ah.fm Countdown, Independent music, Ramblings on Creative Commons

Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 6:02 pm

DeLeMa:

Thanks for taking the time to review the site. We have been marketing like crazy to develop a media catalog to enjoy. We did have some backlash from the creative community about allowing free download of media with purely a donation system, so we built in the controls for the artist to manage this.

I have a little survey for this thread. Would you be willing to offer your email address to the artist in exchange for free download of their media? The intentions would be for marketing and connecting the creator with the consumer. With strict policy against spam and abuse.

All input welcome. Thanks eveyrone.

Posted: Tue Apr 08, 2008 4:22 am

OG wrote:

The problem is that the great majority of people using bittorrent or p2p in general see no moral issue in their actions. They feel as if the internet has given them free reign to do as the please when they please regardless. They also do not like when you point out the fact that what they do, no matter how they or the comminity at large justify it, is illegal. Ive personaly lost count of the number of people Ive offended by stating as much, but at the end of the day its the truth. By artists work appearing in the digital domain be it legaly or illegaly, some feel that this removes any personal responsibility towards supporting artists, and the feeling I get is that as far as most people are concerned, all media should be completely free. To be honest, I cannot see that changing, ever. The blatent ignorance of some people is such that no matter how much you try to change the way of things for the better, if there is any effort required on their part, they want nothing to do with it. Everything must be handed to them on a silver platter, gratis. My opinion, its a rather disgusting attitude to have, unfortunately, common and deep rooted.

I'm a musician in my own indie band, and I had to quote this person as this is what concerns all of us indie folk these days in the p2p culture. My band, Keygen, (yes we get many quips about the name, it's an attention grabber) have our own website which we pay for yearly and we share 24 free high quality mp3s on our homepage. We're giving away some of our best music for the exposure, but realistically how many of our "fans" or folks who love our music enough to download it free would really pay for our other stuff? So far we've tested this attitude OG here mentions and we've found it to be fairly consistent. We placed one of our featured tracks from our new album (which we will be selling in our shopping cart store at our website soon) at our MySpace page to show folks what was in store for them in our next album for streaming only. After over 100 streams we decided to put it up at Indiestore where we have an online store - we can sell 4 tracks here at a time and Indiestore takes a 30% cut from our track earnings, so there is a bit of sacrifice involved in doing it this way. (We hadn't yet bought our site and shopping cart, so this was a great way of selling our music online at that point).

Anyways, to continue with my point.... so far we've had hundreds of views to our Indiestore page and a few streams of the tracks. No buyers. We're going to place at least 2 of our albums for sale at our website shopping cart and give people the option of purchasing individual mp3s. Do these folks here really mean it when they claim that if they like an indie artist's music/art they will actually make a purchase to support the artist? So far our efforts have shown us no, but this is something we may need to give a little more time to be sure. In the meantime, we keep doing what we love for seemingly nothing, though we hope in future to make some money. I think indie artists everywhere are worried about this "entitlement" attitude some folks have and whether this is infectious enough to destroy our efforts to be compensated for our craft. Thanks to the folks who are sincere about the "try before you buy" attitude. Giving away free mp3s and allowing high quality streams to internet users is our way of giving you, the consumer, that option. Again, thanks folks who actually do buy a product/song they like.

By the way, for folks interested in our band name, Keygen is short for The Key Generation - the new generation of indie electronica. So any folks who love instrumental electro music, visit our site if you like and enjoy the free downloads. We hope you'll come back at some stage and help us make a living by purchasing some of our music, and other stuff we create Very Happy

Google us with the keywords, "Keygen Records NZ" and you should find our website.

Cheers,

Sadi Cool

Posted: Fri May 09, 2008 10:35 am

The main issue as I see is it that under our current system download of copywrite material counts as theft and is thus illegal and of course, the courts, etc will want to do something about it

Under my philosphy and that of anyone whose read and agreed with KarL Marx, property ownership itself is illegal. Our economic system is a system of exploitation where the masses i.e. me and you, pay for the excesses of the rich and famous and personaly i have a problem with that. A Big Problem, in particular as the people taking most of your money are the record companies, look at how much the artists make and then think the companies get even more, is that fair? I think not and as a result I now refuse to purchase anything that is not in a major sale.

Why should someone else get more money for their work than i do when I work just as hard so why should they be living the high life at mine and everyone elses expense?

So long as there is inequality then people will steal, they may not even realise this is why they are stealing but it is.

Amswer, sadly probably unnatainable in my lifetime, is to wipe out inequality and until that happens I will continue to get what I can for free. They call us criminals? WTF Who is it living in a huge mansion whilst the poorest cant even afford to eat healthily and have to live in a box? When theres a famine somewhere do you see these companies donating their profits, no, (not most of them anyway, ok theres a few exceptions) its the average person who puts their hands in their pockets and dials up a charity appeal on tv and at the end of the night u might have raised 1% of a multinationals profits for the day and yet we are the ones called criminals.

IS THAT RIGHT????? HELL NO

The one exception to my rule of not paying is when i go to see an independent artist live and they s/he is selling their cds out of a bag to make enough money to get to the next gig. These people I will gladly support and do so on a regular basis, they are deserving of my cash. Big mnc's are not

Im not against paying a fair price for music/film/service what i am against is being exploited as we all are every day. Companies should be not for profit, they should make enough to tick over

Rant over

Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 6:40 pm

Good point drewster

Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 6:40 pm

Good point drewster

sorry about the double-post Please help remove dupe Embarassed

Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 8:46 am

Love music under CC.