One way to deal with piracy

[pklima]

I can't think of any bands that have broken up because not enough people are buying their records. If so, then they should have thought more about the music and less about the sales...

I don't need to think of any, I've done it myself - killed off all my recording projects to focus on playing stuff live. I don't think piracy was really the main reason why selling CDs became more difficult, but that's a whole another subject. In any case, my current bands have no plans to ever sell any recordings, and record pretty much only live videos.

 

[NateS]

Actually, throughout the last few centuries artists have made their money from their art, so I'm not sure what your point is.

Plenty of people engage in an artform without being an artist in a professional sense. I spent years playing music before I became a musician.

You're conflating being a professional artist with having lavish wealth. I never once said anything about rockstardom -- in fact, you're the first to bring it up in this entire thread.

i dunno how to argue with this post, only that you and i are on different wavelengths of what an artist is and what a musician is and what being a professional is and it's too late for me to worry about it.

I don't need to think of any, I've done it myself - killed off all my recording projects to focus on playing stuff live. I don't think piracy was really the main reason why selling CDs became more difficult, but that's a whole another subject. In any case, my current bands have no plans to ever sell any recordings, and record pretty much only live videos.

you are kind of proving my point - you didn't stop being a muscician because of a lack of cd sales. you simply moved on. the artists will continue to make great music for people and people will hear them in some way, and that's what matters in my book. there's no need to "stop" piracy, just work with it.

what do you plan on doing with the live recordings?

 

[pklima]

what do you plan on doing with the live recordings?

Throw'em on youtube to promote live gigs, that's all. And our live gigs promote the venue's alcohol sales, so the recordings become an advertisement for an advertisement. Heh. I'm fine with that.

Incentives matter, though, and money is a good incentive. Let's say hypothetically that there was a new law banning any kind of payment for any kind of music - recorded, live, DJs at weddings, sheet music, military bands' salaries, everything - and that it was effectively enforced. Do you expect nothing would change? I'm sure people would still play music, but for one thing I'd expect a lot less music aimed at middle-aged people with money and a lot more aimed at single young women.

 

[NateS]

Throw'em on youtube to promote live gigs, that's all. And our live gigs promote the venue's alcohol sales, so the recordings become an advertisement for an advertisement. Heh. I'm fine with that.

Incentives matter, though, and money is a good incentive. Let's say hypothetically that there was a new law banning any kind of payment for any kind of music - recorded, live, DJs at weddings, sheet music, military bands' salaries, everything - and that it was effectively enforced. Do you expect nothing would change? I'm sure people would still play music, but for one thing I'd expect a lot less music aimed at middle-aged people with money and a lot more aimed at single young women.

i see your point. let's switch it.

let's say that they enforced laws that made it so you could ONLY hear music by paying for it. no way to hear it otherwise. Do you expect nothing would change? I'm sure people would still listen to music, but there'd be a a lot fewer young people listening to music. studies show that people who download music wouldn't have bought it in the first place. incentives matter, and free music is a great way to say "hey, listen to us! it's free!" the lack of of having to pay money is a great incentive, too.

by putting your music up for free, you are gaining a WAY bigger audience then saying "you have to buy our songs to hear us"

 

[dystopiate]

i dunno how to argue with this post, only that you and i are on different wavelengths of what an artist is and what a musician is and what being a professional is and it's too late for me to worry about it.

I thought I made it pretty clear what I meant, and, really, how the word is used most contexts. Artists are people who make a living off their art form. I love food and I love to cook. I'm actually quite passionate about it. I'm not a chef. Sometimes people call me a chef when I cook something for them. Sometimes I call myself a chef when I'm going to prepare something... but I'm not. Like I said before: I spent years playing music before I became a musician. I always fancied myself a musician, but that's all it was: a fancy.

i see your point. let's switch it.

let's say that they enforced laws that made it so you could ONLY hear music by paying for it. no way to hear it otherwise. Do you expect nothing would change? I'm sure people would still listen to music, but there'd be a a lot fewer young people listening to music. studies show that people who download music wouldn't have bought it in the first place. incentives matter, and free music is a great way to say "hey, listen to us! it's free!" the lack of of having to pay money is a great incentive, too.

by putting your music up for free, you are gaining a WAY bigger audience then saying "you have to buy our songs to hear us"

Two things: one, while there wasn't a law before, there was a situation where people only heard music that was purchased, and predominantly young people listened to (and purchased) music, so that's certainly false. Two, I would love to see that study or know its name. I hear about "studies" all the time, and they usually don't exist. They get made up and then passed around the internet by people who don't realize that they're lies.

 

[Dekker]

Why cant these Labels and distributors put better copyright protection into the discs/mp3's? You can put a CD from a band into your comp and put a blank cd in and burn it no problem, no copyright protection whatsoever.

You try to do this with a movie no dice. Now you can get around the movie thing but its a little harder. If everyone is so smart with how to pirate something, why doesnt the industry hire some of these people to write copyright protection for them?

Someone will always figure out how to get past it but if you stayed ahead of the hackers with more hackers on your side would make it a pain in the butt for people to steal music, movies, etc.

Someone please chime in on this that knows but little old me sitting here thinks its a viable solution to some of it.

OK, since my 'day job' is heavy on the technology (and security) side, I thought I'd chip in on this. I added headings since this ended up a long topic, and some might want to skim

DRM and copy protection is a flawed concept and will never work.

How DRM/copy protection work:
Copy protection (and DRM included) is essentially about controlling who has access to information. The simplest analogy is one of keys and locks, with the music being what is protected. The goal is to allow the consumer to access (play) the music they pay for. DRM essentially puts a lock on the music. The music player must then have a key to unlock the music to play it.

The problem with DRM is that the player (lock) is in the consumer's hands, and therefore also in the hacker's hands, and therefore the consumer (hacker) can always extract the key and pass it around. Even if the DRM capability is built into the player (as is the case with DVDs and Blu-Ray players), hackers are a resourceful bunch and they simply reverse-engineer the hardware to get at the key.

Online-only players (where the playback-software and music (lock and key) resides on the vendor's site and can only be accessed online) are one-step-up, but ultimately they also fail in one important way: To get CD quality music, the (unlocked) signal that is sent from the playback-software to the speakers must still pass through the computer, which allows hackers to intercept-and-copy the full CD quality, and distribute it that way. Satellite radio also operates this way, but it faces an adoption problem...

Why not get better protection?
No matter who you hire to create the protection scheme, the issues presented above will render any protection useless.

Bank-style protection works because it is the reverse of the music model. Data is locked using key "A" such that only key "B" (owned by the banks) can unlock it. There is no need for John Q Public to ever have key "B", and so any information encrypted is safe (unless insiders in the bank give out the key...)

Why copy protection / DRM will never work
Which brings me back to my snide comment about DRM and copy protection never being able to work... Even if the vendor GAVE every single person their own portable music (movie) playing machine, no-one would be happy. This limits consumer choice and that won't work anymore. Perfect example where this (almost) works right now is with satellite television. You must have a device from the vendor (the satellite receiver) who locks the signal but gives everyone a unique key. Every once in a while (hours/days) the vendor changes the lock and gives everyone a new key, and every few years forces a hardware upgrade (new better locks/cards). When hackers distribute a key, the vendor simply changes the locks. When hackers figure out how to effectively bypass the locks, the vendor forces the hardware upgrade.

In the end, since the consumer needs to hear/see the end product, they will always have the key in their hands, or they will have an unprotected copy in their hands, and therefore all copy protection schemes fail eventually.

Future options?:
I don't know. I'm being honest.

What is required is a different revenue model. Where I live, we have a levy on all blank media we buy. Then the federal organization distributes that to registered artists based on a somewhat complex scheme. It's not perfect, but it's a start.

Hopefully I didn't drift too far, but hope this sheds some light on the state of copy protection/DRM

 

[dystopiate]

Thanks for this, Dekker. I didn't realize how off-base I was with my idea.

One of our managers is convinced that the future of the industry is the music-like-water concept (akin to what TV used to be): that we'll have free access to music, but that revenue will be created by ads, fees for "premium" service and stations, etc. It's an interesting concept and one that might eliminate albums in favor of a higher frequency of songs.

 

[aborgman]

The other point you made is about touring. There are tons of bands touring. Tons. Records are not fliers for gigs. Anyone who thinks that is losing money or is pontificating from an armchair.

Seems to work just fine in the jamband scene... Grateful Dead, String Cheese Incident, Leftover Salmon, Allman Brothers Band, etc.

 

[dystopiate]

Seems to work just fine in the jamband scene... Grateful Dead, String Cheese Incident, Leftover Salmon, Allman Brothers Band, etc.

Are these bands that are giving away music to get people to shows, or are they bands that sell a ton of music and also have a ton of people at their shows?