“I reject the term “piracy.” It’s people listening to music and sharing it with other people, and it’s good for musicians because it widens the audience for music. The record industry doesn’t like trading music because they see it as lost sales, but that’s nonsense. Sales have declined because physical discs are no longer the distribution medium for mass-appeal pop music, and expecting people to treat files as physical objects to be inventoried and bought individually is absurd.
The downtrend in sales has hurt the recording business, obviously, but not us specifically because we never relied on the mainstream record industry for our clientele. Bands are always going to want to record themselves, and there will always be a market among serious music fans for well-made record albums. I’ll point to the success of the Chicago label Numero Group as an example.
There won’t ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that’s fine with me because that industry didn’t operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.
Free distribution of music has created a huge growth in the audience for live music performance, where most bands spend most of their time and energy anyway. Ticket prices have risen to the point that even club-level touring bands can earn a middle-class income if they keep their shit together, and every band now has access to a world-wide audience at no cost of acquisition. That’s fantastic.
Additionally, places poorly-served by the old-school record business (small or isolate towns, third-world and non-english-speaking countries) now have access to everything instead of a small sampling of music controlled by a hidebound local industry. When my band toured Eastern Europe a couple of years ago we had full houses despite having sold literally no records in most of those countries. Thank you internets.”
— Steve Albini IaMA
(Source: reddit.com)
I spent Sunday walking around Madrid checking out Los Artistas del Barrio, where artists open up their work spaces to the general public. I should have probably taken pictures of the artists themselves, but I focused more on the people I went with.
Building a tent inside a (small) apartment is harder than it would seem.
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Breakfast like it should be: tea, toast with jam, and a Pastel de Belém.
I went to Logroño (and a bunch of other places) last weekend and took a few pictures.
Slept in an extra hour. Fought hackers. Celebrated Pi Day. Discussed other people’s drunken shenanigans with my boss and a coworker over lunch. Booked a flight. Rented a car. Washed a bunch of clothes. Ironed a shirt. Re-installed my server. Bed.
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Cowprint coffee.