[Hudlug] Elvis Costello! I spit on the floor!

[Les Burns]

On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 11:17, Chris Wood wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 September 2002 10:51 am, you wrote:
> > Poor Elvis, bit old out and out of touch. Well its like they say
> > "accidents will happen". I'm sure he didn't personally condone the DRM
> > aspect of the cd, but almost certainly, the ST did. I'll never buy it
> > again. Its the lowest of the low to back door such "upgrades". It begs
> > the question as to why anyone would use a M$ product- There are
> > literally no advantages in using the windows platform, their media
> > players suck and Office XP is overpriced krudd.
> >
> 
> I'm sure both ST, EC and his record company were all perfectly aware of how 
> the promotion was working.
> If you were a famous recording artist, how chuffed would you be if your 
> record sales were dropping because the general public were trading all your 
> music as mp3s? This is your livelihood remember! Careers tend to be short, 
> so you need to make as much money as you can whilst you are still famous.
> 
> I think most artists and record companies know that digital formats via the 
> Internet are the future. 
> But they can't simply give that sort of material away, as there would then 
> be no record companies, and hence no beautifully recorded music, as it would 
> cost too much money to do more than record music in home studios.

There's two points here:
1. They can't give it away, absolutely not and shouldn't have to.
Capitalism, used responsibly, is a force for good. However, its been
demonstrated a million times that the 5 (yes only 5) record companies
charge over the odds for their product- irresponsible capitalism (v v
bad). Further to that, the monopoly (oligopoly) created by the big 5
forces new and genuinely original talent to the wall. Through the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act and DRM they are shutting down your
rights to choose and your last chance to deny them their stranglehold on
the market. My experience of the music industry is that its a corrupt
business filled with people standing on each others heads, trying to
grab the next crumb. The precedence for this behavior was laid down by
the people that run it.

2. The quality of home recordings is only limited by the acoustic
quality of the recording environment. Technology has gifted us with
cheap and accessible means to produce exceptionally high quality
recordings. You just don't need SSL, NEVE, and Neumann anymore.

The music industry thrives on independent artists and record companies
taking things into their own hands. Technology and the Internet is the
means to achieve this. Anything that stands in the way of this is
detrimental, and I believe DRM is.  

> 
> I dunno - maybe your thoughts are different on this one.
> Don't get me wrong - I have a creative jukebox full of mp3s, but I do 
> personally own all the music on it as CDs as well. I ocassionally get mp3s 
> off mates, but I then generally go out and buy the CD if I liked the album.
> 
> Companies have to make money to survive. So do recording artists.
> Do them a favour - BUY their music if you like it.
> 
> Oh and as for advantages of MS products, I've used Unix for 10 years now, 
> and linux for 9. I use linux at home, and have done for many years, and have 
> used linux boxes as webservers, databases and firewalls in production 
> environments at work.
> Open office is getting quite good, and I'm writing this email on kmail.
> However, for word processing I would still fire up my Windows machine. No 
> question. The Office suite is still a country mile better than anything on 
> Unix.
> 
> ;-)
> 
> C.
> 
> 
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