So, am I right in assuming that you have never given or received a cassette or cd copy of an album that you do not own the rights to? I'd really like to know. I find it interesting that most anti "piracy" people had no problem with making and receiving cassette copies of albums. I've heard it said by these crusaders that file sharing is wrong because it's so easy. Easier than making cassettes I suppose. That doesn't make sense to me.
If it's wrong to share files, it should be wrong to make cassettes or burn cd's right? I know some who readily accept burned cd's from me, but rail against file sharing. Do you have any opinions on these issues?
Another thing. The RIAA has implied that it is illegal to let friends borrow cd's. Do you agree with that stance?

Yet another thing. The brand of music that is represented here has rarely sold very much. Do you really believe that by getting rid of "piracy" people will suddenly start buying obscure "progressive" music that they probably wouldn't have bought in the first place? I've NEVER seen one of your labels bands in a record store. Maybe you need better distribution.
 

Wolfgang, no, I never got tapes or CDR's from other people instead of buying something. What me and my friends would do is get together and have listening parties, everyone would bring one or two albums and we'd sit around listening to it and talking about it and if we liked it, we'd go get our own copies. We'd have themes to the get togethers, it might be comedy, or hard rock or whatever.

Burning a CDR or making a cassette is soooo different than ripping and posting a perfect copy that millions of people can download. With cassettes, you have tape degradation and the expense of the cassette, so there was a real limit to the damage you could do, CDR's allow you to do more damage, but you're still limited by the physical media and distribution.

I think the RIAA is stupid and useless, there are much more effective ways to deal with piracy, they have fucked it up every step of the way.

Yes, piracy is killing prog even more than mainstream music, we see it happen with every release. When I see 50,000 downloads from various sites of one of my albums and I've sold 2,000 copies, I certainly know that downloads are hurting sales. There are many up to date studies and basically the amount of people who actually buy after stealing the music by download is from 2%-5%.

Why do you people always through out pointless comments like "I never see your stuff in stores...." - so you know all 100+ releases that I have out, and you've gone to a bunch of stores and tried to find them all? Our distribution is through one of the biggest companies in the US and in Europe, we are very well distributed, and since we've been removing pirate copies we've seen our sales increase.

I already responded to PBK's duplicate post on the other blog thread, so I won't bother here.
 

Is Shawn Gordon killing music? Not exactly, but the debate stirring around his efforts is very interesting in the current context. Recorded music and the by-products of that process, i.e. the mass-production of fetish objects to be purchased, owned and coveted, have only existed since the 20th century. Any study of the history of 20th century music reveals how easily musicians were exploited(ripped off) by shyster corporations and their greed for profits. If an album didn't meet commercial expectations the artist was dropped, no matter how interesting and innovative their music was. Many musicians were forced to meet corporate expectations by recording songs(aping the hit music of the day) that supposedly had hit single potential. If a musician, or band, were too uncompromising about their music, their album might not be released at all! I was a dj at an AOR radio station in the late 70's and, although we had quite a bit more freedom then than now, the playlist was still a revolving card file of the same 300 albums or so(if that). The radio stations, then as now, were totally in cahoots with the record companies for sake of promotion and profit.

Just start going around to all the music blogs to see the obscurities that we never even knew existed because the music didn't earn enough profit to warrant promotion or reissue of these albums. There's a fuck of a lot of richness out there that FM radio never turned us on to. Where can ANY of this music be heard today?? Most of it is out-of-print, unavailable, never reissued, forgotten about, buried. It is the blogs that are keeping it alive. But digging up the grave of any corpse has it's unseemly side now doesn't it? So, it's time for the squeamish bloggers to speak up and give an account as to WHY they are doing what they do...

To me the whole promotional canonization of the rock idol gods, you know, the ones we keep hearing about decade after decade, the Beatles, Hendrix, Zeppelin, Stones, etc, is just a means of franchising and re-franchising their output for profit over and over and over again. The sooner this system dies the better. When I read about the major record companies and their loss of profits from illegal downloading I laugh. Over the years I've spent way more money than a person ought to on my music hobby! But people are curious, they want to HEAR music they haven't heard before, they want to follow their whims in exploring this music, they want to move between the correlations from within the music they are listening to. But the corporate powers-that-be keep trying to tie us to the fetishistic object (lp > reel-to-reel > 8 track > cassette > dat > cd > mp3 > ? > ? >)- which they then make obsolete every ten years so they can market a new format with a more modern profile. The old "new and improved" shtick used to work, but it's sheen is worn out now. They've been charging us over and over again for the same damned thing and people are sick and tired of it!

Why do musicians create their art? Do they want their music to be heard? Is music a means of communication? Or is this communication only available to the few who can afford to buy it? If so, in my opinion, that is elitism to the Nth degree! Making music, at the very heart of it, is a process quite different and independent of the commodification of the music after the fact.

Here are some important links in considering the dilemma of music bloggers posting unavailable and unheard music for the illumination of others:

David Byrne's Survival Strategies For Emerging Artists: http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_byrne

Bob Ostertag Makes His Music Available For Free: http://www.bobostertag.com/index.php?subaction=showcomments&id=1143308280&archive=&start_from=&ucat=3&

The Professional Suicide of a Recording Musician by Bob Ostertag:
http://www.alternet.org/story/50416/

Here's what Shawn Gordon thinks:

Prog Against Pirates Blog: http://progagainstpirates.blogspot.com/

Prog Against Pirates MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/progagainstpirates