New Sound Now // An online music show and blog

I was beginning to wonder when someone would nail a letter to a door, officially declaring file sharing a revolution in music. Instead of a door, they’ve used a website, which is apt, I suppose, but a tad common, no? In any case, there is now a Declaration of Independence for independent, open source, free(ish) music, written by the 001collective, a label-ish kind of entity that promotes freedom and sharing as a way to generate record sales and advertising (amongst other things).

While in absolutely no means perfect (misspelling of “Distrobution” notwithstanding), this page denotes some fairly obvious points about the last few years:

“Twenty dollars for a CD, or a movie? Very little of this goes to the actual artist; most goes towards a bloated industry to pay for the massive manpower involved in such products. That was the old world, when it was impossible for an artist to have mass public consumption of their work without significant money and effort. But this is the new world. Through the internet an artist can reach millions of people. And through the internet the people can find obscure artists and download anything they want for free.”

This sort of flag-waving revolution-speak is interesting to hear in regards to music. Surely, the public has already spoken on this issue; we generally like free things, and are not as likely to pay for something when it’s available to us from easier transactions. This promptly raises the question, as it always has, of how the musicians (not to mention everyone else) will be paid. Apparently the process that leads to this solution is to remove the head of the CEO of every major record label.

This sort of “revolution” talk comes interestingly, albiet coincidentally, with one 50 Cent’s recent claim that, in regards to file sharing, “What is important for the music industry to understand is that this really doesn’t hurt the artists.” He goes on to point out that concerts are still selling out and merchandise is still a great source of income, and that these sort of things need to be capitalized.

The backbone argument for the RIAA and every other group that discriminates against file sharing (to the point of suing citizens) is that file sharing hurts the artists. While I’m not arguing with them (because that’s a much, much larger argument), the fact that there’s a collective (label) championing independent, free digital music, as well as a multi-million dollar mega-star hip-hop artist letting us know that he’s fine with file sharing (to a point) is definitely worthy of note.