David Lowery - "I’ve been teaching college students about the economics of the music business at the University of Georgia for the last two years." According to the intertubes, David Lowery is also a singer/songwriter/guitarist with 27 years experience as a musician and a member of the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven. Yes, where could be possibly be getting his notions?

And I wonder what happens to the economics of touring when record companies are no longer footing the bill? Ceci Appleface apparently has a good chuckle at artists getting paid while their record company takes a loss. It's an attitude that's not completely unappealing. What happens when artists have to start taking all those expenses that used to fall on the record company's balance sheet?

Mike

Since I'm not arguing their income... okay. Again, not sure what your point is, but why not.



How many have I known well? A couple. How many have I spoken to a couple times? Enough to hear a little about what they do for a living? A lot.

Like I said, anecdotal. But if you'd like more hard data, here you go.



Yeah, he certainly has a long career in music. Still, the data above seems to indicate that he's wrong. So I'd still like to know where the idea's coming from. If it's his personal experience, he would seem to be an outlier.



Since my argument is, and always has been, that the majority of piracy doesn't cause a loss, I'm still not sure what your point is. That it would be nice if nobody ever lost money? Sure, I'll agree with that.

And since, as Charles pointed out, Lowery is also complaining about legal services, like Spotify and iTunes, I seriously don't know what your point is. That a new, legal, copyright-respecting business model is less profitable than the old one? Yeah, maybe. So what?

Unsurprisngly, Allen's argument is the weakest by far. "I spend X so I should be entiteld to X+Y"? Yeah, there couldn't possibly be any problems with that.

Ceci Appleface is making a simple assertion that is either true or false. I don't know which it is in the final analysis. Neither, I suspect, does Ceci Appleface. It's clear that he wishes it's true and is fairly hostile to anything which threatens his desire.

Also unsurprisingly, Charles makes a philosophical argument that is the most resistent to dispute because, well, it's mostly just a matter of opinion. I'm not quite clear, though, on why if an artist doesn't deserve total control over his art, anyone is making such a fuss over BEFORE WATCHMEN. Isn't exploitation the same whether it comes from a corporate headquarters or the faceless mob?

Mike

Uhhhh, no it doesn't. The argument isn't over whether musicians earn money through performing or what amount of their income comes from performing. It's how much they're earning and what effect piracy has on that by denying them additional sources of revenue. That's where the average income of $35,000 (which is also mentioned in the article to which you link) comes into play. $35,000 certainly isn't bad money. But as an average it means there are a lot of folks, possibly even a majority of musicians who are making less than that, possibly a lot less.

Mike

If the reason for your objection to piracy is that it results in less money for the copyright holder, then it's a perfectly valid argument. His actions are not resulting in less money for the copyright holder. Problem solved.



Clearly. In fact, I'm so hostile that on the old piracy thread I saw through time, knew in advance that this conversation would happen, and was threatened enough to preemptively link to the GAO study that backed up my argument.

That's how unreasonable I am.

You're far too clever for such dishonest tactics, of course. You shine as a beacon of intellectual honesty who knows that the sensible thing to do is wait a few months, forget about it, then say, "Look, it's true or it's not, I don't know, and I bet he doesn't either. I bet he just wishes it was."



Charles and I both said... yesterday... that our objection to Before Watchmen was on aesthetic grounds, not moral or ethical.

How many times do you need stuff repeated? Maybe we can get them all out of the way in one go.

Hey, thanks for telling me what point I was addressing. I got all confused, and thought I was talking about whether musicians earned their money through performing. You know... 'cuz what I said was:

Just answer the question: How much money do you spend on entertainment?

Production equipment is the cheapest now that it's ever been. It's very easy to produce a decent result with a PC and less than a thousand dollars of outboard gear.



Define "significant." Obviously there's money to made, else very few people would be doing it. Compare the number of touring musicians (and their support personnel) to the number of professional comics creators, for example.

Heh, Allen starts off with a demand of someone else. How unusual.



Touring was mostly a money-loser for bands decades ago, except as promotion for record sales. Led Zeppelin changed that by demanding 90% of the box office on the sensible argument that they provided the equipment, did all the work setting it up, and gave thousands of people a reason to buy tickets.

I don't pretend to know how it all works - I've only known a few touring musicians and they were all young enough to not need much money beyond getting them from gig to gig; I rarely asked how their business worked either - but the big acts get guarantees now. I think it started with the Rolling Stones in '89, but you offer [whoever] 200 million dollars for tour and then it's on you to book the shows, promote, sell tickets, etc.

I would speculate that this is where the record companies start edging in, and probably all the other elements that kept tours from being profitable forty years ago. I don't know who gets what from t-shirt sales, for instance.



The economies of scale which allow them to put more effort into promotion, access to studios, equipment, collaborators, session musicians. Also there's some value to name recognition; being signed to Atlantic or Capitol has some cachet that isn't there if a band signs with the publishing company they formed with their manager in the garage. The former has people whose sole job is to sell records, the latter won't.

The thing about moral control over art is that the person who treats it morally is better serving the art. Lucas hardly treats his art morally. Kafka wanted to do an immoral thing to his art, destroy it. So, if anyone can make an argument why DC is treating Watchmen more morally than Alan Moore would, feel free.

It's not always easy to separate morality from aesthetics: if a great artist wanted to tamper with the characters from another great artist's creation, which would in turn likely produce great art, then I think that's defensible to do even if the borrowed from artist objects to the borrowing. Simply sucking off the creative juices of a much greater artist to sell books that are really nothing more than a shoddy imitation of what that artist has already done is much more questionable. It certainly won't create art that deserves much moral concern, like the drawings in the Yellow Pages -- no one gives a shit if they're all destroyed.

Having said that, I've made the argument before that I don't see the use of Watchmen characters in BW as being ontologically different than the way Moore uses other people's characters in LOEG. This should be particularly true for Moore, since he believes in Ideaspace where fictional creations all exist together (thus, the characters borrowed from Harry Potter are the same characters, even if given different names).