23C3 - 1.5

23rd Chaos Communication Congress
Who can you trust?

Speakers
Christian Tan
Schedule
Day 2
Room Saal 4
Start time 12:45
Duration 01:00
Info
ID 1492
Event type Lecture
Track Culture
Language English
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Dying Giraffe Recordings: A non-evil recordlabel

Using the power of creative commons to create an alternative system which is fair for musicians and their fans

Todays music industry has created a system that is unfair for both the musicians and the music lover. Combined with an agressive prosecution of downloaders, this causes a very strong polarisation between the industry on one hand and music lovers on the other. Nobody wins. We at dying giraffe recordings are trying to break this impasse and create a system where musicans are rewarded for their work and talent, and where music lovers can enjoy music in a fair way. The key element in this is a breakaway from traditional copyright laws and the use of the creative commons license. This combined with new technologies in the field of internet, audio recording and compression gives us the potency to change te system. Thus building a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude we believe that we can beat the system.

Todays music market is a sick place. Consider this:

Musicians often do not get paid for cd sales, only for tours and merchandise. They have to pay the labels for promotion and recording, and often go bankrupt in spite of selling millions. Their music is checked by software for their hitpotential, and if it's potential is limited, the will not be signed. Music that is produced, is compressed to death, so dynamics are effectively eliminated. Money that is earned by copy levy only goed to the big labels, if at all.

Consumers are getting sued for using p2p, even when they do not own a computer, are dead, or both. IF they buy cd's, the cd's are subject to price fixing, making them ridiculously expensive. Those CD's are protected by DRM or copy protection which makes them unable to be played on a computer, a dvd player, car audio or an mp3 player.

So why buy cd's at all? Now we have p2p, with which the music lover can download music for free, but illegally. There are other legal download means, like itunesMS but they have DRM.

So what do we do now?

We started a label, dying giraffe recordings. Where we try to keep our overhad low, where we do the cherry picking, give tips for homerecording, use the creative commons license, and use pdocasts and streaming for promotion, and have connections to cd distribution companies and concert halls.

Of course we encounter a lot of problems, like limited recording facilities, getting money for airplay and form the ocpy levy, cd manufacturing, the traditional industry and organisation fighting us, shady distributors, psychotic musicians and promotion.

For some of these problems we do not have a solution yet, for some we do have some suggestions. We would like to invite other people to think with us, and to build with us a network of netlabels to beat the system.

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