Jon Bon Jovi VS Steve Jobs

Prime

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This pretty much sums it up now doesn't it? You know you're stealing it and don't care. We could of avoided a lot of rhetoric had you came clean initially instead of trying to justify what you're doing is no big deal. Thanks for the clarification. It's about time.

Try reading the rest of my post before you go and make accusations about me. The fact that you even took my post this seriously is beyond pathetic. But I suppose in your eyes I am not allowed to have my opinion. And clarification? I am pretty sure I made my point quite clear in my post, but yet...you refuse to read the entire post. And that my friend, is not my fault.

Put some reading glasses on and take a breather, you seem very heated over something that you know nothing about.
 

Nololob

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Nowhere in any of my posts did I declare that all uploading/downloading is illegal.

Most of your posts declare downloading either pay and free as illegal. Don't be such a hypocrite and don't ask me for giving the points ready on plate, I'd love to see you doing it yourself.
 

LG

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Let's lower the rhetoric in here, I think it's obvious peoples opinions are not going to change so listen to the classic song I am posting and follow Neil's advice.



:D
 

Hardnecker

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Most of your posts declare downloading either pay and free as illegal. Don't be such a hypocrite and don't ask me for giving the points ready on plate, I'd love to see you doing it yourself.

NONE of my posts mention paying for music as illegal. Learn to comprehend what you're reading. I won't ask you to show me because I know it's not there. Don't participate if you can't follow along.
 

Stone River

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It's amazing how wrong Bon Jovi and Moses Avalon get this situation.

Originally Posted by Jon Bon Jovi

Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it.

Kids can (and do) still put on headphones, close their eyes, and get lost in the music, be it an album or a playlist. No, they're not "holding the jacket" (as if they'd done so any time since the CD revolution of the '80s), but if their eyes are closed as they lose themselves in the music, what difference does that make? I came up in that "magical time" when you bought an album based on the jacket, and while that sometimes resulted in welcome surprises, it was just as often a sad waste of limited funds.

Now, I have no love for lossy audio compression and louder-is-better disc mastering; if Jon is lamenting the rise of lo-fi, I'm with him on that. I'm even with him on the decline of the album format as an art form (not that Bon Jovi ever contributed anything of note to that). But, here's where we part ways again:

Originally Posted by Jon Bon Jovi

Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.

Not exactly, Jon-boy. MP3s—which were not invented by Steve Jobs or Apple—hit the 'net in 1994; iTunes came out in 2001. What Jobs and Apple did was figure out a way to monetize the situation both for itself (mostly by selling iPods) and for the music industry (which had so steadfastly refused to sell MP3s itself that the entire market was given to illegal file sharing).

There is arguably one person who made digital downloads online so easy and attractive that he and his company created a paradigm shift in the way young consumers acquired music. That person is Shawn Fanning; his company, Napster, was launched in 1999. If you need to blame somebody, he's your guy. However, I think iTunes or something like it was inevitable anyway; Napster just accelerated it.

But, hey, Mr. BJ isn't a tech geek, he's a pop star. While I would have hoped he'd have known better than to make such an ill-informed and ill-advised comment—even off-the-cuff—I wouldn't have expected it.

On the other hand, a producer/engineer and artists' rights advocate like Moses Avalon should know better than to post some of what's in his blog:

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

1) iTunes has not, as some have suggested “saved the record business.” iTunes has made up less than 10% of sales over the years since launch.

This is disingenuous. Yes, if you average out sales from 2001 (when the service and the market for it were both new) until now, that number may be accurate: I'll give Mo the benefit of the doubt there. However, in 2010, iTunes had a 28% market share of all US music sales—more than double its nearest competitor—making it the single largest music retailer. With Amazon and Walmart at 12% each, the top three retailers have over 50% of the market. It's essential to note that none of these companies is a traditional music retailer. Amoeba notwithstanding, the record store is dead.

Online downloads will soon account for half of all music sales. Pre-iTunes, there were millions of downloads, but no sales. Album sales started declining in the Napster years: 1999-2001. Avalon suggests that, without iTunes, CD sales would have grown again, but that's a pipe-dream. By then, there was no shutting Pandora's box. New P2P file sharing services that worked around some of the Napster liability issues were popping up left and right. Apple did what the music industry absolutely needed to do, but would not/could not do for itself: turn the #1 source of loss into the #1 source of revenue. If you needed another name for iTunes, it might be "Hope."

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

2) Nor did Steve Jobs “invent” a way for artists to get paid from the internet.

From the Internet, no. From MP3 downloads, for all intents and purposes, yes. There was nothing like the iTunes Music Store before Apple launched it.

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

3) Finally, I believe it was Lawrence Lessig or some fool like him who promised—“If you give people a legal way to buy music they won’t steel it.” Remember that one? Not true: P2P file sharing did not decrease since iTunes went on-line — it actually increased.

File sharing was increasing by leaps and bounds prior to iTunes, and would have continued to do so without it. Once iTunes gave people a legal way to buy music online, there have been over ten billion legal downloads on iTunes alone.

Is there still piracy? Sure there is. Do you want to know what the piracy figures are for physical media (e.g., CDs)? Roughly 40% of all sales worldwide. I suppose that by eliminating commercial CDs we would do away with all CD piracy, but that's not a viable business model. The point is, if people want something, and you offer it for sale, many of them will buy it. If you don't sell it, they will have no recourse but to steal (not "steel") it.

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

What iTunes did that sucks most for music is it destabilized the “album model.” Yeah, yeah, I know, many of you think that that is good for the consumer, but it’s really not in the long run. Not if you’re a true music fan.

iTunes did not "destabilize the 'album model'"; arguably, the MP3 did. It did so because younger consumers were sick of paying for albums with one or two good songs and a lot of crappy filler. Why were there so many albums with one or two desirable tracks? Because much of the the industry and audience was focusing on single-oriented musical styles and artists. I would say that this shift in musical style was just as responsible as technology in killing the album model.

A third factor is that, at $14/ea., CDs were too expensive if the whole album wasn't good. Because (as Avalon later notes) there is little difference in the cost of producing and marketing physical singles vs. albums, CD singles could never be produced inexpensively enough to make much sense for record companies, nor sold cheaply enough to satisfy consumers. Then along came the MP3, perfectly filling the role left vacant by the demise of the 45 (and failure of the CD single) well before Apple got into the game. Apple simply turned it into a legit business.

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

It costs more to make less, which means less risks will be taken on new acts.
If you remove the 80 cents or so that songwriters used to receive for each album sale and replace is with the 9 cents they get for a single, you don’t have to be a math genius to see that you need to sell about seven times more units to break even on a promotion that costs $1,000,000 whether you release an album or a single; or, a production costing about $10,000/song to produce if you do an album, but $25,000/song is you go single-for-single.


This is mixing apples and oranges. Yes, fewer mechanical royalties are paid to writers and publishers for a single than for an album. However, this has little to do with what the record company makes, which is strictly a matter of unit sales. It only affects them by reducing their per-unit overhead—unless, of course, the label is also the publishing company, which is often the case because labels typically force artists to sign over half or more of their publishing.

If the artist is also the songwriter, then, yes, the artist takes a hit on writer's royalties earned per unit sold. Otherwise, the professional songwriting community takes the hit because fewer songs get placed. It doesn't take a math genius to see why. However, it does take someone who knows a little bit about the record business to know that writing and publishing royalties are not recoupable. That means that writers and publishers get paid from unit one. It's the artist royalties that don't get paid until all expenses are recouped. For artists, the primary value of a hit single is that it ups the value and attendance of their live shows, where they make the real money.

Record companies have long been risk-averse. The contracts they offer new artists are usurous, and they rarely spend what it would take to break an artist; only a small percentage of signed artists get serious promotion once the record is completed. This is probably just as well, as record companies have a horrendous track record when it comes to picking winners: the percentage of records that are profitable, much less hits, is so small that the most successful record company on a per product basis would be the laughing stock of almost any other industry. But I digress.

With an MP3, the record label eliminates packaging, manufacturing, and distribution costs. Apple gets about a third off the top, and out of the remaining 65¢ the label pays about 9¢ to the publisher (which may be itself), recoups its expenses out of another 18¢ or so (depending on the contract), and pockets the rest. Yes, that's a lot less than a CD, but hardly cause to weep for record companies.

The cost to actually produce the track is not terribly significant compared to the cost of promoting it, but record companies can easily keep it down. Now more than ever they're buying finished tracks from artists and producers, not paying anything until they've approved the track and putting a ceiling on what they'll pay to anyone without a track record regardless of their costs. Once they've decided an artist is hot enough to provide a budget up-front, they'll cut enough racks to bring the price down, even if they're only going to issue them one at a time.
 

Stone River

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(continued)


Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

Add to that, that without the album economics you lose the 1:14 chance of one of the cuts becoming a hit and reduce those odds to 1:1. To duplicate the effect of an “album promotion” with singles, labels would have to spend more than ten times as much to have the same shot-gun effect that an album delivers.

The label always picks one or two singles off an album before it promotes it. If it doesn't hear a single, there is no big promotion. While it's always possible that some music programmer will adopt an album track and make it a hit, it's never been all that common, and much less so since the consolidation of radio station ownership and the centralization of playlists. There just isn't that much of a "shot-gun effect" in real life.

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

Why should indie artists care about majors and their costs?

Well, now that it costs more to make less, these costs trickle down to everyone in the music food chain. To sell a single for 99 cents on iTunes the indie artist ends up netting about 64%. With a CD album sold at a local store for $14 the Artist/label took almost $10 home—almost 75%. Sold off the side of the stage for $10, the same indie artist took home almost all of it, save a $1, for manufacturing—90%. Big winner here—Apple.

There's a huge difference between "artist" and "artist/label." Unless said indie artist also owns the label, they ain't gettin' most of that $10 projected profit for the CD; they get about $1.50 after recoupment (about a half million units sold). The label gets everything until then—including profit off the top—and the lion's share afterward. Alas, without a label, it's pretty hard to get physical product placed in national chains or in indie stores around the country/world. That is, unless you have a hit via iTunes first.

It's much easier for an indie artist to operate truly independently—without a label—if they have no manufacturing or distribution costs and don't have to record 10+ songs before issuing product. If such artists deal directly with Apple, then they net more money because they get paid @.65¢ on the dollar from day one.

But, label or no label, having your songs available on iTunes does not preclude you from also selling CDs on your own website, on Amazon, via CDBaby, in local music stores, or at gigs. This isn't an either/or deal.

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

For those interested in music as an art, the devaluation of an album as an art form has neutered the musical experience. Deep cuts are dead for the future. This decreases the value of music as an experience and as a communication method. This disembowels artists from helping do what they are supposed to do—make the world a better place. They have been relieved of that job thanks to iTunes and P2P. Now they are just “content providers” and all we want from them are “hits” that are nice, radio safe singles. Great.

When musicians were in charge of music they helped end wars and elevate social consciousness. Now it’s in the hands of the techies. I can only pray they do not abuse this power. So far, I’m not impressed. How can anyone be, with a culture that does not value one of America’s greatest cultural contributions– pop music.


This presumes that popular music wasn't art until the rise of the LP as something other than a container for previously-issued singles in the mid-to-late '60s. For anyone who values music of the early '60s, '50s, and before, that doesn't wash. The writing, performing, and producing of individual songs/records is a perfectly viable form of musical experience and communication, as well as a legitimate platform to "make the world a better place." Besides, as I've already said, nothing about iTunes precludes artists from recording and releasing albums. They do it all the time.

I love reading about how it was "when the musicians were in charge." The musicians were never in charge; businessmen ran the majors, and most of the indies as well. Fortunately, some of those businessmen were also enamored of, and informed about, music. (Indeed, before the record biz got big, there was almost no other reason to enter it.) The industry definitely lost something when people with ears went out and the hordes of MBAs came in. That, however, was long before MP3s.

I understand romanticizing the popular music and artists of the Viet Nam War era, but there was also a ton of crap issued in those days; it's just the good stuff that we remember. Likewise, there's been plenty of good music issued since and plenty still being issued today; but the closer we are to the era and further we are from the current youth culture, the harder it is to hear the signal for the noise.

Originally Posted by Moses Avalon

This is what Jon Bon Jovi was really trying to say. What he probably meant with his comments was that the glory days of music are over. They are. It’s true. And iTunes did accelerate the legitimacy of that decline more so than any other vehicle.

It's not true. The "glory days of music" are the days when whatever it is you like most was at its most popular. For many people, those days are right now. iTunes has had very little to do with shaping the style of music that's been popular for the last decade: it didn't invent the technology/format, nor did it popularize it; it doesn't create or underwrite content. The stylistic range of music available on iTunes is vast, and includes most of that great stuff from Avalon's "glory days." Apple doesn't care which music you buy—only that you buy something. It is record labels, radio stations, music programmers, artists, and consumers who are driving musical trends—not necessarily in that order.

Now, I like Apple products. I've worked with them professionally, both as a "techie" and as a creative artist. But, I'm not writing this from the standpoint of an Apple cult geek. I'm writing this from the standpoint of a music industry professional and music fan who loves albums as much as anyone. Sure, there's a lot of garbage music out there, and you can buy a lot of it from the iTunes Music Store. But, this is no more Apple's fault than the lousy records of the '80s were the fault of Tower Records.

The potential exists for the implosion of the music industry as-we-knew-it and the democratization of production and distribution to result in greater empowerment of independent artists than ever before. Through TuneCore (amongst other things), Apple is helping to facilitate such change. So, maybe Moses Avalon and Jon Bon Jovi should give Steve Jobs and Apple a little credit for doing what they're supposed to do—making the world a better place.
 

LG

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i-tunes = the worst thing to ever happen to music period...I don't care what anyone else says what they have done is diminish everything about what music should be and try to corner the market using slick advertising as the only "Cool" thing you must have to play music on the crappy i-pod.

I think Apple should be ashamed of itself for what it has done myself, offering lossy crap one song at a time instead of a full lossless album at a reasonable cost.

Anyone here forget they added the + catalog a few years ago? You know why they did that? Because so many people complained about the lack of quality of their regular 128 kbs files, that's why. So they added + and charged more for them than the regular dl's.

The record companies should never have signed any deal with Apple or any other company, they should have set up their own servers and offered us FLAC or APE or WAV downloads and cut out the middle man....then again we are talking about dinosaurs here who couldn't find their assholes with both hands and a flashlight.:nw:

And one last thing about Apples anal approach to the way they do business. If you make an account, pay for your music, download them and load them into your i-pod and something happens to your portable, you have to buy them all over again. Apple will not keep track of the music you have bought and paid for and allow you to download the songs again. Your only other options are to keep them on your hard drive(They fail too.), or you can use the built in app and Burn a CD copy of your albums if you want.(I don't know if that works for different songs from different bands on one CD...and don't care to find out.) Even if you burn a CD you end up with a shitty transcode instead of a proper quality burn like a CD you would buy. Some people say they can't tell the difference, but I sure can.

Apple is a bunch of shysters and I have no respect for them and their business model, everything they do is designed to keep you in their box, unlike the plethora of options many other companies offer.
 

LXA

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Thanks for justifying for all of us why you steal artists work. If it was meant for you to have it for free, the artists would put it out there for free. You and your way of thinking are a microcosm of why the music industry is in the state it's in. Enjoy your pirating matey.:violin:

Its funny how the word "pirating" went from being when you obtained media and illegally distributed it for financial gain to being used to describe when a teenager has no money, wants to listen to music and downloads it for his own personal use.

If you actually think bitching about "pirating" is going to get 80% of the world to stop then you are sadly mistaken.

I'm going to start charging you for reading my text. Its not physically real, but I CREATED IT. I POURED MY HEART AND SOUL INTO WRITING THIS FOR YOU. Therefore I absolutely REQUIRE YOU PAY ME FOR PROVIDING YOU WITH THESE TEXTS.

Yeah, so, it exists only virtually... that doesn't mean its not MINE. MONEY MONEY MONEY, GIVE IT TO ME. NOW.

From now on, if anyone reads my texts, they have to send me 1.29 per word to my mailbox at

5235 Inyourface St.
Farmville, Shutyoface, MN
jfffsdfsdo

If you don't I expect to see you in court, I will be suing you for 17 million dollars.





Oh, and have you ever lent a CD to a friend? Well, enjoy life in prison.

But seriously, man. Taking a copy of a song from the internet and taking a CD from a local HMV without paying is different. What if when you picked the CD up, another one would just instantly appear? Without using any resources, just, like magic, pop up.

What if you were a starving person with no money, and someone had a machine that could make an unlimited amount of hamburgers without wasting and resources? Would you think it was right for that person to refuse them a burger since they have no money?
Is it really stealing? No, its them not making a POTENTIAL DOLLAR. There is no stealing involved. ITS ALL POTENTIAL MONEY. Odds are, the person with the unlimited Hamburger machine is pretty well off.
 
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LG

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I am saying it for the last time...no more personal insults veiled or otherwise or I will close this thread.

LXA I edited your post...you can say the same thing without slagging anybody.

The part about paying you for your text is rather funny...:D
 

LXA

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I wasn't trying to make a personal insult. I said Scum because thats how he used to describe file sharing people.
 

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