29 Jun
2010
29 Jun
'10
10:51 p.m.
On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 11:18 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Anyway, I don't suppose my views are very popular among the majority
of folks that might be reading this. I actually think it's very
important that artists be paid a living wage. Once we start bringing
the 0.1% of them that are monster money makers into the discussion it
gets pretty crazy pretty quickly but the 99.9% of them that cannot
make a living really are, in my opinion, hurt financially by all of
this.
Keep in mind that this is not _only_ about the headliner - it's also
about composers, arrangers, back-up musicians, etc, that never make a
penny from the band playing live.
Cheers,
Mark
Hey Mark!
I like the points you make, but in my opinion, having discussed copyright a
lot and working
directly with major labels and publishers as my day job, I can tell you that
the link that we make
between making copies of artists' work and their wages have nothing in
common. Copies
almost never benefited musicians and when you are downloading music off of
torrents, trust me -
you are not making any musician poor - I see those contracts and in real
life 90% of musicians
don't get a penny anyway, even if you are buying it. This is just how it
works. This is how it always
worked. In fact, if you look around, you will see that since the come of
Internet streets of cities did
not become filled with starving musicians. That's because they are not
really starving.
It is important that artists be paid wages, if they choose to be
professionals (nobody is forcing them
to do music, btw, it should be a calling, ideally), but it is also important
to not put the burden of
responsibility on people who simply know how to use modern technology. Even
if we force people
to think that copying is bad, several generations more and a concept of NOT
copying will be alien to
people. Copying becomes better and better and in 10-20 years I bet you would
be able to copy all
book ever written to a small device within a couple of minutes. It is not
science fiction anymore. And
artists will continue to create and have wages.
Just to try to bring in some real life, none of my musicians friends, who
are professionals, make money
byselling copies of their work - none. And my musician friends range from
computer music composers
who write for games and movies, to rock, folk and classical musicians. They
all live fine and don't care
about copies. Seriously. Looking around I do not see a problem at all.
--
Louigi Verona
http://www.louigiverona.ru/