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Looper's Delight
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At 7:20 PM +0100 12/28/06, Per Boysen wrote: > >I see no "going to hell" dimension in the fact that people download >music for free. Why not? Myself I don't mind sending a money >donation to the music creator if I particularly like something. The >challenge with the internet is that most of the free stuff is not >very good, from an artistic point of view. Back in the late-80's/early-90's -- just as the Internet was getting off its training wheels -- Bruce Sterling wrote an essay that posited that the true value of the Internet lay not in the volume of information available on it, but rather in the availability of filtering and search tools to find the information you need. Rather, a map or tool to find that one needle in the haystack. I'd argue that we're today in a similar situation: there are some real gems being composed and published and pushed out into the big world. However, we're still lacking in a good filtering mechanism to separate the wheat and chaff. > With old times record labels it was the other way around; only the >fact that a creator was signed to have his/her outlet physically >copied and distributed by the label worked as a public quality level >assurance. To a certain extent. However, that QA function was hopelessly and fatally intertwined with the company's profit motive. How often would labels receive excellent quality product that they would not publish because it couldn't bring in enough cash. I'm certain that if I had a dollar for every group/album some A&R guy *wished* they could put out (but was outside the label's scope of business), I would most assuredly be a rich man. Also, there was a fair amount of shite pushed out by the labels which did not meet those same quality standards, but they believed it would sell, or it was produced by a friend of the label owner, or some other crap reason. >I'm a big fan of the Creative Commons movement and I'm seriously >looking into giving away an entire album, newly recorded, at >http://www.jamendo.com or some related player. Yes! Do it, Per! I love the whole Creative Commons movement, and (although I understand that its nice for artists to occasionally eat) I wholeheartedly support the removal of the profit motive from music creation. Alternately, you might look into some of the different alternate copyright systems -- copyleft, for instance, or the GNU public license. I also really dig some of the suggestions that Marc Francombe has posted regarding leaving CD's in coffee shops, passing along your music to complete strangers, etc., etc., etc. As long as you can keep control over ownership (just to stop somebody else from unfairly making money off your creations) putting your stuff out for free sounds like an extremely cool idea. --m. -- _______ "Now Simulcast on Crazy People's Fillings"