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Sounds like a plan.

Hey, Steve, I'm sorry that my post seemed argumentative, and I removed it for that reason. I respect your ethics, and ideas on this fascinating topic.

I guess my bottom line is that I agree that copying illegally uploaded youtube videos or even sharing them on the web is indeed ethically wrong. It's also ethically wrong to drive a few miles per hour above the speed limit, but it's hard to resist those kinds of things.

Likewise Al! I respect your opinion as well.

One of the reasons I love this particular forum is that people are friendly 99.9% of the time

There are lots of great players here and good people too.

Just found this interesting article.

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120919jamestaylor

"In 2007, James Taylor initiated an audit of his royalty payments dating back to 2004. In that three-year span, Taylor and his accounting firm, Gelfand, Rennert & Feldman, LLC, found underpayments totaling $1,692,726." and

"(3) Warner Bros. subsequently paid only $97,857 of that balance."

As I pointed out earlier, we don't know whether artists are making money when people put music on youtube, but the same thing can also be said about buying their CDs. They are not even getting the 10-15% cut of they are supposed to get and they have to fight tooth and nail to get a portion of it back.

Again I am not against supporting the artist, but I don't buy the whole idea that piracy is primarily responsible for destroying the financial well-being of these artists.

. . . And exactly how much do you suppose Taylor may have recovered from YouTube under the same conditions?

In fact, etcetra , I am inclined to agree with you, in that artists have been grossly taken advantage of for years. Unscroupulous business practices depend upon the non-business mind-sets of artists, and greed takes over in some cases. But I still contend that this everything-free-for-everyone mentality of YouTube has not only facilited the non-payment to these serious artists, but has actually INVITED the pirating of their work.

There are many other implications, not the least of which is this: If I have virtually everything that McCoy Tyner (for example) has ever played available at all times for me to view and listen, I will probably be less inclined to pay $75++ to hear and see him live, at a real venue, with real sound. That situation might seem good to you -- it seems bad to me.

Ed

Actually based on my experience, most people I know are the exact opposite. They founded out about McCoy Tyner through listening youtube and other forms of legal/illegal downloads. If it wasn't for those things they would probably never have went to a single jazz concert let alone McCoy Tyner.

Like I said, as music students with very limited budget, most of my friends borrowed music and ripped them, In fact the teachers were giving out mp3s of his/her bootlegs!! If it wasn't for that we wouldn't have went to see all those live jazz shows either.

In either case, Most people who went to see live performances end up going to see their favorite artists pretty regularly. You'll be hard pressed to find someone who wouldn't go see a live concert because they can listen to the mp3s at home.




I know I've mentioned this, but some artists believe that the exposure they got from youtube and other places actually helped them more in the long term. So unless there is a tangible study on pros/cons of piracy vs the current model(i.e John Taylor's situations), then I am not going to say which one is better or worse. As Neil Young puts it "Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around" Some see it as a threat, some see it as an opportunity.

I've read Gabe Newell(Valve) saying how "Piracy(in video games) is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.", and it's amazing how he is able to generate a lot of profiting through his Steam service. Likewise Louis CK and Radiohead made a huge profit selling their stuff on their own.

I think the attitude of these people I mentioned above is that they don't mind piracy as long as they are getting exposure. There will always be people with free-for-all mentality but they trust that those who really enjoy their work with support them and buy their products, and having that kind of attitude is far better than treating their potential customers like freeloaders and punishing them for it.

While I think it's important to spread the message of supporting the artists, I also think that the music industry will have to somehow find a different way of distributing music. You are not going to stop piracy and change the mentality that is already there. "STOPPING online piracy is like playing the world’s largest game of Whac-A-Mole."

"http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/sunday-review/internet-pirates-will-always-win.html?_r=1"

Does anyone other than me remember the term propaganda? Propaganda is a most powerful tool, and has been around for a very long time. Propaganda was the primary method used to marshall the citizens of one of Europe’s most intelligent and advanced countries, behind one of the most brutal and heinous dictators of all time.

Propaganda makes things APPEAR different than they really are. It puts a different slant on bad things to make them seem good, and visa versa. It uses rhetoric to convince people that they are not as powerless as they feel.

Depending upon what it is attempting to “prove” at the time, propaganda can make folks believe things are getting better, when all the facts point to the exact opposite.

With the current proliferation of “media”, propaganda has never before been so widely used (and abused!) In its highest, most artistic form, propaganda not only makes people believe that wrong is right, but it then gets those same duped people to actually acclaim in unison how right things are! Pretty powerful stuff . . . and the really insidious part is that we take it so much for granted, it is almost transparent to us.

Ed

Great, so you are reducing my side of argument are merely a propaganda? Do you realize I can just as easily say your argument is propaganda that is fueled by the Big Record Companies?

I am merely presenting an argument from a different side. There are legitimate cases for and against piracy, and I think I've cited sources from different well-known musicians, entertainers, businessmans, who doesn't embrace the whole piracy=evil view and actually came out ahead in their field because of that.

Let's face it, I doubt that anyone here has legal purchased all the music they've listened to. Most of the well-known musicians I know do own quite big collection of bootleg stuff. Did musician's cry foul when people were recordings stuff off the radio from cassette tape?

I am not going to go into too much detail about piracy but often times, piracy happens partly because the market is not responding the demand out there. If it was up to the record companies, we would still be selling singles for $5 a pop still. Napster forced the change in market which eventually led to creation of itunes.

Next time if you want to argue, please stick to actual arguments and ideas that you can support with some kind of evidence, rather than using an empty rhetoric about propaganda. The "Truth" as you call it, isn't so black and white as you'd like to believe.

He protesteth too much, methinks!

I was not referring specifically to you, or any of your arguments, but rather to the wide-spread belief that things among musical artists, and in the music business in general, are better now than in the past. The facts contradict that notion, yet we are told to believe it. That is textbook Propaganda.

I would have made the same assertion about cassette tapes being "better" than LP vinyl. I would have had the same complaint about CDs being "superior" to reel-to-reel. In mildest form, it is advertising, and in the extreme it is grand-scale brainwashing. And it is usually targeted to make the unsuspecting firmly believe that the latest thing is undenyably the best ever.

Does the profile fit?

I don't think anyone here is saying that things are better, Some things are changed for the better, some changed for worse. Some people are actually better off because of the change. Where I live, there are more people listening to jazz thanks in part by availability of music on internet.

It's about things not being what they used to be and you probably can't expect things to work like they used to. A lot of professions do become obsolete if you don't move with time, and music is no exception.

I am not sure what you mean about the second paragraph either. Of course all those media formats have their advantages/disadvantages, but one thing that can be said for sure is that the newer generations of media format are more portable&convienient. People aren't buying mp3's over CD's and cassettes because they are brainwashed, but in a society that values portability, mp3's are the preferred format. It's just meeting the demand of the market.

My point precisely.

At its heart, music is SOUND. I am uncertain how convenience and portability relate to that. And how do you suppose this "demand of the market" came about? Somehow, folks are being diverted away from sound, and toward these unrelated characteristics. And for what reason?

It depends on what you mean by better, and from whose perspective you are looking.
You brought up the example of McCoy Tyner and how you thought youtube was bad for him, but maybe you know that at the end of the 60's McCoy was so short of gigs he had to get a job driving a cab. And that was only a few years after he recorded one of the greatest jazz albums ever (and probably one of the best selling). Now he plays to packed concert halls everywhere he goes. I doubt he misses driving the cab!

Looking at the past with rose tinted spectacles is also a false view of reality.

Do you want to carry a record player with you every time you want to listen to music outside of your home?

Most of us don't want to a carry a separate device for listening to music when we are on the go Personally I am glad I can use my phone to listen to music on the subway. There are other practical concerns, like not wanting to clutter your living spaces with 100's, if not thousands of CDs, and environmental concerns(imagine all the plastic you save by going all digital), better indexing of your library...etc

Technology just makes it easier and more practical to consume music(and media), it doesn't divert your attention away from music, if anything, it allows people to enjoy music in ways they couldn't before.

If you want to go back to carrying camera, cassette player, and portable TV with you, we wouldn't stop you, but to say that new technology is somehow taking you away from the experience of music is absurd.

Beeboss

Not to mention the kind of racial tensions Miles Davis and others have to go through back then. There are many media "propaganda" that appeals to nostalgia too. The Tea Party in America is running on the whole idea that things used to be so much better back then.

With due appologies to Al for moving his thread even further afield . . . . .

Long before I was born, there was an "invention" known as the Swiss Army Knife. In addition to the normal and expected blade of a jack-knife, it had various gadgets: a bottle opener, a sort of screw driver, a leather punch, a kind of spoon, tiny scissors, and the deluxe models even sported a micro saw! It was a great idea -- IN THEORY.

The main problem was this: none of the devices, with the exception of the jack-knife blade, worked very well. Each represented a massive compromise from the real thing it was intended to emulate. When I was growing up, I knew some kids who owned them and thought they were great. Now I know someone who uses his telephone to listen to music . . . and on it goes.

So what's the major compromise of listening to music on your phone as opposed to using a dedicated Cassete CD, or record player? In what ways does it not "work well"? Have you actually used a smartphone to listen to music?

What do you mean by the "real thing" anyways? If you are claiming that listening to music on your phone from listening to real, live music, then that's a absurd statement, and there's no evidence to support that.. Technology doesn't take anything away from experience, its up to the individual to figure out if you want to use it or be used by it.

I would rather not embark here on a side discussion of "really listening", or "listening in depth", as I used to call it. Suffice to say that whenever possible, I prefer to listen to good music live, as you, yourself, have mentioned as your preference. My next favorite way is pre-recorded music THAT IS RECORDED AND REPRODUCED AS FAITHFUL TO THE SOURCE SOUND as possible. The instruments sound AND FEEL like they would if you were sitting in the studio, or concert hall, or nightclub.

While I must confess that I have not listened in depth to music over an iPhone, I have a feeling that, if I did, I would come away disappointed. I suspect that all the notes are there, but without many of the overtones, and without much resonance.

I might ask you if you have listened to a real sound system, with a high quality source?

Now you know why I said "leaving aside issues of copyright and fairness" in my original post.

Well I guess I should leave this issue to rest too. Just to answer the question, Yes I have listened to music on high quality systems. Bottom line is, I agree that things are not changing for the better. But nor is it changing for the worse either. We live in different times which requires different needs. The fact that we prefer mp3 isn't because we are brainwashed into thinking it's better, but it's because people have different needs/demands nowdays. most younger people like me don't have a place of permanent residence, and getting a quality sound system&record/CD to listening to music is just too expensive and impractical. Besides when you are listening to mp3s on the phone, you are usually doing it outside in a noisy environment, which is totally different than listening at home. They are apples and oranges.


Btw if you are serious audiophile you can make high bitrate/quality mp3s and invest in expensive sound-isolation earphones too.

Etcetra,

While we continue to think about the subject from different perspectives, I have enjoyed the "discussion".

Ed