Jasper wrote:
A lot of things are over-priced. Hell, most things, I'd say. Should I steal those things, too? If CDs had been five dollars when napster came around, I'm pretty sure people would have pirated them anyways, eventually. I know I would have. Maybe it wouldn't have happened as fast, but my preferred price is zero on all goods, and that seems to hold true for most people.
That most artists don't care that the RIAA is hurting doesn't matter; most artists could never get a record deal in the first place.
So, I agree with you. Fuck capitalist fat cats. Let's steal. Everything. Then, when they're all bled dry, we can actually live in a sustainable world.
I pretty much agree with what you're saying. Technology and a sense of entitlement on the consumer end sped the demise of the traditional way artists profited from (and where profited from) their work.
But I also agree that the standard record company business model has always been designed to rape the artist, most of whom have zero business sense and relied on lawyers, managers, etc who also happily fucked them over. There's so many bands who've lost their publishing rights to their own music to satisfy a label's contract because they were fronted/billed so much money for everything from producing albums and touring to stupid shit like parties, drugs and personal purchases like cars and homes. Think about it - most artists are barely out of High School and playing music and chasing pussy is about the extent of their skill set and they land a complicated record deal with a couple million dollar advance and who-knows-what interest..... yeah that's a recipe to future financial disaster.
What's really sad is the current climate for older, established artists is simply tour, tour, tour and flog their decade's old hits to an aging (and dwindling) audience of their peers. There's really no incentive to make new music (outside the artistic desire to create new music) unless you want to sell it to big businesses basically as backing music for a movie or commercial so it'll get heard. Record companies have fallen to simply using TV shows like American Idol to quickly sign, sell and throw away disposable cookie cutter pop singers. More than ever, "talent" is a commodity and the standards are in the gutter these days. There's little financial or artistic incentive for kids to go out there and start a new band now - you have to not only be a musician, but you need to have a strong sense of modern self promotion and business sense. You'll do better going through law school or getting into politics if you're that savy.
The odds of younger, newer artists making any headway is akin to winning the lottery now. Most that have achieved some level of success are doing it the old fashioned way through the few big record companies left that still have some money to spend signing a new act they feel they can exploit. For every Arcade Fire or Muse that have "made it" the past 10 years there's thousands of bands that are playing bars on weekends and posting their music for free on webpages that will never get beyond a few hundred dedicated listeners. The current climate in rock music is that bleak.