If an artist is A) not super rich, B) on an indie or self-owned label, and C) his records are available where you live, is there any excuse for downloading them instead of buying them?

isn't there some government rap program that supports them?

No.

I believe anyone caught downloading music illegally should be made to kick a ball in the street for a minimum of 72 hours, just to learn about dignity and optimal social interaction.

would finnish voters be opposed to one?

I've been trying to be ethical about stealing music for the last year or so, which (to me) means something like Tuomas's premise: no stealing of music from an artist I actually care about (the vast majority of which are nowhere near 'super rich'). Unfortunately, this has meant that I have attained virtually no new music in the past year, as I am broke as a joke.

I've gotten into tons of (new to me) old music though!

Actually, some Finnish musicians do get state grants so they don't have to have a day job and can focus on making music. But rap in here is quite marginal, so I don't think any rapper might get such a grant in the near future.

How about downloading it first to see if it's worth buying? If it's bad, erase. If it's good, buy it at their next gig...

I'm fine with that, but that wasn't the question I asked.

what do finnish rappers rap about if they're not wealthy?

fish?

I think in an ideal situation musicians would be supported by the state and records would be free. But since the state can't afford to support every garage band, there'd have have to be some system of deciding which bands are good enough to deserve the state money, and that's where it gets tricky. I believe the former Soviet Union had a system like this, but there where only a handful of pop/rock bands on the government payroll.

If their music is available to buy in the format you want then you should pay. Or, download it for free but then go to one of their gigs and throw some money at them.

im more willing to "donate" to the artist (i.e. buy a cd that i already downloaded even tho i know i'm not going to do anything with the physical cd except but it on a shelf) if the artist is on a major label. especially for r&b/hip-hop, it's very likely that a label is going to look at the artist's album sales and say "well, you only sold 120,000 copies in the first month, so we didn't make any money off this record, and you probably won't be putting one out for another 2-3 years" whereas fatcat didn't look at the sales of animal collective's 'feels' and go "well, you guys only sold 6,000 copies of this record this month, so we probably won't be putting out any more animal collective albums for a few years"

what do finnish rappers rap about if they're not wealthy?

About being poor. It's actually a common subject in Finnish rap, plus most of the rappers are left-leaning.

well then you would hope they would understand my situation and the whole 'not having any money to give them' thing

which i guess i mean to say that i know that the neither a large or mid-sized indie band nor a major artist is going to make money off of my singular purchase, but that my "vote" so to speak matters much more frequently when it comes to artists on major labels than ones on indie labels

and likewise i probably won't go see the-dream for $45 bucks but i'll go see the thermals for $15

I don't buy music any more. I don't want CDs, and I didn't want downloads with DRM, which was the only way to legally get them until recently. I used to download illegally, now I mostly listen to Spotify, which is free and legal. Copyright, and today's forms of distribution, are utterly untenable in the digital age. There's probably a pretty direct correlation between the amount I spent on CDs in the pre-Internet age and the amount I spend on broadband, which enables the downloading. In other words it's the ISPs who are now making money out of music. There have been various suggestions in various countries to bundle in some kind of charge for music with ISP subscription, which I think makes some sense. As for illegal downloading, I think I'm right in saying that in Germany the high court decided it wasn't actually illegal to download, so the issue is not necessarily so legally or morally clearcut.

You let the German high court decide your morality?

(Don't worry, I SB'd myself for that)

well when have they ever let us down?

What was the German high court's reason for making downloading legal? Was it pragmatic (because it can't be stopped) or was there some actual legal / moral substance behind the decision? Because as I see it, a pragmatic decision doesn't affect the morality of the issue at all.

I may have this German business wrong, I'll google and see...

I let the Zimbabwean high court decide for me on most things.

On a related subject - http://www.itwriting.com/blog/1479-spotify-demos-mobile-music-streaming-with-offline-option-for-android.html

From some paper on copyright law:

If a user in Germany downloads a song from a file-sharing network, it is seen as a duplication – a copy of the song. If this copy is for private use, it is perfectly legal – like copying a CD or a videotape. This permission is granted by an exception to copyright ("Schrankenregelung"), resembling – not equalling – the fair use provision in US copyright law. Of course it is not allowed to sell or lend this copy, because then it would be a commercial use, which is prohibited.

It's apparently legal in the Netherlands as well.

if there a justification you can give for including (A) here Tuomas, I'd like to hear it. short of 'charity'

The justification comes from the fact that I'd like to see my favourite artists continue making music, and that's much easier if they actually can make some sort of living out of it. It's not really an issue with artists who are already super rich.

yeah I'm down with that too

In the long term, subscribing to an already collapsing system of remuneration (that never much helped smaller artists anyway) will not necessarily help your favourite artists continue to make music.

Agreed; neither will invisibly downloading their music.

The thing is that if the choice is between you illegally downloading the music and you not buying it and thus not listening to it, what would the artist prefer?

At least there is the intangible benefit of being heard and appreciated, but also the fact that you might spread the word about the music, play it to friends, blog it or whatever, and then some of those people might buy it.

Also, filesharing is NOT stealing (theft) in UK law at least. It's copyright infringement*. Morally it's completely different to stealing the artist's print, as he then has one less to sell to more scrupulous art lovers. There is no unit cost to the musician of each mp3 illegally downloaded.

* And so all the court cases to date have been for uploading, not downloading.

So I think it is morally right to buy stuff. But it's morally neutral to download it. You are doing neither harm nor good.

"There have been various suggestions in various countries to bundle in some kind of charge for music with ISP subscription, which I think makes some sense."

god i'd love to see this happen, i think it's the only really practical way of dealing with this problem. there's already legal precident inasmuch as this is exactly what ascap does for radio. if anything by joining forces with companies/sites/software like pirate bay, soulseek, etc, you could probably get a fairly accurate way of measuring who's getting downloaded and so on... tie it in with myspace and you could even get some checks in the hands of unsigned artists and everything.

obviously theres no excuse for downloading in the above mentioned scenario, but this concern stops about .005% of potential pirates, the rest of us just do it anyway. who doesn't like a free lunch?

The way we view copyright where I work, which is a large academic institution that has to have all sorts of licenses in place and so on, is often the simple question of whether or not a sale was prevented by the copy being made.

how do you answer that question?

Including a charge with ISP subscriptions would be a great idea, and I see it as the most likely outcome in a few years. But expect a lot of principal libertarian ideological arguments against it from people with very strong principles in that direction.

The thing is that if the choice is between you illegally downloading the music and you not buying it and thus not listening to it, what would the artist prefer?

accepting all your other points, jamie, the argument that there is a fairly significant margin between these two poles where smaller artists inhabit is fairly significant.

whether or not a sale was prevented by the copy being made

This is the fallacy that the recording industry make, when they say there were x illegal downloads, so we have lost x CD sales/legal downloads.

Obviously only a tiny fraction of those illegal downloads are actually replacing purchases, and most illegal downloaders DO still purchase music (I know I do), although obviously the "free" option must have a depressing effect on the legal market.

I'm sure there's some demographic who don't, and what happens to their attitudes as they get older and have more money is interesting.

darraghmac - yeah, but still - you can buy one tiny self-released 7" or hand-painted cassette or whatever, and then download ten more releases of the same artist. That in itself doesn't harm the artist.

i'm not getting you there- you wouldn't have been willing to pay for any of the further ten items you downloaded were that option (d/l) not available?

Thread premise is that if an artist is super rich then it's morally unobjectionable to rob them like crazy.

I suppose all I'm saying is that it's the "not buying" that harms the artist, not the downloading. You have to ask yourself if you would have wanted, or been able to afford, to buy the other releases.

I think we all just have access to loads more music than we would have been able to otherwise, which is a good thing. There's no way I would be able to have afforded all the music I have access to, but I still spend too much of my money on records anyway.

how do you answer that question?

― Hard House SugBanton (blueski), Thursday, May 28, 2009 11:50 AM (13 minutes ago)

That's the tricky part! There are guidelines, but the copyright laws for time-based media in this country are so vague and wooly that it is very difficult. We have old VHS copies of films that have never been released on DVD, and we can / do copy those to DVDR and keep the original in storage as "fair use format migration". Likewise old jazz LPs, where we might transcode one track to MP3 and put it behind a password-protected part of the website for students on certain courses to access. If we can buy a copy legitimately, we can't / don't make a copy. (Except under the ERA licence, for TV recordings.) Then there's streaming on/off campus issues with that...

Tuomas has always had a lot in common with Robin Hood.

Wearing tights and living in a forest, presumably.

If you're broke but want to get some cool prints from a local painter, do you wait until you have enough cash or just go ahead and steal them?

I'd take digital photographs of 'em. Stealing the prints themselves would be comparable to stealing irreplaceable master tapes.

Except that in the case of music the "photograph" is virtually indistiguishable from the original print. And if everyone just took those photographs the artist couldn't sell any of the prints.

one answer i have is that i always check for anything first on emusic. there are lots of things i know won't be there -- big-label releases in particular -- but i look anyway. if something's available on emusic, i will always get it there, even if it means waiting a few weeks for my quota to re-up.

my thinking on that runs along the lines of, artists and labels who have made their stuff available on emusic are essentially meeting the consumer halfway by recognizing and accepting (however grudgingly) the extent to which their work has been devalued by the digital marketplace. they are not clinging to the fiction that an album is still "worth" $10 or $15 or whatever. in the early wild-west days of filesharing i always said that if anyone sold songs for 25 cents, i'd buy them. so when emusic did that, i signed on happily. (it helps that they've got so much stuff i want, obviously.) otoh, people who are still selling things for a dollar a song or whatever are essentially price gouging, as far as i'm concerned, which significantly lowers my guilt level about not paying their asking price.

i know the argument is that something like emusic makes it hard for musicians to make much money. i understand that. but that's the nature of the current marketplace.

but a dollar a song is not an unreasonable price anyway. i think the ownership culture and people wanting to own more music than anything else that can be quantified (inc. books) has led to music being under-priced if anything. but of course if you want to own copies of 15,000 songs on a PC you probably wouldn't want to spend $15,000 doing so.

I'm not sure that's some kind of plus or minus to be "canceled out," just a statement that talented/creative people may really, really struggle to have the time, space, and energy to get things done -- and the thought that, if people like what you come up with, you might be allowed a bit more time/space/energy to do more is an important motivator. I suspect we all agree/acknowledge that this is a goal the bulk of creative people have in common, to be able to survive off working on their art full time.

(I'm also assuming we all agree -- and maybe some don't! -- that making art is genuine hard work that requires serious commitments and investments of your time, energy, focus, etc., all things that are in shorter supply when they're dedicated to another job.)

also Phil I have no idea if that's in response to what I said, and I get the feeling we are talking about different things entirely here

imo ^^^^^^^^^ this is canceled out w/ the internet's democratization of creating and exhibiting your work

i think this is a often-heard fallacy these days. sure, you put some music online and it's possible for tons of people to hear it, but to actually get people to care you've got to put some serious time and effort into promotion. and unless you hit the blog hype lottery, most bands are still making their name through relatively old-fashioned methods, i think.

payola?

"sure, you put some music online and it's possible for tons of people to hear it, but to actually get people to care you've got to put some serious time and effort into promotion"

Dude, did you not check out the Finnish rap at the top of the thread?

which is why my hope is that the future of the music industry will be more towards one of the folk tradition and less of the American Idol/pro-sports variety - that music-making will become so commonplace it'll get down to something that people just DO, and the best stuff will circulate and rise to the top via its appeal as something that other people can play and participate in and enjoy.

um wut abt every1 that hates shitty folk music and wants 2 listen to gleaming and crisp r&b???? like i think its generally true that even w/o financial incentive ppl will still be making music but there's a professionalism and a, i guess, structure that happens when something is an industry that wld be lost with this and with it i think certain types of music. like its not just a drive to make "art" that makes something like a dream album possible but what about trained, skilled sound engineers and other tech jobs - those ppl need money too.

i remember talking w/ i think s1ocki about this w/r/t to movies its dope to make your own low-budget films but the difference even a trained lighting tech can makes is huge and w/o ppl buying tickets and DVDs who's going to train for that? and who's going to pay these ppl once they're trained?

"the difference even a trained lighting tech can makes is huge and w/o ppl buying tickets and DVDs who's going to train for that"

CG is probably going to kill this particular profession off faster than illegal downloads is my bet.

i think by folk tradition he means diy not just beardos with dulcimers
also gleamimg & crisp has had a good run but the game changes every so often and new aesthetics come into play

that's maybe a bad example, cause gleaming/crisp modern r&b can actually be made in pretty low-investment way

i guess my point was less abt any specific aesthetic than just that - there are a bunch of ppl from editors to sound engineers that perform imo valuable functions but aren't really "artists" or w/e term shakey et all want to use that i think arent getting work in the new diy folktopia. and if u consciously create a situation where making any money from creative works is really hard then there's no incentive for these ppl to exist, and thus certain kinds of art arent really possible any more.

i mean lol im pretty happy making flash and iphone games for little to no money but w/o a major publisher fronting not just cash but also ppl - coders, designers, testers &c &c &c - i'm never going to make games as ambitious and interesting i think im capable of

they performed valuable functions at a point of time when their contribution helped create a product that made money. now that it doesn't, they don't.

that some brutal economic determinism bro - in a world where any1 can self-publish digitally do u really think a professional editor has *no* value??

if nobody is willing to pay them then yes, in a strict economic sense, they have no value

i'm not sure the crap to gold ratio is gonna be that diff. in whatever comes after the deluge, but yes certain styles/genres or whatever are going to be harder to pull off.
¯\(°_o)/¯

"i'm never going to make games as ambitious and interesting i think im capable of"

As is the case with many aspiring novelists, the personal distractions of life will probably be the larger obstacle than the theoretical loss of a support infrastructure that would aid you in your quest, starfighter!

if nobody is willing to pay them then yes, in a strict economic sense, they have no value

umm mr iatee sir do you concede that there are forms of value other than economic

yes, which is why I prefaced that with 'strict economic'...

if we believe that expensive-to-make music has important social value, then yeah, in the long-term we need to find a way to fund it, because the current system isn't going to for much longer. see: newspapers

Well I've been hesitant to get involved here, because A)it seems to me we've all had this same discussion in the recent past on another thread B)I don't personally know what the answer is, I don't pretend to, and I don't care, I only have faith that it will eventually appear.

What I WILL say right now is that what I do most of my downloading for is to TRY things. TRY B4 YOU BUY. Either that or I'm just catching up on some record or other I already bought years ago and no longer have access to, etc. So speaking as an American who has not yet tasted what Spotify must be like, it seems to me that model is a good way to start as far as I know. A place where music can be played, tried out, maybe paid for after a certain number of plays, whatever. But this endless downloading and dumping into folders and not ever getting around to listening to it drives a person (me) mad. If everything was instantly available, there would be no need for that excess.

Like say, 25 cents to play a song one time, 50 for two...topping out of course at some level or the market will allow. Moving to an ad for the album after three plays. It isn't hard folks! Pardon my impatience with the technological progress of the human race, thanks.

Bimble, you should look into Lala.com. It is for US citizens, and it allows a free first time streaming and then a very cheap purchase for permanent streaming abilities. There is a thread about it here that was bumped recently.

I say this as an ex-user that moved on from the company as it's focus shifted, but it kind of fits an attempt at a different digital model.

Last.fm has been good to me lately; most everything that I'm hesitant about dropping cash on is streamable, with a big increase in lo-fi punk shit in the last couple years (something that I find particularly hit and miss).

But what this thread has really convinced me of is that I should be bootlegging Jay Z albums and sending the money to Finnish rappers in some sort of copyleft global arts socialism.

I think it will be interesting the see where the whole internet/cloud computing/futuristic technologies takes us in the sense of music production and how this affects things in the long run. Like now it's about digital copies of songs, what about in 15 years when everyone has 3d printers that can download models to recreate virgin vinyl first pressings on the molecular-scale?

yeah, wow dude, can't wait for that

15 yrs from now is gonna be more like this I think
http://arcona.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/statue_planet.jpg

can't remember if the apes had 3-d printers, though

http://www.hear2.com/images/2007/12/29/natgeo_musicsales2_6.gif

Wonder if this chart account for changes in inflation?

...this is the stuff with which I took issue; it still strikes me as wrong, most especially the "art should be made for the love of it" - sez who?

― worm? lol (J0hn D.), Friday, May 29, 2009 6:07 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark

Love seems to be worth more than money to those crazy beatnik beardo art types.

yeah I know Devendra is begging for change on Melrose Ave as we speak

Begging for LOVE.

that's a beautiful chart