catathymia wrote:oh and if your answer was that you got into making music for money, make sure to tell me who you are because I will make sure to avoid anything you do and never pay to hear you play out.
I think you missed a really important part of the picture. As if, from now on, to keep up with people who support my labels, I'll need to get a job to survive and make sure now one pays. Well of course, why not?
And i'll also sell my health to make sure every single person who want the music, actually get it for free so that everyone is happy.
There's something I don't get, please explain me.
Now check this out... I really invest all money I get into my labels, and believe me, I really lose much of it. I don't do it for the money but if I want my things to work, so I have to put about 40 hours + a week in it. How can I work and do it all?
There's a choice to be done here. I really love music, I really believe in people I work with and somehow, if I can get any income out of the time I invest, well, I wan't that money. This money investment actually provides you with more quality music.
That said, I don't do it for the money, I do it for the love of it but I do need something to continue.
Something.
And that something is more than a few comments posted on my Myspace.
Damn, catathymia, you sound like a real bitter bastard that I'd never want to hang around with. You're broke, don't have a job, complaining about rising prices, and apparently you want everything to be free. You sound like a commie waiting to sprout.
Look... like Pheek said, some people devote generous amounts of time and money into their releases. They might not be rich, but somehow they find a way to get it done. To see that very same energy then converted and posted online for free isn't part of their initial equasion. It's not a matter of greed (as you stated). It's a matter of preference. Like it or hate it, having their releases posted online for free is not what the artists want.
It's pretty fucking simple if you have a backbone in your body anywhere. You can either:
A.) Not buy tracks from artists who charge for their material.
or
B.) Buy tracks from talented artists and enjoy life a little.
It's time I give my two cents about this topic ...
I'm a 23 year old student (marketing and communiction by the way, but who cares, right?). I only started buying my tracks of beatport in August. So that makes it 5 months now that I have legal tracks on my notebook.
Besides being a student, I work. Why do I work? To buy music. I could get around with the little money my lovely parents provide me each month, but I want more. More, so I can give a little money back to the artists I love so much. How's that love possible? Before August I downloaded loads of tracks via p2p networks. Why? Because I didn't know any better. I was like 'everyting is too expensive, fck them!'. But during those pirate years, I learned a lot about how the music is made, why the music is made, who the artists are etc.
Then, suddenly, a little switch happened in my head. I deleted all my tracks. Believe me, it were gigabytes. I got myself a Visa card to attack Beatport with. Communities like mnml.nl are so great to discover wonderful music. I'm happy when I read about new releases, how people produce them ... I'm also happy when I can actually pay for that music. My bond with the music is really strong now. When I illegaly downloaded music, there was no bond. I just downloaded the tracks, listened to them and that was it. But now ... Every month, when I buy the tracks in my crate (50 - 100 euro), I'm as happy as I child that just got a new toy.
Now, what's my point? I don't know ... Maybe that when you truely love the music, you will find yourself some money to buy it ...
oh and if your answer was that you got into making music for money, make sure to tell me who you are because I will make sure to avoid anything you do and never pay to hear you play out.
are you serious? this has to be some kind of a joke....
i dont think you have any clue of how the music industry works--- or how much money it costs us to get music out there,
seriously you sound like some kind of 80's anarchist
it isn't about sharing music anyway. it is about looking HOT on the internet.
if these guys love the music so bad, why can't they try to talk to the artist and ask them for permission to put music online ? john peel would have done that.
JackNine calling people commies isn't an insult - the cold war is over! Jay Haze you are a netlabel pioneer (textone netlabel) so please read what an 80's anarchist (!) has to say about free music. It's slightly off topic but very interesting.
---
Free Music - The Downfall of Civilization
by Mark (vocals, saxophone, guitar)
One concept that is most closely associated with The Instant Automatons is that of "Free Music". It is also, I have discovered, a concept that is widely misunderstood.
Free Concerts have been around for ages, of course. That's something that, even in our materialistic society, people can get their head around. You go to the gig, you see the band, you leave; it's ephemeral - there's nothing concrete for you to hold in your hand, so you don't feel uncomfortable with the idea.
But when it comes to Free Music cassettes, records or CDs it's a whole different tureen of seafood. Those who don't quite "get it" fall into two distinct camps:
The members of the first group are the ones who say: "If this is a Free Music CD, why do I have to pay £3 for it? Why isn't it free?"
That's easy. What you're paying for is what you're holding in your hand - the plastic and paper. If we're selling something for £3, it means it cost us £3 to manufacture it. We make no profit from it - that's why the music is "free". In actual fact, we were making a small loss on every cassette we distributed via the good old "send in a blank tape" method, because we would enhance the cassette with a sleeve and a set of labels that we had paid for ourselves before returning it to the "customer".
The second group understands quite clearly that the music is free from profit. They just don't understand why. That takes a little more explaining:
Protag once read an article in which Colin Newman of the band Wire claimed that writing a song was simply a bodily function like evacuating the bowels. Steve Lake, one-time bassist with Zounds, said a similar thing: "Playing music was something we did like eating and drinking, breathing and shitting. It seemed to be a natural function."
Our view was exactly the same - and I would have felt as uncomfortable asking people to pay for my words and music as I would have done asking them to pay for the carbon dioxide I exhaled or the nitrogenous waste that came out the other end.
(As a sidenote: The Italian artist Piero Manzoni sold cans containing his own faeces - the Tate Gallery recently bought a can for £22,300 - and Australian-born painter Margaret Morgan uses human urine, blood and faeces in her works, but what that proves I have no idea.)
However - and this is the really important point - this was (and still is) a purely personal ethic. I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with other people making a living from their art. It's just not for me.
I have to state this (to me) rather obvious fact, because I have been misunderstood in the past.
In my last year of school I tried my hand at sculpture. The piece I produced was an emaciated human figure, rendered in wire and plaster. Although it was essentially just a poor imitation of the works of Alberto Giacometti, the art teacher took a liking to it and said he would pay me £5 for it. I said if he liked it that much, he could have it for nothing.
He was horrified, and proceeded to give me a lecture about how, if one artist should give his work away, then all the other struggling artists would not be able to make a living, and no one would then want to become an artist and there would be no art. Then, presumably, Western Civilization would crumble. (You think I'm making this up, don't you? It's all true, I swear!)
Given my well-publicised contempt for the faculty of my alma mater, I'm sure you realise that this tirade just served to strengthen my resolve. I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that since that day I have never made a single penny from any creative work I have produced, whether it be words, music, photography or graphic design.
And did Civilization crumble? I'll leave you to answer that one for yourself.
