Student fined $675K for 30 music track downloads - Page 13

On August 04 2009 06:57 mister.bubbles wrote:
I think there seems to be a lot of confusion in this thread.

The profits from the sale of CDs mostly go straight to the record label. The artist hardly sees any of them. A while back this used to work fairly well since recording equipment was ridiculously expensive and only a large and rich organization could afford to provide it. Consequently this is roughly how things would generally go:

The record label discovers and signs an artist
The label then pays for the band to record an album (which was very expensive at the time)
The label then sells the album, collects money and pays a small cut to the artist.

Unfortunately this system has become obsolete since the cost of quality recording equipment has plummeted and continues to drop at an astronomical rate. These days artist and aspiring producers and enthusiast are able to amass the gear necessary to make high quality recordings fairly easily (by which I mean a dedicated enthusiast with a normal job should be able to do so over a few years).

Here is how things are beginning to evolve into:

Bands with written material decide to make a recording for whatever reason.
The band then seeks out an enthusiast with a home studio or use their own equipment
The band pays to make the recording and then uses the internet and live shows for exposure
The band makes a profit at shows and selling merchandise

I think as the music industry starts moving this way things will be a lot better. Bands will have more creative control without a label holding a contract over their heads. The existence of musicians is guaranteed so small studios will always have a way to profit. As studios become smaller and more numerous the demand for sound engineers and producers will increase making this career option more viable. Everyone gets a chance to make at least a small profit while doing what they love be it playing, recording or producing music.

This brings me to my point. The concept of treating a recording as property only benefits record labels. The only purpose of a record label is to allow artists without vast sums of money to get a chance to make recordings and to promote the band. It no longer costs vast amounts of money to make a recording. The internet promotes artists far better than labels have ever been able to (in addition to evening the playing field between really huge bands and unknown bands in terms of exposure). Thus, having recordings be public property only hurts record labels and to some extent super popular bands like Green Day or Metallica.

SMALL TIME ARTISTS ONLY BENEFIT FROM GIVING AWAY RECORDINGS FOR FREE.
RECORD LABELS ARE GREEDY ORGANIZATIONS WHO ARE CLINGING TO AN OBSOLETE SYSTEM THAT ALLOWED THEM TO PROFIT OFF OF BANDS.

This is just my opinion and I'm not sure how accurate my facts are, but I'm pretty sure this is mostly a correct assumption.