Robert Henke wrote:Dividing the world into good musicians and bad labels seems to be a bit stupid to me. Since i run my own label and dealed with independent labels as well as with a major in the past I think I know a bit about the topic.
I do not care if russian law allows what those guys do, but i do care if they sell crappy encoded music of mine without permission. Why do I care:
- they are making money with stolen music
- they tell their customers lies about their status. ( I don`t know how often I had to tell friends that they DO not pay me or any other artist I know )
- they release my music in horrible quality without my artwork and out of context.
If I make a complex drone piece and nothing is left over from the original sound this compromises my artwork. And who knows if they do not make mistakes and sell some other music labeled "monolake" ? If they do not care about all other things why should they care about the content itself ?
- they make it harder for legal shops to sell. this not only affects iTunes but also smaller independent mp3 stores.
Every musician who thinks this has nothing todo with him/her must be nuts.
If my figures are correct 50% of the market is iTunes, and the second largest is all the russian sites which sum up to 15%. 15% sales going straight to russian mafia. A lot of money....
I recently had the strange honor to come along a russian bootleg of my "polygon cities" CD. Not a cheap CD-R with black and white photocopy. No, a finished product. Including a full color printed booklet, scanned from the orignal cover and modified to fit into the clear tray instead of the original digipack. They were not able to use the original print form the CD itself, so the "redone" it. I do not assume they only do this with my CDs because they are such huge fans. I rather assume they do this with independent labels because there is zero risk. So, you can imagine some guys do this day by day with a lot of independent artists. And they do this because they sell much more then 300 copies per CD. This is big bussiness. Big, because I bet they do this with thousands of artists.
( I will put up some nice pics of the monolake bootleg CD on my website if i find the time )
So, everyone who thinks he is not affected, because he is not Madonna must be very naive.
Robert
you can go through the effort of setting your own label up from an office somewhere in germany and get distribution and push work from your artists out into record stores and digital download stores around the world.
you will still get shafted by the big labels you work so hard to live without.
why?
the price of digital downloads on stores like itunes doesnt give a fair enough discount to the lack of packaging and physical distribution.
big labels still give shit deals to artists.
what ends up happening is that a whole chunk of the market feels that the price and/or terms that music is being sold digitally is grossly inflated, but they do not wish to pirate their music.
this creates a vaccum in the market which sites like allofmp3 are happy to step up to and cater for. the consumer goes through a legitimate process, proper billing, no fraudulent activity so they take confidence in their purchase.
meanwhile, apple will sell a file you can't play elsewhere easily at a low quality bitrate degrading your drone more than what the russian gangstas were likely to.
as soon as we realise that allofmp3 IS NOT going away, and that we are still having our musical careers dictated to us by the 4 big boys we will have to either sell our music at crappy quality for just a couple of dollars less than the packaged CD version or forfeit our true income to the russians.