Scott Henderson Sounds off on Internet/Music Business

[brain21]

So, I guess when has any artists ever owned their own songs and made money off them?

GnR didn't make a dime off of Apetite until it was well into Platinum.

I guess in the end the artist always gets fucked. Its just a question of who is doing it today.


Every artist that wants to get signed should read Moses Avalon's books and Donald Passmans as well. I read them back in the day. But I already knew too, having worked at a few record labels in my seedy past

 

[brain21]

To take this discussion in a slightly different direction (IOW, back towards being on the original topic :-D )

An issue here that hasn't been talked about is the cost. Until recently, CDs would cost you upwards of $17.99 for a single CD at your local store (Wal-Mart, Best Buy), etc. One or two of those quickly add up. And people are sick of paying even $15 for a CD that has 1 or 2 good songs on it.

So people download. And the music community (record labels and signed artists) complains about stealing, yet offers no solutions at all. All they say is why would anyone pay (there a quotes on the net from famous record execs saying that no one would pay for it if they can download for free). Then along comes iTunes and proves them all wrong. Billions of songs paid for and downloaded - in the same market where the record companies and artists said no one would pay. People WILL PAY, as long as you charge a reasonable price! The record companies and artists were so short-sighted. Now, finally, they are waking up.

Last month I was in BestBuy for the first time in a LONG time. I was there to buy one of the new Beatles remasters. I was looking around and saw several NEW CDs on sale. It used to be that if you find a new CD for $11.99 or $12.99 at BB, that was a good deal. Well I ended up picking up the new Wolfmother CD for $7.99. Amazon.com now has Joe Bonamassa's Black Rock CD available for $9.99 - I'll probably pick that up too.

So the record companies and artists need to DEAL with the fact that there is free stuff out there. How? Sell singles on iTunes, etc. is just one way. But when people download it, they should be able to do what they want with it. If I get a CD for free, I might share it (hypothetically), but if I actually buy it, I might be far more reluctant to let others profit freely off of my hard earned & spent money. You can make all sorts of justifiable moral judgements here, and you'd be right, but it doesn't change the facts. IOW, if I pay to download it, I am FAR LESS likely to share it. The problem isn't everyone, its a small few. But If I download something, and PAY for it, and I can ONLY play it on iTunes or WMP or my iPod, sorry, thats not good enough. ITunes blows. What if I don't have an iPod, but some other mp3 player? What if I have a USB reader in the car and I want to put the music file on a thumb drive so I can listen in my car? I can't. That is a problem. iTunes and some others are trying to solve this issue by offering DRM-Free music, but at a 40% premium in some cases. But at least they are recognizing the issue and starting to work on it.

Also, at $0.99/song, a 13 song album costs me $13 to download, and I might be able to buy it brand new, in the store, for $12 (or $7.99!). I pay less, and I have a physical CD, a booklet, and I can do what the hell I want with the CD. I can sell it, I can rip it, etc. There is a big disconnect here between pricing over various different media that makes no sense. This problem needs to be solved as well.

I'm the kind of person that likes to buy a whole album. $7.99 for a whole album? Sure. $15 for a whole album? Every song on it had better be good (or at least more than like 2 or 3)! And thats rarely the case (obviously depends on the artist). There needs to be consistency in pricing, and there is not. I don't mean between artists. I understand why a Michael Jackson album might sell for $12 and a Wolfmother album sells for $7.99. Thats not what I am talking about. If I sell a 12 cut CD in the store for $7.99, then each individual song online had better cost a maximum of $0.50 (brings the cost for the album to $6, which is a nice "discount" for not getting the physical CD and booklet), and I had better be able to make that music portable for myself. People tend to resent being treated like an untrusted criminal BEFORE they have done anything wrong. Or maybe thats just me?

Oh, and lets not forget that a CD is MUCH better audio quality than what iTunes offers. That decrease in quality needs to be reflected in the price as well. I wish they would offer FLAC, but bandwidth is an issue as well. Maybe in the future.

Another thing that has to be fixed in the pricing is the disconnect in preceived value between DVDs and CDs. I can get a DVD of a movie that cost $100 million to make, a nice package, and a bunch of cool extras including commentary, interviews, behind the scenes, how the effects were done, etc. for $13. Yet a CD that cost $20k to make (less these days in many cases), I get the audio and a booklet. Wow. Thanks for nothing (extra). and it costs the same price of that DVD!!! What you went through to make it doesn't matter to the end consumer. If you light your cigarettes with a roll of $100 bills, or you can't give your sick daught a good square meal, doesn't matter to the consumer. They don't know. They want value for THEIR dollar, because they too might not be able to give their daughter a square meal. Hopefully you get my point. Thats part of the appeal of the new Beatles stuff. Not only has it been remastered, and very well, but each comes with a documentary video too. There's added value that you generally can't get from simply downloading it.

Lets say all of these issues are solved. More people buy, but there is still that % of the market where you have to compete with free. So how do you do it? You offer added value. Why do people buy DVDs? Well you get all those extras, not just the movie. I can download movies just like the next guy, and I can't afford to buy every DVD I want. But if you give me something extra, your DVD will top my must-have list, and I will go out and buy it. I could have downloaded all three of the LOTR movies for free, but I bought the deluxe editions because for about $23.99 (I think that was the initial price) I get a SH*T-TON of extra stuff! Like in the Beatles example above, there are probably torrents of the Beatles albums in FLAC with all of the documentaries and everything, but that would be a large file, and the number of people that download that that would have otherwise actually bought it is likely negligible in the larger view.

The movie industry gets this (for the most part). Comedians get this. Most of the comedy albums that come out now run like $12 and are an audio CD and an in concert DVD or VCD as well. The record companies are only STARTING to get this!

So Scott can complain and liken downloading to robbing a bank all he wants. And other than his exaggerations, he has very valid points. But the market is what it is, and that is not gonna change. Instead of complaining to reporters, he should be complaining to the record company, and discussing strategy with them (and he may very well have, I don't know). It's business. If there is a problem, develop a strategy to solve or compete, and quit just whining about it and offering no solutions.

There are solutions out there, but (gasp) you (record industry) have to actually open your eyes to see them!

To paraphrase Bruce Campbell "You now record industry folks... a bunch of bitchy little girls"

 

[brain21]

Not kids ..... anyone. Stealing is stealing no matter how it is done.

Lets change this argument a little bit, for the hell of it, just to illustrate a point. There can be more than one thief in the den.

Remember when the labels all wanted to sue napster back in the day? I can't remember if it was PLG/BMG, or one of the other "Big Six" that filed a lawsuit against napster for ~$1.2 billion. That Billion with a B.

Now, how much of all that loot do you think would have ACTUALLY gone to the artists? And how much would have gone into BMG's coffers? THey had NO WAY of knowing how much of what artist was downloaded. There was absolutely no way of keeping track, at least at that time. Do you think Shawn Lane would have gotten even a penny of that? Yet his stuff was still downloaded. I know cause back then all the MVP and a lot of the old Shrapnel stuff you couldn't get anywhere. eBay was in its infancy, amazon was as well, they were not in reprint. You could try to fins a friend that had the CD, but if they didn't have it you could only continue to go to your local used CD store and HOPE that someone sold those old CDs. Thats how I got that MVP stuff (both albums) and Powers of Ten - when they were not in print, and there really was no way of getting them at all, I could find them easily on napster and see 300 people sharing them. Hell you STILL can't get the Star Project (EVH & Brian May) CD anywhere afaik. I managed to find a copy back in the day on napster riped straight from vinyl by a guy that apparently had a REALLY nice system.

Do you think that EVH would have gotten a penny for that out of the 1.2 billion? No. Would Mike Varney, or Holdsworth or Lane or Garsed or Gambale gotten a single cent from those 300+ copies that were being shared? Nope. OK, so the Mike Varney Project stuff wasn't under the BMG label, but you get the idea.

So BMG sues a company for tons'o'cash (it think the case ended up being settled), they probably pay out a bit to their very top tier artists regardless of whether their albums were the big popular ones being downloaded or not, and pocket the rest.

Who's stealing in that scenario?

I'm not blaming any one person here, just bringing up a slightly different aspect of the whole piracy/paying artists discussion.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

 

[brain21]

In China and some other places you well be killed for stealing. What it is or how much has little to do with it. In most of the world it was all that way at one time.

In the US a lot of people have been killed for stealing cattle and other things.

Thankfully we don't live in China or the Old West , which basically ignored due process, and killing for stealing cattle was incredibly illegal when it happened. Just cause it went on doesn't mean it was right. People were killed for stealing cattle at about the same time that it was OK to own a slave too.

Thankfully in this day and age we live in a country (at least most of the western countries included) where we believe in the punishment fitting the crime. Its called the 8th Amendment. Its what keeps us from executing mp3 downloaders. I agree with sah5150 on this.

Just sayin....

 

[brain21]

You know I never take the left or right very serious or up or down as far as that goes.

I can understand not taking left or right serious, but up and down? If you prefer up vs down, then you sir, are a heretic!

 

[brain21]

My point is when you have guys like Joe Zawinul (may he rest in piece) who has to go on the road even though he's to ill to do so...there is something wrong with how we take care of artists. The union having rendered largely useless due to guys working for free should be taking care of members that kept the Union alive for 5 = decades. But without funds...how can they.

Is this true? I met him (briefly) in Vienna back I think it was 2006? A few weeks after he had opened the Birdland Jazz club there in downtown Vienna. It was a VERY nice, and likely very expensive place. ANd they charged an expensive price for drinks and food too. I was under the impression (not that I am privvy to his finances by any means) that he was doing quite well then.

I'm not disagreeing here, just curious.

 

[brain21]

Not so, I gave a concrete example earlier. We used to play this place in Seattle for the door...made 2500 a gig, the place was jam packed. They made bank on liquor sales. TAfter I left Seattle they changed to 700 bucks fixed pay. The place is less packed now, with bands that draw less, and obviously less liquor sales...

What are the chances you are reversing cause and effect here?

You guys were drawing and you pulled in $2500 a gig. OK. Now you leave town and the owner has to get a new band. Well the bands he is auditioning aren't as good as you guys were, or didn't have the draw that you guys did, so he can't justify getting them ~$2500 a gig (door or whatever).

So he gets inferior bands in. They draw less people, so he pays them less.

I think for your analogy of undercutting to work, the band getting only $700 would still have to be drawing the same amount you were.

There is a difference between Guitar Center charging $2500 for a Les Paul and guitar Village charging $2100 for that same les paul, and GC charging $2500 for a Les Paul and Giutar Village charging $700 for an Epiphone Les Paul. You aren't quite comparing apples to apples here. Undercutting is undercutting when the products are the same (in this case "the same" would mean the same draw and liquor sales for the bar). When the person "undercutting" is offering an inferior product, its NOT undercutting. Its getting what you pay for. Or something like that.

 

[stephen sawall]

In China and some other places you well be killed for stealing. What it is or how much has little to do with it. In most of the world it was all that way at one time.

In the US a lot of people have been killed for stealing cattle and other things.

Thankfully we don't live in China or the Old West , which basically ignored due process, and killing for stealing cattle was incredibly illegal when it happened. Just cause it went on doesn't mean it was right. People were killed for stealing cattle at about the same time that it was OK to own a slave too.

Thankfully in this day and age we live in a country (at least most of the western countries included) where we believe in the punishment fitting the crime. Its called the 8th Amendment. Its what keeps us from executing mp3 downloaders. I agree with sah5150 on this.

Just sayin....

I have family in China and this is very much part of how things are for a lot people alive today. Myself see all this as just the way it is. I do not think anyone believes things well change. I am sure just like VCR's and records and everything else the current system well be replaced.

I have no problem with individuals and it does not surprise me in any way that people well always have little regret if any when something so simple to get away with. I do not think human nature well change.

 

[MOAAH]

I do not think human nature well change.

Doubt anyone could argue that.

 

[Shonuff]

Look in what you quoted of what I said...

... or you had to get hired on a Union gig
Right, you play a Union gig and in order to get paid you pay your dues. Again late 80s LA auditions, not sure what you want me to tell you.

As for Zawinul, I didn't say you said he was wealthy, I said I was under the impression until talking with folks that played for him.

Wrong.... try reading what I wrote. Non Union musicians can do union dates and still be paid through the union as long as they pay the check processing fee, this has nothing to do with union dues and is common knowledge for anyone who has done any union work. You don't need to tell me anything as far as the union is concerned I was just trying to correct some misinformation.

And yes I too thought that Joe Z was wealthy...

That would imply I thought the same

 

[brain21]

To lighten the mood (sorry, embedding disabled in the clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

 

[kasperjensen]

Quality.

 

[degenaro]

My point is when you have guys like Joe Zawinul (may he rest in piece) who has to go on the road even though he's to ill to do so...there is something wrong with how we take care of artists. The union having rendered largely useless due to guys working for free should be taking care of members that kept the Union alive for 5 = decades. But without funds...how can they.

Is this true? I met him (briefly) in Vienna back I think it was 2006? A few weeks after he had opened the Birdland Jazz club there in downtown Vienna. It was a VERY nice, and likely very expensive place. ANd they charged an expensive price for drinks and food too. I was under the impression (not that I am privvy to his finances by any means) that he was doing quite well then.

I'm not disagreeing here, just curious.

Like I said I was under the impression that he did just fine, heck he lived in a nice place in Malibu. But from what I was told I was wrong...but who knows.

 

[degenaro]

Look in what you quoted of what I said...

... or you had to get hired on a Union gig
Right, you play a Union gig and in order to get paid you pay your dues. Again late 80s LA auditions, not sure what you want me to tell you.

As for Zawinul, I didn't say you said he was wealthy, I said I was under the impression until talking with folks that played for him.

Wrong.... try reading what I wrote. Non Union musicians can do union dates and still be paid through the union as long as they pay the check processing fee, this has nothing to do with union dues and is common knowledge for anyone who has done any union work. You don't need to tell me anything as far as the union is concerned I was just trying to correct some misinformation.

And yes I too thought that Joe Z was wealthy...

That would imply I thought the same

No, it would not imply you thought the same.
Lets try this again "I" was under the impression he was wealthy, and was told that the opposite was the case. I have no clue what is the truth but have no reason to doubt the statement.

As for misinformation, here's how I ended up in the Union....in the late 80s....I did a Union gig as a non member and in order to get my check I had to join. So, no there is no misinformation but rather my experience with it.

 

[degenaro]

Not so, I gave a concrete example earlier. We used to play this place in Seattle for the door...made 2500 a gig, the place was jam packed. They made bank on liquor sales. TAfter I left Seattle they changed to 700 bucks fixed pay. The place is less packed now, with bands that draw less, and obviously less liquor sales...

What are the chances you are reversing cause and effect here?

You guys were drawing and you pulled in $2500 a gig. OK. Now you leave town and the owner has to get a new band. Well the bands he is auditioning aren't as good as you guys were, or didn't have the draw that you guys did, so he can't justify getting them ~$2500 a gig (door or whatever).

So he gets inferior bands in. They draw less people, so he pays them less.

I think for your analogy of undercutting to work, the band getting only $700 would still have to be drawing the same amount you were.

There is a difference between Guitar Center charging $2500 for a Les Paul and guitar Village charging $2100 for that same les paul, and GC charging $2500 for a Les Paul and Giutar Village charging $700 for an Epiphone Les Paul. You aren't quite comparing apples to apples here. Undercutting is undercutting when the products are the same (in this case "the same" would mean the same draw and liquor sales for the bar). When the person "undercutting" is offering an inferior product, its NOT undercutting. Its getting what you pay for. Or something like that.

Good point, but if w keep with the initial example.
I left the band and the band split into 2 separate bands, either of them still having pretty much the same draw yet fetching 1800 less.
In the end it doesn't affect me, but I find it still fucked.

 

[degenaro]

Not kids ..... anyone. Stealing is stealing no matter how it is done.

Lets change this argument a little bit, for the hell of it, just to illustrate a point. There can be more than one thief in the den.

Remember when the labels all wanted to sue napster back in the day? I can't remember if it was PLG/BMG, or one of the other "Big Six" that filed a lawsuit against napster for ~$1.2 billion. That Billion with a B.

Now, how much of all that loot do you think would have ACTUALLY gone to the artists? And how much would have gone into BMG's coffers? THey had NO WAY of knowing how much of what artist was downloaded. There was absolutely no way of keeping track, at least at that time. Do you think Shawn Lane would have gotten even a penny of that? Yet his stuff was still downloaded. I know cause back then all the MVP and a lot of the old Shrapnel stuff you couldn't get anywhere. eBay was in its infancy, amazon was as well, they were not in reprint. You could try to fins a friend that had the CD, but if they didn't have it you could only continue to go to your local used CD store and HOPE that someone sold those old CDs. Thats how I got that MVP stuff (both albums) and Powers of Ten - when they were not in print, and there really was no way of getting them at all, I could find them easily on napster and see 300 people sharing them. Hell you STILL can't get the Star Project (EVH & Brian May) CD anywhere afaik. I managed to find a copy back in the day on napster riped straight from vinyl by a guy that apparently had a REALLY nice system.

Do you think that EVH would have gotten a penny for that out of the 1.2 billion? No. Would Mike Varney, or Holdsworth or Lane or Garsed or Gambale gotten a single cent from those 300+ copies that were being shared? Nope. OK, so the Mike Varney Project stuff wasn't under the BMG label, but you get the idea.

So BMG sues a company for tons'o'cash (it think the case ended up being settled), they probably pay out a bit to their very top tier artists regardless of whether their albums were the big popular ones being downloaded or not, and pocket the rest.

Who's stealing in that scenario?

I'm not blaming any one person here, just bringing up a slightly different aspect of the whole piracy/paying artists discussion.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Heck, there is no argument that the labels and RIAA their own worst enemies...
Shit, I'm politically speaking about as far to the left as a person can be. But when Gore ran for President I had such a major hard on against him for the simple reason that back in the day in order to get his wife's PMRC stickering through congress he made a side ways deal with the major lables that constituted the blank tape tax that got funnelled to the labels and musos didn';t see a penny.
And as I said earlier the idea of illegal downloads and the loss of revenue through it how little or big it may be isn't something I have an issue. I have an issue with folks making them self my distributor and uploading stuff that is my copyright in a better quality than I can legally sell through itunes or CD Baby and giving it away without me seeing a penny. I coulda have had label release my stuff for that kinda deal.

 

[ejecta]

I have an issue with folks making them self my distributor and uploading stuff that is my copyright in a better quality than I can legally sell through itunes or CD Baby and giving it away without me seeing a penny. I coulda have had label release my stuff for that kinda deal.

So things haven't really changed.

 

[kasperjensen]

Not kids ..... anyone. Stealing is stealing no matter how it is done.

Lets change this argument a little bit, for the hell of it, just to illustrate a point. There can be more than one thief in the den.

Remember when the labels all wanted to sue napster back in the day? I can't remember if it was PLG/BMG, or one of the other "Big Six" that filed a lawsuit against napster for ~$1.2 billion. That Billion with a B.

Now, how much of all that loot do you think would have ACTUALLY gone to the artists? And how much would have gone into BMG's coffers? THey had NO WAY of knowing how much of what artist was downloaded. There was absolutely no way of keeping track, at least at that time. Do you think Shawn Lane would have gotten even a penny of that? Yet his stuff was still downloaded. I know cause back then all the MVP and a lot of the old Shrapnel stuff you couldn't get anywhere. eBay was in its infancy, amazon was as well, they were not in reprint. You could try to fins a friend that had the CD, but if they didn't have it you could only continue to go to your local used CD store and HOPE that someone sold those old CDs. Thats how I got that MVP stuff (both albums) and Powers of Ten - when they were not in print, and there really was no way of getting them at all, I could find them easily on napster and see 300 people sharing them. Hell you STILL can't get the Star Project (EVH & Brian May) CD anywhere afaik. I managed to find a copy back in the day on napster riped straight from vinyl by a guy that apparently had a REALLY nice system.

Do you think that EVH would have gotten a penny for that out of the 1.2 billion? No. Would Mike Varney, or Holdsworth or Lane or Garsed or Gambale gotten a single cent from those 300+ copies that were being shared? Nope. OK, so the Mike Varney Project stuff wasn't under the BMG label, but you get the idea.

So BMG sues a company for tons'o'cash (it think the case ended up being settled), they probably pay out a bit to their very top tier artists regardless of whether their albums were the big popular ones being downloaded or not, and pocket the rest.

Who's stealing in that scenario?

I'm not blaming any one person here, just bringing up a slightly different aspect of the whole piracy/paying artists discussion.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Heck, there is no argument that the labels and RIAA their own worst enemies...
Shit, I'm politically speaking about as far to the left as a person can be. But when Gore ran for President I had such a major hard on against him for the simple reason that back in the day in order to get his wife's PMRC stickering through congress he made a side ways deal with the major lables that constituted the blank tape tax that got funnelled to the labels and musos didn';t see a penny.
And as I said earlier the idea of illegal downloads and the loss of revenue through it how little or big it may be isn't something I have an issue. I have an issue with folks making them self my distributor and uploading stuff that is my copyright in a better quality than I can legally sell through itunes or CD Baby and giving it away without me seeing a penny. I coulda have had label release my stuff for that kinda deal.

Now THAT would piss me the f*** off!

 

[Scumback Speakers]

Henderson is a guitar god. But I think his snifter of brandy went straight to the skinny part of his dreds on this one.

One second he's talking about how people are poor, and suffering in this economy, in the next breath, he calls them 'thieving motherfuckers' for downloading music.

The whole thing is debatable. And has been debated ad nauseum. You can't stop people from downloading. You either figure out a way to make your product marketable, or you don't. Or you get out of the entertainment business. Quit crying.

Actually it's not debatable. Scott is right. He made music you wanted to hear. He doesn't give his music away, you pay to hear it. If you offer it up for free, that's theft. There is no gray area here. You either pay for the privilege to hear it, or you have stolen it.

I wonder...if you were a musician of Scott's stature, playing for a living, how you would feel if your positions were reversed? Would you give your music away to a download site? Hell no. You couldn't pay the rent, buy your gear, feed your family, etc, etc.

You know, sometimes people just don't think it through, or put themselves in the artist's shoes/place, and they forget that it's not "all about me!" in the real world.

I played for a living for nine years, two failed recording contracts, then went back to school, got a degree in computers. They paid me to sell them/fix them.

Being a musician is no different. You are an artist, sure, but you still have to get paid to create the art. Otherwise it's a hobby/passion. Being a successful musician is a business.

End of discussion.

 

[degenaro]

I have an issue with folks making them self my distributor and uploading stuff that is my copyright in a better quality than I can legally sell through itunes or CD Baby and giving it away without me seeing a penny. I coulda have had label release my stuff for that kinda deal.

So things haven't really changed.

Other that now I'm the label as well as the artist meaning I will get ripped and have to pay for the production.