At 12:37 PM 11/10/02 -0500, you wrote:
I guess the Orb are a bunch of buggers for "stealing" from other people's songs. It's quite likely that more copies of Ultraworld were sold than Minnie Riperton's album with "Loving You" on it. I bet Minnie was pissed. In case you don't fathom the sarcasm there, the Orb song lead directly to the release of Minnie Riperton's Greatest Hits. That song had been out of print for over ten years when Ultraworld came out. I know, I tried to find it. (A little side note, I did find it on an "Italian Import" (read bootleg) but not on any legit releases. I think it was also available on a 45rpm single.)
Yeh, the Orb did Minnie a favour like the KLF did Gary Glitter a favour by sampling him for 'Doctorin the Tardis'. (I won't say Tammy Wynette quite because they actually had her singing a song instead of them just outright sampling her.)
Personally, I think most music industry people and even a lot of musicians have got their heads so far up their asses about remixes, filesharing, sampling, and the like that they can't see how all of these make the world a better place for all of them and us.
It's mainly the thought of lost money that gets people narky, that and having the creative ownership of their work challenged in any way. The scale that Internet filesharing operates on would probably be making any cynical record company exec's skin crawl at the idea of how much music's passing around that they'll never ever be paid a cent for. (Never mind the salient benefits of having a try-before-you-buy system accessible from anywhere in the world so you don't end up buying a rubbish CD.) Actually having their music passed around the web doesn't cost them a penny save the legal fees when they decide to sue someone to bring their service down. It costs them more to get a song played on the radio than it does to get it fileshared around. Why they don't make use of filesharing services instead of trying to shut them down is beyond me, specially ones like Soulseek which have actual chat channels. Anyone fancy being a filesharing spruiker for a major label? There could be some serious money in it. What really strikes the fear into record companies and artists, i think, is that they've lost control of their own music. People aren't going to be compelled to buy CDs anymore if they can just as easily get an MP3 set off the web and for nothing as well, not unless there's a very good reason to buy the CD from the shop. Soon the same's going to be true of movies, i think, once bandwidth and storage media are so insanely capacitous that even movies can come zipping down onto your home computer. That's their take anyway, that nobody's going to be arsed to buy a CD if they can download it all from the web. Cynical bastards. Of course we'll keep buying CDs as long as the music's good enough to warrant shelling out, not only for the content but to send a message to the record company and artist that the world's a better place for their music--more please. :) That'll have to do before the Powers That Be finally get their act together and standardise micropayments or something.
I need a beer and the fucking stores don't sell it here for another half hour. GODDAMNIT I hate Baptists.
That was really strange about the US. We went to find some ceremonial beer for Australia Day and had to cross the border to Missouri coz alcohol is illegal to sell in Arkansas on Sunday. Kwook www.kwookyworld.com The kwinkunx is imminent. "Australia is merely an island of Antarctica and of no further significance." -- Russell Guy, "What's Rangoon To You Is Grafton To Me"