[advocacy] Trading of 'pirated' music online is wider than ever (my quotes)

[Bacchus 13]

Well…  I didn’t know that it was a lie although I regard myself as a
person who is quite suspicious of mass media especially in political
and military contexts.  However, I did not have any CDR for audio recording,
neither.  Simply, I could not understand how to draw the line.  Yes,
indeed, I have got thousands of MP3 and I have plenty of them on normal
CDR.  However, I cannot understand the reason why I have to use CDR for
audio recording wile I can have the same contents on my hard disks.
All of my MP3 collection is from my own CDs, which are obtained legally.
I simply back them up as well as I do the same on any other files on
my computer.  If I were convinced that all the data on my hard disks
cannot be lost, I would not need to back them up at all.  ;-) Therefore,
my reason for using CDRs is completely technical.  Then, why should I
pay record industry doubled or tripled costs beside my original payment
to the CDs?  Where is the justification of this stupidity?

This is, I think, quite typical of the ‘globalisation’ tendency in which
authorised agents try to exploit the ends of economic chain, that is,
the producers and the consumers.  These authorised agents justify themselves
by saying that they are doing this in order to avoid the global economic
slowdown.  However, their monopolistic nature does not seem to be concealable.
While those marketing ‘professionals’ spend ridiculous amount of money
defending their own profits, there is the increasing number of people
who are excluded from the economic system all around the world.  Probably
one way to solve this problem is to prevent these ‘specialist’ from intervening.
I believe that Ogg project tries to connect the technical specialists,
artists and music fan without the intervention of monopolistic enterprises.

However, what about the reality?  In this list, I can see that programmers,
audio compression fans and journalists.  …Wait.  Where are artists and
music fans, the producers and the consumers in media content industry?
There is programmer-compression audio fan nexus establishing but I cannot
see artist-music fan nexus here.

The problem is that they seem to be quite happy with the present situation.
If record industry spends a lot of money on promoting an artist, although
music fans are bound to pay for the costs, they seem to be happy with
having someone whom they can worship.  Music industry, if they are convinced
that an artist cannot worth the promotion costs, simply, throws him or
her out and seeks new ‘talent.’  Long lived-artists who survived this
murky water of music industry tend to have cunningness:

Madonna obviously is a talented business woman.  Bon Jovi has a good
manager, who is also his brother.  In David Bowie’s case, he is a bit
complex but he took advantage of his unique parody of the image of rock
stars (He was even accused by gay groups of pretending to be gay!).
U2 mixed the political conflict with their music to get their ‘worshippers.’
I do not mean that they are not talented as artists but some artists
know how to impose their talents into consumerist culture.  For the most
of consumers, to point out the technical and political advantage of a
format is, simply, ‘not cool.’  If consumers are not interested in, how
musicians are supposed to be interested in the project?  A simple problem…a
serious artist and his or her fans are not the part of consumer-centred
music industry nowadays.  Then, again, there is a paradox with the definition
of the word ‘serious’:  How can serious artist make arts that are not
related with the reality of our society?  Sorry for the typical ‘Campbell
soup and Andy Worhall’ argument.

By the way, talking about Andy Worhall, didn’t Bowie once play as him
in a movie?  Bowie might be eccentric (or cynical) enough to join the
club.  ;-)

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