Posted on 12/17/2001 10:34:47 AM PST by rustbucket
Question: What do you call 1,000 lawyers entombed on the bottom of the ocean?
Answer: A good start.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." --Henry VI
"The more I think about it, Old Billy was right, Let's kill all the lawyers--kill 'em tonight" --Eagles. "Get Over It"
The only problem with the legal profession is, it is infested with lawyers.
There are many elements that both cheapen and deaden the music industry these days. Bear in mind, the better part of the cost in CD has to do with promotional costs. While the actual manufacturing is fairly cheap, it takes a great deal of skill, time, and effort to put together a good recording and get to a place you can hear it.
As for the industry controlling our collections, they are foolish to try, especially when they do not have the means to completely prevent unauthorized duplication. You, the consumer, have the ears and the money. You can do with it as you please. Only understand that good artists need incentive to be creative.
You may want to visit a record label that understands these things. They may not give away the store, but they do support their artists as well as the end users. You'll be surprised at the lengths to which they go.
Meanwhile, I've paid full price for some fantastic CDs in my lifetime, though I cannot afford them today. Never will I kick myself for paying the price, but I'd sure kick myself if I paid for what passes as "free music" these days. The satisfaction and enjoyment gained from a fine recording is too great to spill guts and whine about the industry in general.
It's not even that difficult. Just run a line from the output jack on your amplifier or souncard right back into the input jack on your soundcard. The analog signal can then be capured by the soundcard and converted right back to digital in the form of a .wav or .mp3 or any format you want. Just set your recording software to record the "line in" input. Audiophiles say there is a loss of quality (there is albeit very minor) but I guarantee that 99 out of 100 people would not be able to tell any loss of quality. The sound quality would still be MUCH better than the cassettes many of us grew up listening to. With many digital audio recoding programs you don't even need to run the line. It will just capture the signal as it plays through your soundcard. CoolEdit and Soundforge both do this. You can also record audio from Realaudio or MS Media player this way. Just record it with CoolEdit as it is being played by real player. Then save it in whatever format you want. I save copies of RealAudio streams all the time this way. You could easily save copies of the Thursday night Freep Radio streams this way.
Having bought hundreds of CDs at full price (and before that hundreds of vinyl recordings), I agree with you on the value of supporting artists. (My wife is a musician, by the way.) My complaint is that the new copy-proofing may make it harder for me to use the music I bought and now own in the way I want to use it. I have no intensions of copying it for any one else. I bought a second copy of the disk some months ago and sent it to my son as a birthday present.
The music industry can do what they want, of course, but so can I, the consummer.
No just to you Jack Booted Thug types.
Some of us have no desire to control anyone else at all.
You're lying ... just by making that post indicates you're attemting to exert some control ...
At least until recently, copyright law recognized the concept of "performance rights" for musical and textual compositions, but specifically not for audiovisual transcriptions. It still recognized the concept of "duplication rights" for audiovisual transcriptions, but not performance rights.
Unless things have changed, the RIAA has no legal basis for demanding royalty payments. ASCAP/BMI might conceivably have a legal basis, except that the short musical clips heard in commercials generally either already have had license fees paid by the advertisers, or are of a nature that they could be considered "fair use".
One thug looks like another to me when it comes to shaking down the bars I frequent.
Some bands at the bars I go to sell CD-Rs of their work for less than $10. Eugene Chadbourne even changes the track list and tries to make it a "unique" package for his audience.
The Flat Duo Jets sold a cassette of older recordings (out of print). The tape carried no label, the placard on their booth said "official bootleg, help the Flat Duo Jets to steal from themselves!"
I've gone to getting CDs signed at the live shows when I buy the album from the band. Several reasons, buying from the band puts the most cash in the band's coffers (cut out the middle man), gives them cash for the road trip (food-gas-cigarettes), and getting it signed gives it an advantage if I decide that I don't like the recording as much as the live show (an added interest for someone who digs the band, not for profiteering, just to recoup my cost of the disc). So far I haven't cashed out of any of my discs but there are some albums by Japanese bands that I may get rid of at some point.
"They" say home taping is killing the record industrybut I think that really it is DIY (Do It Yourself) that could really be a factor in the coming years. The Doors, Prince, Chadbourne, and other artists have decided to issue new releases themselves and cut out the labels. They may never chart again but it wasn't like they had commercial radio airplay for these discs in the past 10 years anyway. Even a dollar a disc net can be more than some of the artist ever saw...
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