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The audacity of record companies

I will start this post with a disclaimer. I am opposed to record companies as a whole. Granted, many smaller ones are responsible, and many career musicians owe their lifestyles and successes to these types of companies. However, in the grand scheme of things, record companies homogenize digestible sound to “shut-up-and-take-my-money” consumers without a second thought to artistry. It’s all about the big bucks.

From the above disclaimer, one could probably gather that I am all for torrent sites, file-sharing, and the like. I do appreciate the fact that I have access to millions of songs that I could otherwise not have found without being required to buy used or rare vinyl records and equipment to hear. I’m also able to get special foreign releases from my favorite bands not available in the US.

Yet I do understand that a musician has to be able to continue creating the artistry. That’s what touring is for. Case in point: the independent band Dispatch. Three college friends from Vermont put the music they had recorded on their own, in their basement, on equipment they had purchased, up on Napster, the file sharing site, and within 8 years, they sold out Madison Square Gardens 3 consecutive nights.

I see the music that a band or a musician creates as their way of advertising. Getting people to like your music, creating buzz, and then performing would create an income (and weed out crap like Nicki Minaj).

Copyright, it seems to me, is really just a way for record companies to make money (artists only receive about 9 percent of the money made from album sales) and they operate as a middle man that doesn’t really need to exist in the digital age.

~ by William Hammill on September 23, 2012 . Tagged: , , , , ,



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