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

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.

pretty lol when he goes on about mediocre bands needing to get out of the way!

The Camper Van Beethoven bashing is sort of sad-making, actually. Having read the comments to Allen's piece, I'm craving a graphic of a cowboy saying to an indian, "I am very proud of the mobile-first beer finder I helped launch for Deschutes Brewery."

^^^ For all the "YOUR BAND SUXXORZ" at Lowery's expense in the responses, I bet more people on the street would recognize "Low" before any song from the Gang of Four catalog.

oh unquestionably

Not around here they wouldn't.

fact: there are more people on the street in america than in the uk

factor in those that would recognise neither..

My sympathies in this debate are with Lowery, but as all these elderly men – Lowery, Lefsetz, Allen – weigh in, there's an increasing feeling of bald men fighting over a comb, with increasing viciousness, while most of the world wonders what the fuck those old crazies are doing.

yeah but if you read ilx you really can't throw stones

I'm cool with Lowery guilting a kid who writes blog posts about how they've never spent a dime on music and blame it on a lack of catering. I'm cool with Travis Morrison mocking David Lowery for pretending "kids today" don't have the same respect for artists' rights as previous generations. I'm also cool with Dave Allen pointing out other bits of malarkey in Lowery's rant. But then I read ILX so I'm obviously down to hear some grumpy dudes talk confidently about The Music Industry and its ills.

i'm sick of all these people. that's my grumpy dude on the internet endgame.

i was talking about a band i like on facebook and this band only put out two hard to find/obscure 7 inch EPs and within a day someone who wasn't even facebook friends with me sent me a dropbox link or whatever on my facebook with files of the two EPs that they had remastered(!) and files of the cover art. things move fast these days. i had to pretend to be thankful. but i never listen to music files on a computer so it was kinda lost on me.

That reminds me of the time someone emailled me the lyrics of "Do the Standing Still" by The Table, the day after I had played it in the car stereo, and despite my not actually talking (or posting) about it at all!

im sure this has been said elsewhere on ilx and the internet so forgive me cause i have been off the net but lowerys letter to an lost intern makes a p good if obvious ethical point in a comically ott sloppy manner, like yeah the internet did not kill yr friends and is there any evidence that downloadin caused all of the industry decline etc, but really the worst part is that he assumes that because this problem is a moral one the solution must be moral too when obvs just like taxing iphones is a thing that could actually produce irl $$$

ho wait the dismemberment plan guy is 'Director of Commercial Production, The Huffington Post'

http://www.north.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/npr_emily_white_dave_allen.jpeg

this is the most morally indefensible thing thats appeared itt tho

what
barriers?
do WE
encounter

NORTH is a compass pointed forward. Part ad agency, part creative boutique, part crash-pad for artists, designers, film makers, bloggers, bands and big-thought thinkers. Unlike older paradigms, we not only strategize and conceive stuff, we usually draw it, film it, score it, tweet it and construct it too. In the vernacular: We eliminate the middle man and pass the passion on to you. Peruse this site and glimpse what this more collaborative, agile, streamlined approach can yield.

no thank you

Lol yea. "You can download all the free music your hard drive can store but first you have to read through two years' worth of blog posts about audience synergy and the magic of 'branding'."

NORTH is a compass pointed forward.

no, actually it is a compass pointed....north

lol @ "know your competition" [drawing of guy with 'hello my name is competitor' nametag]

Lol yea. "You can download all the free music your hard drive can store but first you have to read through two years' worth of blog posts about audience synergy and the magic of 'branding'."

― robert mcnamara in reverse (loves laboured breathing), Monday, June 25, 2012 10:05 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

makes mid-90s sam goody prices seem like a str8-up bargain

Weak when people continually call out the record industry as the only group that sues its own customers, as much as I find the practice unseemly. I wouldn't call people downloading music for free "customers," just consumers in the most general sense. And for sure they're not the only people getting in trouble for taking something without paying for it.

Again, not wanting to defend the RIAA or whatever, but it's sort of to our benefit that they have no other real recourse. A 7/11 clerk can just call the police. Record industry forced to burn-bridges and make a mockery of itself by playing whack-a-mole. It's like an abused blind dog that now snaps at everything within reach.

This actually surprised me, even though it's as bogus an indicator as anything else that's been trotted out (multiple editions of things, etc.):

Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #54,582 in Music

Entertainment
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #64,980 in Music

Is it the term "branding" you lot find offensive or just the idea that selling music is a business and therefore impure?

i find allen's new-agey adspeak offensively vapid and hollow

But his point about your band needing an identity is valid.

i don't really know what that means

This actually surprised me, even though it's as bogus an indicator as anything else that's been trotted out (multiple editions of things, etc.):

Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #54,582 in Music

Entertainment
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #64,980 in Music

― dlp9001, Monday, June 25, 2012 10:51 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

Kerosene Hat
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,778 in Music

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.

pretty sure this 100% not true

To summarize the summary of the summary, people are a problem:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2012/06/digital_music_arguments.php

Right, that's sorted.