Singing For Your Supper

Here is a comment I made on The Grauniad’s Cif site about the recording industry becoming redundant.

My comment:

Technology changes and new industries come into being – like the record industry in the 20^th century. Then technology changes and industries fade away and some die. The record companies existed to get a physical thing – the record, cassette, 8-track, CD DVD - out into the mass market. That is no longer necessary as the physical object nowadays - the CD or DVD - is no longer needed to transport its contents from producer to customer. Therefore, the record companies are no longer necessary – despite what they claim. The only real possible claim they can have against ‘pirates’ anyway, is against those that make and *sell* the actual physical object – only then are they actually losing a genuine sale as a downloaded ‘illegal’ copy is only a tenuously theoretical possible loss, if that.

The question now is what the makers of the tunes want to do with their stuff, nobody really wants to pay for stuff off the web and once the tune exists in digital form, extra copies of it are virtually costless.

So, that’s it really. If people want to buy a physical object professionally produced with a cover, case and so forth the band (or whoever) should sell it to them. These sort of threads always seem to have loads of people who want that. Otherwise, the raw tracks should be free, out there for people to do with what they will. They could look upon the recorded stuff as adverts, publicity, PR – what you will. The bands will eventually not even have to pay the server cost of hosting the files as they roam free.

Quite simply, the cost of making recoded music is now negligible – as compared to days of yore – and the costs of getting it out into the world are now virtually non-existent. So the only question remains as to whether the artists should be paid for making the recording, but if they look at it as a form of PR, advertising and so forth for their live gigs or whatever, then they will get some return on their time spent making it.

It may mean the days of limos, mansions and groupies are over, but there may be enough for a reasonable living, after all nobody is forcing them to do what they do, are they? So ANY reward at all is a bonus, after all we are often told that the world doesn’t owe anyone a living.