WHAT GRINDS MY FRIGGEN GEARS

I don't get it, I really really don't get it. Simply put, how are so many apparently smart people actually so dumb? I'm having serious trouble understanding why certain (read most) record companies cannot grasp the benefits of letting people share a sound. Like when people put a video up on YouTube and use a song and then the big record company finds out and screams theft and shuts the video down. Example? Try clicking the video 4 posts down... see what I mean?

It's not just YouTube, let's look at SoundCloud. I have a page on there and I've got around 10 or so songs and the only reason they're still up there is because they're mostly obscure and don't show up in the filter that the mega decca record companies have forced SoundCloud to install. God forbid I should upload a song, that I've purchased, that alerts the filter settings. Because then I get a message which makes me out to either be mentally deranged for even attempting to do such a thing or a common thief, stealing from the mouths of the poor record executives and their family of starving musicians.

Straight up let me say what I'm not saying, I'm not saying  I should be allowed to put music up on these sites so people can download for free (I'll leave that to the torrents), what I'm saying is why can't I share this music with other people, introduce them to it? Other people will hear it, possibly enjoy it, look up the artist and most likely purchase the song. The same goes for videos like that below, it had a catchy pop tune, one I'd actually never heard of before. I didn't want to buy it, not really my style, but others no doubt will have after they watched and listened to that video. I mean jeebus, as soon as I got home from seeing "Drive" at the cinema I bought the soundtrack on iTunes. Fantastic marketing concept yes? Way to share music and sell product yes?

Then why can these intelligent music moguls not see the benefits of people sharing and introducing music to others? I once heard a song on a video clip of some dudes riding bikes through the streets of New York, loved the song, found out it was by a band called Broken Social Scene and as a result I've now purchased every single one of their albums and EP's, not to mention the off shoot solo artists like Feist and Kevin Drew. Christ I even bought a T Shirt from their website. Hundreds of dollars spent on those artists simply because I heard that song on that video. We don't all watch Video Hits ya know. (well nobody does now do they?)

These are the very same record companies who cried like babies when iTunes upped the listening time on their song previews. What do these companies think people do? Find an album on iTunes and play the previews and then hit repeat? Or maybe they go to SoundCloud and try and find a song they want and hit play again and again every time they want to hear it? Could make for a boring disjointed party atmosphere if the host is constantly on the web trying to find music to play for people to listen to. God knows how this method works in a car? It doesn't right? No, we buy the music, we're the consumers, we want to put it on our iPod, iPad, laptop, cars hard drive (what you don't have a hard drive in your car? pffft keep up) and where ever else we so choose. To do that we need to buy the song, we know that and we agree to that.

It's time record companies woke up to the internet, embraced it and developed their marketing strategies around the ways people like to find music, how they want to listen to it and how they want to purchase it. Maybe Spotify is a good direction but I'm hearing rumours that eventually you will have to pay to use that service. Pay? Pay to buy the songs right? Yes, but also pay to preview them first. Errrrr nah. Why not look at the model that websites like RCRD.LBL use. I get sent 2 songs a day from a random genre, mine to download for free or not if I so choose. I can even search their site for other artists and grab some free singles. But I, like most people, want albums from artists. So now by using a site like this I get to firstly discover new music, then listen to it and then go to iTunes or similar to buy it. Note: You wont find the latest chart topping artists on RCRD.LBL it remains the obscure... but then again, I get to share them on SoundCloud.

Wake up and get with it.

I wanted to post a pic of a greedy boss with this rant but google images just gave me Boss Hogg, I reckon that's good enough eh? (Christ I hope that's not a Licensed Image)