what happens if SOPA passes?

A: Rolling Regional Thug Thread will take place in Petco parking lot after hours (boom-boxes provided).

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metal-archives.com is gone for the day! this'll be the first time I go 24 w/o using it in years!

I shld really buy a non US domain for ILX, just in case. Us foreign websites can't take no chances.

No Rateyourmusic today either, which isn't a terrible loss, but I've been using it to track what I listen to.

is the .ilx TLD still available?

French Wikipedia is so quaint

do we need a way to ensure that people can be artists full-time?

Until piratebay starts torrenting booze, inebriated members of the opposite sex, and the atmosphere of a dimly lit bar, perhaps artists can play live shows.

right, but the $ in live music is never gonna make up for the losses from recorded music

It was my understanding that a lot of ppl make the majority of their money touring or at least as much as they make from sales of their work.

that's probably true today but people were playing live music before record sales so the only 'new revenue' is from people who go to live music events today and wouldn't have before.

it's kind of silly to turn back the clock to before people sold any records at all, a MUCH smaller percentage of people were playing music at any kind of professional level back then

also they were largely poor/itinerant and dead before the age of 50

touring is often p horrible and money losing for small bands fyi, esp w/gas prices now

also let's not pretend like live music hasn't changed drastically - the narrowing of venues to bars, large clubs and arenas is totally different from the economic environment of, say, the 20s and 30s where bands could be booked for multi-date engagements at a variety of clubs. If you wanted to dance, you're only option was live music, often provided by a band playing multiple sets a night for several weeks in a row. Nowadays clubs just hire DJs for that shit.

also also also touring is RIDICULOUSLY expensive now with the price of gas, increase in food prices, etc. the odds that a band can survive and make it to the next gig on $200 or whatever are really low.

haha yeah I didn't want to be the one to bring that up, but the costs of transportation are only gonna rise over the years xp

yeah i think you have to hit a certain tipping point where "this many people will show up for you in any major city" before it's anything other than an expensive hobby, and that bar is probably getting higher every year now

it would be pretty interesting to figure out what that exact point is, although maybe it would vary hugely depending on the type of venues, type of band, how good they are with money, etc.

Meantime we might as well update a bit here -- the protests actually seem to be doing some good, both Rubio and Cornyn have pulled their sponsorships in the Senate.

also how big the band is - duos are easier to feed/move than an 8-piece ensemble for ex.

xp

fwiw I totally do not give a shit about SOPA or PIPA and don't care if they pass or not, getting really irritated by all the righteous indignation of the tech people in my social circle

like one dude was complaining about FBI warnings on DVDs. really dude.

maybe we'll get (big) bands doing simulcasts of their shows to theaters like they do with opera now

xps

Listening to Mike Doughty (the ex-Soul Coughing frontman) talk about this stuff is pretty interesting. At one point this guy was a rock star with a record deal and a few hits on MTV, and wound up having to take a day job to get by anyway. Now, much less famous, playing smaller shows, and in the era of filesharing (which he famously said "saved his life"), he's finally able to support himself. I mean the new "no money in record sales" enviroment sucks but it sounds much better than what the majors would do to you

basically this is just economic/political warfare between mega-rich corporations trafficking in free content (Google, etc.) and formerly mega-rich corporations trafficking in paid content. both sides are reprehensible.

xp

I mean the new "no money in record sales" enviroment sucks but it sounds much better than what the majors would do to you

lol the scale is vast these generalizations are meaningless

...and smaller bands will just skype from one shithole basement to another. the future!

xp2myself

like for all the bands that got fucked by a major label, there were guys like Neil Young who were nurtured by major labels and turned into bazillionaires

he probably would have made good music even if he weren't a bazillionaire

or he might have made one record and died in obscurity

well one story then is management one day looked at the books and wondered why there was a "nurture neil young" budget line and got rid of it

I'd say the chances of a musical genius dying in obscurity today are lower than they were 40 years ago

xp: Old man, take a look at my accounts

and what are you basing that on exactly iatee

he would have, but it would have been different. we shouldn't pretend that they height of the major label system didn't afford artists (some artists) a scale and freedom to do things they couldn't have done otherwise.

for example, "tonight's the night" by neil is one of my favorite albums, but i think it could never have been made without funding, or made by someone that wasn't a rich rock star

basically what i'm saying is all the crazy bloat and waste and excess and stupidity created an atmosphere where certain things could happen, and more importantly, they meant something different specifically because of who these people were and the pedestal they were put on.

and what are you basing that on exactly iatee

the fact that mass distribution in the internet age isn't inherently limited to a small % of people who make music

Cool what does Mike have to say about all this?

Major labels have been ripping off artists for decades, and seldom do artists make money from record sales. The people making music that earn a living wage off record sales is probably close to the number of people earning a living wage off playing professional sports.

Licensing is where all the real money is, so maybe the best hope for artists is to combat piracy of the movies/tv shows/commercials that may one day feature their music.

getting really irritated by all the righteous indignation of the tech people in my social circle

Well, sure, the example you chose to cite about FBI warnings is rmde, but I think there is actually a lot of justified indignation about this bill and it irritates me to people be so casual about it. As it stands right now, these bills go well beyond just pirating music and can impact quite a bit of how the internet gets used. Like I understand if you don't want to care, but I don't think you should be dismissive of people who are following this very closely and do give a shit.

like for all the bands that got fucked by a major label, there were guys like Neil Young who were nurtured by major labels and turned into bazillionaires

seems like there are so much more in the former category. from the labels' perspective selling 20 million of one album is so much better than selling a half million of 40 different albums by 40 different artists so obviously the way they treat those two groups are going to be drastically different

Like I get that people itt are just "well it'll be harder to pirate music now", but that is a dangerously reductive view of these bills.

basically what i'm saying is all the crazy bloat and waste and excess and stupidity created an atmosphere where certain things could happen, and more importantly, they meant something different specifically because of who these people were and the pedestal they were put on.

yeah I'm pretty sure the era of the mega-blockbuster album is over, but the system that creates that seems to do way more harm than good

besides, the cost of getting certain types of sounds/instruments on your album is probably way down from Neil's heyday, but I guess I'm not really sure what you're referring to here

same w/ the cost of drugs

1) these bills aren't going to pass, they were never going to pass
2) programmers/hackers would have just found ways around this shit, like they always do
3) righteous indignation about the right to pirate DVDs, MP3s, etc is nagl

xp

the cost of getting certain types of sounds/instruments on your album is probably way down from Neil's heyday,

this is absolutely 100% not true

Shakey you are impossible to argue with on this. Like I've said multiple times now, the bills aren't just about illegally downloading music and movies.

like I said, it really depends on what exactly he's talking about here

it's terrible bill and i don't think it's going to pass, and if it does it won't have the draconian DNS stuff in it IMO

basically what i'm saying is all the crazy bloat and waste and excess and stupidity created an atmosphere where certain things could happen, and more importantly, they meant something different specifically because of who these people were and the pedestal they were put on.

yeah I'm pretty sure the era of the mega-blockbuster album is over, but the system that creates that seems to do way more harm than good

besides, the cost of getting certain types of sounds/instruments on your album is probably way down from Neil's heyday, but I guess I'm not really sure what you're referring to here

― frogbs, Wednesday, January 18, 2012 11:54 AM (36 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

tonight's the night isn't a mega-blockbuster, it's a super ragged album that was done over a few months where neil and the band rented out a building in LA and proceeded to do drugs and drink themselves to death and then did takes at like 2AM

it's an amazing album and captures that vibe of being fucked up beyond belief and sad etc

i'm not saying the money went to like hiring orchestras and brian wilson type shit, i'm saying that it is a great album SPECIFICALLY because neil got to live like he got to live, as a fucked up rockstar coming off a huge hit album and thus the label was willing to fund his ridiculous antics and even release an amazingly non-commercial album because harvest

the album could not have been made on weeknights on a macbook before neil went to bed to go work in an HR job or something

there are plenty of musicians out there. some talented ones will always languish in obscurity. some hacks will, inexplicably and inevitably, rise to the top. a few will find their place, high or low on the musical totem, under native impulse. money has little to do with it.

~ from sensei bean's collected tritisms vol. 2 ~

Like I've said multiple times now, the bills aren't just about illegally downloading music and movies.

I know it isn't and I never said they were. Nonetheless, this is what the most panic-stricken comments about these bills have been concerned about.