Baby Gremlin VS Music Industry Part II
PART II
DOUBLE BONUS : TAX ON FAMILY FUN
Nope not the divorce, but the wedding…
Don’t play music at your party or family event unless you get permission from some music licensing societies that you’ve probably never heard of. Hey, you know that boring guy at the end of the Grammy’s each year that talks and bores the living hell out of ya about the “Academy”? Just imagine someone like him, charging you for playing music you already bought at your own wedding.
MAD TANGENT ABOUT THE GRAMMYS
Okay, so the Grammy’s spokesman or chair or whoever he is — is probably an alright guy (Neil) – I’ll assume he is, but hey wait, you charge artists to enter music for the Grammys? Isn’t this all about the gift of music? Is this true?
Oh, found this quote:
The GRAMMYs are the only peer-presented award to honor artistic achievement, technical proficiency and overall excellence in the recording industry, without regard to album sales or chart position.
Couple questions on this one…
Who are the peers? Are they my friends? Or are they merely peers through membership? Are you guys basically a marketing scam that gives away some money to charity? Because no one is making a dent in helping schools with their music programs and when I worked in that non-profit field, you guys were no where to be found.
Funny what you find when you keep looking huh?
Today, The Academy’s Advocacy & Government Relations office represents artists, songwriters, studio professionals and other music makers before Congress at a critical time for the music industry.
Another powerhouse for the industry, but what about consumers and fledgling artists/students?
Wow, there’s more eye popping magic:
Other issues the department is taking an active role in range from expanding health insurance access for artists, to ensuring wireless microphones and monitors are protected from interference, to allowing arts presenters to expedite visa processing for foreign performers.
Neil has a tough job being such a dutiful advocate:
- The GRAMMY Industry Roundtable
- Music Leaders Retreat, co-hosted by Academy President/CEO Neil Portnow, giving the leaders of every major music association an opportunity to jointly address community issues in a closed-door working session
- Music & Technology Leadership Retreat at Skywalker Ranch, addressing issues affecting the digital music marketplace
- Advocacy Action @ GRAMMY.com, providing Academy and industry members with an online tool to communicate with their local political representatives
What are the odds that even if you got into the club that you would have your music reviewed by your “peers” in the industry? Okay, let’s say the odds are good that it gets listened to in this round. Congratulations, your song made it! But, there’s also a second round. Oh, and there’s the Special Nominating Committees. Well, who are the infamous “SC”?
In craft and other specialized categories, final nominations are determined by national nomination review committees comprised of voting members from all of The Academy’s Chapter cities.
These special committees are kind of the wild card in the final voting round:
Final Voting
Final-round ballots are sent to voting members in good dues standing. The finalists determined by the special nominating committees are also included in this ballot. In this final round, Recording Academy members may vote in the four general categories and in no more than eight (8) of the 29 fields. Ballots again are tabulated by the independent accounting firm of Deloitte.
What’s any different with this setup than a Who’s Who book club?
On the Grammy.com website, several steps into the application process, when you apply to be a “voting” member, the website states:
This classification is for creative and technical professionals who qualify in at least one of the categories of eligibility. If you have received technical or creative credit in any one capacity on at least six tracks or equivalent, you qualify. All recordings must have been commercially released in the United States. Commercially released recordings are defined as being released regionally or nationally through distribution companies/outlets and retail Internet distribution outlets that are generally recognized. Distribution solely through personal sales at performances, retail consignment, Internet consignment or non-retail Internet Web sites is not eligible for Voting qualification.
Sounds an awful lot like the, “we’ll take your money” but you may not be allowed “in the club” to me. Being at a recognized outlet typically means that your sales are being tracked by a major royalties tracking society. These societies will happily collect some 10% of your sales revenue directly from the retailers even without your permission and the governments are cool with it (U.S. is different than most countries). Of course, getting in touch with these collection agencies is tough enough. So basically you can get in, if you have money, and if you are within the guardianship of the big four. Fortunately, in this case, your “voting” membership qualifications can be verified by your releases appearing on the All Music Guide website. According to AMG, product submissions take 4-6 weeks to get into their database manually.
Once again let me reiterate that this is simply an editorial piece. It’s purely for entertainment purposes. However, I could get an award for best fiction writing if you pay to join a special club and vote for me!
They do a few things right – I’ll give them that. I could go on and on with this one and maybe I will some other time, as there are massive disadvantages to being an unknown artist and trying to cut it against competition like this but back to the Family Fun Tax.
Look, they’re not after the bridge and groom, just the DJ. Oh, that’s your cousin Rick playing the sweet 70’s tracks for your first dance? Oh, the Humpty Dance to close it down…you’ll pay for that one! Better hope that there aren’t any ASCAP or BMI contracted spies showing up. Let’s hope they keep their battlegrounds to the corner bar or the local shoe store like they claim.
Don’t play music at work either! Don’t play it for customers. Don’t play it in your store because you’d be surprised how many people come all the way to the mall to listen to your music without paying! They don’t want to shop, they want to listen to music and have you pay for it. This includes adding music to your YouTube family videos! You’ll be banned from YouTube because of the pressure from the labels!
To The Baby G, all this is a total joke. But, if you really truly don’t want to get sued, listen to what I said. Being in the business, friends and family always ask me about music or even send me illegal music without me asking for it. Heck, bands send me their music when their masters are owned by the label – that’s illegal too. Maybe the label should sue the band for copyright infringement.
I see two problems here Hollywood. The first is your brute force tactics that have infiltrated way too deep into our lives. Second, the piracy is a problem. Both pieces need transformation to find happy ground…but you fat cats, do you really care if the customer side is happy with your value proposition? Or do you have an insatiable appetite at the cost of both your supply and demand?
Are you just the middle man in all of this?
How Not To Get Sued By Hollywood – Your Very Own Ace In the Hole
SOLUTION TO NOT GETTING SUED: Don’t think that you ever “own” the music. Just because you bought it, doesn’t mean you can do stuff with it. Just because you bought one format doesn’t mean you can convert it to another. Just because you CAN burn it to CD doesn’t mean you legally can. Just because you bought it, it doesn’t mean that you can share or exhibit it for people. There will be no more “hey check out this cool song that I heard” with your girlfriend. The lines are just too grey to risk it. Methods of introducing others to music or accidentily leaving your music out to be found are clear violations of the p*nis code. Sorry, I meant to say DICK code.
Well The Baby G has a code for you. QUIT F*CKING US!
Ok, back to not getting sued…
Pay for all songs that you want to playback at your leisure. Of course, whoever you buy it from will have stipulations on whether you can play the song on just your phone, or as just a ringtone, or as just a CD, or as just a wmv file, or just on a particular number of devices, within a particular software, or many other restrictive policies. Make sure to read whatever agreement you enter into when you pay for the music. You’re merely buying a specific license set forth by the copyright owner. If there’s no licensing agreement clearly available, then you’re probably shopping at a Dread Pirate Roberts contraband store – get outta there quick!
So basically, you’re just leasing the music. Get a written agreement for using anyone’s music for public or entertainment purposes. Don’t ever use any samples of music in your recordings. Don’t mess with the tracks, don’t remix them, don’t copy them except for backup as explicitly stated in the U.S. copyright laws.
Oh one last thing, don’t look Mr. X in the eye or you will see no soul.
If that all sounds ridiculous, it is. That’s only a tiny fraction of it. Wait till we talk about record deals, licensing, and royalties…Times are changing because of the digital revolution and the executives are still treating the next generation of customers like an “us versus them” zero sum war game.
Where the Labels Failed Horribly
Guys, a little news here. The consumer knows that your digital distribution is cheaper. We know that your access to marketing because of the internet is cheaper. We know that digital duplication costs nearly nothing compared to your former costs of overhead and replication. We know that you use interns. We know that 94% of your releases are failures and the 6% that are a success takes care of the rest. We know that artists are a whiney bunch. We know that many of you are greedy pricks with nasty ties to nasty things. But, you can learn alot from history, right guys?
You failed at many things since 1999:
1. Delivering good value for the price
2. Delivering the media in the desired, consumable fashion
3. Delivering the media with artwork and liner notes, in a timely, convenient, manner
4. Delivering rich media experiences like place-shifted concerts (there’s 100 million music fans in the U.S. and you guys are still making everyone come to the venue?). For gosh sakes, you don’t need to broadcast at a movie theatre… Break it up with commercials or charge us. People will pay. Hook up a webcam. Hook up to a free multicast service. Pay the premium fee and get your own advertisers. I thought you guys were in the business of making money? You know how many people are not within 30 miles of a concert venue? You think they love music, have a credit card, and internet access? Oh let me guess, licensing negotiations are taking too long? Well, here’s an idea. Start this with all new acts. Rights problem solved.
Let’s not forget the big one:
4. Failing all the way back in 1999 with Napster negotiations and then blaming the consumer for having different preferences
As Geoff Taylor of BPI recently said in a BBC interview:
In speaking of 1999, “To make music fully and legally available on the internet meant clearing the rights in millions of tracks for a huge number of countries,” he said, “agreeing how the revenue should be shared, implementing workable DRM (which everyone considered fundamental at the time), developing technology to track all the downloads for royalty purposes, as well as creating a quality user experience people would pay for.”
Sounds to me like you said Fanning f*cking schooled us all by himself with his little team of what? Interns?
Okay, to let Geoff off the hook for a second, I think he’s spot on and gave a good summary at that. Hindsight is always 20/20. But once again, you neglected the most important voice.
We don’t care if Fanning’s uncle was a ball breaker and pissed you guys off. Fanning wanted to charge for the service the whole time and people sweep that information under the rug like it’s dirty laundry and like Fanning is this big whiz-kid-hacker-student-pirate-genius. Well, he was a genius, for listening to what people wanted and delivering. He’s still doing that today. You had your second chance to build something unique with Snocap…uhhh…uhhh…balk. Oh and then there was the i2hub which leveraged the Abilene. Beautiful. Unfortunately Wayne took the “ask for forgiveness” route when you guys were giving no quarter. Instead schools could have utilized the service to trade educational materials and labels could have utilized a wonderful new, amazingly fast distribution mechanism to their future spenders….uhhh….uhhh…balk. You forced Wayne into the corner with Morpheus. Unfortunate. At the very least, why not tap the talent of these guys… They have a knack for building wildfire just get em some matches.
We don’t care if you thought DRM was a necessity. We told you we would never accept it the entire time. I remember having a meeting with RSA who said it seemed like a nearly impossible task to develop multi-platform, multi-device DRM. It’s been at least six years and I still haven’t seen the solution they talked about. Real abandoned their junky DRM but it was the only one to play on PC and Mac. You guys didn’t care and stuck it to the CEO who was sticking it to you back. It’s no fun when someone plays the same type of “ball” game is it? You catch my drift there? Did you ever believe that Microsoft would nail the customer experience with it? When their DRM failed, it broke devices, soaked up battery life, and you had to delete your DRM folder. Hell, only Apple got it right and it’s just because they left it easily hackable. Ever hear of MyTunes? Another great distribution tool – ignored almost completely.
We don’t care if you have to clear all the rights to an overly bureaucratic system that you fat cats painted yourselves into. And, no we don’t care about rights in the UK, Japan, and Germany. At least not in the U.S. They have their own way of doing things anyways. Let’s start with American artists and American rights negotiations first. The music market is the U.S. you fools. You proclaim it yourselves over and over how you created the biggest market all by yourselves.
We don’t F*CKING care. And now you want to take it out on us. You dropped the ball and in your greediness, you take it out on your fans for falling in love with what a college student in a dorm room created in his spare time. It was a door of opportunity in which your standardization reinforces your path to extinction. How long will your marketing machine last? How long will people fall for your formulaic, meat market product presentation.
See what I mean? It’s like a zoo exhibit with people in their cages!
You still have the balls to sue us. Bet it backfired a bit when the jury said 1.92 million. You must have pitched your case of fear well. The jury must have thought that Jammie was an evildoer and that she was singlehandedly undoing the music industry. We were happy with having crappy quality files back then in the Napster days. You guys want to continue punishing the fans who are obsessed over your artists, who would sacrifice anything to connect with those artists, whom you already sell $60 concert tickets and $15 CDs too?
You’re just like the professional sports industry. You’re so worried about your existing models that you refuse to compromise on your perceived value even when the seats are empty! The Gutenberg Press of creativity, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and communication was invented and you guys break it because it’s too efficient and “you’re not ready”. People are clambering wildly for your products and you are pissed because you’re not riding the gravy train because of it. Demand for new music is at an all time high. It’s your fault. You made mistakes. You allowed the problem to manifest by a total ignorance of positioning and lack of investment. You did not hand the reigns to the whiz-kids out of sheer pompousness. You are changing in this manner, but far too slowly.
Is this is all part of your plan to get government intervention because you know you’ll still be able to triple-dip us on value-adds? Your fans already think you’re evil, but are you even worse than we thought?
Back To Jammie
Okay, with that little music industry background in mind, let’s get back to Jammie. She was sued for sharing songs on her computer and let’s face it, she had 1,700 songs in the shared folder? Big, costly mistake. And then Jammie, you decided to take on the lawyers. Oh, I hope you get a book deal and Oprah out of this. If it were me, I’d be cool with dropping a settlement just to avoid the pain of it all. But what if I couldn’t afford the settlement or the defense? Would they garnish my wages? Luckily for me, The Baby Gremlin, I’m also not like some people who would take on a team of mega-profile lawyers just because I was right. Call me intelligent, ignorant, or lazy. All would apply. Some people stick up for what they believe in, even if it jeopardizes the comfort and financial security of their life.
I’m not sticking up for piracy here, not sticking up for Jammie, just sticking up for the “fair and just” punishment and the trying my best to call out the bullsh*t influence over government and courts that these fatty pockets from Hollywood have hanging over us. How can they actually convince government to mandate that we pay for music? As a citizen, it’s not my role to support organizations based on damages they’ve received by their own lack of control. That would be the same as asking me to pay for Jammie’s damages right? Are you going to add a fee to blank CDs in order to compensate Jammie for damages that can only be vaguely extrapolated?
How can a governement for the people allow so much lobbied influence to penetrate from an industry that lacks competition because of the increase of regulations?
Who’s speaking for the music fans, the music lovers, the consumers? Where’s our funded organization that’s lobbying to congress to make sure that my Grandma doesn’t have to pay for music that she’ll never ever even want to listen to. Because I want to backup my computer by burning my data on blank CDs, I suppose I have to pay your music fee for that too.
Back to Jammie’s Situation…
1,700 songs were supposedly infringed which means the labels could have tried to prove that all songs were infringed @ $80,000 each or $136,000,000 in total damages.
Let me get this straight. So if a jury of her peers decides on the maximum and the labels seek the maximum, a lady, whose household (probably) participated in piracy at least with one party (an agent of the copyright owner), could have faced $136 million as punishment.
Bummer for Hollywood, that amount as punishment falls just slightly short of movie blockbuster The Matrix’s all-time domestic revenue.
Fortunately for the record companies, they did not do this. What’s worse, is that the jurors could have awarded $150,000 per song or a total of $255,000,000 at the maximum if they wanted to. So, a maximum lawsuit and maximum damages could have gone as high as $255 million.
Legally, they should be able to do it right? That’s would be as much as Jaws made. Maybe Spielberg could make a movie about Jammie’s lawsuit and fix everything for us? I hardly bet that the movie’s money would be made on its soundtrack!
Step Three To Ruining the Industry: Punish Your Biggest Fans’ Parents
There was no proof that Jammie was the one who shared the songs. There was no video tape, or visual evidence that Jammie shared the music. So I guess a person in the household must be a scapegoat automatically even if we don’t know who did it? Well, we’re fairly certain that someone with that IP address did this. We have to pick an adult because adults are ultimately responsible for what happens in their house, so…hmm, how about the only one in the house…the single mom. We can corner her in on negligence, especially if her kids are more savvy with the computer than she is (kids are quick learners all of the sudden).
Hell, we’ve sued dead people before too right? And no, I’m not going to even post that link where they sued an old lady who passed, you can find it yourself.
There was no proof that anyone downloaded the songs from the computer except for MediaSentry…but hey, they’ve got some undesireable media attention of their own. Their main source of copyright infringement proof is the fact that if they can download it with their own MediaSentry computer, they feel they feel they have proven that Jammie was willfully distributing the music to anyone who wanted it. Is the punishment just for having the songs in the shared folder? Is the biggest punishment that Jammie might have not known what she was even sharing? Or even if she knew what she was doing – 1.92 million to a single mom?
Therefore, there is reasonable doubt that there are $1.92 million in damages. I wish I knew someone who attended the trial. Am I completely wrong? Is the media twisting it? Are the label PR firms working overtime? How can you award damages when there is no proof of sales loss? Who downloaded it? There’s no proof that anyone but MediaSentry downloaded songs from her computer. Is that enough proof? How can you prove damages to that level. How can you expect a group of common people (the jury) to even know what a song is worth without a team of lawyers to educate and scare the living sh*t out of them.
I can understand coming up with a penalty amount within the law’s boundaries, but what’s the penalty for? It’s basically a juror’s discretion for the amount…so the “peers” that the Grammys talked about not only “award” musical awards, but they also “award” damages to the tune of 1.92 million for 24 songs that a disputed “unlawful” private investigator “stole” himself. Nice.
Let’s think about a couple figures here:
Buying all 24 songs through iTunes would cost about $25.00 USD. So, we should be able to guesstimate how much revenue could have been lost if we make assumptions based on the damages. This is obviously not a far apples to apples comparison, but should be fun nonetheless.
With $1.92 million in damages, a good equivalent would be $0.99 per song on iTunes, so that’s roughly 1.92 million songs that Jammie may have prevented from being sold at a normal market price. With an even distribution of downloads among songs, that would be 80,000 downloads/sales of each song. Wow Jammie, you’re quite the pirate! You’re pushing more product than the labels themselves.
To conclude the comparison, based on damages, we’ve assumed that it’s the equivalent of 24 songs being stolen a maximum of 80,000 times each. If you served up those songs directly from one computer, 1.92 million downloads would be the roughly the equivalent of 4MB each (on the small end) in size or 7500 Gigabytes of data that would have to be downloaded. Assuming that Jammie allowed the songs to be transferred in a distributed fashion over a four month period, that’s only 200GB per month of bandwidth that she would have to serve or only about $800 per month to outsource a server that can handle the 200GB per month transfer.
Okay, so there are obvious problems with this estimate.
The damages are based on merely violating the copyright laws by number of infractions.
The estimate is thrown out based on the fact that it utilizes data for the wrong purpose. BUT, this is still an amusing point. Because, if we went with our argument, and assuming by sharing those songs, 1.92 million tracks were not purchased…bear with me. Statistics have shown that people who “steal” music don’t necessarily buy it when it’s not available to steal. Some studies have shown that people who “steal” music are actually very active buyers too. Based on these studies, we would have to assume that Jammie would have had far more downloads that 80,000 per track to prevent 80,000 sales of that individual track. So now, she’d have had to been serving up uber traffic.
There’s also a bit of a flaw in this argument in that stealing or shoplifting carries damages in the amount of the full purchase price. Traditional merchandise may have lost revenue of full price as one lens, but may also have only the wholesale loss when looking through a different lens.
Clearly there is some cause here to re-examine this entire situation whether our argument is sound or not. Frankly, I don’t want to see my kids inherit some kind of music slave tax.
To recap the facts:
Jammie had a login on Kazaa that was the same as her account on another website
MediaSentry downloaded songs through Jammie’s computer
Labels sued and lost
Labels sued and won
Do you think that this makes the younger generation want to pay you for music?
Were you making a statement? Is this part of your revenue stream? Is this a scare tactic? Is this to make you look like you hate your biggest fans?
I don’t know what you’re thinking. And maybe Baby G is chump.
But, The Baby knows there are better ways to use a carrot and stick. You guys are still playing a zero sum game with your division of lawyers and your brinkmanship.
Quotes from the RIAA’s ‘Who We Are‘ Page:
RIAA members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 85% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States.
Legitimate being what? Authenticity: undisputed credibility? That’s weird because I know about 300 bands in my city that release records every year that aren’t represented by you. In fact, I know entire genres where you have literally no representation – of course you are threatening to sue for revenue share in those genres as we speak…
Since your statement is entirely hogwash if you consider the millions and millions of studios and groups that do not fall into the major four, you must be referring to the units sold for the 85% number. Nice play on words “produced and sold”…brilliant.
Apparently, the bands I know and pay to see and pay to buy their physical CD…who perform concerts, who get radio play…these music groups must be un-authentic or have some type of disputed credibility. Perhaps they just forgot to get their CD listed on All Music. Or perhaps All Music dropped their CD into a crack by accident. Who came up with the 85% number for you? The IFPI? I’d love to know. Here’s a quote from the IFPI site.. see the humdinger sentence…the last sentence on the page of course…
IFPI is affiliated with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the organisation responsible for the world’s largest music market.
Wow, I didn’t even notice what they actually said until now, “the organisation responsible for the world’s largest music market”. The RIAA is now responsible for the United States music market according to the IFPI. Another beautiful play on words…what do you mean by “music market”? And “responsible for”?
One last quote from the RIAA website:
Its [the trade group] mission is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members’ creative and financial vitality.
For a company that is affiliated with the IFPI and the IFPI represents them as the organization responsible for the world’s largest music market, I find it interesting that the RIAA makes no mention in it’s mission to improve the music industry for those who consume it. Makes sense, it’s all for the artists right…or is it really the strongarm for the labels? Hey, do you know anyone getting a kickback from those CD-Rs you bought?
According to basic economic theory, a “competition” is one in which there is both a supply and a demand.
Let’s face it, the RIAA is a trade group that is all about standardization and solving the “coordination” game theory problem where mutual decisions create mutual gains…
Wait a second, what’s a monopoly?
According to Wikipedia:
A monopoly exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it.
I see an industry pissing on fans, content creators, distributors, retailers, fledgling innovators and itself.
ya heard?
The Baby Gremlin
http://musicgremlins.com
