From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Tue Sep 19 2000 - 08:41:40 MDT
Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
> "Michael S. Lorrey" wrote:
> >
>
> > What is being ignored? The fact is that the people who create stuff need to
> > live. The inscentive of wealth is ONE tool that is useful to to encourage
> > creativeness. Historical analysis suggests that to date, it seems to be one of
> > the most effective tools to do so. So the better question is: Do we need the
> > current or higher levels of creativity, or can we survive in societies of lesser
> > creativity before we engulf the planet? I say we need as high a level of
> > creativity as possible. It is understood, that at some point, there are only so
> > many boats and cars you can park in your garage to make you happy, however a
> > creative person can ALWAYS, I think, find something new and better to do with
> > more wealth.
>
> What is being ignored is that to date we have been living largely in
> scarcity. As our tech advances rapidly toward singularity we live in
> comparative abundance. It literally takes less and less human labor to
> produce most of our needs and many of our wants.
Less labor, but more capital. Every new generation of computer chip from Intel,
AMD, etc requires twice the capital of the previous to develop and build the
plants to manufacture. While operational costs of manufacture drop due to
automation, there is still front loading costs of capitalization which need to
be paid for.
>
> Also, in the case of Napster, I think we need to ask whether it makes
> sense to accuse people who simply use the internet to share music that
> they would share with friends anyway to be actual "pirates" in any
> meaningful sense. It also has been pointed out that most muscicians
> never get rich at all from their work no matter how well received it is.
> The lion's share of most music revenues goes to the recording industry.
> In this day and age of nearly instant global communication most of the
> recording industry's advertising and distribution costs are simply
> archaic and highly overpriced overhead.
Music companies spend many millions of dollars not only recording and producing
the musician's CDs, but in generating the media hype with advertising and other
marketing expenditures. That is tantamount to venture capitalists backing a
high-tech startup. They need to be paid back for their investment. Idiot
musicians like Courtney Love bitch about musicians being 'raped' by the music
companies, but the music companies deal with 9 of ten bands they sign breaking
up or failing long before the money invested in them is paid back. They have to
deal with covering up the damages and rude behavior of spoiled brat musicians
who get rock star head cases as soon as their first single hits the top 40,
bailing them out of jail, and paying for the extravagant stage shows the
musicians want to put on, where the musicians are too stupid to realize that all
the money they are blowing is coming out of their own pockets, one way or
another.
>
> The dumbest thing to me about Napster is that the recording industry
> didn't embrace the idea as free advertising and take it a step further
> by offering custom CDs containing your favorite music as well as
> anywhere availability of your music and perhaps per play micro-charges.
If what you say is true, they could easily have used the CD-Card format (the
size of a credit card) for this purpose. They did not. Giving away digital
quality music for the price of FM quality music (radio transmissions) is a
really really really DUMB idea from both the point of the artist and the music
company. Justifying the looter mentality with the claim that you'd never have
been a looter if they had just given it to you for free is a bullshit cop out.
> Yes, artists deserve to make a living. But it doesn't require
> protecting an outmoded way of publishing and distribution to take care
> of that. Most artists do not create to get rich. They create because
> they love to create.
Most artists I know do have that as their prime motivation. They would also love
to be able to create art for a living, rather than having to keep some schmuck
job to pay their bills.
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