The "New Economy" is here. "New Media" has arrived. "Convergence" this and "Paradigm" that… the dawn of "a whole new way of making a gazillion dollars without having to actually do anything"… "Digital" this, and "Streaming" that… blah blah blah and so forth.

There has been a lot of misinformation in the media regarding the "mp3 revolution". Worries that Celine Dione will go broke run rampant across the land. Fears that Britney Spears and the "Backstreet Boys" will only make half a bazillion dollars this year make up the headlines of newspapers and magazines everywhere you look. Artists are under attack by renegade music listeners who copy their precious art, sending them to the poorhouse in droves. Well kids, no one said being an artist was gonna be easy, and you’ve already made a hell of a lot more money than you should have.

To be fair, obviously most of the anti-mp3 propaganda has been spun out of the mouths of (surprise surprise) record execs and not artists. The following is an attempt to clarify some things, and rant a bit so I can stop embarrassing myself by screaming at Magazines and Newspapers I read in public places.

I’m in a little comedy outfit called "Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie" (www.deadtroll.com). We have, over the years, created two comedy albums, "Steaming Pile of Skit" and "Live @ the Hyperbole". We’ve never been able to get a record deal, but we sold them off the stage when we performed, and people who saw us bought them. Since we never tour outside of Western Canada, our audience has been quite small. In August I started putting our album online at mp3.com just to get rid of the headache of burning cds for fans. I would inevitably lose the cheque or forget about these poor people and I needed a distributor who would print the damn things. Mp3.com let us pick the price, printed the cds and shipped them, giving us half the money for cd’s sold online. I was happy with this, but then things got even more interesting.

In about September, mp3.com started to pay their artists from a pool of $200 000 per month (American dollars). As such, we can make up to $200 bucks a month off of people who simply download and listen to our stuff for free. This isn’t a new concept. Radio stations have long had to pay royalties on the songs they broadcast (yes that’s right kids, we had streaming WIRELESS audio for years, and it was FREE!), but the listener was forced to be spoonfed the same 40 tunes over and over again, and couldn’t easily further investigate an artist they liked.

The difference then, is that mp3.com (the broadcaster) is paying us (the artist) directly, with no middle party sucking up their hefty percentage.

But EVEN IF mp3.com didn’t pay us for our stuff, I would still put it up for free.

"But Wes, you dumb fart, " I can hear you saying, "you’ll go broke!"

I’m already broke… I’m comfortable with it.

"But you should be paid for your art!"

Of course I should. And when I perform it, I am. And the more popular my stuff becomes, the more I can charge for a live performance, the only honest labour an artist does is live. Furthermore, if people dig our stuff, they’ll want the CD because they’ll want liner notes and the convenience of listening to it away from the computer, or lending it to a friend. They can buy the cd from mp3.com, who will burn, mail, and process the order, then send me half the coin (in American funds).

There’s also the fact that CDs have been grossly overpriced for 15 years, and the music listening public is fed up with it. Cds are cheaper to make than cassettes, but they cost up to twice as much. Furthermore, the new Canadian blank CD tax assumes that everyone is pirating copyrighted music and forces anyone who buys a blank cd to pay royalties to the likes of Brian Adams and Allanis Morrisette. When I buy blank CDs to burn copies of my own albums, I would rather Celine Dione not get a cut, thank you very much.

I also can’t help but point out that the fears about mp3’s ripping off artists because they’re so easy to copy are pure crap. Believe it or not, most people have had, since the 70’s and even before, the ability to record albums, make mix tapes, and lend them out to friends. In fact, it’s standard issue to make the tape deck in a home audio system able to record from the radio (in streaming analogue), so people can record artists even though they HAVEN’T PURCHASED THE RECORD. People have been pirating music for as long as there have been cassette recorders. Of course cassette tapes are of lower quality, but so are mp3s. They are NOT CD quality and anyone who tells you otherwise is full of poo. MP3 is a compression format that removes certain frequencies from the music in order to make the files smaller. A good tape deck will make just as good a copy of a song as an mp3 encoder. Furthermore, tapes are much more universally playable than mp3s, and still somehow the top 40 artists manage to make a million bucks off their album sales. Go figure.

The Music industry has been in bed with the lawmakers while screwing both consumers and artists for too long, and the mp3 revolution threatens their sexy monopoly.

Artists are not the people getting ripped off by the MP3 revolution. If artists are smart, they’ll realize that and represent themselves online.

We’ve sold more cd’s than ever before thanks to the NEW MEDIA, and video is just around the corner. Our first experiment is up, with more to come. It will also be freely available on the net, and people will be able to order a real actual ANALOGUE video tape of it if they want ultra-high full-screen resolution.

Ten years back, when we were looking for a record deal, no one thought we could find an audience. Now I'm glad they passed on us. We own our music, we share it with our audience for free, and we still make money off it. So there. Nya.