'War Stories'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
The only connection I've found between finding lyrics online and putting songs on my iPod is when reading the lyrics made me buy them.
Ah, I mis-read you.
Well that's stupid too. Unless its being used in some defamatory sense in either venue its only going to be positive (or have no effect at all). They should by all means protect their rights, but it would behoove them to come up with an easy contract for the new mediums.
I don't think the lyrics sites are seeking to pay for their content in any case; they're just using it either to sell advertising or install something on your computer.
The lyrics thing mystifies me, I don't see where they are losing anything there.
Now the DVDs make sense, you have the rights to music being used and you want to get as big a cut as you can. You don't want to take a smaller cut for a particular DVD release because that undermines your position for other deals, so maybe some deals don't get made. I doubt they are worried about the five people who are going to rip the ac3 stream, translate to mp3, and edit out the music.
I can see how they might not want to be associated with certain shows and/or plot events. But, basically a dumb idea.
As for the lyrics thing, apparently they go after those all-lyric sites, whose worst context is the amount of popups. Other than that, a place where fans go.
it would seem sensible zeitgiest-wise for the owners of the old music to make it accessable in this way. A DVD isn't going to cut into their record sales and may even encourage some.
I think the feeling of the music owners is that they have incredible leverage and they want to exploit it. It's probably worth more to them to wring the money from the TV producers than use the DVDs as a marketing tool.
I love the use of Styx's "Come Sail Away" in Freaks and Geeks, but it didn't make me want to go buy a Styx album. F&G is another show that had to fight hard to get all the music on the DVDs, and that delayed the set for a long time.
In most cases, legality is not the issue with music rights, just price. Record companies charge exhorbitantly high rates for home video rights (because they can), and anything the studios have to pay for cuts into their profit margins on DVD sales. So if you're releasing Friends, and expect to sell 12 bazillion box sets, it's worth it to buy the music rights. If you're releasing Mid-80's Cult Hit #7 and expect to only sell 2 or 3 bazillion, it's probably not.
As long as both sides are still making money on the transactions that do take place (and they clearly are), there's no incentive for either one to change their business model.
I'm the sort who will hear a song onscreen and have bought it before the commercial break. Can't do that much without the lyrics sites, and can't do it at all if it's scrubbed from the DVD (lack of commercial breaks notwithstanding).
So, in the world that's all about me, leave the sites alone and make the rights affordable.
There are a lot of songwriters out there just eking a living off of rights. It's not all Styx (which is in my head now THANKS A LOT) and if those lyrics sites started paying for content, or Universal paid what releasing Miami Vice is worth to them, it would make a big difference to them.
t /firm party line
Someone tell me that it would be perfectly fine to leave 20 minutes early.