Camper Van Beethoven guitarist David Lowery has posted a full transcript of a forthcoming address on the digital revolution in music through The Trichordist; a curated blog subtitled 'Artists For An Ethical Internet'. Lowery will be delivering the speech in person at the San Francisco MusicTech Summit on the 9th of October, 2012, but has posted it in it's entirety months ahead of time.
The preamble to the piece reads:
What follows is based on my notes and slides from my talk at SF Music Tech Summit. I realize that Iâm about to alienate some of my friends that work on the tech side of the music business. These are good well intentioned people who genuinely want to help musicians succeed in the new digital paradigm. But if we are gonna come up with a system to compensate artists fairly in the new digital age we need an honest discussion of what is going on. The tech side of the music business really needs to look at how their actions and policies negatively impact artists, just as they have pointed out the negative effect record company actions have had on artists.
Too often the debate has been pirates vs the RIAA. This is ridiculous because the artists, the 99 percent of the music business are left out of the debate. Iâm not advocating going back to the old record label model, to an industry dominated by the big three multi-national labels. This is a bit of hyperbole intended to make us all think about this question: Is the new digital model better for the artist?
You can find the full transcript, including slides, here.