Piracy??
My arse.. He's just finally realised his vocal talent is non existant..
Fans of the artist Beck must wait until December for his new album - and if they want to hear it, they can play it themselves. As you may have heard, Beck has said he'll issue his next album Song Reader as sheet music, rather than as a performed and produced sound recording. "The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d …
And I am not saying piracy is good in any way. I am just saying most of the artists I love didn't do it for the money and in many ways loathe the corrupt western money whore aspect of our culture in general. I like the Grateful Dead biz model (lol not that they considered it that way) of letting people freely share your music including recording concerts and making your money on the tours. Of course not everyone can do that.
Then instantly get take down notices by his label and/or riaa*. It'd also be fun getting sued for infringing some copyright somewhere. It's genius!!
Having said that, this could be the push I needed to dust off the old guitar and finish learning it... again. :)
* I am sort of joking, guessing it's actually free to perform the song yourself on youtube, but not to redistribute the sheet music or lyrics right?
photocopier? that so 80s dude! someone will scan these in and then they'll be up on the interwebs and you'll be able to download it via torrent just like it was a normal audio release. 'cept the filesize of the rar's will be smaller so it'll download much faster.
All that's needed is some kind of OCR that can convert scanned sheet music into a midi file...
It's certainly a rather more creative publicity stunt than the sort of crap the PR/Advertising pond life usually come up with.
However this is really going to bite him on the arse if he waits too long to release his own recording. People will be comparing the work of some really talented amateurs with his usual mediocre efforts.
Can someone explain to why Beck releasing a sheet music album has anything whatsoever to do with piracy?
It almost looks to like the article is trying to conflate an artistic experiment (a logical extension of the whole lo-fi ethos) with a totally unrelated piracy arguament in order to support an unpopular opinion.
I could be wrong, and Beck has sucked for a long time anyway.
I too like the idea. Pay the performers or perform it yourself.
And the bonus is that if he can't sing you can end up with his songs well sung in a way that doesn't hide the songwriter, which is one of the fundamental problems with the music business that leads to a mix of ephemeral singers and singer-songwriters who can't sing well.
"I always wondered how did they manage to achieve fame without an industry association."
Fans, basically.
J.S. Bach (I assume you mean) wrote his stuff before cheap music printing became available, so most of it was unknown until Mendelssohn revived some of it in the middle of the 19th century. We don't know how many pages of manuscript have been used to light fires or wrap sausages over the years...
Clementi's licencing payments to one L. van Beethoven helped the impoverished Viennese composer continue to write music, in the face of intense piracy at home! Clementi was a founder of the Philharmonic Society of London, which went on to commission a little ditty by L. van (sometimes referred to as L's 9th).
PS: Has anyone else noticed that independent CD shops are in sharp decline, but that musical instrument shops seem to be doing fine,
Think about it - whatever you may think of his performances, he is offering his compositions for you to perform yourself (and performing music offers you a much richer experience than simply plugging in ear pods) in a day and age when humming something is seen as infringing somebody's intellectual property rights.
While musicians (and the likes of that Bieber girl, who perhaps can't be considered "musicians") make their wares as their job and for their income, our access to popular music has become instantaneous, but our ability to do stuff with it has gotten further and further away - like the thing about having a radio on at work (why should somebody pay a licence for that? didn't the radio station pay a licence for the broadcast? what's the difference between a dozen personal radios and one stood beside the photocopier?). So now we have something we can examine, interpret, perform, and hopefully enjoy.
Well done.
Upvoted, solely because I hate the PRS bollocks we have to put up with.
We're forced to pay for a fucking PRS licence in our waiting rooms (this is a hospital; there's little leniency) just so we can put BBC News on for patients. However, because we ONLY pay for these areas, this makes it illegal for me to put my (paid for!) Spotify account on in our office of two. I'm paying royalties every fucking month, but this is somehow irrelevant?
Beck? No opinion.
It's a neat thing to do BUT what makes a song is the author's performance... especially with modern music anyway. Not just obvious things like the tone of their voice, but how they set up the effects on electric guitars. Every artist has a distinctive sound - even from a few bars without singing you can normally tell who the artist is.
Way to go before they invented those new fangled wax cylinders. Interesting that musicians then thought being recorded for posterity as a compliment, rather than a source of income. The latter of course came from live performances and sales of sheet music. As to the publisher quote: ...
makes a radical statement about the value and importance of performed and recorded music at a time when these very things are under threat
exclusive rights by musicians to sell tickets to performances are not threatened, and trying to prevent fans who buy tickets from bootlegging live performance recordings isn't ever likely to be effective, but recording contract terms imposed in the interests of publishers obliging musicians to tour at subsidised ticket prices in order to promote studio recordings, (instead of for ticket sale revenue), are increasingly unlikely to be signed by musicians who know which side their bread is buttered.
Whilst I'm here, tours are subsidised by album sales because they're ridiculously expensive to organise, most people don't want to pay £150 per ticket for a single gig. That's why they're used as a promotional tool for album sales and merchandise (where an artist actually can make money).
He releases sheet music, encouraging everyone to play his songs, instead of lawsuits left right and center for humming his tunes in the shower, and you twist it around into an attack on pirates? Yer doin a heckuva job there!!
Here is Beck's experience with the "music industry":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutations_%28Beck_album%29#Release
All you haters take a puff on this talent cannon:
I'm guessing there'll be some sort of Purchase agreement stamped onto the sheet-music-cover?
"By purchasing this, you agree that Beck Inc. will get 80% of any revenue you may generate using this sheet music in any way"
Or will that be inside the box - meaning that loads of people will get home, copy the sheet music for themselves, then return it to the store saying "I don't accept this agreement that was covertly placed in this product. I demand that you take it back"
If no such agreement is anywhere on the product, are we then free to assume that once bought, you are free to do with the product as you see fit - I.E make tons of money off of it, without paying anything to Beck?
So many questions I want answers to, and I only know one Beck song.
As for more tangible matters:
Beck fans will be either learning to play the songs themselves (unlikely), or wait for someone else to upload to youtube.
Non-Beck fans will be shuffling along as before.
"If no such agreement is anywhere on the product, are we then free to assume that once bought, you are free to do with the product as you see fit - I.E make tons of money off of it, without paying anything to Beck?"
The way I understand copyright law, rights are withheld by default. That is if they aren't explicitly granted to you, you don't have them. Long story short: if there isn't any agreement on or in the box, you don't have any rights to what you bought (except to the physical support, which isn't under copyright, and you can use that any way you like, like, say, as a paperweight or a doorstop). It's not public domain unless the author says so.
Challenge to "****tards"? How is this not also a challenge to his cash-paying fans? In fact, it's a BIGGER challenge to them, because they're the ones who actually paid for his music in the first place. Downloaders are the people that get it because it's there, not because they care.
"Fans of the artist Beck must wait until December for his new album" is incorrect right out the gate as well, because he's not releasing an album at all. He's merely turned into another songwriter, making his sheet music available.
For fans of his performance, it's an utter non-event.
I haven't checked what conditions are attached, and of course he can attach what conditions he likes to his songs, but I imagine If other folks sell recordings of his songs they keep the performance royalties and pay Mr Beck the song writing royalties just like any other cover version.
Not particularly aiming at you, but the level of ignorance on the posts here is pretty breathtaking.