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?

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.

xpost - But that's just it though: there is no historical precedent for being able to make an exact copy without any cost whatsoever while leaving the original intact. Even bootleg CDs require an investment in some physical media. If it was possible to do this with food, farmers would go out of business and 50,000 years of agrarian culture would be snuffed out, but starvation would end. I wish Shawn Fanning had worked on this problem instead.

this is my pledge that if you fuckin guys turn me into one of those super-rich artists, I will start releasing it all for free, both digitally and on vinyl

or stop releasing it entirely, your call, I don't give a shit, just get me rich and we'll figure out the rest of the terms of the agreement when we get there

Tuomas, is there ever a moment when you're not wondering what the right thing to do, say, or think is? Live a little bro.

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.

conspiracy to provide finnish rappers with more material about bein' broke

Pages in category "Finnish rappers"
The following 10 pages are in this category, out of 10 total.

a dollar a song is not an unreasonable price anyway.

sort of depends. i've bought individual tracks for that -- singles, basically. but if i want a whole album, a dollar a song works out to about the same as plain old physical-media record-store pricing, which was too high to start with.

anyway, everyone sets their own levels. i'm basically willing to pay 25 cents a song. people who charge more are pricing themselves out of my market.

a dollar to own a song you like is pretty cheap in my book.

you can buy my book for only €25.00, or d/l it for free. your choice.

plain old physical-media record-store pricing, which was too high to start with.

high compared to what? books, games or films? why should music cost less than those? just because people tend to want to own more music than other media?

i would accept 'yes' to that last question tbh

AFAIC, music that's so easily transferable and downloadable etc is worth more to me as an end user than it was on a cassette or a CD (ie just on a CD).

Yes, the cost of transferring the medium has gone down, but i don't think that that's necessarily an argument that the price of a song/album should automatically go through the floor.

why should music cost less than those?

are you suggesting that the only basis for price is cost relative to an arbitrary basket of similar items?

just because people tend to want to own more music than other media?

rofl

Yes, the cost of transferring the medium has gone down, but i don't think that that's necessarily an argument that the price of a song/album should automatically go through the floor.

take it up with adam smith

Tuomas what did you vote on that poll Should Filesharers Be Disconnected By Their ISP's? (and discussion about future laws) ?

just because people tend to want to own more music than other media?

A visit to any major "record shop" would dispel this notion

high compared to what? books, games or films?

compared to actual cost of production and distribution, for one thing. everybody knows the story of the massive price jumps that came in with the introduction of cds. they got away with it for a lot of years, and made a gazillion-zillion dollars by rereleasing all their back catalogs. (and then repackaging and rerereleasing them in bonus/remastered editions, etc.) then that changed, too bad for them.

are you suggesting that the only basis for price is cost relative to an arbitrary basket of similar items?

not exactly. all of these media share characteristics in terms of how they're produced, levels of personnel involved, means of distribution. what else would you base it on?

rofl

is that funny? as far as art/entertainment media goes don't people in general own (legitimately or not) more music than other?

A visit to any major "record shop" would dispel this notion

No it wouldn't

Give me the stats on that

Games sell more than music these days, don't they? I'm sure that was on the new a while back.

Maybe people own more music in terms of physical items, but perhaps you should be measuring how much people own in terms of how long it takes them to consume? And even then not just "an album is 50 mins, a film is 120 mins, a book takes 260 mins to read" etc, but in terms of... "I'll listen to this album x times, watch film y times, and read book z times, adding up to...." etc.

I bet more people by dvds than cd, i bet more would download films than music if it was as easy as it is for getting music. I bet more people go to cinemas than gigs.

*buy

oh and i would bet more buy/play videogames than buy/listen to music they bought

good job you're not a betting man then

If you walk into any major record shop, the first thing you'll see is racks of DVDs

cinemas != to gigs, unless bands can distribute themselves in new and alarming ways.

take it up with adam smith

killfiled that mf months ago.

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