Monday, December 6, 2010

Ways of Making Money


Raising funds for a small business can be a daunting task for any fledgeling entrepreneur. Whether it be from friends and family or from the general public, finding investors, setting terms of the funding, assigning equity and filing compliance documents is a challenge. Enter ProFounder, a stealth startup that launches today to ensure that all entrepreneurs and small businesses have access to an easy and simple fundraising platform.


ProFounder, which has been in private beta for the past year, offers entrepreneurs two ways to raise money on the site: through a private fundraising round, and/or a public fundraising round. The private fundraising rounds allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues with investors (their friends, family, and community) over time. Essentially, this type of fundraising round is an offering of securities, and ProFounder helps facilitate compliance with state and federal laws related to this offering.


Public fundraising rounds allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of revenues with both investors (anyone can participate – friends, family, community, and general public too) as well as a nonprofit organization. For both public and private fundraising rounds, ProFounder has a limit of $1 million raised.


Entrepreneurs can apply to Profounder, upload a pitch to offer to potential investors and then create a term sheet with Profounder’s templated forms and compliance sheets. As stated above, the term sheets are based on a revenue-share model. ProFounder then gives businesses a page where they can invite friends, family, and investors to a destination page that allows users to make contributions and investments directly on the site.


The bonus of using ProFounder is that the platform allows unaccredited investors (i.e. friends and family as opposed to a venture firm) to participate, so anyone can be an investor. And entrepreneurs can set their own investment terms and ProFounder facilitates all of the compliance, including tracking the number of investor seats in each state where each of their investors live, making sure entrepreneurs know which compliance documents they need to file, making sure entrepreneurs know which filing fees to pay, etc.


ProFounder, which was is the brainchild of Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley and fellow Stanford Business School alum Dana Mauriello, also manages payouts and will pull funds from the entrepreneur’s bank account every quarter to pay investors their share of the business’ revenues.


ProFounder makes money by charging a 5 percent fee (of a public raise) and/or a flat $1,000 fee for any private raises.


If a company pays out investors before the terms of the deal end, then founders can choose to donate the rest of the revenues to a non profit organization. For example, if you offer two percent of your revenues to investors over the next five years and within two years, everyone has been fully paid, then the next three years of two percent of your revenues will go to the nonprofit.


To date, ProFounder has facilitated 5 successful private fundraising rounds, raising a total of $155,000 and engaging a total of 108 investors. For example, Bronson Chang, a recent USC alumni moved back to his native Hawaii to help out with the family business—a candy shop in Honolulu. Bronson wanted to open another shop in the area and raised $54,000 from 19 community members including friends, family, and USC classmates. Bronson is also currently raising an additional $60,000 through a public investing round.


Another private beta tester, BucketFeet, is a start-up from two recent college grads that makes hand-painted sneakers. The fledgling entrepreneurs managed to raise $60,000 from 37 investors including friends, family, and classmates across the country.


ProFounder’s model is similar in some ways to Kiva’s microlending, which recently opened up its platform to American entrepreneurs. Other companies playing in the space include Kickstarter, and Prosper.


But Jackley and Mauriello say that with the 27 million new and existing small businesses in the U.S., there are plenty of opportunities to offer fundraising and investment platforms to this demographic. Eventually, ProFounder will include social networking integration and possibly a convertible debt option for term sheets, say Jackley and Mauriello. In the end, Mauriello says, it’s about making sure that small business entrepreneurs have access to much-needed resources in terms of raising money.



State of the indy music industry looks rosy, so why all the doom-and-gloom about music?






TuneCore's Jeff Price has a six-part series analyzing the financial state of the music industry from the point of view of an independent artist. Price offers compelling reasons to believe that although the labels are experiencing a severe downturn, artists as a group are earning more than ever, thanks to the Internet.


I have a feeling that the record industry's rejoinder to this would be, yes, more artists are earning some money from their music, and all told, there's more money going to artists than ever before, but there are fewer opportunities for an artist to sign up to a label like ours that controls so much of the distribution channel that we can guarantee large sums of money for these lottery winners.


In other words, the music industry today is much less winner-take-all, with the benefits diffused to a larger pool of artists at the expense of the few who did so well under the old system. This is what I mean when I say a good copyright system is one that encourages the broadest-possible engagement in culture: more music, from more musicians, reaching more people, at more price-points, in more formats. It's a win for free expression and for art, but it's a loss for some artists and the institutions that supported them.


I don't celebrate those losses: it's terrible to think of people who loved and lived for music losing their jobs (most of the people at labels aren't greedy tools deciding to sue 40,000 music fans; greedy tool-dom is confined to a few powerful decisionmakers). It's sad to think of the tiny pool of musicians who did so well taking a loss (though before we weep for them too much, remember that yesterday's winners are well situated to get even richer from merch, performance and licensing, even without the archaic recorded music industry and its shiny bits of plastic).


But copyright's purpose should be to get as much art made and available as possible -- it's not a full-employment scheme for administrators and marketing people and record-store clerks; it's not a lottery that makes millionaires out of a couple of lucky artists. There's nothing wrong with it doing those things, but they aren't why it's there: it's there to fuel expression and art.



The reality is:


* More musicians are making money off their music now then at any point in history.

* The cost of buying music has gotten lower but the amount of money going into the artist's pocket has increased.

* There are more people listening, sharing, buying, monetizing, stealing and engaging with music than at any other point in history.

* There are more ways for an artist to get heard, become famous and make a living off their music now than at any point in the history of this planet.

* Technology has made it possible for any artist to get distribution, to get discovered, to pursue his/her dreams with no company or person out there making the editorial decision that they are not allowed "in".

* The majority of music now being created and distributed is happening outside of the "traditional" system.


And to reiterate, sales are up...


Seeing that the Nielsen stats are readily accessible and accepted as legitimate, why then are we left with the impression that music sales and revenue are down? The simple answer is album sales and overall gross revenue from music sales (CD and downloads) are down. The increase in music purchases comes from the people buying individual songs. The decrease in revenue comes from a $0.99 song costing less than a $16.98 physical album as well as fewer purchases of physical CDs.



The State of The Music Industry & the Delegitimization of Artists

(via EFF Deep Links)



(Image: Diesel Sweeties tee)

bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...


bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...


bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...


bench craft company rip off
<b> Noticias </ b> - Justin Bieber Cancela televisión alemana concierto tras Stunt sale mal <b> ...</ b> La cantante adolescente restos de su actuación después de que un hombre está gravemente herido en la popular serie de Wetten Dass .

Campamento Carnahan Para Fox News <b> </ b>: ¿Por qué solo nosotros fuera? | TPMMuckrakerLawyers para el ex candidato al Senado Robin Carnahan argumentan que la cadena Fox News es singularizar el demócrata de Missouri en su demanda alegando su campaña violado los derechos de autor de la red.

Habitaciones Lujiazui: <b> Noticias </ b> &amp; puntos de vista sobre las existencias de China (06 de diciembre <b> ...</ b> Inversores y comerciantes en el principal distrito financiero de China se trata de la siguiente antes del inicio del día de hoy el comercio: Con las expectativas sobre la inflación y la política monetaria cada vez más claro, los inversores están tomando las señales desde el extranjero ...


bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...


bench craft company rip off

Raising funds for a small business can be a daunting task for any fledgeling entrepreneur. Whether it be from friends and family or from the general public, finding investors, setting terms of the funding, assigning equity and filing compliance documents is a challenge. Enter ProFounder, a stealth startup that launches today to ensure that all entrepreneurs and small businesses have access to an easy and simple fundraising platform.


ProFounder, which has been in private beta for the past year, offers entrepreneurs two ways to raise money on the site: through a private fundraising round, and/or a public fundraising round. The private fundraising rounds allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues with investors (their friends, family, and community) over time. Essentially, this type of fundraising round is an offering of securities, and ProFounder helps facilitate compliance with state and federal laws related to this offering.


Public fundraising rounds allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of revenues with both investors (anyone can participate – friends, family, community, and general public too) as well as a nonprofit organization. For both public and private fundraising rounds, ProFounder has a limit of $1 million raised.


Entrepreneurs can apply to Profounder, upload a pitch to offer to potential investors and then create a term sheet with Profounder’s templated forms and compliance sheets. As stated above, the term sheets are based on a revenue-share model. ProFounder then gives businesses a page where they can invite friends, family, and investors to a destination page that allows users to make contributions and investments directly on the site.


The bonus of using ProFounder is that the platform allows unaccredited investors (i.e. friends and family as opposed to a venture firm) to participate, so anyone can be an investor. And entrepreneurs can set their own investment terms and ProFounder facilitates all of the compliance, including tracking the number of investor seats in each state where each of their investors live, making sure entrepreneurs know which compliance documents they need to file, making sure entrepreneurs know which filing fees to pay, etc.


ProFounder, which was is the brainchild of Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley and fellow Stanford Business School alum Dana Mauriello, also manages payouts and will pull funds from the entrepreneur’s bank account every quarter to pay investors their share of the business’ revenues.


ProFounder makes money by charging a 5 percent fee (of a public raise) and/or a flat $1,000 fee for any private raises.


If a company pays out investors before the terms of the deal end, then founders can choose to donate the rest of the revenues to a non profit organization. For example, if you offer two percent of your revenues to investors over the next five years and within two years, everyone has been fully paid, then the next three years of two percent of your revenues will go to the nonprofit.


To date, ProFounder has facilitated 5 successful private fundraising rounds, raising a total of $155,000 and engaging a total of 108 investors. For example, Bronson Chang, a recent USC alumni moved back to his native Hawaii to help out with the family business—a candy shop in Honolulu. Bronson wanted to open another shop in the area and raised $54,000 from 19 community members including friends, family, and USC classmates. Bronson is also currently raising an additional $60,000 through a public investing round.


Another private beta tester, BucketFeet, is a start-up from two recent college grads that makes hand-painted sneakers. The fledgling entrepreneurs managed to raise $60,000 from 37 investors including friends, family, and classmates across the country.


ProFounder’s model is similar in some ways to Kiva’s microlending, which recently opened up its platform to American entrepreneurs. Other companies playing in the space include Kickstarter, and Prosper.


But Jackley and Mauriello say that with the 27 million new and existing small businesses in the U.S., there are plenty of opportunities to offer fundraising and investment platforms to this demographic. Eventually, ProFounder will include social networking integration and possibly a convertible debt option for term sheets, say Jackley and Mauriello. In the end, Mauriello says, it’s about making sure that small business entrepreneurs have access to much-needed resources in terms of raising money.



State of the indy music industry looks rosy, so why all the doom-and-gloom about music?






TuneCore's Jeff Price has a six-part series analyzing the financial state of the music industry from the point of view of an independent artist. Price offers compelling reasons to believe that although the labels are experiencing a severe downturn, artists as a group are earning more than ever, thanks to the Internet.


I have a feeling that the record industry's rejoinder to this would be, yes, more artists are earning some money from their music, and all told, there's more money going to artists than ever before, but there are fewer opportunities for an artist to sign up to a label like ours that controls so much of the distribution channel that we can guarantee large sums of money for these lottery winners.


In other words, the music industry today is much less winner-take-all, with the benefits diffused to a larger pool of artists at the expense of the few who did so well under the old system. This is what I mean when I say a good copyright system is one that encourages the broadest-possible engagement in culture: more music, from more musicians, reaching more people, at more price-points, in more formats. It's a win for free expression and for art, but it's a loss for some artists and the institutions that supported them.


I don't celebrate those losses: it's terrible to think of people who loved and lived for music losing their jobs (most of the people at labels aren't greedy tools deciding to sue 40,000 music fans; greedy tool-dom is confined to a few powerful decisionmakers). It's sad to think of the tiny pool of musicians who did so well taking a loss (though before we weep for them too much, remember that yesterday's winners are well situated to get even richer from merch, performance and licensing, even without the archaic recorded music industry and its shiny bits of plastic).


But copyright's purpose should be to get as much art made and available as possible -- it's not a full-employment scheme for administrators and marketing people and record-store clerks; it's not a lottery that makes millionaires out of a couple of lucky artists. There's nothing wrong with it doing those things, but they aren't why it's there: it's there to fuel expression and art.



The reality is:


* More musicians are making money off their music now then at any point in history.

* The cost of buying music has gotten lower but the amount of money going into the artist's pocket has increased.

* There are more people listening, sharing, buying, monetizing, stealing and engaging with music than at any other point in history.

* There are more ways for an artist to get heard, become famous and make a living off their music now than at any point in the history of this planet.

* Technology has made it possible for any artist to get distribution, to get discovered, to pursue his/her dreams with no company or person out there making the editorial decision that they are not allowed "in".

* The majority of music now being created and distributed is happening outside of the "traditional" system.


And to reiterate, sales are up...


Seeing that the Nielsen stats are readily accessible and accepted as legitimate, why then are we left with the impression that music sales and revenue are down? The simple answer is album sales and overall gross revenue from music sales (CD and downloads) are down. The increase in music purchases comes from the people buying individual songs. The decrease in revenue comes from a $0.99 song costing less than a $16.98 physical album as well as fewer purchases of physical CDs.



The State of The Music Industry & the Delegitimization of Artists

(via EFF Deep Links)



(Image: Diesel Sweeties tee)

bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...


bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...


bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...


bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...


bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...


bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...


bench craft company rip off

Raising funds for a small business can be a daunting task for any fledgeling entrepreneur. Whether it be from friends and family or from the general public, finding investors, setting terms of the funding, assigning equity and filing compliance documents is a challenge. Enter ProFounder, a stealth startup that launches today to ensure that all entrepreneurs and small businesses have access to an easy and simple fundraising platform.


ProFounder, which has been in private beta for the past year, offers entrepreneurs two ways to raise money on the site: through a private fundraising round, and/or a public fundraising round. The private fundraising rounds allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues with investors (their friends, family, and community) over time. Essentially, this type of fundraising round is an offering of securities, and ProFounder helps facilitate compliance with state and federal laws related to this offering.


Public fundraising rounds allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of revenues with both investors (anyone can participate – friends, family, community, and general public too) as well as a nonprofit organization. For both public and private fundraising rounds, ProFounder has a limit of $1 million raised.


Entrepreneurs can apply to Profounder, upload a pitch to offer to potential investors and then create a term sheet with Profounder’s templated forms and compliance sheets. As stated above, the term sheets are based on a revenue-share model. ProFounder then gives businesses a page where they can invite friends, family, and investors to a destination page that allows users to make contributions and investments directly on the site.


The bonus of using ProFounder is that the platform allows unaccredited investors (i.e. friends and family as opposed to a venture firm) to participate, so anyone can be an investor. And entrepreneurs can set their own investment terms and ProFounder facilitates all of the compliance, including tracking the number of investor seats in each state where each of their investors live, making sure entrepreneurs know which compliance documents they need to file, making sure entrepreneurs know which filing fees to pay, etc.


ProFounder, which was is the brainchild of Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley and fellow Stanford Business School alum Dana Mauriello, also manages payouts and will pull funds from the entrepreneur’s bank account every quarter to pay investors their share of the business’ revenues.


ProFounder makes money by charging a 5 percent fee (of a public raise) and/or a flat $1,000 fee for any private raises.


If a company pays out investors before the terms of the deal end, then founders can choose to donate the rest of the revenues to a non profit organization. For example, if you offer two percent of your revenues to investors over the next five years and within two years, everyone has been fully paid, then the next three years of two percent of your revenues will go to the nonprofit.


To date, ProFounder has facilitated 5 successful private fundraising rounds, raising a total of $155,000 and engaging a total of 108 investors. For example, Bronson Chang, a recent USC alumni moved back to his native Hawaii to help out with the family business—a candy shop in Honolulu. Bronson wanted to open another shop in the area and raised $54,000 from 19 community members including friends, family, and USC classmates. Bronson is also currently raising an additional $60,000 through a public investing round.


Another private beta tester, BucketFeet, is a start-up from two recent college grads that makes hand-painted sneakers. The fledgling entrepreneurs managed to raise $60,000 from 37 investors including friends, family, and classmates across the country.


ProFounder’s model is similar in some ways to Kiva’s microlending, which recently opened up its platform to American entrepreneurs. Other companies playing in the space include Kickstarter, and Prosper.


But Jackley and Mauriello say that with the 27 million new and existing small businesses in the U.S., there are plenty of opportunities to offer fundraising and investment platforms to this demographic. Eventually, ProFounder will include social networking integration and possibly a convertible debt option for term sheets, say Jackley and Mauriello. In the end, Mauriello says, it’s about making sure that small business entrepreneurs have access to much-needed resources in terms of raising money.



State of the indy music industry looks rosy, so why all the doom-and-gloom about music?






TuneCore's Jeff Price has a six-part series analyzing the financial state of the music industry from the point of view of an independent artist. Price offers compelling reasons to believe that although the labels are experiencing a severe downturn, artists as a group are earning more than ever, thanks to the Internet.


I have a feeling that the record industry's rejoinder to this would be, yes, more artists are earning some money from their music, and all told, there's more money going to artists than ever before, but there are fewer opportunities for an artist to sign up to a label like ours that controls so much of the distribution channel that we can guarantee large sums of money for these lottery winners.


In other words, the music industry today is much less winner-take-all, with the benefits diffused to a larger pool of artists at the expense of the few who did so well under the old system. This is what I mean when I say a good copyright system is one that encourages the broadest-possible engagement in culture: more music, from more musicians, reaching more people, at more price-points, in more formats. It's a win for free expression and for art, but it's a loss for some artists and the institutions that supported them.


I don't celebrate those losses: it's terrible to think of people who loved and lived for music losing their jobs (most of the people at labels aren't greedy tools deciding to sue 40,000 music fans; greedy tool-dom is confined to a few powerful decisionmakers). It's sad to think of the tiny pool of musicians who did so well taking a loss (though before we weep for them too much, remember that yesterday's winners are well situated to get even richer from merch, performance and licensing, even without the archaic recorded music industry and its shiny bits of plastic).


But copyright's purpose should be to get as much art made and available as possible -- it's not a full-employment scheme for administrators and marketing people and record-store clerks; it's not a lottery that makes millionaires out of a couple of lucky artists. There's nothing wrong with it doing those things, but they aren't why it's there: it's there to fuel expression and art.



The reality is:


* More musicians are making money off their music now then at any point in history.

* The cost of buying music has gotten lower but the amount of money going into the artist's pocket has increased.

* There are more people listening, sharing, buying, monetizing, stealing and engaging with music than at any other point in history.

* There are more ways for an artist to get heard, become famous and make a living off their music now than at any point in the history of this planet.

* Technology has made it possible for any artist to get distribution, to get discovered, to pursue his/her dreams with no company or person out there making the editorial decision that they are not allowed "in".

* The majority of music now being created and distributed is happening outside of the "traditional" system.


And to reiterate, sales are up...


Seeing that the Nielsen stats are readily accessible and accepted as legitimate, why then are we left with the impression that music sales and revenue are down? The simple answer is album sales and overall gross revenue from music sales (CD and downloads) are down. The increase in music purchases comes from the people buying individual songs. The decrease in revenue comes from a $0.99 song costing less than a $16.98 physical album as well as fewer purchases of physical CDs.



The State of The Music Industry & the Delegitimization of Artists

(via EFF Deep Links)



(Image: Diesel Sweeties tee)

bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...


bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...


bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...


bench craft company rip off

<b>News</b> - Justin Bieber Cancels German TV Gig After Stunt Goes Awry <b>...</b>

The teen singer scraps his performance after a man is severely injured on the popular series Wetten Dass.

Carnahan Camp To Fox <b>News</b>: Why Single Us Out? | TPMMuckraker

Lawyers for former Senate Candidate Robin Carnahan are arguing that the Fox News network is singling the Missouri Democrat out in its lawsuit alleging her campaign violated the network's copyrights.

Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> &amp; Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>

Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...



















No comments:

Post a Comment