Gar, we weren't talking about Prince. We were talking about a blog entry by someone name Sean Keenan, BlancoMusic. Keenan wasn't talking about arresting 17 year olds for downloading music. Prince wasnt' advocating that. You are arguing about something no one was ever asserting! Prince made news because 1. he's decided his album will be released in CD format only in the Mirror - a newspaper (which is why, in part, he said the internet was dead.) 2. He made a controversial, viral marketing comment about the Internet being dead (e.g., the same way MTV is dead. it was once hip, but no more).
What Keenan didn't say is that Prince does have a history of going after Youtube and eBay for profiting from his music. As far as I know, he doestn' care about 17 year olds downloading music, he cares about people who make a profit off his music and who make merchandise profiting off his "brand." Youtube does it by letting people upload pirated music and videos, then sells advertising and demographic and other data about it's users. eBay does it by allowing people to sell merchandise billed as offical Prince (tm) merch. WTF!
The evil audacity of the guy who goes after 17 year oldS who make Prince (tm) Alarm Clocks and tube socks! </sarcasm>
Not surprisingly, when you pulled all this crap about copyright and prosecuting 17 year old, I thought you were attributing these things to doug. But you are now attributing them to Prince. Except, as far as I can tell (being no Prince expert) that's not what is up to either!
Keenan goes on to point out that Prince is saying fuck the internet because of his past experience with bootlegging: "His biggest-selling hit came off a record that only ever got released on bootleg! What does this man want with a social network buzz! Get real, that's for desperate little girls with stage-school mockney accents and rich dads."
Sorry to get all shagaliciously outraged, or whatever it was that sean described one, but honestly, did anyone read what the guy wrote? I know Matt and Mike did, based on what they wrote, but I'm thinking most people didn't read the entire piece: http://blancomusic.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/why-prince-is-right/
He's talking about people who tell him to put his music online, so that he can make money in a more circuitous way. This isn't about people advocating some path to socialism; they are simply arguing about a new production, distribution, and marketing model within a capitalist system. The idea is that you can outwit the bad old ways of capitalist music production with the good new improved ways of capitalist music production. Everybody put everything online, for free or sign contracts with Apple iTunes, so that you can make money through concert tours, tee shirts, and the like. (There was a recent harper's article about how this is being taught to MBA's, using the Grateful Dead as the exemplar of this approach!)
for christ sake.
what is prince right about, according to Keenan?
1. That it takes a huge effort, on the part of the musician, to actually pull this social media crap off. You have to tweet, blog, myspace, facebook, have a website, upload music, respond to people, get in conversations with people, endlessly promote yourself.
2. Prince figures that it's simply not worth the ROI. The Gratful Dead model is to say, fuck yeah, do whatever you want with the music and then count on some people to buy it - people like me who, back then, wouldn't have ahd a clue how to get my hands on bootlegs. Today, the argument goes that 80% of folks with pirate the music, and you'll get money from the 20% who use Apple and buy your music.
3. he also argued about the claim that all of this "democratizes" music. He says bullshit to that. I think that's correct, because of one point: democratization just produces so much music that, in the end, it turns out to produce it's own mechanisms of inequlity. In order to stand out, you have to have more resources such as time, the money to hire profiessionals to market you, the knowledge to know how to use and manage social media. (In the social media business, they already have a term for the problme: the social media firehose -- because you get innundated with so much information, it's like a firehose int he face and it's overwhelming for both producers and consumers of social media)
I disagree with him about a bunch of other romanticizing bullshit such as the distinction between some kinds of selling and others, and between
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