Music = Respect?

Worth reading the below rant by Hans Ebert. Thanks to Peggy from MSG for forwarding. Forgive the repetitive incorrect use of ‘for free’. Of course, things cannot be ‘for free’ they can only be ‘free’ or ‘without charge’.

Great rant though

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Blaine was mentioning to me how there are so many people “out there” who believe they are “owed” music – and for free – and how all music is free- AND all the software to help them smash and grab this music. Go to www.limewire.com and with the file sharing going on, all the music exchanged becomes free and which begs the question, where’s it all gone so horribly wrong that from rocking in the free world, musicians are now “fair game” for what I call the Vulture Culture and where they and their product are “owned” by consumers?

I hear sanctimonous bullshit from people about “caring for the music, man” but listen to them an hour later and they’re telling you to “just go to limewire and download, dude. Why pay?” Er, ‘cos it’s just not right? ‘cos it’s highway robbery.It’s Download Piracy? It’s Digital Hell? It devalues art?

Let’s not look at the States and talk about giving away music to “help gigs and tours.” In many countries, there are no VENUES to “gig,” let alone, “tour.” Again, this is talk from the geographically-challenged and the music industry equivalent of Fox News’ “true American” Sean “Huff Daddy” Hannity.

Even if you are to get a “gig” today, you’re told it’s “for free” and how you can “use it” for “promotion” and build up your “fan base” and soon you’re over thirty, you’re still gigging, you’re still updating your MySpace page, you’re still trying to “do an Arctic Monkeys” or “do a Lily Allen” when they have disappeared into the giant abyss and you’ve  finally decided to audition for “American Idol” ‘cos nothing else has worked and you are ready to be a karaoke singer, be called “dawg” and sell yourself to four “judges” who know you’re too old to be “idol material.”

You were irrelevant before and you’re irrelevant now, you have no “fan base” other than your dog and Mum. Even the girlfriend moved out and is living with either Tommy Lee, or Gene Simmons, or David Navarro, or David Lee Roth, or Kid Rock or Sammy Hagar. [Are they one and the same?]

Let’s just look at the pure economics of spending one’s time- and time is money- creating music, buying instruments, equipment, renting rehearsal rooms, perhaps paying for studio time, getting a finished product “out there”- and only to then have it downloaded for free and without anyone even leaving you a ten cent tip? There’s also the chance that you’ll get your songs ripped off in the process and with many claiming the same “bragging rights” and worse – copyrights – and you have nada bananas for legal warfare.

How have we become so darn callous to it all? How has the art of creating music become “content?” And how and why has this “content” become so discardable and dispensable?

I might not download music for free, but I AM caught up in the feeding frenzy of going online and, like a kid at a buffet table, subscribing to anything and everything that is free- free newsletters about music, free psycho-babble from wealth mentors, free blogs…and which I then spend hours Unsubscribing the next week as my Inbox is on Overload with useless “information” and not unlike all the “jokes” and other spam that finds its way past the firewalls of protection. I feel like a scavenger – a Hurdy Gurdy Man – and part of the Vulture Culture that exists today and where we think and act in “bit torrents.”

But “purchasing music for free,” something I hear all the time from “oxy morons” is, to me, like Quasimodo sounding the death knell to a dilapidated music industry “model” that’s barely able to stand these days as it’s been knocked Over, Under, Sideways, Down. Yes, it’s like that old Yardbirds song.

Having said this, I care for the ARTISTS. I have absolutely no sympathy for music companies as they have always had do to do with a privileged few being the arrogant twats they still are today and never seeing nor caring to see the fast train of technology approaching and which has run over them. The railway tracks are written all over their faces, but they think it’s a tan.

Their “solution” to it all: Legislation and ‘let’s sue the bastards.” As Tim so succinctly puts it, now is the time for Innovation not Legislation.

Leave these hapless twats to their own means and, for reasons that baffle me, many are still running music companies – often, into the ground- but, I guess, it comes down to them having their power bases and being surrounded by toadies to keep their egos on a “higher plain” and who remain “blinded by the light” and dazzled by their own bullshit.

My fear is that unless this weird imbalance of “power,” this dysfunctional “tribe” of artists – and many are also arrogant, ignorant, swaggering twats – fans who support music, management and “new model music companies” come together like a Youngbloods song, this really might be “the day the music died” and we’ll be seeing “Music: R.I.P.” headstones all around.

Silence is not golden and nor is it a pretty sound.

Like a child, like the people who matter in your life, music, like any other art form, needs to heard, nurtured and respected for it to live, breathe, be happy and multiply.

by Hans Ebert,
Chairman & CEO, We-Enhance Inc