Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Flea breaks my heart.

[ Update (5/18/06, 2pm): This was originally intended as a comment to a post on Fred Wilson's blog. To get a sense of context, check out the discussion here and here. By the way, I've since listened to the record in question, Stadium Arcadium, and it's awesome -- check it out if you haven't already. ]
[ Update 2: Fred responded. Also, he likes my band. =)]

I'm thinking that there are a couple of separate questions here that are getting a little muddled.


High fidelity

  1. You can get uncompressed versions of Stadium Arcadium via bittorrent.
  2. It's a mistake to assume that CDs represent the upper ceiling of audio fidelity. In fact, most music nowadays is recorded and mixed at better-than-CD quality. It's downsampled during mastering to fit CD specifications. My sound card can decode 24-bit audio; my CD player can't do better than 16-bit. So digital distribution can, and will, enable better-sounding music. It's just a question of bandwidth and storage... and we all know what's happening there.
  3. Practically speaking, all this talk of audio quality is irrelevant. The musician (and recording engineer) in me completely empathathizes with RHCP's desire for people to hear their music as they intended it to sound. But, for better or for worse, most listeners don't notice the difference, and most of the ones who do simply don't care. That's why everyone's rocking out to lo-fi mp3s through crappy earbuds.

So, like Bob Lefsetz said, Flea's fidelity argument simply doesn't hold water. The larger question is really about...

Stealing music

Here's what I'm predicting: Musicians will eventually sell their music directly to consumers. Once this day arrives, we'll find that people are far less willing to steal from a struggling independent artist than from Warner Music Group et al., and piracy will work itself out. Until then... well, look at it this way. The $20 a teenager spends on Stadium Arcadium is probably worth a lot more to him, compared to the 50 cents that RHCP sees from the transaction.

Actually, hold on, I'm not totally convinced that musicians really will sell directly to consumers. They might find that they'll have to give their music away for free to get anyone to listen. If you can't swallow that, look at what blogs are doing to print media. Look at what YouTube's doing to TV and Hollywood. Plenty of people are willing to create for the intrinsic rewards of creating... and some of them are actually good at what they do, which is bad news for people trying to sell music. We're all going to be fighting for consumers' attention, and it'll get increasingly easy for those people to ignore music that they have to pay for.

But that begs a very, very important question -- how IS anyone going to make a living as a musician? Ok, here's some food for thought... doesn't seem to be a date on this RollingStone.com article, but it sounds like it's from around '04 or '05. Here's the interesting bit:

ON THE ROAD The Peppers played the world's highest-grossing concert stand last year, earning $17 million for three shows in London's Hyde Park.
ON CD The band's 2003 Greatest Hits CD is still selling, and it earned about $3 million in publishing royalties.

I'm sure Flea's not blind to the fact that the bulk of the money in his pocket comes from the road ($17M for THREE SHOWS?!). File-sharing doesn't hurt concert attendance -- in fact, the resulting word of mouth almost certainly drives attendance.

Flea was one of my heroes growing up. And now either he's sadly misinformed about the state of the industry, or he's pulling some Lars Ulrich bullshit. Either way, he's slapping the wrists of people who love his music. And that breaks my heart.

3 comments:

Chrispy said...

Lots of good points.

This is a "quick" comment... :)

My guess is the only time this music saw digital was at the mastering stage. So it is a question of fidelity, in that the CD represents the compromise the artists (including the mastering engineer) made.

Still, the stuff on the 'net, uncmpressed or not, was stolen. This may force musicians to give their music away. But it hasn't yet, and it's still stealing. This is very clear. If there were a deeper social reason for this concientious objection (a la Rosa Parks) I'd be behind it in a second. But right now it's stealing...

Either way, if the artists want to circumvent the stealing, they can release the music in a way that keeps its value and maeks it instantly available, obviously at a lower cost than a physical CD...

..which is my next point, that CD's shouldn't be nearly as expensive as they are.

The business sense of the labels is obviously not in synch with the rest of the world, but to Flea it was simple black and white - his music was showing up as a crappy mp3 something before he released it, and he didn't like it. He didn't hold back his feelings, and it doesn't break my heart that he felt slighted and was hurt...

Tony Alva said...

Chrispy speaks for me as well. Maybe it's because I don't listen to an iPod, but what the fuck is so hard about ripping CD's? I just don't get it?

BTW, Stop using the $20 price point for a CD. It swallows your credibility. CD's of major releases haven't cost that much in more than a decade. Stadium Arcadium can be purchased for $11.96 from Amazon. A more than fair price for a two disc set.

Jackson said...

I don't get how Flea is breaking anyone's heart. He's the one who's heart has been broken. It's this attitude that bugs me, that somehow the public feels it has the right to steal content, change it, and distribute it - wtf?

Just because a major artist is calling foul, and he's right, all of a sudden the public is up in arms about it.

Lars was right as well.

It's just silly.