Why not simply PayPal the artist HALF of that money and download their music from TPB (or wherever) for free? That approach rewards the artist MANY TIMES MORE than the brain-dead system you are supporting.
See where I'm getting at?
I'm not saying that artists can or should directly interact with fans (there are many artists who simply can't), but the middleman environment changes significantly when the distribution of plastic discs is eliminated from the process.
Are you trying to indicate that the companies whose primary purpose is the distribution and sales of CDs are not powerful?
Ah. But in order to be a fan in the first place, you have to know the band exists.
You've just set yourself up for a Catch-22 argument.
But there are a couple of things you need to take into account:
Success for most artists means being able to "earn a living" doing their art. It does not (necessarily) mean multiple houses on 4 different continents. When you think of a band becoming successful, don't think of bands that Big Media push...that's a formula that most artists, even "commercial artists", fail (possibly after 15 minutes of "success").
Fans are freely allowed to share the music of any artist who allows it and can do so without the fear of retribution.
Then you haven't been paying attention. There are tons of stories of people having posts pulled, accounts disabled/deleted, etc. because of perceived copyright issues.
Many ISPs and platform providers would rather work against their own customers than face the possibility of working against RIAA lawyers. They won't take the time to determine who the real copyright holders are, much less expensive (and immediate) to just cut the account.
One thing that is hard to come around is the fact that the music biz is profit driven. If there really was a vivid indipendent scene that was growing up by the means of filesharing, we would have seen attempts to control it a long time ago.
Sorry, but I believe your interpretation of events is myopic.
There have been attempts to make a vivid (and profitable) scene driven by file sharing. However, there are very powerful business (and political) forces that essentially get squeezed out of the scene once the artist is directly doing business with fans. They are the inefficiencies in the existing music models, and therefore they cannot allow "the new model" to take hold.
Reality is this: digital music costs NOTHING to copy and distribute. Therefore the price of a digital copy will eventually be zero. Laws and technology is being thrown at the situation trying to keep the genie in the bottle. But consumers now understand the cost of the goods they are buying.
So the music industry needs to find ways to leverage the benefits of FREE advertising being done by their fans who share music with their friends. Take that savings (the $$ artists would otherwise have to spend on advertising) and capitalize on it.
Opportunity is there. Someone is going to eventually seize it.
So yes, the current activity is not conducive to indie labels specifically because the recording industry makes it clear that "P2P is piracy". People don't share music links in blogs/myspace/facebook/etc... because "it is wrong". Some copyright holders find themselves getting into trouble by sharing their content (e.g. YouTube taking down stuff that an artist themself put up).
The power of P2P is not in having "pirates" share music. It is allowing fans to freely share and promote artists. This is not something that can be done today without fear of retribution from an industry that doesn't care about facts or truths.
I actually take very few exceptions to what Tim has to say in that video. I believe he is bang on w.r.t. multi-core, REST, (lack of) RIA, the strength of HTTP and the lack of evidence supporting a need for push-based applications (i.e. the argument that poll-based doesn't scale is completely invalidated by the fact that it does as RSS, twitter, email and a host of other very large scale apps are poll-based).
In the past 2 years, I have spent 3490 hours on the "business at hand" [...], 10 hours on infrastructure (setup and maintenance of trac, svn, backups, VPN)
This is very much not inline with my experiences. In most organizations I've been with, the "build master" is a FTE. The "server guy" is a FTE who maintains dev and QA machines (though may also maintain a few other corporate servers). The docs team spends a whack of time maintaining the documentation system. The bug tracking system is a load of garbage because no one is willing to spend time on maintaining it...so emails and/or spreadsheets and/or poorly implemented OSS tracking systems are used thus wasting time and resources because it cannot support a proper SDLC.
All of this is wasted resources. For the majority of companies, these should be commodity systems and thus could be outsourced to someone else to maintain.
Choice of outsourcing should be based on reducing resource cost on the development team, not on reducing the price. Development resources are worth WAY MORE than their hourly wages.
I would never ever switch to a remote {webhosting|email|CRM|ERP|backup|datacenter|...}
Many, many times in history we've seen this initial gut reaction to the idea of "remote data". And many, many organizations are recognizing the business benefit of no longer hosting/maintaining their own infrastructure.
Focus on the business at hand (e.g. coding) and quit wasting time on infrastructure (version control, defect tracking, build systems, backup & recovery, server sizing, etc...).
I don't currently foresee our organization moving to remote IDE, but if we decided to cut costs on non-core areas, outsourcing IT infrastructure would certainly be one option (we've already outsourced a portion of it).
Remember, UNIX spelled backwards is XINU. -- Mt.
