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?

"That's why hearing those Finnish rappers actually saying in their songs that people shouldn't fileshare their music, it hurts their chances of making a living out of music and continuing to release records, was a sobering experience."

Do these rappers rap in English -- do you think their appeal could go beyond their local record-buying public?
(You might not want to disclose who they are because chances are, I may in fact download them)

lately when i've mentioned how it feels a little weird to be releasing a cd (because who buys cds anymore), i've had multiple people say things like "maybe you guys can give it away for free or use it as promotion to get people to the shows?" this frustrating because i thought that was the justification for not making any money playing club shows, to promote the album.

pretty sure the only way to make money in music these days is to play a lot of weddings and corporate picnics, so if you guys download something you like maybe you could just tell your fiancee or your boss about it?

"play a lot of weddings and corporate picnics"
Don't most weddings hire DJs now? And all the corp. picnics I've been to were at a venues that provided their own entertainment.

probably, but i'm playing a wedding and a corporate party (at a baseball game!) in the next week, so.

Do these rappers rap in English -- do you think their appeal could go beyond their local record-buying public?

No, 95% percent of them rap in Finnish, hence their potential marketplace is quite limited to begin with.

Anyway, if you're really interested in Finnish rap, here's a few of my favourite tunes and artists:

before I view any of those, I would like to be assured that they are on YouTube legally

Haha, I guess that's kinda hypocritical. Some of them are official music videos, but there's a few unofficially uploaded tunes too. Well, at least you can't download them from Youtube, so if you like the music you have to buy it.

before I view any of those, what's Finnish for "Yah Trick Yah"?

or just listen to it on youtube a lot.

xp

huge L

The L stands for Lapp.

Oh man now I want to change my name to Huge Lapp Dogg.

"Huge" is a Helsinki slang word for "Mark", the currency we used to have before the Euro.

Is the gun imagery from the first vid inspired by US gangstaism or is there already a heavy Finn gun culture from I guess military service?

I think it's supposed to be a bit of a satire. There's not a big gun culture here, nor do Finnish rappers rap about guns. The song is about the Armageddon though.

russia invading?????

No, about the environmental destruction of Earth.

mine seems scarier

aren't all rap songs about Armageddon

asher roth's are about carmageddon

"probably, but i'm playing a wedding and a corporate party (at a baseball game!) in the next week, so."
This is pretty amazing. The only entertainment they showed at the game I attended was a bunch of grainy youtube clips of Carlton from Fresh Prince dancing.

Did I hear them do a shoutout to flava flav in 'koputa puuta'?

Kinda, but what the dude actually says is,

I'll soon be 30. ("Is it easy?") Not really,
My back goes "crack!", like Flavor Flav.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8073068.stm

Around seven million people in the UK are involved in illegal downloads, costing the economy tens of billions of pounds, government advisors say.

Researchers found 1.3m people using one file-sharing network on one weekday and estimated that over a year they had free access to material worth £120bn.

The Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP) warned it may be hard to change attitudes.

The government says work must be done internationally to tackle the problem.

Intellectual property minister David Lammy said the report put into context the impact illegal downloads had on copyright industries and the UK economy as a whole.

But he added: "This is not an issue confined by national boundaries and I am sure that other (EU) member states and their copyright industries will find this report of use in the development of policy."

An alliance of nine UK bodies representing the creative industries recently joined trades unions in calling on the government to force internet service providers to cut off persistent illegal file-sharers.

They said more than half of net traffic in the UK was illegal content.

Copyright confusion

Internet service providers say it is not their job to police the web.

The latest report for the SABIP, said the new generation of broadband access at 50Mbps could deliver 200 MP3 files in five minutes, a DVD in three and the complete digitised works of Charles Dickens in less than 10.

It said the seven million people who access files illegally could not all be students and that many of them were uncertain about what was illegal.

The fact that so much on the internet is free only added to the confusion, it said.

Dame Lynne Brindley, SABIP Board member, said: "This report gives us some baseline evidence from which we can develop a clear research strategy to support policy development in this fast moving area."

You convinced me: I will stop downloading all Finnish rap.

Bootleggers get they legs broke.

Why are the complete digitized works of Charles Dickens so large?

I'm waiting for a punchline involving Little Dorritt

Oh, you'd just adore it if that happened, wouldn't you?

i always wonder if eventually there will be some kinda crazy big brother web sheriff technology that finally makes free filesharing impossible.

like i always assume "well there's no way they could ever stop it" but i dunno, i guess i would have never imagined that someday you could get anything on the internet for free...there's probably like crazy scientist dudes working on it now.

I think the answer to the question that is the thread title is: "no." Not any excuses that I think holdup, anyway. Best one is 'try before you buy' (which I quit actually buying albums, except 2 or 3 a year, years ago), but there's still plenty of ways to do that w/out d/ling!

I still do it, tho, of course. Like the other thread said (paraphrase): stealing music from the internet and everyone does it, esp. me! OTOH, my brother, when he returned from his mission, vowed not to download things illegally and he's stuck to it! God, that is the mindblowingest goal to achieve IMO. Actually PAYING for all your software & digital media! He's the only one I know who does that! I've been doing this over 10 years and it wld take some serious reconfiguration of my life not to.

stealing music from the internet (is lots of fun) and everyone does it

I think it's supposed to be a bit of a satire. There's not a big gun culture here, nor do Finnish rappers rap about guns. The song is about the Armageddon though.

isn't it because of the Finnish school shooter who had videos of himself in essentially the same pose

xp Yeah who needs a fucking excuse.

i always wonder if eventually there will be some kinda crazy big brother web sheriff technology that finally makes free filesharing impossible.

I dare you to find a Star Trek website and ask about copyright and licensing issues w/r/t the ship's music library on Next Generation

nabisco if ppl take you up on that I think that makes you an accessory to the eventual crime

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 buying their records on the internet instead?

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

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 buying mp3s (which artist see barely a fucking thin dime from) from the iTunes store instead?

If a tree falls on someone's head and I make a recording of the sound of air escaping from the aformentioned crushed skull would anyone download it from me on slsk?

no i prefer your earlier tuomas-related soundscapes. you fell off after the first three.

What faith is this that makes your brother pay for software? I have a sense that within certain religious contexts, it could be seen as forbidden to pay for non-physical goods, like the realm of the ethereal is reserved for The Creator, and His Word will not be prostituted by sale @ 99cents per Black Eyed Peas mp3.

Also there could be some precedents in anti-usury commandments:

"St. Thomas Aquinas, the leading theologian of the Catholic Church, argued charging of interest is wrong because it amounts to "double charging", charging for both the thing and the use of the thing. Aquinas said this would be morally wrong in the same way as if one sold a bottle of wine, charged for the bottle of wine, and then charged for the person using the wine to actually drink it. Similarly, one cannot charge for a piece of cake and for the eating of the piece of cake. Yet this, said Aquinas, is what usury does."

For mp3s, there is no thing to be charged, only the use of it. From a biblical POV, it seems reasonable to charge for the download service itself, but attaching prohibitions on an mp3's use afterwards would be same as 'double charging'

He's Mormon, and he's going by the basic 'don't steal' commandment without, uh, getting all Phariseed out abt the specifics thereof?

"Excuses are the tools of the weak and incompetent they are the skins of liars stuffed with irrelevance, therefore I will not use excuses."

with you know some addendum from me like 'p.s. I am an ass'

I totally got a pirated copy Kings Quest from a Mormon. It was sweet. (The corruption of the Mormon, the game wasn't that fun)

King's Quest is incredible!

He's really in the minority tbh.

I pay for music more now, than I did before mp3s existed because back then I just made everyone else make me tapes of their albums so I didnt have to buy them. I have a box full of 100s of taped copies of albums, but since mp3 times, I subscribe to emusic, or I'll buy cds - sure, I do have a bit of stuff I havent paid for but its other ppls CDs ive ripped directly; I dont use BT at all.

If all the channels to distrubute mp3s were stopped, ppl would just go back to making copies and sending them to people like we used to, shurely.

Music is doomed. Once it became possible to make a copy of a song for free in 10 seconds without leaving your chair and store tens of thousands of them in your computer, the game was over. Film is eventually doomed as computer storage capacity increases, and if the Kindle ever catches on, books are doomed too.

I doubt that we will ever convince the majority of people who illegally download to stop doing it, but I can think of two things which might curb it a bit:

1. $0.99 may not sound like a lot of money when you're talking about buying a song or two, but in quantity it adds up; lower prices could only help. Rather than giving iTunes around 30% (is that correct?) of the profits merely for providing a storefront (yes, I know it's a little more complicated than that), why can't there be a similar website which only takes maybe 5% of the profits? In a business with instant distribution and no need for physical stock, artists shouldn't have to give away that much of their profit to a label or store anymore. If the storefront were more Ebay-like, with the artist doing all the work of posting their songs and setting their own prices, they could lower prices to $0.75 or less and still make as much money as before.

2. There should be a website that allows you to stream ANY song or album of your choosing on demand, charged to your account as micropayments of some number of cents per minute (considerably less than the $0.99 per song purchase price), with a monthly price cap so you would never pay more than, say, $19.99 per month. The price has to seem reasonable to the listener if you want to ween them away from illegal downloading. As a benefit for the artists, royalties would be much easier to determine than they are for radio--it will be known exactly how many plays each song received and at what price.

Keep in mind that I know nothing about economics or downloading and am talking out my ass.

"Music is doomed"
I dunno, I'm pretty amazed that Finnish rap exists in the first place, though I'm wondering how it could possibly have proliferated outside of some kind of file trading (either tapes or mp3s)
Is there a protectionist Finnish music rule like 50% of radio/music TV must be devoted to Finnish artists?

Yeah I'm all for subscription sites or paying for downloads - esp if I know the artist gets a hefty cut, or even the full cut if they're offering it themselves.

I'd much prefer that to some kind of arbitrary fee added to my monthly ISP access costs. That can't work. What would it apply to? Music? Games? Movies/TV? Software? What if I dont use the internet to get any of those things, do I get to not pay it?

But people have always and will always be able to make a copy of something and give it to a friend. They can shut the internet down all together and that isn't going to change.