A panel of music industry professionals and Chicago-area musicians lead a discussion today titled “I Am Not A Pirate: Filesharing and the Music Industry” at Columbia College Chicago.
Musicians Terrence “Hustle Simmons” Randolph, Alex Katz, and DJ Sean Alvarez spoke alongside Michael Roffman, editor-in-chief of Consequence of Sound, Lara Phillips of Chicago Hip Hop Connects, a hip-hop marketing firm, and Trevis Milton from Tanslation, LLC., a New York City-based advertising firm.
Topics like branding, making money as an artist, and legal music downloading dominated the conversation.
“Music is itself advertising,” said Milton at the beginning of the discussion. “I think that protecting copyright is almost the music industry trying to hold on to an antiquated model, and the new model for distribution of any digital content is different. It’s not the ‘Let’s sell CDs like they’re packaged goods, like they’re cereal.’ Digital content is being distributed in new and different ways, and so I think the whole idea of a copyright needs to be reevaluated in the context of the new distribution model.”
Milton, who said copyrights should favor the artist, or the creator of the copyrighted material instead of corporate stakeholders, agreed with the rest of the panel who said that today’s musicians are no longer just selling music.
“You look at a Drake, you look at an Odd Future. You’re not buying into the record that they put out, you’re buying into the artists themselves,” said Katz, a Chicago-based indie-rock musician.
This discussion comes at a time as the music industry is grappling with how to compete with rampant illegal downloading. The panel touched on how artists are making paltry sums off of legal streaming channels such as Spotify, or legal pay-per-download sites like iTunes. While no simple solutions to such large problems were offered, the artists and industry professionals all pointed to sites like Bandcamp and Kickstarter as examples of how musicians can raise money outside of traditional album sales.
You can listen to the entire discussion below.
For more information check out the I Am Not A Pirate website here.
