I think that meeting the consumer where they are right now, instead of where the industry wishes they were would be a good start. What that is exactly isn’t clear to me, but I’m not a label executive. I think that consumption habits need to hold sway here. While I agree that we shouldn’t celebrate the new leak culture, I don’t know if there’s anything that can come of the effort we make bemoaning its existence.

I’m also not committed to careerism in my role as critic. I don’t think anyone is guaranteed a career in the music business, going all the way back to its origins as a commercial enterprise. Let me make it clear that I don’t think that artists should be paid for their work. I just don’t think that we should automatically assume that any artist today would necessarily be able to make a living solely off of recording and performing music. I think if we could look at the guts of a record deal we might come to some new conclusions about where the artist stands in relation to their label, and how it really shakes out for their career prospects.

I’m going to spend some time addressing where music fits into the entertainment ecosystem as I see it in my role at comcast.net. It’s not pretty.

I think there are a few issues overlapping here. First, the purpose of my post was strictly a comment on independent music – music that was once based very much around the idea of a community of fans really supporting their artists in a truly altruistic way–letting bands sleep on their floors, talking them up to their friends, playing them on old-school college radio, etc. It’s become an antiquated notion, I know, and it’s clearly not an environment we can return to.

I’m not naive enough to think that “the role model approach” is enough to fix things. Still, it irks me when people respond by saying “that’s just the way it is now” and go about devaluing artists’ work. Sure, when you flip the argument and point to what “people” do now, how “the youth” behave, it seems silly to bother behaving differently. But it’s not so difficult to look at one’s own actions and determine whether or not one is being helpful to the artists one likes. Leaks are killing the notion of a long-term music career, whether at the major level or the indie level, and people need to recognize their complicity in this problem.

The role-modeling approach is too quaint for me to take seriously. That’s simply a virtuous (read: naive) way of sticking your head in the sand.

For example: while you say that “Animal Collective and Deerhunter fans are actively hacking to get the new music!” I’m not sure that’s true. In my mind, a “fan” is someone who cares about the music, and the musicians. Meanwhile, I suspect the folks hacking for leaks do so, regardless of what they CLAIM, because they get a thrill out of that behavior — one that has little to do with fandom.

Scott is calling for us to hold fans to a different standard, and, AS bloggers, own our own fandom as role modeling. I think that does mitigate — though not dissipate, as you say — the red arrows.

But we’re not talking about “do the red arrows exist”; we’re talking about what status do they have. Mitigation also minimizes the impact on the true fan market, as the impression real fans get of legitimacy is going to spring, partially, from saturation of the blogs with the leak. It does make a difference.

My point wasn’t that it couldn’t be done, but that confusion and reluctance on behalf of people who have spent their entire careers selling a THING that you could see and touch and stock store shelves from trying to wrap their minds around selling access to bits. Especially when those bits offer an inferior listening experience, sound-quality wise.

I’m arguing that the process is broken and that we can’t go on fooling ourselves that it isn’t. What does it even mean to “perpetuate” a leak? They’re out there and they circulate beyond anyone’s control. I feel that online media need to fill the gap that long-lead publications create. It’s a brave new world. It’s time we all start living in it.

Like Scott, I see nothing wrong with partial leaks, or single song leaks. And I know leaks happen.

But Scott is merely calling on people like US not to perpetuate those leaks. Especially when they come out three months early, when a band has not been able to build the buzz, or be on tour to promote the work — that really DOES cut into sales.

Scott, in other words, isn’t asking the industry to change, or the society. He’s asking US not to make “big red arrows” that point to the leak, so that the buzz can build more slowly, which sells more records and show tickets, and also supports bands more. And, ultimately, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask of music bloggers. After all, we CLAIM to be here FOR the bands — so to say “here’s what supports the bands best”, and make a good case for that, is solid, legit, and important.

To me, that’s asking us as bloggers to be more aware about the process we work with, rather than rabid, BECAUSE we love the music and the musicians. That seems valid to me — after all, if we burn artist sales potential now for the artists we love, we make it that much harder for those artists to make enough to keep touring and recording.

“Dismissing” that argument by saying that music has changed, on the other hand, isn’t corrective, like you think it is. Instead, it misses the argument, because it misconstrues a call for blogger action as a complaint against “fans” and “industry” and “culture”. Sorry, man. Put the straw man away, and step up to the community.

The RECORDING industry (not the MUSIC industry as a whole) was caught sleeping, there’s no doubt about that. However, labels could not abandon CD’s when they still accounted for so much revenue for a format where they did not control the means of production. When the film studios moved from VHS to DVD, there weren’t DVD burners shipping in every computer.

A lot of people inside the business started facing the reality awhile ago. However it is much harder to shift from being in the wholesale product business to a consumer service business than it is from one product format to another.

As for Tennent’s plea, that gets a big yawn. Labels have been leaking records for years and the trail of a leak usually leads back to someone working on the project, not some rogue who swiped a copy.