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Re: Downloading Classical Music

Author: EEBaum
Date: 2007-08-28 21:56

srattle:

Money made on iTunes depends on who puts the music up there. Someone self-producing their music gets a nice chunk, as David says. Someone under contract to a recording company gets about the same as they get for a physical CD sale. Really, you get very roughly as much through iTunes as you do for a CD sale, whatever your situation.

Mark:

When classical musicians sell quantities comparable to pop musicans then they'll be compensated at the same level, I'll bet. A few classical albums made reasonable money for their artists (Walter/Wendy Carlos, for instance).

They're already compensated at about the same level with the big labels. From what I've heard (on the internets! among other places), most pop artists end up significantly in DEBT to the labels.

Ski:

If you enjoy music and want to listen to it, YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT.

Musicians being paid for their work, for what they're paid, how long they're paid, and how they're paid is something that has evolved over the ages. Used to be, anything over 29 years old was public domain, free for the enrichment of mankind as a whole. The copyright term was treated as an incentive... if it's free from the start, nobody's going to make music or art or literature because they'll go broke with no income. The end goal, however, was for it to be public domain, free to enrich humanity as a whole, after a period if "thank you" time to the people who made it possible.

Problem is, that time has been extended continuously, to the point now where the vast majority of all creative work is still wrapped up by someone, very rarely the original creator. The absence of new works in the public domain makes it all the more expensive to buy music, not to mention de-enriching humanity as a whole and stifling new forms of creative expression.

Somewhere over the past hundred or so years, copyright has been changed from a means of encouraging new works to be created for the good of society (essentially, "we'd like this to be free, but artists have to eat too") to a means of ensuring a century of profit for the creators or to those the creators have sold their rights to.

Why do people have no qualms whatsoever about freely xeroxing Beethoven scores, but suddenly it's taboo to copy an 80-year-old Stravinsky piece? I hardly think Stravinsky would have avoided writing Firebird because his great-grandchildren (or his publisher's great-grandchildren) wouldn't be able to partake further in the spoils. Or would you prefer that the great^15 grand-children of Hildegard von Bingen be compensated every time a student buys a music history text?

I fully endorse the concept of an artist being able to cash in on their music for exorbitant amounts of money. Once said exorbitant amounts have had an ample opportunity to appear, however, in a free society the art really should belong to the public.

-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com

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Downloading Classical Music new

Caco185

2007-08-18 00:02