Reinventing the wheel to run myself over

Tory Regan — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:45:01 +0000

Image from Sharky_p2p on Flickr.com

Today’s blog is about the reinvention of the music industry. Music is not dying completely, maybe CD’s are dying but music will always live on, just in different forms.

I have two links to post today. But I guess I could do it in two different posts on two different days just to add to my content a little.

I am currently having some issues working out jargon from one link I’ve found. Using abbreviations makes things very hard. Terms like RIAA and DRM are abbreviations a lot of people would have to google repeditively to find out about.

However, this is a good piece about the transformation of the music industry.

My apologies to anyone who is following this blog, I will try and make my posts more frequent. I am also learning a lot about the different ways I can make the blog more visually exciting aswell as add more exciting content.
I’ve just done a quick Google search for a couple of things I could write about and it seems that most of what comes up are blogs. Clearly the topic of music, piracy aswell as a little politics thrown in here or there is a popular topic with bloggers.

“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.”
–Oscar Ameringer

Tory.

They believed the lie

Tory Regan — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:44:33 +0000

Over the last few years we have been made to believe the lie that our music piracy is making musicians poor and corrupting the world. But on the 18th of June, just 4 days ago, it was announced that in fact our music piracy is benefitting the world!

Basically, this article from the UK says that some guys from some well thought of US universities are publishing a paper which asserts the benefits of internet piracy.
In my last blog I covered a few of the many reasons why people would want to pirate music. Obviously there are a lot more reasons, both good and bad.

Reading some of these articles makes me realise why I’m a journalist. I have to put these big words and big ideas into little bitesize pieces so that it’s understandable for anyone to read. Right now, I need someone else to put all this complication into bitesize pieces for me!

The basic jist of this article so far seems to be that economists say that the point of copyright, which stops piracy, is so that artists are able to make money off their product, ie: their music.
Their study shows that while a ‘business model’ may be destroyed by the technology of file sharing, artists will still produce new work.

An example of this according to them is that if music becomes free, people may have to pay more to see an artist perform live so that the musician still makes some cash.
I don’t know about you but I’d be happy to pay almost any amount of money to see the bands I love perform live.
My understanding has always been that artists make like 10c off every CD and make most of their money from performing live. Although I’m not sure how true that is but it sounds like if that is true, not much is really changing.

Left to right: Bob Bryar (drums), Frank Iero (guitar), Gerard Way (vocals), Mikey Way(bass), Ray Toro (guitar)

The next point is interesting. What about bands who don’t like live performances? I can see how stressful performing live could be and I personally understand why not every musician would want to follow in the footsteps of a band such as My Chemical Romance who performed live for 3 years straight (I think).

As much as I love this band and was glad they were touring a lot (therefore coming to New Zealand a few times), I do wonder how much of a toll 3 years of touring would take on a person’s mental health aswell as physical health.

Electronic devices such as Ipods and MP3 players have recieved a boost in sales because of ‘file sharing’ and music piracy. I guess this is because people put music from CD’s onto their computers so they can listen to it anywhere they like rather than just where there is a CD player.

Gone are the days of CD Walkman’s where you needed a physical disc to play your music. You can get music files straight from your computer to your ears now.

Physical album sales have fallen which is predictable. However, more albums are being created than ever! This means that music piracy and file sharing have not affected the quantity of music being created even if it’s not being sold in the conventional ways. An interesting point to me is that there has been no research into the quality of the music being released. There may be more of it but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily better than CD’s.

The whole paper by the economists can be found here. If you think you can make sense of it.

“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” – John F Kennedy.

Tory.

Picture: My Chemical Romance from Quizilla.

The Costanza » copyright

Reinventing the wheel to run myself over

They believed the lie