‘Music is my absolute SOUL’
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music say they’re losing money.
The reason? Those DASTARDLY P2P FILE SHARERS !!
Solution?
Sue their asses.
The people behind the Big 4 don’t seem to be able to get their heads around the fact if you treat your customers like dirt, they’ll walk.
“Funny,” says voxleo in a Reader’s Write to our story in Apple’s introduction of variable pricing on iTunes, “not any of the recent articles concerning the profitablility of the music industry (including the hubbub over the RIAA’s absurdly abusive behaviour) have touched on the #1 top-notch single most compelling reason I have spent less and less money on music over the years, most notably the last 5 or 6.”
“First, let me explain why this is significant,” she says, continuing »»»
For a number of years the greatest expense I had at all was music – before I had to pay rent, of course. But even after college and in the real world, the bulk of my entertainment budget was earmarked for music – ahead of movies, appliances, dining-out everything except maybe the hi-fi to listen to it on.
I am an audiophile. Music is my absolute SOUL – I have been hooked ever since I was 13 when I told my dad I wanted to with him to Tower Records (a regular trip for him) because I wanted to buy a song I heard (on am radio, mind you – I would stay up til 4am waiting for my favorite radio station to play the song I requested so I could record it on my portable cassette player, but I was becoming sleep deprived). When I hummed it to him because I didn’t know the name, he walked over to the shelf and plucked a 45 from his considerable collection and handed it to me (turned out to be “Break my Stride” by Mattew Wilder) and I haven’t been the same since. From that point on I would accompany him on ALL his trips to Tower, would harass the employees with my renditions of songs I couldn’t identify and became entirely familiar with the giant yellow book they kept in the center of the store which was a database of the songs and the artists.
At 15 when I got my work permit so I could get a job at the warehouse I might has well have had them pay me in store credit. I consumed 45s and LPs like candy and would even buy albums before I heard stuff on it if it was an artist I already liked pretty well (A-ha does have more than one, you know) or if the single wasn’t available and I liked one or two songs.
I hated cassettes. Too likely to be eaten by the player and necessitated the buying of a machine with AMS, but I had to move to them for a while because the CDs had hit the market and they started pulling the vinyl for shelf space. I just couldn’t stomach paying $22.00 or more for the same stuff I used to buy for 6.99, so I bit the bullet and paid 8.99 for the tapes. I made great use of that Music Choice or whatever it was called where you could make your own mixtape in the store from certain songs that participated in the program; the quality wasn’t as good, but it was preferable when there was only one or two songs I liked from an album or such. If I could I bought the cassette single, which Tower carried and I still visited despite my working for the competition.
This behaviour continued even til the giant yellow book which was becoming ever thicker – was replaced with a touch screen computer, but I had to temper my purchasing habits a bit, because even the cassettes were losing ground to the CDs which were still out of reach for me at $18.99. I shifted to used LP stores and discovered an entire wealth of music from generations past.
The best job I ever had was as an exotic dancer where I would bring in my music for the dj to cue up 20 minute sets on tapes. I held out for as long as I could, and then the dreaded thing happened: the club would take CDs only! So I reluctantly ponied up the cash for many tunes I already owned in a different format, and bought as much used as I could, and fell in love with one of the djs who had an admirable and eclectic collection of more than the current pop/metal classics that everyone played, and tipped heavily the ones who would find me the songs I wanted and add them to their collections.
One in particular had been digging up a great deal of stuff and I finally got curious as to where this was coming from. When I inquired, he told me about a wonderous thing called “Napster” and I actually bought a PC despite being an Apple follower simply because I couldn’t get the “audiogalaxy” software for the G4!
I freely admit to downloading music – I was one of the early joiners and a HUGE fan of Morpheus even when I was on a 56k modem (it hasn’t been the same since it’s demise). Mostly it was a cost effective way to digitize my music collection for the purpose of using it at work, because the stuff that was available was overplayed and most of it was crap anyway. I was at least making enough money though, that I could buy CDs of the stuff that was either too obscure for the net to have or if it was something by Sting.
But I had noticed a change. There were not nearly as many trips to Tower that I was compelled to take, and when I did go, my load was light even though I had the money to buy CDs (which were STILL too expensive for my tastes if not my wallet). At first I thought maybe it was just getting older that was the reason the music on the radio (solely fm now) seemed a little lackluster, but since I share his genes and my Dad bought an album by Cinderella because he really liked the song “Shake Me,” I am concluding that maybe the producers were not really anything but putting together paint-by -number boy and girl bands and pushing bubble-gum pop and shit that all started to sound the same.
It got rarer and rarer for me to find a group whose album I would buy unheard, and now my very occasional peek at the cd shelves is only motivated by a specific desire to find something particular – on these, the only occasions I even go to the store to buy music now, usually I will buy only 1 CD. The last time I did that was over a year ago at least. And you know what? The CD I bought was one they don’t even play in the mainstream media. I found it on a p2p network by accident and liked it. The next one I want to buy I can’t even FIND on iTunes or anyplace else that sells music legally online because it’s a bit obscure – I heard it once at the house of a pickup that turned out to be more fun than karaoke bar where we met. If I could find it being shared I would have dld it to listen to until I can find the damned cd anywhere to purchase it! (And writing this has inspired me that maybe its time to make a trek to Tower – if they haven’t got it, no one does and I’ll have to order it special)
The RIAA has outlived its usefulness. Garage bands can cut their own CDs in a home studio for less money than they used to have to pay the producers, and if they are savvy they can promote themselves and be heard even without the support of an FM radio single. It isn’t really that filesharing has killed them so much as the emergence of the internet itself, since the monopoly they held on a gateway to the public ear is now worth much less in and of itself. With so many alternatives to even what sources we listen to, the bands no longer require the services that the RIAA used to provide to get them a coveted spot on a playlist heard on the handful of syndicated stations. When they began CREATING bands by formula to woo advertisers instead of supporting real talent, it put the final nail in the coffin. To quote Grease II, “Johnny just hasn’t learned: when you’re dead, lie down!”
Adds voxleo, “When is anybody going to wonder if maybe the reason people don’t want to buy music is because they aren’t offering anything GOOD? Even the stuff people are getting sued over is all pretty much pre-2002, right? I wonder if maybe some indie bands aren’t making some cash – even if it isn’t the millions of yore – with a little direct marketing or in circles that aren’t readily as measurable as iTunes.
“AND come to think of it, maybe this whole thing is a way of evening the playing field a little. Now being a rock-star isn’t quite what it used to be, and maybe it feels a little more like work?”
variable pricing on iTunes – iTunes price hike doesn`t do much: reports, May 7, 2009
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May 9th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Great post voxleo! More more more!
May 9th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
You do have the talent to bring out strong memories of the past from your writing. If there’s room and no text count limit I’ve a similar story but probably as eloquent as you’ve displayed.
I can remember my step bothers and sisters coming to visit for the summer. The 45s seemed to always be playing when we weren’t all outside. I was a young lad then and always wanted to hear what was on the AM radio that was new. I would even take my bike to school, rather than ride the bus, so I could put my portable transistor radio in the bike basket to listen as I rode. I was so proud of it because transistors had just come out on market and it had 6 of them! Never mind it was tinny with a tiny speaker and ate batteries like it food. Of course the ride was quite a ways for a bike but I beat the bus all the time.
I remember when my brother drove up with his first shiny new Plymouth. It was a convertible and wonder of wonders, it had a 4 track tape player in it he had put in himself. It was all chrome and you dropped the tape on it, rather than put it in a slot. It loaded from the top just sat there in two heavy wire brackets that held the tape case in place. Oh, we listened to some tunes!
Then shortly came 8 track. I bought one myself and started to save for music cause I wanted a collection. Only the tape format wasn’t particularly durable. They broke easily and they were expensive! As time went on, I learned how to save a favorite tape by going and buying a cheap tape of someone doing someone elses music; they weren’t called covers then and they didn’t try for near mimicking of the original but they were dirt cheap compared to the newest hits. I would take the tape, cut it, spool it off into a paper bag, rewind it on the newer case after I had dumped the original tape, splice it the tape back together and reassemble the case. Now that’s wanting favorite music badly!
Later I went overseas in the military. We didn’t spend much time inside the walls of buildings. We spend it running around the countryside, summer or winter. If the civilians were shut down in the mountains because of ice and snow, it did not stop us from going out to play soldier. Caught frostbite that way in a steel track without heater, in below zero weather, for a couple of weeks. We rolled day and night.
Didn’t have time to spend the money, we were never where there were stores to spend it on for most of the month. So the money stayed in a bank account and just sat there until a good amount would build up and I would go buy the piece of stereo equipment I drooled over. I would read the spec sheets, go look at it in the stereo shop, finally settle on one and save up till I could buy it. All for hearing that fine sounding music played the way it ought to be played.
If I was eying stereo, then I was eying music. I bought over 500 albums in less than two years and probably borrowed as much if not more from others. I would carefully clean them, play them once to hear how they sounded, and then the second time they were played was to record them on reel to reel. Had what seems to be a massive collection of music on reel. It was music so clear, you could hear the guitar pick hit the string before the string rang. You could hear the drum stick hit the cymbal before the cymbal rang. The more you turned the volume up, the more that came out of the music, often hearing things you had never heard before. Of course, finding the places to turning it up at, was the problem.
Then came the cd and at first I was fascinated at the cd. All the other media eventually wore out and had to be replaced. The cd just kept playing and playing and each time was as good as the first. But the high cost kept me from buying as much. I resorted to taping off the radio, just to have the tunes I could not afford to spend on. Later on I got a job that paid well but more importantly I was isolated from home and again could not spend my money just any time. So I did it again with the stereo equipment, only for a car. About this time, I was hearing at work that there were places on the net where you could get free music just like you did from the radio recordings but it took a little longer. Problem was, there wasn’t internet where I lived beyond 56k. So I found the sneakernet. Me and another fellow at work would swap stuff. I had tons of old stuff he wanted and he was giving me in return new stuff I wanted.
Finally I got 56k and started up on the AudioGalaxy. Was I ever in hog heaven!
I replaced what I already had in digital form, for those I hadn’t already ripped myself. Newer bands were starting to loose attraction to me. They all sounded the same. It wasn’t like the heyday. There became less and less of the new stuff I was interested in, I couldn’t relate to most of the music and if there was one I liked, it wasn’t worth buying an album for a single good hit. The cds were lasting and didn’t require replacement so I could look for more esoteric stuff that you didn’t hear on mainstream. Only I wasn’t hearing it on the radio. MTV didn’t carrying for sure. There was nowhere to hear the more unusual stuff. Music shops for the most part didn’t carry it but could order it, being in local small town USA. Wasn’t long and there wasn’t a music shop, they had collapsed and went out of business because they couldn’t compete with the box stores. So I had no where local to buy anything that wasn’t Top 40 and Top 40 wasn’t doing it for me.
I had no need of the latest by Jimi Hendrix, the fella had been dead for a long time and he wasn’t making any new tunes and had all the old stuff already. So the majors weren’t supplying my needs with new tunes only offering rehashes of the old. I had to go to p2p for that. Go I did. I found bunches of other folks, with the same problems that were ready and willing to suggest new artists and tunes for me to listen to. Some I liked, most I didn’t. Would not have spent a fortune to discover this or that one tune I liked. I had already tapered off buying anything for selective choice. I still bought music, just not in the qualities I used to. When I did buy, it was for cover art and quality. But cover art was no longer what it used to be with vinyl. Drag out a magnifying glass to see the image, and you saw the print ink dots, not closer inspection of the artwork.
Now I don’t buy anything in music. I have all the oldies and have had years to collect them. The new stuff doesn’t do it for me. I don’t hear anything on the radio in those few times I listen I can relate to. So the radio section goes unused. Besides, I probably have a collection at this point to rival theirs and mine’s not compressed when I hear it.
It was very easy for me to stop buying when the majors started the sue em all. I don’t have to support them, I no longer associate with the artists and feel they are speaking to and for me. Nor do I hear new stuff any longer through “approved means”. It’s quite frankly too dang expensive to find the very few that might appeal to me in a years time and largely a waste of time and money to look that way. Kill p2p and it will kill the only source I now use for finding new music on those rare occasions when I look.
I do promise you one thing, I will never, ever, again look for music the way I used. It’s too much of a pain to do that, too expensive and time consuming, and I have no inclination to do so with sue’em all going on. Since I now don’t listen for the new exposure, I have no inspiration to go hunt something to listen to from an on-line store. Digitally it’s not mine when I buy it and I don’t accept that. I spend money to HAVE SOMETHING FOR MY OWN, to play UNDER MY LIFESTYLE, how I WANT TO LISTEN TO IT. Since the majors are wanting to control that, I have no use for them nor their product. You can call me a disillusioned life long music fanatic that has lost that fanaticism and with that, the music industry lost a customer and a rather good one.
May 9th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
I’m a really weird person, but this is all sounding rather familiar
1. I was never really “into” music in the trendy/conformist/herd-mentality way everybody else at my school was — my school was all “dress exactly like us, listen to whatever happens to be trendy”, etc. I totally didn’t buy it, and I still don’t.
That changed when I turned 13 and bought my first guitar (one of those crappy ones that are made out of pressed sawdust board, like that furniture you assemble yourself.) I learned to play from an uncle or great-uncle or somebody, who was really into bluegrass and old-time fiddle music, so that’s where my first leanings were musically.
My family was never really prosperous, especially after my dad split (he’d banged some chick he met at work, and decided he was into her more than us), so I never really had large amounts of money around to buy stuff.
(my two favorite albums when I was 15: The soundtrack to “Transformers, the Movie” and “Frampton Comes alive”. God, that sounds lame when I read it back.
2. Then, after I ran out of money and had to drop out of college (long story) and moved back to this area, I found this dumpy little record store out at a local strip-mall, where he had crates of 45s, LP’s and such. The first day I went there, I dropped about 150 bucks, and walked out with something like 1500 albums and another 250 45’s. Odd mix of hippie-rock, punk, Big Band stuff from the 1940s (Benny Goodman especially), weird stuff from India and Asia and all over the map.
(I still haven’t gotten to listen to all of them).
3. My next big “find” musically came when our local library changed from LP’s to CD’s, and sold off all the old albums.
Guess who pretty much shoved his way to the front of the line, and got out with another big mess of albums?
I was into ham radio for awhile, but instead of buying radio gear, I always came back from hamfests with big boxes of even more albums, reel-to-reel tape, and (believe it or not) a wire spool that I suspect is one of those used for the wire-recorders Ca. 1930, but I think a “friend” of mine — the guy who collects LED calculators I mentioned in another thread — stole that off me.)
Another way I got great music was by doing “format conversions” for people: they wanted their album collection xferred to CD, I’d do it for a good price, IF I got to keep the original records (needless to say, I also kept the digital backups.)
The “music industry” has probably NEVER viewed me as a customer, primarily because (as our erstwhile colleague “Sam” would put it) I spend so much time “hiding behind” things like the first-sale doctrine (I very seldom pay “full-price” for print books, either.)
But seriously, even if I wasn’t the compete nutjob that I so obviously am, why WOULD I buy any of their crap, now?
That shit with Jay-Z auto-tuning his way through an epileptic seisure, backed up by a crappy drum machine? (What is that called?)
Nah.
But I gotta say: if Susan Boyle put out an album, I ‘d buy that — but ONLY if she got 95 percent of the money, or more.
May 14th, 2009 at 4:34 am
lol, also sounds like me. music is the answer to everything
)
brings a world of different people together (anyone gone raving
turns depressed people into happy people, keeps us motivated, makes us want to live!
thank the lord for p2p/rapidshare/newsgroups/ftp!
(i have paid for access to 0day ftp servers before though lol)
i always get asked, if you like the music so much buy the cd! i will do one day, but since i live on £30 per week, only option is to download
MUSIC FTW! all music should be free
(whole 470gig of dld music and going strong )