well, i think the folks @ ninjatune are trying to tell us something.
first amon tobin went online via his myspace and laid into people ripping his recent foley room album in a forthright and passionate outburst, and today i received the new album by another of the labels big sellers, cinematic orchestra with a fantastically straight from the heart rant to those of us who are priviledged to get to hear these albums early. now i don’t have any of that p2p rubbish, and so i totally agree with the sentiments and respect the rules of promos. here goes, there’s a lot of words, so expect typos.
oh, and, one more thing, it’s all in capitals, the buggers are shouting this out at me !
“before you copy, burn, or upload these recordings, please take a moment to think what you’re doing and what you’re not doing. you are not “sticking it to the man”, you are not “striking a blow against copyright laws”, you’re not “liberating content from the corporations”. nor are “promoting our recordings for us”, you are making it much harder for the musicians in cinematic orchestra to make anything like a living wage for creating the music which is good enough to give to friends and associates. you are making it hard for an independent label like ninjatune to stay in business (we’re not trying to rip anyone off so don’t pretend we are – we split our profits 50/50 with our artists and we put out music we believe in rather than music we just think will make the most money). by all means pirate the latest corporate spew from major central, but don’t pretend its the same thing as copying this, because one day, when we’re all gone and all that’s left is two or three giant multinational conglomerates putting out lowest common denominator bollocks, you’ll wish you hadn’t – no clicking’
along with this, the album is cutup over 99 tracks making one track a series of various tracks, thus rendering the album impossible to drop on an mp3 player, which i have to say is a novel way to make life more difficuilt, and one that doesn’t involve drm.