Anyone who has ever dealt with a major label knows that all recording/production costs are recouped by the label before the artist makes any money. Plus the record label only pay out a dollar or two per album (I had heard a few years back that Metallica was making $4 per album, but even that figure is ludicrously high). Plus retail also takes a cut (even on itunes). Plus manufacturing costs money if you're making CDs and 15% (this is standard) of these CDs are given away as promotional. So consider the fact that if one spends $50,000 on the recording and production of an album (a modest figure in a major studio), one must sell about 30,000 copies of the album just to break even on the cost of making the album. Music acts make money playing live, and don't recieve a wage during recording (unless they get an advance, which is also recouped, adding to the number of albums which must be sold to break even).

The alternative now is that I can buy the $100 computer (a p4 with 3gb ram will do great), and a $200 soundcard (an m-audio delta 1010lt). I should have been more clear earlier, but the other $700 would easily rent a nice set of drum microphones (if you're even using real drums, and even then, it's usually easier to get a good sound with triggers - ala Nirvana's Nevermind, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magic, and just about every other mainstream record you've ever heard), a good vocal mic, and any instruments you may also need (although if you're a recording musician you probably already have that stuff, major label deal or not). To be absolutely realistic, the costs of the rentals you'll need for tracking (and the old carpet you need for the walls) is probably more in the region of about $200, but I tend to err on the side of caution when I make such broad statements. So you could make an album yourself, and after you recoup the $1000 it took to make it, you start earning money on all the hard work you have done in writing and recording your music. Alternatively, you could make an album with a major label, go into the hole with them for $50,000, and start making money for the same amount of work after 30,000 albums are sold. And when you want to make a new album again, the label won't let you unless you've made money on the last. If you had done it yourself, you could not only start creating again in a couple of months, but your costs for album 2 are 30% less because you already have the computer and soundcard you used the first time

Where do I come up with this stuff? I've done it. Several times. Check out dickmacinnis.com to listen to my debut solo album, which I've already made almost $20,000 on to date. The album took about two months to write/record/produce/master, and I'll be able to continue selling it until the day I die. I'm currently working on the follow up.

DickMacInnis.com

I remember when I started programming basic on a 386. It had only the pc speaker. I had always been interested in music, so I had started programming with basic little beeps and such to play a melody I had written. At the time you needed to spend $50,000 to record a decent sounding professional album in a studio. Nowadays you can make a recording on par with the hits of the 90s (at least) on a $100 desktop with a $200 soundcard. And major record labels wonder why we're not convinced that the major pop acts are worth the money. The reason is they're not. The old days are gone, and anybody with the willingness to learn and a passion for music making can make just as good a product for a tiny fraction of the cost. One only needs to sell about a hundred albums at $10 each to break even nowadays (of course most mainstream pop artists don't have the first clue how to do any of this work, which is why they're so easily duped into a record contract).

DickMacInnis.com

IMHO, listening to these side by side, that Roland MT32 is better sounding than even the cd-quality digital audio. How about that sweet marimba lead line? DickMacInnis.com

Agreed! Besides which, ideas are certainly not the only thing being sold in multimedia content.

I'm a songwriter. You want to come to my house and listen to me play a song. Sure! But if I don't let you in, you're screwed. If I'm playing a song in my front yard and you're on the street, I can't stop you from listening. And even if you learn all the words and how to play it on the piano, I can't stop you from playing it at your house, or to your friends. Try that with a movie. Hang around with a screenwriter, watch what he types, and then convince your friends to act it out with you. Not very good? Well, maybe what you want is a professional movie. Maybe what you want is a professional sound recording. Here's the rub: even if I own a studio, professional musicians and actors don't work for free. A jam band at your family reunion? Sure! A community play? Maybe. The point is, you probably wouldn't watch Transformers (at least not for an hour and a half), if it was acted out by people from your neighborhood with cardboard outfits. And even then, do you think they'd want to do that every night?? And you probably wouldn't want to listen to Radiohead's latest album if it was played by laidoff workers from the local steel mill, and even if you did, they wouldn't do it every day, at least not for free. Even street performers pack up and go home when they don't make a single penny. And yet, people think that they have the right to consume PROFESSIONAL works, which COST MONEY TO MAKE, for free (and yes, I am one of those people). I don't disagree with piracy, but it is CERTAINLY unethical

DickMacInnis.com

I download pirated movies, music, software (to a far lesser extent since I switched to FOSS) for all of the above reasons, but as a content provider myself, I must mention that it's not as easy as we would all think to have simultaneous global distribution. Here are the problems:

1) Registration of copyrighted works. This takes a different amount of time every time you do it, never mind in every global jurisdiction. With advertising being so expensive, and/or so time consuming, we want the product to drop as soon as it's advertised, which leads me to point

2) Global advertising. If I advertise on a website most frequently visited by people in my country (Canada), there are certainly people from other countries around the globe who will see these ads. If those people want my content, and they are impatient (as I am), they will want to pirate the content in question rather than wait for it to appear in stores. This, in and of itself is not such a problem, as all content providers want to reach as wide a fan/user base as possible. Nonetheless, I would say with almost absolute certainty that if someone (myself, at least) ALREADY has a pirated copy of the content, they have even LESS motivation to buy the legal content than they originally did. In a best case scenario, a friend will come over to your house, watch the pirated movie, and want to buy it because they don't know about bittorrent.

3) Manufacturing and shipping. If I make a movie, and want to get it into theatres, no problem! Make a couple thousand copies, and send them around the world. Once they've arrived, release the movie everywhere at once and millions can be made at the box office. When it's DVD release time, however, I must make MILLIONS of copies. Now what? If I contract the work out to a single duplication service, they will take months to make that many DVDs (because they have other clients, and even major film studios with in-house duplication have more than one movie to print at a time; think about back catalogs alone). Since I've advertised the hell out of my movie, and this advertising is next to worthless six months from now, this is not an option. That's not even taking into account that shipping times would delay the release in many areas of the world. Option 2 is to contract the duplication out to regional companies (which almost everyone does). I can't set a specific release date in any area until I know when they're ready to ship, and yet even this will vary from region to region. Perhaps in China my movie is not as popular as in Canada, so the duplication house is prioritizing larger clients ahead of me, which delays release there.

There are only two ways to achieve simultaneous global release with the above problems in mind.

1) Wait until every single aspect is in place to release. This could take years. It's ludicrous. As long as I have a product ready and it's sitting in a warehouse awaiting release, I'm losing massive amounts of money.

2) Forget about physical media. I'm sure we'll get there someday (probably soon), but for now, even with piracy, physical media is still making money, and I can guarantee that stopping all production will not increase digital sales, It will just prevent people who don't know how to download (legally or illegally) from buying my product.

Now, all this aside, I completely agree, as a consumer, with every point in favour of piracy. As content providers, we need to have BOTH simultaneous global DIGITAL release, AND the standard, staggered physical release. Meeting the needs of ALL possible customers only makes business sense.

DickMacInnis.com

easy solution:

1) I film something with these cameras, convert the footage to an open codec, and release the copies under a creative commons attribution license. I keep this footage on my personal computer behind a firewall in a folder with a copy of the license previously mentioned.

2) When I decide to make a commercial movie (which could be years, days, or even seconds later), I license this raw footage from myself under the terms of the creative commons license (if I really want to get complex, my wife licenses it from me and subsequently I from her).

3) I make a movie using footage I obtained under an attribution license which has no commercial or share-alike restrictions. In the credits of the movie, I clearly state who filmed the footage I used, and under what license I obtained it.

4) Profit!!!

5) The MPEG-LA sues me because I made a movie with their codec. I explain to them that this was not the case, as the movie I made contained no footage using their codec.

6) the MPEG-LA sues me because I released footage I had recorded without their consent to the filmmaker in question (me). I explain that the footage was converted away from their codec and subsequently licenced to the filmmaker for free, which adheres to the license I obtained when I bought the camera. No violation.

All this is not even taking into account that I may have rented said camera, or bought it second-hand, in which case I had no dealings whatsoever with, and hence could not have entered into a contract with the MPEG-LA.

Bear in mind that even if everything above was untrue, buying a camera only to read the manual is not a binding contract. What's to say I even read the darned thing? I rarely read manuals, and even if I did, nothing prevented me from using the camera before I had agreed to the terms of said license (as in the case of software which cannot be installed without agreeing to an EULA).

I may sell you a coat with a note in the inside pocket stating that you may not wear this coat on Tuesdays, but good luck getting that through any court of law in the world should I decide to sue, even in the US, and even with millions of dollars to spend on lawyers.

Should anyone actually be sued concerning such a ridiculous license, they should take their appeals to the highest court in the land, where a judgement in the defendant's favour will forever set the precedent for case law of such a ludicrous nature.

this entire license is nothing more than FUD, although I can see why it can be included, as the camera manufaturer's HAVE entered into an agreement with the MPEG-LA to include this license, and their contract is binding, no matter how insane it may be

Ok, as someone who used Cubase as my first foray into recording, I can understand your confusion. However, things on linux work much more like real hardware, so to anyone besides you and me, who has used a tape machine or hdr, with a console, outboard effects, and a patchbay, the Ardour approach is much more sensible. Much like the way a beginner guitarist will want an all-in-one amplifier with effects, reverb, and several channels, whereas a seasoned pro used stompboxes, rackmounted processing and a dedicated power amplifier, this is the difference between a studio suite like Cubase and a dedicated editor/mixer/recorder like Ardour. Check out the plugins available at linuxdsp.co.uk or google search for the invada plugins if you need something with a fancy gui. Otherwise, the plugins included with ubuntustudio-audio-plugins in your standard repos are sure to have all the functionality you need (although they're not necessarily user-friendly, as a trade off though, the ladspa effects are generally quite system-resouce light, so you can use more than in a Cubase VST type setup). As for your issues with hydrogen, I don't really understand. When you use a piece of software like fruity loops or reason (i've never programmed drums in cubase), you must use a loop that's four beats long. To make a 3/4 beat in hydrogen, just change the pattern length to 12. The reason this is way more useful is in the case that you're making a song with one patter at 3/4, another at 4/4. and so on. Sure, it's a little bit harder to wrap your head around if you're only using one type of beat for a song, and you only use either 4/4 or 3/4 for any song you do, but for anyone looking to get truly creative (hence, anyone with moderate to advanced musical training), the complexity you can achieve with such a system is absolutely necessary.

I've been using Ardour professionally for the last five years. Check out my latest album at dickmacinnis.com. Works better than any other DAW I've used (including cubase/nuendo, protools, cakewalk, etc....). I've only recently started using hydrogen, but the fact that it can be hooked up via jack to any midi sequencer is super great, and even programming within the editor itself is totally awesome. I used to use fruity loops and reason back when I was a windows guy. The unlimited routability of jack applications is not only terribly handy, it's how software should behave (that's how hardware works: you can plug a hard-disk recorder into a separate guitar amplifier). And believe me, I am definitely a professional musician: I have been solely self-employed (making live appearance and merchandise profits) for the last 3 years. All the while using open source software for everything from recording, to graphic and web design, to video production.

I use lastpass. They have online sync plugins for firefox, chrome, ie, and safari, as well as a downloadable tool similar to keepassx. All you have to do is remember this one password, and it keeps track of all the others. very handy. Plus, if you do use the online sync tool (i.e. if you're not afraid of having your passwords on some other company's machine), you can always log in at their site to retrieve passwords if you're on a computer that can't download the plugin.

I agree that people in marketing are not tech-savvy (on the average anyway). I agree that some people would never care that Linux is used in the machine, and that some (though probably very few) would even be scared away by the fact that linux is the basis of the machine. What strikes me as glaringly obvious though, is that anybody who cares whether or not their radio runs on Linux can already find out that this particular one does just that (look at the coverage it's been given here), and anyone who doesn't know, doesn't care or would shy away from the product because of it probably doesn't read things like slashdot, and would never know the difference. To me, this a perfect example of marketing genius.

I appreciate your suggestion, and in fact I've heard that before from at least one other person (my lead guitar player). However, most of the people who come to my shows find out about them from facebook events, myspace updates, or tweets as opposed to checking out the events section of my website. Having the links on my home page just makes this all easier for the average person. Also, I've sold a few songs and even a couple albums on the various internet distribution sites you'll see on my banner ad (most sales are at the concerts), but I have yet to sell a single CD from my own online store. While I agree that one stop shopping looks more professional, at an entry-level people are far more likely to recieve news and purchase from sites they already use and trust. Were I to rely on people checking dickmacinnis.com every day to see if new events have been posted, or even have a mailing list, I can tell you from experience with other band that I've been in that far fewer people would be aware of what's going on. As always though, criticism is appreciated! Thanks for checking it out. Dick