Comment by jMyles
3 months ago
I'm a full-time professional musician, and I don't know anybody (at least in bluegrass) who thinks that the system of IP is designed to protect us, or is in fact serving us in economic terms. It seems much more geared to protect spotify and apple than it does the musicians.
Last year, I cut Drowsy Maggie with David Grier (something about which I boast every chance I get :-) ), and part of our journey was listening to aging, nearly-forgotten versions to find melodic and harmonic ideas to harvest and revive. For this, we of course made heavy use of archive.org's Great 78 project - and at the very same time, the RIAA (who is supposed to represent us?!) was waging aggressive lawfare against the Great 78 project, to try to take it down.
It was just the height of absurdity.
Consider that since at least 2020, every grammy winner in both the bluegrass and americana categories (and almost no nominee) has been released DRM-free. And that many of the up-and-coming bluegrass and jam bands are now releasing all of their shows, directly off the board, licensed with creative commons-compatible licenses.
I don't understand this opinion.
The only leverage you have to stop Spotify from taking your music and publishing it without your permission is your copyright of the music.
In fact, every time I see a complaint about copyright it's always "we tried to do something at small scale for some noble purpose and couldn't because of pesky copyright laws," and it completely ignores the massive scale of abuse for profit purpose that would occur if copyright didn't exist.
Think of how AI scraped everyone's books without permission using the flimsy excuse that it's transformative work, except they wouldn't even need that excuse or the transformation. Amazon could just take everyone's books and sell it on Kindle, then kick out all authors because they only need to buy 1 book to resell it as if they were the owner of the book.
> The only leverage you have to stop Spotify from taking your music and publishing it without your permission is your copyright of the music.
There are a lot of challenges facing a band, including the frustrations of CDBaby and Distrokid. If you told me my music would just magically appear on Spotify without my having to lift a finger (and without having to implicitly endorse them by putting it there), that'd be a huge relief.
> it completely ignores the massive scale of abuse for profit purpose that would occur if copyright didn't exist.
"abuse"? If you can somehow make money by playing music that I've made, nothing will make me prouder. And whatever you're doing that's generating that profit, it will almost certainly increase the likelihood that I can plan a series of shows around it, which will in turn generate income for me. Who exactly is losing here? Where is the "abuse"?
> Think of how AI scraped everyone's books without permission using the flimsy excuse that it's transformative work, except they wouldn't even need that excuse or the transformation.
I'm already sold, you don't have to keep making it sound sweeter and sweeter.
I find your arguments hard to relate to, given that I buy CDs/on Bandcamp because I want to pay musicians. I usually can't afford concerts, so I won't be there as a channel for merch. If you release all your work under permissive licenses, how do you expect to be supported?
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I assume that this means you simply make all your work public domain, as you don't believe in copyright?
I don't believe that most creators would willingly let go of their right as you would.
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