Tom Petty......he's a freakin liberal.

[PatrioticAmerican]

Petty may be a liberal, but his statements here are very good.

[B Knotts]

You know, I saw a billboard in New York I wish I had photographed. It was for the TNN network. It said three words against a patriotic background of red, white and blue - BIGGER, YOUNGER, RICHER.

FWIW, I'm guessing this was targeted at advertisers, after Viacom/MTV Networks took over TNN and ruined it, changing it from the only major channel for rural Americans, into some weird pseudo-yuppie channel.

[Rocko]

Petty suckered by Gore's phony Populism.

[Afronaut]

Petty is a great AMERICAN Rock&Roller. Two Guitars bass and drums. Two great sounding guitars I might add. Seen him live 10x's at least. Great shows, good guy. I love that Rock & Roll.

Al Bore does suck though.

Maybe Marilyn Manson is more the conservative,,,

[Reaganwuzthebest]

Hey Petty was cool as a Traveling Wilbury, so we better handle him with care, even if he's a flaming liberal.

[timm22]

Petty may be a liberal, but his statements here are very good.

A few of them are pretty good, such as his stance against hip-hop lyrics and sexualizing young girls. However, his profit-phobia is kind of silly.

[Fester Chugabrew]

As the owner of a small record label dedicated to brass, jazz, and blues music I'd like to know - given the current market - what really is a fair price for a CD?

I don't want to cheapen it. Good recorded music has an inherent value. For the price of a decent dinner one can enjoy a good recording for years and years. While the costs for pressing a CD are very low, the price for promoting a CD is very high. And the sweat and passion that goes into it . . . well . . . it's worth something.

So how do we set the price? $8.95? Really? Is that the key?

[Reaganwuzthebest]

So how do we set the price? $8.95? Really? Is that the key?

Even on ebay where I have gotten some hard to find used disks I'm paying $10 or more + shipping. I don't know what a fair price could be, but $17 is pretty steep when you consider most of the disks I buy are just digital versions I've already got on vinyl. New music, forget it, it's not worth it.

Bottom line, I'd say $10 or $11 is reasonable, I know you have to make money so the music industry are the ones who should come down in price.

[giznort]

In this world of pissant sucky music, one of my few pleasures is listening to Mr. Tom Petty's music. I was saddened to see the photogs of him with Gore. But then again, I had my photog take with Dale Earnhardt without his permission. Maybe Algore horned in for a photo op with Tom! Maybe Tom told him "don't come around here no more".

[Lizard_King]

Not the case at all...that was a party for Algore thrown by all his celeb buddies, including Tom Petty, if memory serves. No one was tricked into being there, unless you are counting the delusion of socialism.

Look, I can see why any shred of apparent morality on the part of a celebrity appeals to us. But you have to look at the reasons he is saying these things. He does not want to lower cd prices because he thinks the Music cartel is unfairly monopolistic; it is just his way of reliving the 60's and expressing a general hatred of money (except when it pours in to him).

""You don't hear any more of, 'Hey, we did something creative and we turned a profit, how about that?'"

You know, the Beatles explicitly had a profit motive behind a lot of their music, (as in, "oy, paul, let's write us a new pool"). Once again, it is not the profit motive that is the evil; it is the desire to gain such a profit without producing anything of value.

"Maybe Marilyn Manson is more the conservative,,,"

Probably not, but at least Manson votes Republican.

[TheLurkerX]

I own hundreds of CD's, and in the last two years, I've bought next to none. I got good and damned tired of paying nearly 20.00 for a CD with maybe two decent singles on it. And if you like a single, you can't by it for less than 5.99 or so. I've got euro-groups whose entire albums are great. From beginning to end. It seems like here in the American industry anymore, they find a couple of tunes in a new artists material that sound like decent radio singles, promote the hell out of them, and then when you buy the album, you find out the others songs sound completely different, and all too often, the song that made the charts isn't even one the artist wanted on the album to begin with. Look at the Rembrandts and Duncan Shiek's first album. I'm sorry, but until I can listen to a CD ahead of time and find out whether it's got more than one decent song on it, and until I can buy a CD for 9.99, I'm not buying another one. Not when I can download it and listen too it first. I think that's the real bitch that the RIAA has with mp3's. You can now see what kind of crap they're peddling in it's entirety before they can bamboozle you into buying it.

[LurkerNoMore!]

Free falling bump

[zeaal]

Maybe at the time no one had presented the Republican Platform to him for him to compare and say, "Hey, I think I am a Republican." Its about education.

[College Repub]

Exactly. Department stores let you try on clothes before buying them. Computer stores let you fiddle with the pc before buying. Yet the recording industry expects you to buy cds without hearing what's on them and then not accepting returns on opened cds???

[Dallas]

Nahhh...Tom Petty, and Bon Jovi had their lips firmly planted on OwlGore's ass all during the 2000 election cycle.......screw em.

[Orangedog]

As the owner of a small record label dedicated to brass, jazz, and blues music I'd like to know - given the current market - what really is a fair price for a CD?

I was one of the early-adopters of CD's in the mid 80's, back when the CD rack (yes, one SMALL rack) was dwarfed by vinyl and cassettes. $10.99 was the highest price for a single CD and most were $8.99 and $9.99. That was kind of high for the day, but then there were only 2 or 3 places in the country could make CD's. But the quality was much better than the alternatives, so I payed it. Now it costs pennies to make and package one, and they charge twice as much.

When CD's started costing me $16, $17 and $18 I quit buying them. I bought quite a few of the 3" CD's because I wasn't going to spend close to $20 for one good song and 10 tracks of over-produced crap, but the small CD's are hard to find for the music I want. I do download and burn my own CD's, but it's almost exclusively older stuff that I baught on cassette years ago and have since worn-out.

I'll still buy an occasional CD...but it has to be a damn good CD for what the industry is charging. Napster and all of it's bastard step-children have the potential to really revolutionize the distribution end of music. Keep the charge per track reasonable and everyone wins. The consumer gets just the music they want at a fair price without paying for pretty packaging and retail mark-ups, and the industry can completely eliminate the money they spend on cranking out the CD's, packaging them, shipping, loss to defects and damage in transit...we're talking about a lot of money!