smoe.org mailing lists
ivan@stellysee.de
| From | Jason Damas <jason.damas@gmail.com> |
| Subject | Damien Kulash (of OK GO)'s New York Times Editorial |
| Date | Sat, 10 Dec 2005 18:11:51 -0500 |
[Part 1 text/plain ISO-8859-1 (4.6 kilobytes)]
(View Text in a separate window)
From the New York Times, sometime this week. I also feel the need to
note that OK Go's "Oh No" WILL be in my top ten list, and quite near (if
not at) #1. --J
Buy, play, trade, repeat
*Damian Kulash Jr.*
<http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=Damian%20Kulash%20Jr.&sort=swishrank>
The New York Times
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2005
*LOS ANGELES*
<http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=LOS%20ANGELES&sort=swishrank>
The record company Sony BMG recently got into trouble after attempting
to stem music piracy by encoding its CDs with software meant to limit
how many copies of the discs can be made. It turned out that the
copy-protection software exposed consumers' computers to Internet
viruses, forcing Sony BMG to recall the CDs.
This technological disaster aside, though, Sony BMG and the other major
labels need to face reality: Copy-protection software is bad for
everyone, consumers, musicians and labels alike. It's much better to
have copies of albums on lots of iPods, even if only half of them have
been paid for, than to have a few CDs sitting on a shelf and not being
played.
The Sony BMG debacle revealed the privacy issues and security risks tied
to the spyware that many copy-protection programs install on users'
computers. But even if these problems were solved, copy protection would
be guaranteed to fail, because it's a house of cards. No matter how
sophisticated the software, it takes only one person to break it, once,
and then the music is free to roam and multiply on the peer-to-peer
file-trading networks.
Meanwhile music lovers get pushed away. Tech-savvy fans won't go to the
trouble of buying a strings-attached record when they can get a better
version free. Less Net-knowledgeable fans, ones who don't know the
simple tricks to get around the copy-protection software or don't use
peer-to-peer networks, are punished by discs that often won't load onto
their MP3 players - the copy-protection programs are incompatible with
Apple's iPods, for example - and sometimes won't even play in their
computers.
Conscientious fans, who buy music legally because it's the right thing
to do, simply get insulted. They've made the choice not to steal their
music, and the labels thank them by giving them an inferior product
hampered by software that's at best a nuisance. As for musicians, we are
left to wonder how many more people might be listening to our music if
it weren't such a hassle, and how many more iPods might have our albums
on them if our labels hadn't sabotaged our releases with cumbersome
software.
The truth is that the more a record gets listened to, the more
successful it is. This is not our megalomania, it's Marketing 101: The
more times a song gets played, the more of a chance it has to catch the
ear of someone new. It doesn't do us much good if people buy our records
and promptly shelve them. We need people to fall in love with our songs
and listen to them over and over. A record that you can't transfer to
your iPod is a record that you're less likely to listen to, less likely
to get obsessed with and less likely to tell your friends about.
Luckily my band's recently released album, "Oh No," escaped copy
control, but only narrowly. When our album came out, our label's parent
company, EMI, was testing protective software and thought that we were a
good candidate for it. Record executives reasoned that, because we
appeal to college students who have the high-bandwidth connections
necessary for accessing peer-to-peer networks, we're the kind of band
that gets traded instead of bought.
That may be true, but we are also the sort of band that hasn't yet
gotten the full attention of MTV and major commercial radio stations, so
those college students are our only window onto the world. They are our
best chance for success, and we desperately need them to be listening to
us, talking about us, coming to our shows and, yes, trading us.
To be clear, I certainly don't encourage people to pirate our music. I
have poured my life into my band and, after two major-label records, our
accountants can tell you that we're not real rock stars yet. But before
a million people can buy our record, a million people have to hear our
music and like it enough to go looking for it. That won't happen without
lots of people playing us for their friends, which in turn won't happen
without a fair amount of file sharing.
As it happened, for a variety of reasons, our label didn't put
copy-protection software on our album. What a shame, though, that so
many bands aren't as fortunate.
/(Damian Kulash Jr. is the lead singer for the Los Angeles-based band OK
Go.)/
For assistance, please contact
the smoe.org administrators.