from the ‘widely-blogged-but-i’m-still-posting-it-so-it-makes-it-into-my-annotated-bookmarks’ department; courtney love talking sense about piracy and music:
“I want to work with people who believe in music and art and passion. And I’m just the tip of the iceberg. I’m leaving the major label system and there are hundreds of artists who are going to follow me. There’s an unbelievable opportunity for new companies that dare to get it right.
How can anyone defend the current system when it fails to deliver music to so many potential fans? That only expects of itself a “5 percent success rate” a year? The status quo gives us a boring culture. In a society of over 300 million people, only 30 new artists a year sell a million records. By any measure, that’s a huge failure.”
“Since I’ve basically been giving my music away for free under the old system, I’m not afraid of wireless, MP3 files or any of the other threats to my copyrights. Anything that makes my music more available to more people is great. MP3 files sound cruddy, but a well-made album sounds great. And I don’t care what anyone says about digital recordings. At this point they are good for dance music, but try listening to a warm guitar tone on them. They suck for what I do.”
and with near perfect timing comes this study:
“The new survey, by market research firm Yankelovich Partners, says 66% of all consumers said that listening to a song online has at least once prompted them to later buy a CD or cassette featuring the song. The survey included 16,903 people age 13 through 39 who buy and listen to some music. ”