Current music industry woes

The music industry has been transforming since songs and music video clips could be streamed for free. Neil Milliner appeals to his fellow musicians worldwide to unite and come up with a workable system.

There is a lot of talk going around lately over the subject of streaming and the lack of money getting to the bands or the songwriters. As you may or may not already know, a song that is streamed to the public makes a minuscule amount for the poor musician. 1,000 streams wouldn’t even buy him a decent set of strings for his guitar to make music with, let alone feed the poor bugger.

Just as the print media is slowly transitioning from paper to its place in this electronic world and had to let go of all its old ways and methods (think – there will be no more paperboys), the music industry is going to have to find its own method of operating in the bright new future we are beholding.

There is only one problem, and that is not too many businesses had a printing press in the basement or a high-speed xerox copier and access to cheap methods of long-haul parcel delivery, but in the music industry we are now dealing with everybody does. The costs of copying, ripping, burning even have dropped so much that a child could pay for it with his pocket money. No longer do we go cap in hand to the record store and pay the price demanded or go without, we can just troll Google until we get what we want. Legally or illegally. There is no way of stopping this behaviour.

What I am proposing is that ALL of the music people worldwide unite and rebuild this mess we have now into a workable system. The system of streaming full songs and music video clips for free has to stop. There has to be a ban on posting full songs altogether. The method iTunes and others use whereby the song is automatically cropped is the only way the band/songwriter has of getting a sale because free is a hard discount to compete with, and I know of no musician that lives for free.

This way the only way anybody can get a full song is to buy it, plus any full song on the internet can be found as being probably illegal and dealt with harshly. Maybe all that needs to be done is to cross-check the length of the known preview and title with any other audio that is an exact match (like they are tracking for copyright now). All these sites are doing is using the musicians work as site content and generating an income from the ads and clicks they receive for their “popularity”. The poor muso gets crumbs.

The big boys like Sony and EMI should have collared everything musically worthwhile to sell and stayed in the business, but the Indie movement has overtaken them. Maybe like the movie system where there were only half a dozen huge players in the game and you selected from what they had. This mess has gone feral, and there seemingly is no filter to sort the great from the grating.

That is my little rant for today. PS: I am one of those trying to make more out of my career than the average street beggar.