DVD Players will not be able to play future Universal Audio CDs! (1 Viewer)

[Will_B]

CNN.com:

Musicians rally for legal fight

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Elton John, No Doubt and the Eagles are among a group of musicians who will perform at five benefit concerts the night before the Grammy Awards telecast to raise money for a legislative fight against the record industry.

The Recording Artists Coalition, a trade group representing more than 100 entertainers, has booked several sites in Los Angeles for the February 26 concerts.

Money raised from the concerts will help fund an offensive against the major record labels for allegedly denying musicians a share of royalty earnings.

Courtney Love and the Dixie Chicks are embroiled in their own legal battles, accusing their labels of exploiting them financially and locking them into long-term contracts.

"It's about time for artists to take control of their work and how it is presented to our fans," said Dexter Holland of the band Offspring, which will perform as part of the effort.

Record companies deny the allegations and say musicians are receiving a fair share of revenue and royalties.

The five shows will feature different genres -- pop, alternative, rhythm and blues, hard rock and country music.

Other artists confirmed for the performances include Billy Joel, Stevie Nicks, Weezer, Dixie Chicks and Ozzy Osbourne. More artists were expected to join the list in coming weeks.

Michael Greene, president of the Recording Academy, said he's supportive of the concerts.

"I would absolutely not support this if I thought it was just an in-your-face thing against the labels," Greene said.

 

[Todd Hochard]

For me, I don't really care about Napster-style sharing with a bunch of people I don't know. I just want to be able to share my music with the various playback devices in my home and car.

That's why this looks like trouble to me. If I can't do this, I'll stop buying. Period. What's the point of music you can't listen to?

Todd

 

[Will_B]

I'd like to suggest...

Someone should really do a survey of why people buy CD-R spindles. I doubt they are all for music, and I doubt most end up in friend's hands, as the record company's lawyers like to imagine.

Myself, I've got one of those 200-CD players, and I realized one day that if someone broke into my house and took my stereo, years of collecting would be gone. So my machine is loaded up with copies. I also make copies for playing at work.

CD-Rs are also used when I love an album but absolutely hate one of the songs on the album - I reburn it minus the offending song.

Or with CD-singles, I tack the b-sides to the end of the disc so I don't fill up the CD player's slots.

There are SO MANY reasons why people burn CD-Rs that has NOTHING to do with piracy! Until there is a survey done, the record company is just imagining worst case scenarios. They're out of touch with their customers.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

that's a great way to promote studio participation at HTF.

While it's great that the studios participate here, it doesn't mean we have to kiss their collective ass all the time.

 

[Brian Knolhoff]

Jeff Ulmer wrote:

...in fact most popular songs are written by people other than the artists...

Woah!! That is a wholly inaccurate statement.
If you really believe that, why don't you try asking any of the following artists if they agree: The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Who, Led Zeppelin, REM, The Grateful Dead, Michael Penn, Aimee Mann, Eric Clapton, Weezer, Sheryl Crow, Garbage, Foo Fighters, Dave Matthews, Rush...
The list could go on and on until the HTF servers run out of memory.
The members of The Beatles wrote some of the most popular (and wonderful, in my personal opinion) songs of all time. They wrote them.
Please don't bring talented artists down to the level of those performers that the record companies foist on an uneducated public.
I'm sure those of us at HTF that are artists, musical or otherwise, don't appreciate it. I certainly do not.
Regards,
-Brian

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

RS:
Will_B:
I find it interesting that these major label artists are taking legal action against the labels that got them where they are. Are they being exploited? Sure they are, but nobody forced them to sign the contracts. This is a far cry from the 1960s when artists didn't know any better. There have been hundreds of books published on the music industry, how to negotiate, and what is fair. If the artists don't have the due diligence to mind their business affairs then they have only themsleves to blame if they get a raw deal.
As someone who has turned down a number of contracts, even from the majors, there are two sides to the artist deal to be considered. First is the obvious fact that no artist has to sign with anybody. Doing so is their choice, and has to be done considering the up and down sides to the commitment. You can wail away in your garage forever, or hope to have a shot at the big time by aligning with a major - it won't guarantee you anything, but it does considerably up your profile, and gives you an established distribution network and team of promoters to push your product. On the flipside, the amount of money you make per unit sold is negligible, but the company does finance your recording (which you have to pay back), allowing you to get to market.
From a corporate viewpoint, it makes no sense to spend upwards of $100K bankrolling an artist's recording and paying for the necessary promotion it will need to be successful without a long term commitment, and a substantial piece of the profits should there be any. Artist development, marketing, advertising, videos all add up, and since the vast majority of artists will not break even, those that do have to carry the burden for all of them.
ZZ Top sued their management because he was taking 50% of their earnings. The courts asked where they were playing before and after they signed with him. Since they were playing bars to begin with, and were now doing mega stadium shows, the courts said the manager probably deserved more - which I disagree with, but the point is that the road to success has its price, and if signing with a major moves you from 10 sales to 100,000 sales, then there is some value there, at least in perception.
However, if an artist choses not to sign with a major and market independently, while their sales may be down (ie no Gold records for the wall) they can potentially make more from selling less by cutting out the record company fat. The downside is it is a lot more work this way, and requires self financing the whole project, which is not an easy thing for most people to do.
Pick your poison.

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

Woah!! That is a wholly inaccurate statement.

No it's not actually. The writer/artist is the exception, not the rule. There are a lot more writer/artists these days, some of them great, but the independent songwriter is still a very important part of popular music, and always will be.

 

[Jon_W]

Good point concerning the beer I completely agree with you concerning other industries, like military contractors. I just singled out the entertainment industry because I thought it was the most relevant to this thread. The entertainment industry is always in the public spotlight, thus unfairly takes the most criticism. I don't know of a single person that doesn't complain about fuel, housing, or food prices. Complaining about costs is a part of life.
I understand your point concerning the voluntary nature of entertainment, however, I would question exatly how voluntary entertainment is. The consumer nature of our society makes forms of entertainment, especially television, almost mandatory, lest you become a social hermit.

 

[Damin J Toell]

While it's great that the studios participate here, it doesn't mean we have to kiss their collective ass all the time.

Michael St. Clair made almost the exact same reply to me on page 1 of the thread, where i also responded to him. i suggest turning back to page 1 to read it.

DJ

 

[Ryan Wright]

Sure they are, but nobody forced them to sign the contracts.

Au contraire. Do you think you could get your voice heard without a contract? If you do, you're wrong. You can't put a CD in stores, as the major labels control the distribution channels and retailers. You can't get a song on the radio, as companies such as Clear Channel control the vast majority of radio stations. The RIAA has a stranglehold on the entire industry. You either deal with them, or they deal you out of existence.
Fortunately, the Internet is slowly changing all of this.
A big THANK YOU to the moderators for letting this discussion stray slightly into no-no territory. It's been a great discussion thus far and I'm enjoying it immensly.

 

[Ted Todorov]

No it's not actually. The writer/artist is the exception, not the rule. There are a lot more writer/artists these days, some of them great, but the independent songwriter is still a very important part of popular music, and always will be.

"These days??" The Beatles started recording in 1962! Hell, even ABBA wrote all their own music. The people who don't write their music fall into three broad categories -- Classical musicians, Jazz singers/players who do standards and musical nonentities like Milli Vanili and Brittney Spears. Yes, there are exceptions, but "these days" the exceptions are just that.
To try to get this back on topic, I predict that Universal's plan will bite the dust within a year -- when the Classical music fans with their $5000 "CD Transports" discover that their Beethoven, Bach and Mozart CDs don't play, they are going to go ballistic and at least one of them will turn out to be a major Universal/Vivendi/Seagrams/whatever stockholder.
Ted

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

With regard to how mandatory entertainment is in our society, I would suggest that there are few less social activities than spending hours in front of a computer scouring obscure ftp sites for mp3s to download. Go out and play sports, visit with friends, go to a mall. These are social activities. If you want free music, turn on the radio!
If the argument is that file sharing is necessary for sampling purposes, my argument remains that artist websites or online retaillers offer a more comprehensive and intuitive way of locating material that you may like than file servers, and they are offering material approved by the artists.

Au contraire. Do you think you could get your voice heard without a contract? If you do, you're
wrong. You can't put a CD in stores, as the major labels control the distribution channels and retailers. You can't get a song on the radio, as companies such as Clear Channel control the vast majority of radio stations. The RIAA has a stranglehold on the entire industry. You either deal with them, or they deal you out of existence.
Fortunately, the Internet is slowly changing all of this.

I would disagree. Noone is forced to deal with the majors. How do you think all these independent labels got started? There are a number of distribution services that will get you into most online retaillers and chains, and many will deal direct with the artist. Are you going to have national ad campigns for your product? Probably not unless you have a wealthy backer, but as I said earlier, direct marketing can make you more money than going through a label, regardless of the increase in sales it will get you.
I had a conversation with Brad Delp from the band Boston. At that time (1989ish) they were in litigation with Epic (the label I was negotiating with) over 32 million dollars in royalties they hadn't been paid on albums already sold. Their albums were multiplatinum, but they weren't getting paid. While I doubt I'll see a paycheck that big, if you crunch the numbers, it isn't hard to see where selling direct makes more sense, since you can sell a tenth as many discs and make the same amount of money, plus actually get paid, not have your funds held in a reserve or lost in advertising expenditures. You may not be as famous as Brittiny, but then again, that's not such a bad thing. I'd hate to have my face pasted on some naked French supermodel's body and posted all over usenet.
Things are changing, but the problem that the file sharing mentality has brought is that the value of music has been diminished, and just as artists begin to gain the kind of direct control over their products to launch successful, independent careers, a large portyion of the audience feels that they should be getting the music for free, and the artist should rely on touring or other sources to fund their projects. This works in favor of the big corporations, not against them. They still have the money to finance acts who can't afford to do it themselves.
PS. The tracks I have online were recorded in 1986, the current stuff won't be up for another month....

 

[Ryan Wright]

There's an interesting article on Salon by Courtney Love. It's a couple of years old, but if you haven't read it, I'd advise you to. It's a great read. Here's the first page of the article - there is much more there:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/

Courtney Love does the math
The controversial singer takes on record label profits, Napster and "sucka VCs."
Editor's note: This is an unedited transcript of Courtney Love's speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York on May 16.
By Courtney Love
June 14, 2000 | Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software.
I'm talking about major label recording contracts.
I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math:
This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.
What happens to that million dollars?
They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager.
That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person.
That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released.
The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it's based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.)
So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band's royalties.
The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable.
The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records.
All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band.
Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company.
If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record.
Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals ... zero!
How much does the record company make?
They grossed $11 million.
It costs $500,000 to manufacture the CDs and they advanced the band $1 million. Plus there were $1 million in video costs, $300,000 in radio promotion and $200,000 in tour support.
The company also paid $750,000 in music publishing royalties.
They spent $2.2 million on marketing. That's mostly retail advertising, but marketing also pays for those huge posters of Marilyn Manson in Times Square and the street scouts who drive around in vans handing out black Korn T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. Not to mention trips to Scores and cash for tips for all and sundry.
Add it up and the record company has spent about $4.4 million.
So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.

 

[Ted Todorov]

Au contraire. Do you think you could get your voice heard without a contract? If you do, you're wrong. You can't put a CD in stores, as the major labels control the distribution channels and retailers. You can't get a song on the radio, as companies such as Clear Channel control the vast majority of radio stations. The RIAA has a stranglehold on the entire industry. You either deal with them, or they deal you out of existence.

That is, unfortunately, EXACTLY true. The only and I mean only exception I know of is Ani DiFranco -- I'm pretty sure she is the only one.

Ted

 

[Alex Shk]

I don't know if this is feasible, possible or true - but if the anti-piracy scheme Universal plans to use violates the red book code, could they be prevented - or sued to cease - using the "compact disc digital audio" symbol? Additionally, could they be forced to refrain from describing their product as a "compact disc" or CD?

 

[Thomas Newton]

I have been boycotting all Big Five music for a while -- waiting for the record companies to come to their senses and ditch SDMI and its threat of audible watermarks.
Now this.
Universal, hear this: It is not just CD sales that you are losing now, but ticket sales and DVD sales, too. If the name "Vivendi Universal" is associated with a product, that's going to be an instant strike against it on my list -- much as I boycotted Circuit City when they were pushing DIVX.

 

[Jerry AZ]

Music sharing like this is widespread for a reason: $17.99 per CD. When the same material on cassette goes for $9.99. Singles are $5 a pop. 5 years ago I could buy almost any CD for $14.99; the prices just keep going up while the value goes down, not to mention the fact that these industry produced bands release one or two good songs per CD, with 8 to 10 crappy ones. It's no wonder people opt to download music - why would you pay almost $20 for two songs? A movies costs many times more than an album, and most DVDs I buy are less than CDs. Isn't that a little ridiculous?

Right on the money Ryan. I haven't bought any CD's for awhile now because of this very reason. I just can't justify paying out $15-16 for one or two good songs.

The industry needs to come up with a way to pay per song for downloads; that way you could get the music you want without all the filler.

 

[Michael St. Clair]

Well, if you guys are willing to read the Courtney Love article about how artists get raped by the record companies, you might as well read the Albini article.
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

 

[Chris Demaree]

I used Napster, Gnutella, Newsgroups and FTP servers mainly to see if I would like the other 8-10 songs on whatever CD I was interested in. The radio only plays 1, 2 or 3 'Hit' songs from a single CD. This is fine, but I will NEVER, EVER pay $14 - $18!!!! for 1, 2 or 3 good songs. Almost every single CD that contains a song I liked on the radio is FILLED with utter crap!! If CD's contained 10 really good songs I would have no problem paying $14- $18. I would also have no problem purchasing single songs for

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

For example, gimme a CD with 2 'hit' songs for $3.50 or 3 for $5.00

The problem is this won't even cover the cost of manufacturing, let alone shipping the disc to retailers, promotion and all the other good stuff that comes with promoting a CD. I totally understand not wanting to buy a whole album for 2 songs.

I do disagree with the comparison to a DVD, the reason being that you will watch a DVD maybe a couple of times a month tops, while a CD will be played a lot more, so you are not equating usage time to the cost of acquisition. I've listened to some CDs more than 100 times since I bought them. I'd be lucky to count 5 plays on 90% of the DVD collection.

Courtney and Steve have the music biz pretty much wrapped up in those articles. I can remember my head hurting trying to figure out how much 90% of 80% of 40% of 30% less returns and a reserve were - it quickly adds up to a whole lot of nothing. But hey, we got to party didn't we?