FBI Quality

Although I'm personally on YouToogle's side here, I just love the expression 'FBI Quality'. Exactly what is this meant to express? That it'll be barely legal and involve shady undercover deals? That dissenters will be assassinated and records altered or covered up for 50 years?

Hateful? Not ME...

Will - I think you misread someone's comments of quotes of me as my own writing. Or you mis-understood my sarcasm in the original post (when I say "easy" it is sarcastic and dismissive, for the record). Nothing could be further from the truth - please see the message that I posted 3 minutes before yours, defending the music industry, and saying, as you do, that it is a free market, and to get a better contract if they so wish. I am very much pro-content creator's rights, and the corporations that they freely choose and contractually align with to distribute those creations.

And I DO have a nice day job...not in the music industry anymore. But I do create a bit of intellectual property in it...

Thank you...

For concentrating on one line of my reasoned response, which you took as a signal to engage in a tantrum of childlike proportions.

I have worked, not for the music industry, but for National Public Radio, where I used to assist in engineering a series of live jazz showcases in the Mid-West. But I have been close to a lot of people in the industry, on the studio and muscian side.

And albums, properly recorded, produced, and then marketed, cost money. Lots of it to do it well. Top studio engineers/producers/writers/etc. want to be paid, because they have a lifetime of skills and talents. And then add what it costs to MARKET a band and an album these days, and the costs are staggering for a national rollout. Support a tour that will promote that album? EEKS!

NO ONE is stopping a band from recording in a garage studio and posting their own MP3s on the web or any social networking site. No one is even stopping them from doing that and charging for it. Prince's label didn't even stop him from giving away his last album on CD - because he paid for it, start to finish.

But the music industry does front all these costs for new bands, and even established bands. And it expects to, over the course of time, make money from that. Any band that doesn't like the terms one label offers can negotiate with another label - it IS a free market, and many musicians have started their own labels in almost all genres. And yet - still there is a cry that the terms aren't fair?

The sad fact is that music will always be a pyramid - with those at the very top earning outsized results, while everyone else struggles. That's because its one of those things that everyone has a dream of making a living at, if only they could. It has always been this way - but its only now that people have decided that they need a "cause celebre" to justify their theft of intellectual capital that so many people bemoan the status of the "musician victims".

Your average classical violinist, one good enough to perform in Carengie Hall and Lincoln Center several times per month, is lucky to make between $30k and (if in the NY Symphony) $100k per year. AFTER a lifetime of strenuous practice from age 8 or so, and MUST own an instrument that costs ~$100k+. Don't talk to me about poor pop musicians...lol.