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Re: [LUG] My letter to my MP / ISP ban to The Pirate Bay

 

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Julian Hall wrote:
> That's the difference in the case of the music industry.  People like the
> BPI are claiming that piracy is robbing the *artists* of their revenue,
> while everyone knows it's the big music publishers like Sony etc who are
> losing the most because they take the most.  If the companies gave the
> artists - without whom they'd have zero income - a reasonable percentage I
> think more people would be sympathetic to their argument.

The point I'm trying to make is that there's nothing unreasonable
about the percentage the artist gets.

And artists do lose out as revenues for the music industry decrease.
You may not think the percentage they get is reasonable, but it's
still a percentage. Which means that if sales halve, so does their
income through record sales. Which is why some artists (Metallica,
most famously) are vocal opponents of file sharing.

> Remember the
> artists can survive without the publishers - the example I quoted earlier of
> Prince - but the promoters cannot survive without the artists and it's about
> time they realised that IMHO.

But Prince is an exceptionally successful and well-known artist. He
doesn't need promotion to sell his new album, and if he signs a deal
with some newspapers, distribution is also taken care of. Likewise, if
you are a tomato farmer and for some reason people really want to buy
_your_ tomatoes, then you can can them on your farm and sell them to
anyone who comes to buy them -- and thus sell them at a lower price,
while striking a bigger profit.

That's of course an unreasonable scenario, but Prince is exceptional
among artists that he has the option of doing it this way. If you're
an average artist, even if you can live off your music (which would
make you exceptionally successful), and you want to make money through
selling CDs, you still need the CDs to make it to the people and the
people to know about your new CD in the first place.

Mind you, I do think that most of what the record industry does isn't
necessary any more and the way artists make money will change (and is
already changing). But that is because it is outdated, not because it
was wrong in some kind of way.

Martijn.

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