Meet the new boss, David Lowery tackles the internet and the past while Ted Lucas gets past around

You're otm about university libraries being awesome. I have spent some time reading goofy lit crit.

"bullshit library sales"

this is the only time i go to the library.

the sea rabbit! an underwater rabbit squad? awesome.

As as bullshit library sales:

My library in Iowa City had a n awesome collection of Jazz vinyl and Comedy lps. checked out record after record for years. But some idiot decided that vinyl was dinosaur so we should sell off the whole collection for 10 cents an album, first come first served.

Sure that's great for the one jobless prick who showed up first and snagged everything good, and probably sold it online. (I'm still murderous toward some of the swine I witnessed at these sales.) But it screwed everyone like me who actually used the library as a resource.

Fuck library sales.

As far as

and scott if you only go to the library when there's a sale then we are not of the same species.

LPs take up a lot of space and are probably more prone to getting warped and damaged -- it's probably way too burdensome to keep a collection up, and is probably a great argument for piracy as a social good.

i mean i'd sure feel ethically better about stealing some mp3s than having checked out a super-rare record and left it in the sun, ruining it for everyone else.

yeah the whole let's-get-rid-of-all-of-our-vinyl rush was regrettable.

that said, huge academic library i use has literally 10,000s of LPs, still. and you can check them out. BOOM.

x-post then everyone in the community is forced to download rather than check out, because you can't keep your shit out of the sun?

that's essentially what happened. sorry vinyl dudes.

i asked one of my classes of incoming freshman how many of them had physically gone into a library and checked out a book and about 40% said they hadn't.

The university library staff goes "Look, our only customer!" whenever I check out books. All students use it for is to get study rooms and laptops.

it's better than that. rich people (and aspirational people who also think libraries are 'icky') don't go to libraries.

Don't any of you guys have kids? The small branch library near me is full of people all the time, probably 75% parents with little kids, 15% high-school aged kids, 10% old people reading the paper. Plenty of these folks are rich, too.

i'm pretty firmly on the side of vinyl on the 'which sounds better' debate but on 'which format is melt-resistant and seems to be built for the near-sole purpose of pirating to anyone who wants to listen to it' digital wins.

i'd argue that the prevalence of digital helped save the existing vinyl collections because the people who tend to check them out aren't just trying to hear the music, but care about the whole experience, and therefore take better care of the stuff. pre-napster, all the records I ever checked out were scratched up to hell.

yeah it sucks that people went to a sale and...bought stuff.

'Plenty of these folks are rich, too.'
If they were rich they'd just buy the thing they wanted instead of fighting with a family who canceled their blockbuster membership for the latest pixar dvd.

x-post stuff that other people could have checked out and enjoyed

i'm not blaming the buyers but the sellers

"and scott if you only go to the library when there's a sale then we are not of the same species."

oh yeah i know we aren't it's okay i just have a disorder. my disorder involves libraries, schools, and museums. won't go into it here. done that on ilx before and i regret it. i'm not here to bum people out.

how much did you buy the stuff for? ten cents? fifty cents? i'm sure that went a long way towards helping the library buy new shit.

one of my fondest memories in college was listening to phillip glass' "music with changing parts" on vinyl at the library. we weren't allowed to exit with LPs so they had to be listened to in this library. only annoying part is the piece is supposed to be one hour-long track, so this got chopped up into 4 sides of vinyl.

LPs take up a lot of space and are probably more prone to getting warped and damaged -- it's probably way too burdensome to keep a collection up, and is probably a great argument for piracy as a social good.

Seriously dumb shit right here

occasionally i buy a book from abe or thriftbooks or something & it turns out to be an ex-libris copy. it's always really nice, to have, adds another dimension, comes with the imprimatur of ILLINOIS STATE COLLEGE or something & then i remember that whenever you buy a second hand book & find it's from a library collection it means that a small library died, like when you say you don't believe in fairies.

yeah, it's not likecwhenever a library sells off a book or an pl, it offers a digital download of said item to its patrons. the item goes from public to private, which is suck.

re: dumb shit
why is it dumb? you want as many people as possible who want to to listen to this stuff -- that's the point of having the LPs there at a library -- the lower the costs, the more easily that goal is achieved.

pl=lp

i remember that whenever you buy a second hand book & find it's from a library collection it means that a small library died

Naw, it could mean that they just got rid of old stuff to make room or something.

yeah they get rid of old stuff all the time. if they didn't they would have to keep building new buildings or something.

i don't mind libraries selling stuff, just when they sell ALL their stuff (i.e. the entire lp collection.)

Most of the initial article makes some sense, but this seems odd:

The fact that artists are spending much less TIME recording can only mean they have less money or expect to make less money.

Couldn't at least part of the explanation be that artists record on their own equipment, on time that doesn't equal money in such a literal sense?

Full album sharing of in-print music is very weird to me. But I wonder what this guy would think of O.O.P. stuff being shared--or with a track being used in a mix, rather than an entire album being given away. Of the dozens of artists/labels with whom I came in contact with when making/distributing the '1981' box (a few hundred physical copies, probably a few thousand "copies" in equivalent downloads) only one was unsuportive and asked to be removed from the project. It seems like most artists might know the difference between theft and promotion, on the internet. I'm not sure if listeners do, though--I hear young people regularly say things like "who buys music anymore," even people who make music themselves. Whereas I bet a lot of us whose music-geek years straddle the pre- and post-file-sharing eras download stuff--but then go buy it, if it's any good. And probably subconsciously we assume others do the same, which is contrary to all of the evidence Lowery presents.

Which artist was unsupportive? Was it Prince?

same thought i had .

president keyes libraries actually have a pretty good handle on what they need to have in their collections to serve their community/patron base (and they need to in the face of budget cuts and crumbling infrastructure and lack of $$ for collections in general)--go to a library director and act all pissy that they ditched a bunch of jazz lps that took up space, barely circulated, and weighed a fucking ton and (s)he would be gracious not to laugh you out of the friggin' room

you mean they took up the space underneath the CD racks--space they never filled with anything else. i suppose they were heavy when they lugged them out to the parking lot of sell, but otherwise no. yeah, i work in a library and i do get pissy about the stuff we get rid of, and the decisions are not always good ones, usually some suit wants to see some progress into the digital age. libraries should be about dust and mold.

Uh oh librarian fight...

My local library was great for CDs growing up although their selection was quite weird - some indie/alt. stuff, lots of AOR type things like '90s Jackson Browne albums - ok, fair enough but then they'd have Black Sabbath's Born Again and two copies of Deicide's second album and no other metal whatsoever.

At my university libary you could hire out films on VHS, which was great but they also had - bearing in mind this was the turn of the millennium - laserdiscs.

Which artist was unsupportive? Was it Prince?

― robert mcnamara in reverse (loves laboured breathing), Saturday, June 23, 2012 9:39 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha! Never heard from Prince. . .

It was actually one of the most totally obscure artists on the box, for whom the ~500 or so people who heard it initially and then the couple thousand who would've heard it online might have doubled the number of people who had ever heard their music. But that's totally their right, obviously--ethically as well as legally. I was just glad most people I talked with understood I wanted to help artists, not hurt them. (Or they just didn't give a shit about such a tiny thing, at least not enough to sue me. . .)

The fact that I'm currently in the middle of something like thousands of librarians (or it feels like it) here at the annual ALA convention makes this discussion very amusing -- and relevant, these are all very much hot issues in terms of archiving, storage, digital collections and much more. Will be hanging with a couple of very smart librarian friends for dinner and if we get into this discussion at all I'll post some thoughts later.

Not sure i want to read something that makes liberal use of the word "Digerati".

ned: be sure to post details on the ALA after-after-party too, if you know what i mean.

Dave Allen of Gang of Four fame craps on Lowery's claims[/url].

The constant whining by David Lowery (this isn’t the first time) proves only that, whether he knows it or not, he doesn’t understand the Internet and how people use it (more on this later in the post.) Like many, many people who have had their lives or businesses upended by the Internet, his nostalgia runs so deep he wants everything to be the way it used to be. Ain’t gonna happen. If he looked long and hard in the mirror he might confess to himself that the way it used to be was a tragedy for the majority of musicians, and probably not that great for himself either, as his bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, like Gang of Four, were not exactly in the upper echelons of fame. We scraped out a living by touring and yes, David, selling T-shirts. The adage that musicians always pay back the mortgage to the labels but never own the house is entirely true in so many cases. We can’t blame the Internet for that.

This is where Lowery outlines his case. I take issue with it in its entirety because Lowery is attempting to solve the wrong problem. He is attempting in the present to solve a problem of the past – lack of music sales; ergo, damage to musicians income levels or lack thereof since the advent of the Internet. (Oddly he doesn’t mention that the music industry is most likely the only industry to ever, ever, sue its own customers. An inconvenient truth.) He even lays out in fine detail how much Emily would owe if she’d paid for all of her music (most of which came from the labels as “promos”. Once again Lowery doesn’t mention how music writers and radio DJ’s sold those promos to record stores..just saying.) He then asks her to cough up the dough for starving musicians.

He also rather insensitively points out, while undermining his argument, that “the average income of a musician that files taxes is something like 35k a year w/o benefits.” That’s almost $10k more than the current US median wage. There are around 8 million unemployed people here in the USA, many without a place to call home, who would gladly take that income. I find him so condescending that I want to break something right now.

http://www.north.com/latest/the-internet-could-care-less-about-your-mediocre-band/

dave allen sounds like a guy completely resigned to trading one unfair system for another; not the best look imo

I wouldn't think so either, but I didn't really have a huge problem with that excerpt.

dude is a serious whiner

reassuring to know we're still divided

xxp read the whole piece

reading in his archives allen's angle seems to be that musicians need to be responsible for some amorphous 360-degree "branding strategy" so they can be the fittest survivors of the internet, or something. but it seems like he would just stare blankly if you asked him straight-up with people should be obligated to pay for recorded music, if enforcability were out of the equation.

that ad exec who used to be in a situationist-marxist punk band is gung-ho about branding and kinda vague about an individual's duty to pay for stuff? weird.

tbf i don't know what his current job is, nor have i stayed up to date with him, nor do i really care about his band, so this is all news to me!

sounds like a super-cool dude tho!

definitely had a more interesting political platform than Cracker fwiw.