[nickconfer]

I hope this doesn't happen. With Google weakly policing illegal content, labels really do have a bad situation here.

They either take the deal Google has given them which is bad, or say no, and risk getting removed from YouTube and having their music uploaded by fans as lower quality streams. In other words, they take less money, or possibly lose everything while paying huge fees to send YouTube take down notices.

This is bad for the consumer in my opinion. I want indie musicians and labels to be able to make more money, not less. This further incentives musicians to look for another path of work.

Its disappointing that while technology is making it easier than ever to record and produce music, its becoming tougher and tougher to make a living off it.

[notatoad]

"This is bad for the consumer."

I don't see how that follows, except for the terrible logic of less profit for the musician is automatically bad for the consumer because people will just stop making music if they can't get rich off it. It looks like they're fighting back against exclusives and bullshit restrictions like "you can stream the first 5 songs, but if you want more you have to buy the album for $14.99", just the sort of thing everybody was complaining about two weeks ago when amazon launched their streaming service.

I understand that musicians like money. I can empathize with that, i like money too. But trying to frame it as good for the consumer is silly.

[wwweston]

> except for the terrible logic of less profit for the musician is automatically bad for the consumer because people will just stop making music if they can't get rich off it.

It's not terrible logic, it's fundamentally sound. It's just not absolute.

That is, people won't "just stop" across the board. But the harder we make it to make money from making music itself, the more time would-be music makers will have to spend finding some other way to make money to finance their life.

So you lose music at the margins, particularly music that requires a higher level of investment to produce, particularly from those who have less disposable time/money.

[namlem]

Most indie musicians can scarcely eek out a middle class lifestyle. Only a lucky few ever get rich off it.

[betterunix]

"labels really do have a bad situation here"

Are people expected to feel sympathy for these companies? Have we forgotten that people turned to big centralized services for their music as a direct result of the recording industry's aggressive effort to kill P2P? This situation was created by the labels' own actions, their failure to embrace the Internet early on before these kinds services existed.

"Its disappointing that while technology is making it easier than ever to record and produce music, its becoming tougher and tougher to make a living off it."

It did not have to be that way. We could have set things up so that when a song was downloaded, the artist and recording studio that produced it received a small payment automatically. It could have been a truly innovative revenue stream.

[crucialfelix]

> Have we forgotten that people turned to big centralized services for their music as a direct result of the recording industry's aggressive effort to kill P2P?

We are talking about small independent labels.

> This situation was created by the labels' own actions

You are talking about major labels.

[lukasm]

> Its disappointing that while technology is making it easier than ever to record and produce music, its becoming tougher and tougher to make a living off it.

That's normal. Market commoditization. The problem is musician and labels don't want to change and they are learning the hard way.

I'd be interesting to see how many people live off music in the last century.

[res0nat0r]

I don't really know what "change" they are supposed to be dealing with. Sure digital makes it easy to copy and distribute, but musicians keep making less and less and it is harder for them to actually use music as a career. Is the change you are referring to, that they basically should just deal with being broke, because it is easy to pirate? That sounds like a bad thing to me, not good.

[ulisesrmzroche]

LOL what world do you live in where music is a commodity? A market treats commodities as equal with no regard to who produced them. This has 0 to do with music, because it's all about skill, star power and charisma, so...