Why Piracy is Perpetuating Plastic Pop

All over the world there are people purchasing varies musical products from artist in order for them to make money, and then from that they would be able to make more and more songs. There are also people who would not rather purchase a song but instead to acquire it without giving any profit to the artist. This has started out small but then more and more people start doing it, until it has become a global situation.

       

      Some people might say how could this be a global problem, it does not do any damage, and you might think that the only people who accuse this as a problem are just greedy artists and record labels. If you think through it for a while you could finally understand that is a chain of events that ends badly for everyone. When someone downloads some product by just one click of a button it might seem as not much is going on but what you’re doing is stealing from a person who has worked hard for that and they start loosing money, think if there are a million people like you who press that same button, they had then lost a huge amount of income. If this were to happen to most of the music groups out there then all the prices of the music will have to decrease in order to get as many people for them to buy their songs instead of illegally downloading it, if this action continues to fail this would lead the to the bands extinction.

      An example of a band trying to fight piracy had been Metallica’s Lars Ulrich when he had sued Napster for letting the world download their songs for free. In the end Lars Ulrich had demanded of a settlement of a minimum of $10 million, $100,000 per song that was illegally downloaded. This again had forced the myth of rock stars being greedy and the public had been arguing and debating, but in the end Ulrich had said that it had never been about the money but instead of control.

      Lily Allen was one of the few people who spoke about the opposition to online copyright enforcement; she had started to talk out on more older and successful artist by saying that it is easy for them to become more popular because they had made the money already. As for the younger bands it’s like they don’t even have the chance because they need the money to make more songs and if they were not to receive that much they would just disappear like dust from the world.

Noel Gallagher had been a bit more blunt about the subject by stating ‘The consumer [says] ‘Where’s my free music on the internet? Is there a free download?’ Fuck off! It costs me a quarter of a million pounds to make it, you’re not getting it for nothing. I want my quarter of a million back, thank you very much. That’s why we’re rock stars.’

This is a problem all over the world and something has to be done about this otherwise the problem will become too big to handle.

A Bio of Jamal Edwards from the Guardian

Jamal Edwards is a 22 year old founder of a online music channel called SBTV. This is a company that broadcast different types of music and does interviews with artists, although he is only 22 years old he was able to make this channel a reality. At the age of 16 he received a video camera for Christmas which he used to make his first videos of fox’s in his backyard, while receiving around a 1,000 views for it he was thinking of different types of videos so he could get more views.

He had been filming many different things, he had used his handycam to film some freestyle rappers off the street in guerrilla style. He had done this for 3 years until he had started filming some grime music, this music genre wasn’t put in mainstream radio stations and in general was not played enough, that had lead him with a wide door open for the grime genre of music. He had gained a lot of subscribers on his youtube channel by filming interviews with artists, backstage videos of bands playing and everything had been filmed normally without any of the studio gloss.

Overtime he has grown larger and larger that even Ellie Goulding, Nicki Minaj, Bruno Mars and Justin Bieber has been seen on SBTV. Nowadays he has around 350,000 subscribers along with close to 200 million views on his channel and he is able to get his funding through advertisement. This just goes to show how much a person is able to succeed in life from going to film foxes in the yard to even touring with Dr. Dre.

 Here is his YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/smokeybarz

Trent Reznor and the Formula for Future Music Business Models

            Trent Reznor is considered a genius among the music industry, he has developed the formula of the success of music business models. He had started out in working with a record labels to help him produce his music, while he had been thinking of ways to increase his success he had thought of this formula:

Connect With Fans (CwF) + Reason To Buy (RtB)
=

 The Business Model ($$$$)

            When he had thought of it the first thing that he did was try to connect to the audience by Alternative Reality Games (ARG) on his website, by selecting all the highlighted letters of a t-shirt that he was selling in a concert would then create a link to show some secret message, this had brought excitement for the audiences and interest to the artist. Another thing that he did was put out some of his new songs in USB’s and scattered it around the concert stadium in order for fans to find them, this again had brought excitement towards the audience. As for the his record label they did not like what he did because he was giving out new free music which was later shared around the internet. From then on he had started doing things his way without the record label, he had even started out giving free music to the audience; they were able to get the first 9 songs of his new album but then if you want you were able to buy the rest of the album for 5 dollars (which consisted of 36 tracks), it is a much better price than the iTunes 1 dollar for 1 song deal. One important part of what he did was that he had given options to the audience rather than giving only one deal, the biggest deal that he had done was a Ultra Deluxe Limited Edition Pack (as seen on the bottom picture) which consisted of all of his albums along with a personal autograph from Trent Reznor, in total the pack cost 300 dollars. Well only under 30 hours of it being online to purchase it had become sold out, and he had made 750,000 dollars just from that pack. There are so many example that he had used the formula for.

 

            A lot of different artists had become to use this formula due to the success of Trent Reznor, and it had helped the artist to connect more to the fan base and to make it stronger. The best thing about the formula is that it has no possibilities to what could be done with the formula. In usual music groups the record labels set up some band merchandise for the audience to buy, but Reznor had stated that it is more difficult to sell products without doing a very good job convincing fans why they should buy it. If you don’t put any effort to connect to the fans, then you might not have as many fans.

            Although there are new technologies being created in this point in life which also means that more and more possibilities to connect with the audience, by doing so then you will make them happy, and by making the fans happy they give you money that you deserve. The more you think about it the more you understand that it is a huge chain of actions.

Everything on this subject is in a presentation given by Michael Masnick:

A Background to the Music Industry and Some Basic Theory

Pop Music Genre:

Genre is a classification for a certain text according to the style and content. Throughout time more and more different types of genres are being invented.

            The Pop music genre had started out in the 1950’s with the popular music genre called Rock and Roll, the genre of rock and roll comes from a large collection of genres that have merged together to create one, the genres that made rock and roll was jazz, blues, rockabilly, gospel and soul music. One of the people that had made this genre more and more popular had been the artist Elvis Presley and one of the things that had made him famous was his star image. He had been a great influence to the music history with his music and his image, his image had been so powerful to a female audience with his hip movements, there was one interesting fact that Elvis when being seen on camera he was only to be seen from the waist up. Elvis had been the artist that created the breakthrough in dance.

            Every song has a genre and even some of them go into more detail which become a sub-genre of music that is a hybrid of 2 of more types of genre. With any song it has its own rhythm, instruments used for melody, lyric and vocal style which make it unique in its own way, but some people associate their looks and lifestyle with the type of music that they are playing to make the make the band more suitable for the genre. 

           Here is one example of a song and the artists look does not fit and how people are sceptical to listen to him even before he sings, and that is the reason why the artists look should match the music: 

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        Throughout time there have been people that use the music that they make to drive their appearance and lifestyle. One more example of this is Adele with her music that draws from classic pop of the 1960’s and 1970’s, and her outfits that are both classic and retro.