Says that artists who don’t take advantage of technology to hear and learn as much music as possible are at a “severe disadvantage” to those that do, and that “resisting file-sharing hasn’t helped anything.”
Musicianwages is a website dedicated to helping those who want to make a living as a musician. The site is about the musician business, not the music business, and so it has a interesting point to make in the whole P2P debate.
A mother with a teenage son aspiring to be a musician himself recently asked David J.Hahn, co-founder of the site and freelance pianist in New York City, if file-sharing of his work bothers him or is he “just glad to have it being enjoyed.”
“He tells me the record sales make money for the record label, not the artist,” she writes. “He says that the artists make all their money from touring and live concerts. He thinks the pirated music promotes the concerts and therefore helps the artist make more money.”
Smart kid, and Hahn admits to be surprisingly pro-P2P.
Hahn first makes the distinction between piracy and file-sharing, the former meaning one makes a profit from illegal copies and with the latter does not.
He says that if her son is going to make a “real, professional try” at being a musician he’ll need to be familiar with many genres including those he doesn’t like. It’s obviously cost prohibitive to buy them all so he recommends her son “download every song out there and sift through them one by one.”
“Jazz musicians are expected to know a whole reservoir of standard tunes and their famous recordings,” Hahn writes. “How are we going to play “Maiden Voyage” if we haven’t heard the original Herbie Hancock recording? Do I know the version of “Down By the Riverside” that Bennie Green played on his live album? Do I know the difference between Ed Thigpen’s style and Elvin Jones’?”
Now Hahn isn’t saying that P2P is moral or immoral, only that if Valerie’s son wants to succeed as a musician he needs to make sure he’s doing all he can to learn the art of music.
“If a musician doesn’t take advantage of the avenues for acquiring this knowledge that technology has given us – then they are at a severe disadvantage to the rest of us,” he continues. “Because I do know the difference between Thigpen and Elvin, I know French rap (blech), I know hymns, bandeon playing and metal bands. I also know the cast recordings of famous and obscure Broadway shows backwards and forwards.”
He also believes that digital distribution has opened the doors of music to the world in a way never before seen, and I agree.
At the music industry’s physical distribution peak in 1999 record stores and the radio were the sole sources of music. Label execs and DJs were the gatekeepers of content to the detriment of music fans.
It also lends further credence to the countless studies that have concluded P2P actually increases legal music consumption, the latest being by the BI Norwegian School of Management, Europe’s second largest business school, which found that file-sharers actually buy 10 times as much music as they download for free.
Hahn closes by pointing out that musicians have been around long before the music industry and that no matter what will always be here.
“The musician industry has been around as long as humans have, but recorded music is, relatively, a very new invention,” he says. “Mozart never sold a record. Beethoven never released an album. Yet they made careers as musicians.”
Interesting observation to be sure, and that’s precisely Hahn’s point, that artists are professional musicians and may have to go back to doing as they did before the advent of recorded music.
“What if we’re just coming out of a prolonged, 100-year tech bubble for the music industry? What if the easy money of the record-selling days is gone, and we’re back to selling live performance and commissioned compositions just like things were before the bubble?”
Trent Reznor, NIN frontman, has suggested that we’re in between business models and that the future lies in a distribution system that gives artists greater control and percentage of revenues.
Hahn isn’t sure where it’s all headed, but he does know that musicians will always be around, and that “resisting file-sharing hasn’t helped anything.”
Indeed it has not.
Stay tuned.
jared@zeropaid.com
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I think I’ve said this befor a couple of times, but I wouldn’t be an artist if it weren’t for p2p. I would never have heard of electronica (namely DnB and Trance), I would never have gotten my software studio, I would never have gotten any motivation to create music period.
P2P makes content creators and I am one of them. There’s a lot of fantastic music out there and it’s 100% thanks to file-sharing that I’ve been exposed to music I like where radio failed miserably for me.
What an absolute CROCK!
P2P is still *stealing*. There are many artists who do NOT tour (extensively or otherwise). There are numerous estates of musicians who have passed away – and their families depend on the income from ROYALTIES.
Screw P2P – you get access the same material at your PUBLIC LIBRARY!
It’s not stealing because people would not otherwise buy all the music they download.
And there are just as many estates of artists where the royalties go to record labels (JIMI HENDRIX) and not their families.
Public library? You’re not serious are you? With nonsense like that it’s no wonder the music industry can’t connect with music fans.
BTW big Steely Dan fan, and yes, despite being a clandestine file-sharer have indeed BOUGHT a few of your albums (”pretzel logic” was the first).
Why should the family be mooching off a dead artists career. If you and I die does our family stay set for life off the work we did, hell no, so why should an artists family? People keep on justifying the copyright laws as supporting the artist and allowing them to make money, but in every instance it does not fit the reward model society has built for everyone else, its simply capitalist greed. You can spin it however you want, but monopolizing ideas is wrong, and has harmed society greatly for the benefit of a few.
EXACTLY! It’s totally demeaned what the whole point of music is. Artists like the Grateful Dead and more contemporary artists like the Dave Matthews Band encourage the sharing of their work so long as one isn’t making a profit from it.
If you start the whole passing copyrights onto family nonsense then at what heir does it end? Child? Grandson? Great-grandson? Great-great grandson?
Music isn’t a commodity like timber or oil, it’s a piece of art meant to be listened to and enjoyed.
If the music industry is concerned about theft how about the fact that radio stations get to play all of their music for free while selling ads in between and profiting handsomely in the process?
It needs to finally diversify its revenue sources and realize the physical CD is fading fast.
Actually radio stations don’t play music for free. They pay royalties every time they play a song.
In some cases, radio stations actually get paid to pay music through a system called “independent promotion”, a loophole where record companies have revived the practice of payola. However, slowly but surely, radio stations have started to wise up. Clear channel no longer deals with indie promoters last I heard.
You know why, because they got a larger secret payola from the big four. Artist can’t even let stations play their music for free if they want, this was prohibited by law. The artist has to be paid no matter what. You want to know why this is, because the big 4 wanted to be paid, indie didn’t care they wanted exposure. If the law allowed the radio to play certain artist for free, only those artist would get air time and the big four would be butted out. So in order to protect their own interests they lobbied and had mandatory compensation passed. Had the market been allowed to work itself out, radio stations would not have to pay to promote artists, because they are doing a service for the record industry. Just another corrupt law passed by the corrupt big four.
An artist gets royalties because they took the time to write and perform the music. Why should their family be paid too? You shouldn’t be paid what you didn’t earn.
And if you think libraries have as much material as p2p, you really haven’t spent time looking. How many libraries do you know that carry Throbbing Gristle? Sun Ra released hundreds of albums, and my library has exactly two of them. Honestly, libraries skim the surface.
Not to mention the fact that not everybody has access to a library, or even has one for that matter.
Last time I checked local libraries stocked with music for checkout isn’t exactly a priority in China, Africa, the Middle East, etc..
“P2P is still *stealing*.”
If it’s so obvious to you, then try to take a shot at proving it; otherwise your claim is empty.
“There are numerous estates of musicians who have passed away …”
Then they wouldn’t give a damn about money, since they’re dead.
“… – and their families depend on the income from ROYALTIES.”
What is the family doing to earn their own money? Nothing?
“Screw P2P – you get access the same material at your PUBLIC LIBRARY!”
EPIC FAIL.
As a musician myself, I can attest to the power of p2p. If I hadn’t discovered napster back in the day, I wouldn’t have been able to expose myself to as many different styles of music as I did. There is just such a limited selection in your average record store. The diversity offered by p2p has made my own music richer. All the artists I’ve listened to over the Internet influence the music I write, and I enjoy blending disparate styles into new genre bending music.
I used to (and still do) listen to a lot of metal. Thanks to Soulseek, eMule and Bittorrent I became a fan of MANY genres including but not limited to: Romantic Era Orchestral Music, Hardcore Rave Tech, Drum and Bass and Jazz! I don’t know where I would be without my hyped up music collection now. I am literally discovering new artists several times a week.