most sensible thing I've heard in ages...

[rodneyorpheus]

At last my thoughts on the digital copying issue have finally been crystallised in this statement from Cory Doctorow, in the foreword to Little Brother:
...here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks makes sense at this time and place:
Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that

Comments

[lee_chaos]

For the sake of debate - do you believe the same argument is true of music?

[rodneyorpheus]

I am beginning to come to that inevitable conclusion, yes.

[vret]

That's one very good way of looking at it, but there is a bit more to it, on both sides

[lee_chaos]

In the example of the Flower Kings, this is only really an issue if they can't shift gear from making music in studios to playing music live - that's how you take a big fanbase and make money from it these days - and it could be argued that this is a return to where music was before the invention of the Edison Cylinder.

It's actually true of my record label and its decline - none of my artists would take time off their well-paid IT jobs to go out and gig, so the money we made from album sales in the 90's declined (downloading is just one reason; the strong £ and refusal to join the Euro probably hit us as hard if not moreso) and our artists got fat and jaded infront of their computers, wondering where the good times went.

Popular bands can make money; popular bands can no longer make money the way they used to.

[guitarlawman]

With music it is becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to make any serious money from the sale of relatively small numbers of copies. By relatively small I mean less than 500,000 copies. I act for a band who sold a million albums in the UK and the person who made the most money from that (in fact possibly the only actual profit) was the songwriter, who got paid his mechanical royalties on every copy sold for no outlay (other than the time he spent writing the songs). They have now been dropped by their record company....because they didnt make any money