Followupster
Just a follow-up to my last post:
Something I think I didn’t get across clearly enough was that I’m all for musicians making money from their work. It’s just that they don’t. They end up millions of dollars in debt after their first album, and are slaves to their contracts for the next 5 albums, just so they can pay the record company off. And that isn’t right, to me. If musicians ran the music industry, it would be a million times different, I think. And Jen raised another point: we’re paying end-user licenses on art. If I go online to look at a Hopper painting somewhere, I don’t have to pay money just to see it, and if I really wanted to, I could download it and make a nice (little) print-out of it, for pesonal desk-related use. No one in the poster-making industry is crying about that. The only difference between a scan of a peice of art and an MP3 is time. The only difference between music and say, a painting, is that music takes place over time, and it’s aural, not visual.
Something a friend of mine once said about people (in high-school) fighting over which one got to buy a painting of mine, and I didn’t know who to sell it to: He said, ‘It doesn’t matter who buys it. Art is in the creating, not the creation.’ I’ve always felt that was true. So treating songs as if they were sticks of bubble-gum instead of what they are (works of art) is why I think the record industry has screwed us (the music- ‘consuming’ public). I would buy all the CDs I could if they record companies didn’t make such huge profits from every single CD sale, and musicians got like 2 cents. I think the average CD (with liner notes) costs something like $1.50 to actually make and ship. And they turn around and sell it to stores (and you after that) for 15 bucks.
Which brings up another point. My Napster rage here is just another arm of my hating corporatization of everything. Corporations control what you listen to and buy. Sometimes I just hate feeling like a target market. Napster is my way of proving that I’m not.