My thoughts:
For the industry, this is great.
For artists, it sucks.
Again, the more and more that people ignore Bill and I's argument of the "pay per byte" entertainment thing online, the more and more cutthroat this will get for everyone, and the more that people--including people on this board--will have to resort to shake down tactics.
As an artist, rights to publishing is a shakedown tactic. I'll say this firmly and strongly right now. But from an engineer's point of view, sure, we all have to eat, too.
If you noticed in my other threads, I predicted that this would be the wave of the future for the industry's woes--shakedown tactics from publishing. No one listened.
Look at Paul McCartney....didn't Michael Jackson own more of his songs than Paul? Isn't that a sad state of affairs? Then you get Luvs commercials, and the art becomes a laughing stock. It isn't artists making the decisions anymore, it's a goddamned marketing board looking to use prominent music to sell anything but music.
When I went to the music store to buy music, they cleared out at LEAST half of their music. Now it's just the biggest artists, or artists that have sold. The stores have no more time or money for taking a chance on newer artists. But this is what I saw:
DVD's
hoodies
hats
shirts
baby "Iron Maiden" shirts
If you think music is a joke now with American Idol delusionists, imagine what a laughing stock it will be when everyone has to sell their publishing out. Music will become more and more of a jingle. Merchandising is selling more than the actual music, everything's becoming a "brand". More now than ever, music is something that you wear, rather than, say, sitting down and listening to the music, or going out to clubs. The club scene here has been a bloody morgue for a long time. That's because people don't give a shit about music, it's a name, a brand, something they wear or download but don't actually support.
COUNT on it.
Pay per byte, folks. Join up now in the fight against rampant ISP "oversights". Don't wait for the Titanic to sink, you can do something NOW. The lifeboats are still there. If we let the ISP's continue on with this, there will be no lifeboats left, because the Titanic will be underwater.
I guarantee it.
Edit: I think that there can be some good for artists to put songs in movies or create soundtrack work. I'm going after soundtrack work, myself, because tons of people have said that I should get into soundtracks, because that's what most of my released music sounds like, anyways. But to relinquish 25 percent? I dunno man. That's steep. I'm still the guy that has to find that "in" with the soundtrack work, at which point i'm the guy that recoups 100 percent, still.
Reading the writing on the wall, you know what will happen? Bands will just record their stuff themselves, because they can't afford to. At some point, I think that there was that slim fraction of time, that window of opportunity, where the majors--if they had the foresight--would have aligned themselves with smaller home based studios or bands, to cut costs. That would have paid those smaller bands and engineers and acknowledged their time (some records have been done like this: Caribou's "Andorra", Loney Dear, Jason Falkner had stuff on his first album that was recorded at home and then mixed by bigger guys--and it sounds great). But it was the exception, not the rule.
Even at worst, they could have got bands to produce and record their own material, and then get a guy like Andy Wallace or Butch Vig to sort of produce it by mixing what they thought were the best elements in or out, or punching it up and spicing it up. You need a modern day equivalent of what Butch Vig was doing in Smart Studios in the late 80's--creating amazing sounding big budget albums on a small budget. It's no coincidence that Nirvana's "Nevermind" bears his name. When you take people that know what they're doing--for great AND for an affordable price, you can get albums like "Nevermind". Butch recorded other tracks of theirs before they were signed to Geffen, and those sound great, too. Nirvana never had tons of money to pay producers at that time, those producers helped push Nirvana into the stratosphere, because they did a great job AND it didn't cost an arm and a leg.
Who's the new Butch Vig?
Too late for that now--the majors kept on throwing big dollars and MORE money into the sinking large ship, rather than the smaller lifeboats. That means that the whole momentum is taking the entire lifeboat system. If you pull a parachute too late, that's it. You're done. If problems arise before that altitude, you'd best locate them and do something quick. They never created any reputable home studio "names" to be able to spin gold from straw. It can be done. I'm doing it. I've got worldwide acclaim for doing this my way, on my artistic and production merits. But the majors wouldn't have gave a shit how good I could get things to sound for much, much less than the big boys. I don't have the overhead that most people do, i've learned to get efficient on a budget. But at some point, someone convinced them that they did need all that excess, all that overspending, and now it's hurting them.
That is something that the majors never really saw as an asset. And the window has pretty much closed. If the majors came to me now and said, "hey, we like the productions you're putting out on your label and getting big budget sound for cheap". I'd tell 'em to get bent, because they have dollar signs in their eyes and there's nothing that they can do for me for promotion, other than to sell my fucking songs out, man.
BUT, then more artists like me will just create their own work, sell it, and keep 100 percent of the publishing, because they're out there having to bust their ass anyways, because the labels (even indie) are of no help. They can't take chances on bands. Bands will go either really, really big (Mutt Lange, etc) or go very small. There won't be any more middle class engineers or producers anymore.
Author
Topic: producers want publishing, not points these days (Read 53164 times)