It's a cold cruel world out there, and not just in the music business, times are tough all over. So the best thing is to work hard, hope for the best, and be thankful for whatever you do get. What I'm finding out here in my old age, is that your health is what becomes important, as no matter what you finances or musical aspirations are, you need your good health.
Sorry for being so long, but those are my thoughts.
Hi Loreena, thanks for chiming in. Yes, the music business is a tough business, so is the factory business, the housing business, the restaurant business, the banking business, in fact, things are tough all over for many people. Some people though, are still doing well, so it goes to show that you really have to work hard and be at the top of your game just to make it successful. It's not totally impossible, but not easy.
I'm the wrong person to ask on how to make money in the music business, as I have made some, but not much, but I still tinker around in my studio, because it gives me something to do, and I enjoy it.
As with any business, there are no guarantees, but there are opportunities, which must be pursued. In the music business, currently I believe iTunes is burning up the charts with selling music downloads. I've read they sold 3 billion downloads over the last five years....that's a lot of business going to musicians...so you'd think somebody is making money. However the problem is there's 6 million songs on iTunes so what money is being made is being spread out very thinly. So live performances become the money making tool, as long as you can keep your road and traveling expenses within reason, and you can sell concert tickets. Some artists can do this, some can't, so this may become the determining factor on who makes it as an artist and who doesn't.
It's a cold cruel world out there, and not just in the music business, times are tough all over. So the best thing is to work hard, hope for the best, and be thankful for whatever you do get. What I'm finding out here in my old age, is that your health is what becomes important, as no matter what you finances or musical aspirations are, you need your good health.
Sorry for being so long, but those are my thoughts.
Posts: 71 | Location: North East Ohio | Registered: May 23, 2006
Well you must have been reading my mind Angie, as yesterday I started to enter some comments into this thread. I wanted to share some comments another musician, Billy Bragg had to say about this subject in another column ( see below)
<snip>
Here is the link to Billy Bragg's comments I was referring to earlier.
Thank you all once again for your comments and I hope you are finding each other's thoughts and experience interesting and valuable. I certainly am and I will join in as I can.
(I apologize for the length of this post.)
Loreena
Thank you Loreena, and no need to apologize. Both articles by you and Billy Bragg were well written and certainly gave me food for thought.
I've been contemplating a lot of late as to how I should handle my music. I suddenly realized myself standing at a busy 'intersection', and knew that these were not the times of 'yesterday', when good ol' fashion 'get-off-the-butt' work was needed to get an honest pay. Liken to the principle of an agriculturist that goes out and grows his/her own food if they want to eat. At least, whatever they grow, they know what they're eating.
Today, there seem to be so many 'quick schemes' flying into people's faces, that the first impression I receive is, 'easy come, easy go', and that's a bit of a scary feeling. Not knowing what's going to happen to my music.
Extracting a phrase from what Billy Bragg wrote in his article:
"The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet, too?"
Indeed, this very notion has crossed my mind, as well. It is beguiling. I want to know where my assets are going.
There were times, when I just sat on the nearby park bench and wondered, "Is it even worth getting started?", then I would think, "....but everything I've created would be wasted...it would be a massive desecration to myself...I may be a late bloomer, but I've got enough energy in me to pull this off....but what direction?"
So, I thank you Loreena for having started this thread subject, because I'm gleaning a lot of information here.
Uh, Ms. McKennitt, I have two questions. First of all, do you feel that piracy of music should be legal in certain countries? I brought this up because I was concerned with piracy of music in China, which I think is "legal" over there. Second, should there be legal action to be taken when artists, especially those of hip-hop and rap, sample other people's music? I'd appreciate imparting your wisdom on this matter. --Loreenya
Posts: 302 | Location: Sterling Heights, Michigan | Registered: December 04, 2007
Originally posted by Loreena: In relation to the more contemporary music industry, if there is not a sufficient and internationally agreed upon system which ensures creative people are paid for their creative initiatives and copyrights, of course, more will be turning to other lines of work in order to support themselves. They may still be involved in their 'art' but probably at a lesser degree. I am already seeing this.
Thank you for contributing again Loreena. No need to apologize for length, though I may have to at the end of my post. (insert self directed eye roll here)
I am a bit concerned about the statement above in that if you're having to cut back or diversify your attentions from the admin/creating/touring cycle in order to support yourself, what does that mean for the rest of the industry full of the up-and-coming or indie artists described in Billy Bragg's article?
To answer your question of what can we do about this situation, I have some ideas. Some have already been discussed on here by me and others but I think they bear repeating.
1. Support artists at the source. I still maintain it would be better for all involved if we just dealt with the artists directly, no matter where they are on the sliding scale of notoriety or wealth. The artist bears some responsibility for this, in that they have to make sure their website or other infrastructure is well laid out enough that patrons young and old will be able to get whatever it is they're looking for (CD buying information, tour information, etc). Good, Great, or even Excellent Customer Service is a must. In this age of outsourcing and trying to save a buck in the workplace, customers are starting to rebel against talking to a real live person. Of course, I know this is a top priority at QR, but for the rest of the world it's starting to be a sorely lacking part of business.
2. Support local business. I know that when I have lived in smaller communities than where I am now, I've taken great pride in the diversity of local business. Unfortunately, with the era of Walmart and other big box stores (even trying to undersell Apple's .99 cent downloads, which some may argue is not enough as it is) this is becoming increasingly hard to come by. However, it is my personal belief that we need less Box and more local community, something my own community is lacking and may have already lost. And that's another issue - many people today are just in a different mindset that they go shop at the Big Box stores and have a certain standard of living, and they could really care less that the Mom/Pop stores, maybe even if a Box store went out of business. And that is definitely the biggest obstacle and one I don't even know how to start to change, even with other issues like environmentalism, conservation, and other arenas.
3. Lay down some sort of ground rules for places like YouTube. It is my understanding that YouTube started as a way to broadcast videos or other original content that you created and wanted to share. However I think like in the case of Bebo, YouTube got sold for quite a lot of money and turned into being all about profit, not about a good infrastructure to protect illegal action like putting up videos that aren't yours and violate copyright law. As I just learned from Billy Bragg's article, I had no idea how much corporations and networking sites were taking away from musicians. This issue is I think how people think about pollution. People are used to the general space they live in that they forget what people in other states, provinces, countries are doing. It's like contemplating the vastness of space. Because people think well, "what harm can I do?" they're not thinking about the other 1 million people thinking the same thing when they engage in the same action, and lo and behold we find ourselves in the situation we're in, left asking "how did it get this bad?" So for future applications, I really think a lot of foresight and planning is going to have to be put in to any future applications that deal with information being sorted and shared because right now that's sorely lacking. I don't know how to fix it, other than to do the things I suggested in point #1. It's a big moral issue I think.
Ok that's enough. I really think if people acted on being considerate, thinking of people other than themselves and how their actions affect others, having morality over profit margins, and showed decency and respect, then a lot of these issues would be avoided. However, there's a lot of that lacking on the internet.
Thanks Loreena. Almost everything you said can be applied to the world in general. The era of Mom&Pop is past, I agree to our significant loss. It was an era of character, trust and community...and civility. But technology marches on driving all the changes western civilization has seen since the beginning. The common lament for every generation has been: "It ain't like it used to be..." Indeed that's as true for someone living 150 years ago as it is today. Are we objectively better off now than someone living in the 1920's? Like Loreena sez, some changes are for the better, some not so better. In some ways we gain, in others we've lost. Sorry for getting so etherial here. I said early in this thread, the internet and easy free downloads are new terrority that Loreena et al (Billy Bragg) are working their way through. One of djwayne's points is correct, and I'm the perfect example. I would not have discovered Loreena if it hadn't been for a free file sharing website. I wasn't looking specifically for Loreena, but the style of music. It started via Google with the keywords: celtic Irish music highland druid. Out of that came Enya and Loreena, Enya and Loreena went into LimeWire and out came The Mummers' Dance. Does she gain from this? Yes, for I immediately purshased 7 CD's, 3 concerts, a DVD, a hat and a shirt and made a promise I would continue to do so. Does this mitigate her rights to control her intellectual property? No, it does not, and knowing what I know now I strongly support those rights, because someone else might just say: screw paying for this when I can get it for free. Billy Bragg, is correct when he writes: "The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet, too?". New territory... Early on I was talking to Robin and asked what do they (QR ltd) think of LimeWire. She replied they do not like it. That started the notions of this issue churning in my head. Loreena didn't post those videos on YouTube, somebody else did and did so without permission. She didn't put her recordings up on LimeWire, somebody else did without permission. Billy Bragg says it all: "If young musicians are to have a chance of enjoying a fruitful career, then we need to establish the principle of artists’ rights throughout the Internet — and we need to do it now." I would just replace the word "young" with the word "all", and ask the question, how do we do that and still keep the Internet a free and open place, free from massive government interference?
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Posts: 214 | Location: Monterey CA | Registered: May 22, 2007
Well you must have been reading my mind Angie, as yesterday I started to enter some comments into this thread. I wanted to share some comments another musician, Billy Bragg had to say about this subject in another column ( see below)
In the end I was not able to complete my comments and headed 'stage left' to the matter which was calling me.
I must begin by saying this has been one of the most intelligent dialogues on this issue I have seen, professionally or otherwise for a long time. I am so impressed by how current many of you are with the issue and willing to get into the ‘nitty gritty.’
Indeed, I have learned a lot myself and am grateful to all of you for this . No doubt I will continue to learn more.
As you will see, the technological advancements have brought a mixture of good things and less good things.
What I am seeing on the front lines is quite possible an 'end game' of sorts and I don't think there is anyone in or out of the industry who is able to predict where it will all end.
The disintegration of bricks and mortar music retail , in particular the Mom and Pop music stores, has been an incredible loss in my view.
They were often run by people who loved music and loved turning their customers on to music.(In my view, the best way any business should be run!!) However, they were pressed out by a number of things including other retail outlets who adopted very different business models, including that of selling real estate in the stores ( rack space, listening posts etc back to the record companies) and that, along with the technological advances and disenfranchised public, became like a deck of cards pushing out the little folks who genuinely cared and gave their customers good service. Some retailers have used ( and continue to use) CD's as loss leaders ( sell for less than their cost in order to get customers into the stores to buy more expensive things)
The many layers of infrastructure and legislation which are needed in the digital realm to compensate for this disappearance of music retail are simply not there yet and as a result, any artist and their supporters who prefer to 'consume' their music through CD's have quickly become further disenfranchised.
There are a lot of variables and layers involved in the new technological and economic world and their dynamics and interplay need to be computed together. Not an easy thing.
I believe there are a number of industries in a similar position.
What is clear is that creative people need a critical mass of success in order to do what they do unless they revert back to a patronage system .
We still have patronage arrangements in a variety of forms, for a variety of artistic endeavors. As for myself , it is something I have sought to avoid as much as possible for a variety of reasons This would include product endorsements etc.
The patronage system may be the only way certain things can survive and we see this often in relation to art forms such as classical music, dance etc.
This can be OK if there is no creative push for more 'commercial 'creations or programming. However, when outside companies use the arts for 'marketing and advertising' through name association of course this can set up a situation of potential conflict .Who does the creative director serve? The art and creative expression or steer creative direction to more populist or 'commercial' directions in order to serve the marketing objective of the patron?
Piggy backing on this can lead to the promotion of things which society does not support anymore like cigarettes. It can be a difficult relationship, but there are many examples of it working too.
In relation to the more contemporary music industry, if there is not a sufficient and internationally agreed upon system which ensures creative people are paid for their creative initiatives and copyrights, of course, more will be turning to other lines of work in order to support themselves. They may still be involved in their 'art' but probably at a lesser degree. I am already seeing this.
I have wondered how long it will take for certain artistic communities to 'dry up' at the scale they are existing at right now. Maybe it will all become more localised again. ...akin to the Slow Food Movement!! And not to say that is a bad thing either. Just different.
Like many things in our contemporary world, things are in great flux and the situation nor the solutions are easy or obvious , especially when there are various technological and commercial interests who are vying for supremacy or advantage. The creative folk and the public, as frequently is the case, are caught in between, sometimes left empty handed or wanting.
Even though the situation is not easy or clear, I do feel the first step towards the solution of any problem is being willing, prepared and equipped to tackle complex issues. I commend all of you in your approach to this rather less than ‘sexy’ part of the music business.
I guess the next stage is , what can or should we do about it?
And now for just a little bit more food for thought.
Here is the link to Billy Bragg's comments I was referring to earlier.
Thank you all once again for your comments and I hope you are finding each other's thoughts and experience interesting and valuable. I certainly am and I will join in as I can.
Hi Loreena, I forgot to mention that I really enjoy your latest Nights from the Alhambra dvd, and cd set.It is excellent! As for this cd,dvds,music files etc. I think it must be a real problem. You can buy a burner for 45 bucks and blank cds,dvds are also cheap. For example I know there are a number of people that I work with that make all kinds of copies of everything, you name it. They refuse to buy originals, and say why when I can get them basically for free. I work with about 500 people and I can honestly say that most of them burn their own, or there is a number of people that will do it for you for $5.00 copy,or they ask what do you have and will make trades and copies. I don't take part in this and have voiced my opinion to some individuals. Robert.
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Posts: 38 | Location: Canada. | Registered: October 31, 2006
It takes an enormous investment of time, energy, and money to create and distribute an album, especially music like yours, of which your travel and studies are so intricate a part. I would be very surprised to see any type of media which requires such investment on the part of the artist and support staff available for free unless there is some other revenue stream associated with it, and the last thing I want is to see the distribution of music tied up in some type of marketing and advertising. Virtually nothing of value is free unless you do it yourself, and even then, there is usually a cost associated.
I prefer to get my music on a tangible media, whether it be purchased from an online distributor, direct, or in a store. I rip all of my music to my computer, and store it on a network storage array, from which it can be accessed by any device on my network, and I do not use any file sharing services or expose my network, so I'm comfortable with digital media, but I still prefer to have a physical disc that can be played on any CD player.
As long as it either comes on one, or I can burn it to one for my own use without violating the terms of use, I don't care where it comes from. With the exception of media that is no longer in print and is otherwise unavailable, I won't buy music online otherwise. Besides, you can't hang an autographed download on the wall!
Originally posted by Shan-Lyn: As already mentioned, it's not hard to dowload videos from YouTube, Google, MySpace, etc. Despite the quality (for some viewers) being 'poor', the 'pirate' can easily take the downloaded video and improve it to a better quality.
Due to the limitations of the video compression, this is unlikely to be true. As for piracy (and this is a matter of semantics), illegally profiting from someone else's work is criminal and I am personally against it, but it is still not theft. It is criminal copyright infringement.
Liberté -
With all due respect, there is nothing 'semantical' about 'piracy'. A pirate, is a pirate, is a pirate. Cards on the table. No matter how you slice or dice it, no matter what area, what lifestyle, what different associated elements the 'pirate' may want to keep company with, if an individual has tendency to want to capitalize on someone else's work, and deprives them of monies that are, in essence, belonging to them, it is still theft.
I don't understand how you cannot understand this. Let's make believe that you're the one that has toiled to bring a work into a market. You expect a certain market that you've signed contracts with to bring to you the monies that are rightfully yours. If someone else decides to open up a market, taking your work, but doesn't pay you but keeps the profits for themselves, then would you not feel that they're stealing the bread & butter out of your mouth? And also putting you in a position, because the people you've signed a contract with to propagate your work, also receive a certain percentage because these people work to help your creation become known. So, in essence, two entities are being stolen from here...that would be you, and the agencies which you've signed contracts with.
In Loreena's situation, she didn't want to be governed and dictated to by agencies handling her incoming monies, which means, that she - having her own business - becomes affected twice. Not receiving the monies due to her which are rightfully hers to have by:
1) her artistic musical works and achievements; 2) and the costs that she must invest in her business to keep it running.
Talk about a 'double whammy' when piracy is on the loose. I'm not saying that you support 'piracy', but I think you err if you think that depriving one of their rightful monies is not theft. It is theft, no matter how you slice or dice it.
Originally posted by Shan-Lyn: ...to understand how to better protect their music in an obvious Digital world that has gone out of control.
There are ways.
Could you elaborate on this one, please?
You're not talking about digital "copy protection" such as so-called DRM, are you? DRM has been proven not to work in practice. The only thing DRM achieves is constraining the legitimate user.
Once again, I'm not encouraging illegal downloads - I'm just opposing any DRM schemes.
Cheers, Stefan.
Stefan -
Certainly. DRM (Digital Rights Management - for the folks that don't know), has proven to be ineffective due to the reason that their CSS (Content Scrambling System) which was used to encode DVD movie files became somewhat useless after its algorithm became broken. It goes into a lot of tech jargon details.
DRM was not on my mind when I mentioned that surely there must be ways.
I did think, however, of sound imaging encoding. Musical artists have started the trend of encoding pictures into their music, which I think is a pretty cool idea. The images can then be viewed with a spectrogram, which is a graph representing the intensity or a frequency with relation to time.
So Loreena could download all nice pictures of herself in her music, and we'd go to sleep dreaming about her after listening to her music before bedtime, because our subconscious would be releasing the information. Aye, she'd be spoiling us for sure.
Originally posted by angie: <snip> As far as putting things up on YouTube or other places in the name of giving Loreena all the publicity she "needs", why can't you just point them to the QR website? It doesn't make any sense to go to some grainy video online when a cleaner, clearer version exists here on the website.
Is Loreena going to weigh in again, or is she waiting for this discussion to reach 20 pages?
Angie
Angie -
Good points. As for Loreena weighing in, I, myself, am having a hard time catching up, lol.
Aye, Loreena, you see what you went and did?
One has to admit, it's a very stimulating subject. I, for one, am learning a lot out of this for my own copyrights to music, for future's sake.
I am new here and I see this is quite an active thread. Drizzt, I beg to differ from your view but this is not a fiction. You are laughing but it is possible to improve the quality but I will not explain how this can be done in this forum because I don't want to put ideas into the people's heads. Maybe it is good that you think this way because this means that you could not spread illegal information. It just means that you are ignorant (not insulting you) to what the procedures would be. People keep saying that it is always possible to rip a song off a cd because when people really want it they will find a way. The same goes for a pirate. If he really wants it he knows the way. It takes little work to recreate a master copy of the original. FYI, I am not a pirate but it was explained to me how it could be done.
Silver
I am not a pirate, and I hope than I am not ignorant, al least as ignorant as other people.
As we can see in the image samples, the scaled up image sample has more quality than the standard rescaling method (lanczos, bicubid, etc) but it lacks of truly good quality, at least for me (the "ghosts" in the leaves given as example).
About to know or not to know how to do things I disagree with your opinion, this knowledge is free, this is a published paper from an University. If you think this is somewhat illegal, just call the police. And then, because it is just Maths, try to impose restrictions to the use & knowledge of multiplication tables/sines & cosines and all the stuff that is used in the public and free algorithms to compress images, videos or music: MP3 verbigratia. The problem is doing something illegal with knowledge, not the knowledge itself. And for the first one there are laws in all our countries.
I don't really know what are you trying to say me with sentences like:
quote:
Maybe it is good that you think this way because this means that you could not spread illegal information. [..] It takes little work to recreate a master copy of the original
When I make an afirmation, I try to help it with proofs or some kind of explanation. I tried (with or without success) to explain why I believe that things exposed by Shan-Lyn do not exist today. If you are arguing that I may be wrong, proofs are welcome since they came from free papers (avaliable to all of us) that their possesion does not represent a violation of any law.
As a resume, those works about enhancing image/video resolution are a great and promissing line of investigation, but, at least for my eyes, are far at this point of time from what you are telling us. Of course, any counterexample given to me, I will apologize for my mistake because knowledge is always good, and learning from my own misconceptions is better.
So I continue thinking unless proofs are given that from a youtube tiny source, it is not possible to obtain a DVD video with acceptable quality.
Originally posted by Shan-Lyn: ...to understand how to better protect their music in an obvious Digital world that has gone out of control.
There are ways.
Could you elaborate on this one, please?
You're not talking about digital "copy protection" such as so-called DRM, are you? DRM has been proven not to work in practice. The only thing DRM achieves is constraining the legitimate user.
Once again, I'm not encouraging illegal downloads - I'm just opposing any DRM schemes.
Cheers, Stefan.
Posts: 25 | Location: Earth | Registered: May 30, 2006
Originally posted by Shan-Lyn: [...] As already mentioned, it's not hard to dowload videos from YouTube, Google, MySpace, etc. Despite the quality (for some viewers) being 'poor', the 'pirate' can easily take the downloaded video and improve it to a better quality. [...] Shan-Lyn
LOL, Youtube/Google/any video/audio in a lossy format CANNOT be improved to a better quality. The information lost from the original source (DVD/Bluray/HDTV) is lost forever. Once you have a video/audio file in AVI/MP3 etc you cannot obtain the original DVD/CD from it. Pieces of information have been erased, they are lost, and from a lossy source you cannot try to take them back.
Applied to the video problem, you can convert a youtube video from his tiny source (320x240 I think it is) to a DVD resolution (720x576) but the image just get blured, you cannot rebuild the lost pixels like in a CSI chapter. That fiction isn't true. The computer software can try to guess how to blur efficiently when rescaling from youtube to DVD, but it will be a poor quality. Just think on it, you have lost 81% of surface area. From youtube's tiny screen source you cannot rebuild a DVD with an acceptable quality for most humans.
It is just a simple "technical" quote, I don't want to interrupt your conversation about artists' rights and the new information era, discusion that I am following with attention for all arguments.
Regards, Drizzt
Hello Drizzt,
I am new here and I see this is quite an active thread. Drizzt, I beg to differ from your view but this is not a fiction. You are laughing but it is possible to improve the quality but I will not explain how this can be done in this forum because I don't want to put ideas into the people's heads. Maybe it is good that you think this way because this means that you could not spread illegal information. It just means that you are ignorant (not insulting you) to what the procedures would be. People keep saying that it is always possible to rip a song off a cd because when people really want it they will find a way. The same goes for a pirate. If he really wants it he knows the way. It takes little work to recreate a master copy of the original. FYI, I am not a pirate but it was explained to me how it could be done.
