Wants to prove P2P can be used by music artists as an important marketing tool to showcase their work.
Formed back in early July of this year, one of the main goals of the Pirate Party of Canada is to “reform copyright and facilitate access to culture,” and as part of that it wants to help music artists learn how to earn a living that’s not dependent on the sale of albums alone.
It’s pledge:
We want to adjust copyright so that artists can better build on previous works and chose the distribution and licensing model that allows them to make a living. We will also help music artists educate themselves about earning money through other means than selling records, for example by performing live shows and selling fan articles and where feasible, we will evaluate the introduction of levies to further compensate artists. In turn, we want to adjust copyright for consumers to make private, non-commercial copying of content legal. This will promote artists and help spread culture farther than ever before.
As part of that effort it has finally launched the previously alluded to “pirate-y distribution method” for helping music artists market their work to a global audience. Dubbed “Captain,” short for Canadian Pirate Tracker, The PPCA’s Creative Commons torrent tracker will give them a quick, cheap, and easy access to a global distribution network.
“The current distribution model is dead, the market must evolve,” it adds.
It currently has a number of artists available for download, one of which, interestingly enough, is ZeroPaid’s own Drew Wilson, and is always looking for more. It’s not genre specific and takes about a day to get posted.
“We do have a slight moderation system, which is mainly me going through every track, just to make sure it isn’t a copyright violation, but it shouldn’t take more than 24 hours to get something posted,” said Jake Daynes, a spokesperson for the Pirate Party of Canada, in a recent interview.
It’s a bold move for the PPCA. It’s tough to argue that P2P can be a positive thing for music artists unless one can show them clear statistics to the contrary. With UK pop singer Lily Allen having recently dubbed file-sharing a “disaster” for emerging artists it’s important that the P2P community prove critics wrong.
The PPCA is the counterpart of the international Pirate Party movement, which has gained seats in both Sweden and Germany.
Stay tuned.
jared@zeropaid.com
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“It currently has a number of artists available for download, one of which, interestingly enough, is ZeroPaid’s own Drew Wilson, and is always looking for more. It’s not genre specific and takes about a day to get posted.”
*Grins ear to ear*
So are their any good artist offering their music through the service? J/k Drew.
This is just the first step, they should set up a website to help artist along all part of the process. Fill it with a bunch of wiki pages and contact information for venues, recording studios, etc.
P2P is useless for promotion. The website is what promotes the music, not P2P!
P2P is just the distribution – and a good website is far more reliable, you can distribute the music that is unpopular and that nobody chooses to seed or reseed – and it can be online, globally, 24 hours a day, for free if you choose.
P2P as a distribution medium is completely redundant for an artist – there are far better technologies out there, just simple webistes for instance. If a listener comes to a website to download, they can buy the stuff you make money off of or see if theres a show. p2p doesn;t give an artist any of that. Companies trying to make money off of p2p are just leeches.
Your business sense is about as good as your logic. P2P gives you free bandwidth, you can continue seeding yourself, and subsidise your cost by having other people seed while downloading and afterwards should they wish. The more popular you become the less you have to spend on bandwidth saving you on the only cost of online distribution. Since you are no longer hosting the file you also save on server maintenance and energy bills.
Why do you have it in for P2P, so you don’t like it, why shouldn’t everyone else. Do you own or work for a record label?
Bandwidth is cheap – in comparison to the other costs of runing a band or a label, it’s nothing. The higher cost of bandwidth running a website are payed for many times over by the visitirs who come to your website to listen and download and see what kind of products you have for sale – or constribute to your forums, join your mailing list, etc., all valuable things.
I work for myself, I have owned tiny labels in the past. and the reason I am pointing out the obvious is because I’m tired of the hype – it’s not based on reality. I hear all this junk about the superiority of p2p and it makes no sense from a business point of view – I think musicians are being misled, in some cases intentionally.
Is it possible that you are just too invested in the old ways of doing things that you can’t perceive the benefits of this changed market?
I mentioned this in other threads, but there are other revenue streams other than selling music. If you cut out the label, and only have a manager setting up your tours than you cut out a large middle man.
With this middle man, and the cost of cd production removed you have many savings that can rationalize free distribution of music.
But that doesn’t mean the artist has to rely on merchandise and concerts for funding either. By being creative they can generate revenue with music sales or donations.
First off, an artist can have a deal where a certain level of donation gets the individual exclusive merchandise, chance to win special concert promos, special web access, early access to tickets, etc.
Another model would be to withhold tracks until the fans donate a certain amount of money to have it release as a creative commons piece. Let them hear only 30 seconds on the song.
Money can be made in a file sharing open world, you just have to be smart about it and give consumers added value they can’t get from file sharing the track.
There is something cool about the way things were back in the day with mom and pop record stores all over the place and lots more places to see bands, but I’m more about the technology empowering artists – not taking power away.
I was giving away my own music on the web in 1996, so it’s not exactly a new way of doing things. Ten years ago I was arguing the other side of this – I just think there were some big flaws in my logic and if it was going to be like what we thought, you’d see a real business model by now. The web is cool as promotion but the basics of the business are still the same, there’s just less money around.
I didn’t say anything about free or not free, label or no label, I’m talking about p2p as a distribution medium, it’s redundant, and web distribution, even if it’s free, is more valuable for an artist becuase he gets eyes to his site.
I also want to point out that p2p is not promotion, sure, you can argue that ‘free’ is good for promotion, but I am talking specifically about peer to peer networks, which are not only redundant for distribution but are NOT promotion as they are often labeled, they are just a way to access a file.
I think a lot of people have invested a lot of money in p2p technologies and lobby hard for them, and artists are being misled. I’m not talking about the bigger issues of free or not free, just the relative usefulness of p2p as an artist.
It could be free is a good form of promotoin depending on who you are and what other kind of marketing is in the mix (and what market you have) but that’s not really my point. I’m talking about the specific method of distribution, on a p2p network or a regualr client-server network, and for a musician if you weight the advantages, you’ll want to go with a clent-server architecture.
Having the promotion and distribution be part of the same thing (the site) is advantageous, in all your materials you’re going to try to get people to go to the site. If they have to go to the site to get the free downloads, that’s HUGE. That could be the difference between ‘making it’ or just spinning wheels.
The other thing is, and I don’t want to make a big deal here because it’s not my point, when you list all those revenue streams, those aren’t really anything new, but there is a big revenue stream that’s missing. So far, since napster, NO ONE has been able to replace the income from record sales – you’d think they would have by now if it were possible. The facts are that artists are making less and the things that supported them – like agents and labels that could invest in them, do promotion (and pay for it) are making less, that’s just the facts. So ‘changed market’ is just a euphamism for ‘collapsed market’. For artists who had stuff that had a cult following but wasn’t real popular, it’s bad news.
But see you are assuming that people stick to filesharing networks and never venture deeper into bands they discover. Nor will most people get their first glimpse of the band from p2p. If I hear of a band I’ll first look on the web to get short samples of their music, I will then download an album to get a better idea of the artist. Once I know I like the album I go back to the web to check tour dates and what else they are up to, post their videos on face book etc. P2P doesn’t keep people in P2P networks, its just another discovery tool people use.
I’m also assuming you have not heard of magnet links. Just paste a link on your web page and it redirects people to the file on file sharing networks. A lot of creative commons work is distributed this way. Its free distribution, no cost. I’m not sure how you can claim that to be inferior to paying for bandwidth.
“P2P doesn’t keep people in P2P networks, its just another discovery tool people use. ”
And if you can download the file using http, peer to peer download is redundant.
I used to distribute on gnutella and emule, and evaluated BT when it came out. I speak from personal experience. For an artist p2p is redundant and it’s way better to have people come to your site to get new files.
“Its free distribution, no cost. I’m not sure how you can claim that to be inferior to paying for bandwidth.”
Because if people have to come back to your site to get more stuff, then basically, you tie them in to your site. Otherwise they can just search for your stuff on the network and download it – without going to your site. Bandwidth is a business investment and you can make it pay off if you use it correctly. P2P may be free but from a business POV you get what you pay for.
@malgre:
“And if you can download the file using http, peer to peer download is redundant.”
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, i.e. it is a protocol mostly for text documents. It is not very reliable for very large file transfers.
“[...] without going to your site.”
Simply link the web site on the information page.
“Bandwidth is a business investment and you can make it pay off if you use it correctly.”
So can many other mechanisms. All you are doing suggesting to close all windows on innovation involving P2P.
“P2P may be free but from a business POV you get what you pay for.”
That is not a from a business perspective.
Unless you provide the credentials that you run a successful business, refrain from asserting what is from a business perspective.
malgre: “blah blah blah blah blah …”
“Bandwidth is cheap – in comparison to the other costs of runing a band or a label, it’s nothing.”
However bandwidth in absolute context is not cheap and you have not yet stated those other expenses.
“The higher cost of bandwidth running a website are payed for many times over by the visitirs who come to your website to listen and download and see what kind of products you have for sale”
No. How does visiting the web site, listening and then downloading, and viewing products pay for the bandwidth costs? It is not for certain that every visitor will buy something on the first visit.
” – or constribute to your forums, join your mailing list, etc., all valuable things.”
Except there’s nothing to do in those forums and there is no point of joining the mailing list.
“I work for myself, I have owned tiny labels in the past. and the reason I am pointing out the obvious is because I’m tired of the hype – it’s not based on reality. I hear all this junk about the superiority of p2p and it makes no sense from a business point of view – ”
Ad verecundiam. What tiny labels do you own right now and how is a P2P system not based on reality when it is already existing? Being self-employed does not mean you can make assertions and claim them to be from a business point of view.
“I think musicians are being misled, in some cases intentionally.”
Then you are probably one of those middle men.
“P2P is useless for promotion. The website is what promotes the music, not P2P!”
Humanly readable information online is usually in the form of web pages. In other words, users discover the existence of the objects usually by accessing the page’s information. But the website is not owned by the artist, so it does not contain whatever appears in personal web pages and therefore this does not mean P2P is useless for promotion when using an auxiliary web page.
Your argument is pointless, since you have been asserting that artists must create a website. Don’t try to change your claim such that you try to discard its weakness.
“P2P is just the distribution”
False. I’m not going to repeat the disproofs that P2P is not just distribution.
“… a good web presence is far more reliable, …”
However creating a new website is not the best method of promotion and a poorly generated one is not at all reliable.
“… you can distribute the music that is unpopular and that nobody chooses to seed or reseed – …”
Seeding is part of P2P; the term ‘file-sharing’ is self explanatory.
“… and it can be online, globally, 24 hours a day, for free if you choose.”
That is exactly the same for P2P.
“P2P as a distribution medium is completely redundant for an artist – there are far better technologies out there, just simple webistes for instance.”
We all disproved that already. Repeating it does not mean that it’s true, and there is no such thing as a “webistes”.
“If a listener comes to a website to download, …”
Users are not listeners until after they hear the music.
“they can buy the stuff you make money off of or see if theres a show.”
Stuff such as what? If the artist is new, why would there be a show preplanned?
Your point is irrelevant.
“p2p doesn;t give an artist any of that.”
You are off-topic: you simply stated that websites can be used for e-commerce, which is obvious, but promotion itself does not earn anything.
You can’t just assert that P2P is useless for promotion if you don’t even know what promoting means.
“Companies trying to make money off of p2p are just leeches.”
Reality laughs at your face: companies that manage to make money by utilizing P2P understand that creating unnecessary expenses loses money.
You are a leech as long as you think users should not share files back with other users.