Re: (TV) Burning Cds Endangered / Costello

[eric gregory <crackcity_2000@yahoo.com>]

this is proof that costello has turned into the very
thing a younger declan mcmanus woulda despised, not to
mention it helps further explain why he hasn't made a
decent record in over a decade...what a twat.
--- "Casey, Leo J" <CaseyL@VOLPE.DOT.GOV> wrote:
> I thought list might find this article interesting.
> 
> I would have just sent a web link to list that
> contained the article instead 
> of the entire article itself, but although I have
> free access to Boston Globe 
> Archives there's a snafu which would prevent such a
> link from showing you the 
> article.
> 
> 	Leo 
> 
> Burned? 
> Last year, recordable discs outsold CDs for the
> first time. With so many people copying music, is
> the record industry toast? 
> By Steve Morse, Globe Staff, 4/21/2002 
> The cries are getting louder from many artists and
> record companies. Sheryl Crow calls it
> ''shoplifting.'' Elvis Costello calls it
> ''stealing.'' But many young music fans are calling
> it their personal right in the digital age. 
> The issue is CD burning - the act of duping a CD for
> free on your computer. It's become the central worry
> of a music industry that slumped last year and
> continues to dive alarmingly, as more and more
> consumers feel entitled to burn CDs and often
> distribute copies to friends. 
> Even Harvard Law School students are getting into
> the act. When Hilary Rosen, the head of the
> Recording Industry Association of America, lectured
> at Harvard last week, she asked how many of the law
> students had illegally downloaded music. About
> one-third of them put their hands up. But when she
> asked how many had burned CDs for friends, the vast
> majority raised their hands. 
> ''And some of these people are thinking of going
> into the entertainment industry,'' Rosen said
> afterward, shaking her head in disbelief. ''This is
> what we're up against.'' 
> For decades, people have made cassette recordings
> for friends. But record-label representatives say
> that home taping was never as prevalent as CD
> burning, mainly because blank tapes cost up to eight
> times what you now pay for blank CDs. Also, the
> sound depreciated every time you made another copy. 
> Not so in the digital age, when immaculate-sounding
> copies can be made every time. 
> Ownership of CD burners 
> has nearly tripled since 1999. Last year, according
> to a study by Peter Hart Research Associates
> (commissioned by the RIAA), two in five music
> consumers owned a CD burner, as compared with 14
> percent in 1999. And the same study found that 23
> percent of consumers bought less music last year
> because they downloaded or copied most of it for
> free. 
> Many new computers now come equipped with burners,
> and recent TV commercials tout them as being hip
> accessories. Sales of blank CDs - used for recording
> purposes - have skyrocketed to the point that, for
> the first time, more blank CDs (1.1 billion) were
> sold last year than prerecorded CDs (968 million). 
> ''Obviously, something is being done with those
> blank CDs,'' says Mike Dreese, owner of the
> Boston-based Newbury Comics record chain and
> prophetic coauthor two years ago of a widely
> distributed essay, ''Disc burning equals death.'' 
> Dreese notes that CD sales were down 4 percent last
> year from the year before. They are down 9 percent
> so far in 2002 and he predicts a 13 percent overall
> decline this year, based on how many consumers will
> buy new CD burners. 
> There's a ''sex appeal'' to burning CDs, says Crow,
> adding that it is a social event for young people,
> just as listening to 45s was once a social event for
> their parents. 
> The industry is grappling with technologies that
> prevent copying to help stall this trend and
> especially to harness the ''cottage industry'' (as
> Dreese calls it) of people who make copies on a dorm
> floor and sell them to other students. This goes way
> beyond just making copies for friends. 
> ''None of the [copy-prevention technologies] totally
> work yet, but the best minds in the business are
> spending copious amounts of time to find a
> solution,'' says Ron Fair, president of A&M Records.
> 
> In the meantime, the industry is mounting a massive
> public-education campaign before other, sterner
> tactics are tried, as happened when the RIAA
> effectively shut down the file-sharing service
> Napster by hitting it with a lawsuit that succeeded,
> ultimately protecting against copyright infringement
> and ensuring that record companies and artists would
> be compensated for past copyright violations. 
> Seeing both sides 
> It's a complex issue that is far from cut-and-dried
> in the eyes of many observers, including some
> artists. ''I see it from two different sides,'' says
> Boyd Tinsley of the Dave Matthews Band. ''It sucks
> because musicians will make a lot less money'' from
> CD burning, he says. ''But, on the other hand, it's
> a cool thing because kids gets exposed to so much
> music through the Internet - and that's a good
> thing.'' 
> Many young people such as Eric Gregory, a
> 16-year-old student at Cambridge's Buckingham,
> Browne & Nichols School, also see both sides of the
> issue. But they burn CDs anyway, convinced that
> store-bought CDs are just too expensive (up to
> $19.98 apiece for domestic releases). 
> ''The amount you have to pay for CDs is
> horrendous,'' says Gregory. Instead, he's joined the
> parade of fans who buy blank CDs in bulk (costing
> between 25 and 50 cents each) and then add the CD
> cover artwork by checking Internet sites such as
> www.CD-cover-search.com. His CD burner cost less
> than $100 and he can copy a CD in about three
> minutes. 
> ''Burning a CD is a good thing,'' he says, ''because
> you get to see if you like the band, and then you
> can go to their shows, where you help them by buying
> tickets and merchandise. I'm not trying to rip off
> the band. And a lot of times, kids will buy the CDs
> after they've burned a CD, just to support the
> band.'' 
> The RIAA's Rosen, however, sees some of this as
> bogus logic. ''It's in vogue to diss record
> companies. That gives fans the license to say,
> `Well, we're only hurting record companies. We're
> not hurting the artists,''' she says. ''People
> sometimes think `If an artist is well known enough
> and I've heard of them, they have a lot of money and
> I don't care. And if an artist is unknown, they
> ought to be grateful to me for spreading their name
> around.' So they create this sort of
> rationalization.'' 
> Rosen does a lot of public speaking at schools and
> she prods the students to think about what they're
> doing by burning CDs, since the artists aren't
> getting any royalties from that. ''Analogies are
> what really work best,'' she says. ''I ask them,
> `What have you done last week? They may say they
> wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, `Oh,
> you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother
> you if somebody could just take that paper and get
> an A too? Would that bug you?' So this sense of
> personal investment does ring true with people.'' 
> In today's volatile business climate, arguments over
> CD burning can sometimes get much more testy. Dreese
> of Newbury Comics recently spoke at Berklee College
> of Music and lost his temper with one student who
> said that he could hack through any encryption
> technology and still get the music for free. 
> ''I said, `Well, what if you could steal a penny
> from every senior citizen's bank account in the
> country? They're not going to miss it, but you'd
> quickly make yourself a million dollars. Now what
> would happen if everybody behaved that way?' 
> ''These type of people perceive the risk of getting
> caught as being nonexistent. It's like a hacker
> mentality. If there's a way you can hack it, then
> you should just be entitled to it. It goes with the
> hacker ethic.'' 
> The downturn 
> The reasons are debatable, but signs of a record
> industry swan dive are everywhere. There have been
> recent bankruptcies by the National Record Mart and
> Northeast One-Stop (the No.1 supplier of music for
> Newbury Comics), Valley Records in California, and a
> stunning move by EMI Records to lay off 1,400
> employees globally and drop 400 acts. 
> It's also notable where the people who still buy
> music are buying it. Chains like Tower and Virgin
> are down 8 to 9 percent, according to SoundScan,
> while mass merchants such as Wal-Mart and Target
> (that is, stores that sell many other products
> besides CDs) are up 6 percent. That has a negative
> impact on the selection of music in record stores,
> because obviously, those retailers focus on the
> faster-selling hit-making acts, rather than exposing
> a lot of new, lesser-known CDs that sell fewer
> copies and take up space. 
> Stopping the practice of CD burning, however, could
> be thorny on legal grounds. ''Is CD burning legal?
> That's a little complicated. Probably the answer is
> yes,'' says William Fisher, co-director of Harvard's
> Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. 
> ''The cottage industry of kids burning CDs and
> selling them around dorms is plainly illegal. That's
> a commercial use,'' he adds, noting that it violates
> the Audio Home Recording Act Congress passed in
> 1992. ''But if a kid wants to distribute 10 copies
> around his dorm for free, that's looking a lot more
> like it's OK. That sounds like what was happening
> for [what led up to] the Audio Home Recording Act.
> You'd make a mix and distribute it to friends as
> gifts. And gifts are not commercial, so it's very
> hard to stop.'' 
> The way to address the record industry's concerns
> about 
=== message truncated ===


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