The Recording Academy today announced the winners of its annual Special Merit Grammy Awards, with Steve Jobs being named a recipient of a Trustees Award for 2012. The Trustees Award category is designed to recognize those who have made significant contributions to music in areas other than performance.
As former CEO and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs helped create products and technology that transformed the way we consume music, TV, movies, and books. A creative visionary, Jobs' innovations such as the iPod and its counterpart, the online iTunes store, revolutionized the industry and how music was distributed and purchased. In 2002 Apple Computer Inc. was a recipient of a Technical GRAMMY Award for contributions of outstanding technical significance to the recording field. The company continues to lead the way with new technology and in-demand products such as the iPhone and iPad.
A ceremony honoring the winners of Trustees Awards, Lifetime Achievement Awards, and Technical Grammy Awards will be held on Saturday, February 11th, with special recognition also being made during the main Grammy Awards ceremony the following day.
Jobs is one of several recipients, including Brazilian composer and arranger Antonio Carlos Jobim, spoken word soul performer Gil Scott-Heron, and audio engineer Roger Nichols, who will be honored posthumously.
Top Rated Comments
???
apparently you didn't read the story.
So you think those AudioGalaxy/Napster/etc downloads people were doing must have been generating revenue for the music companies after all?
And I am getting tired of losers spreading this same lame excuse why contemporary so-called art plain and simple sucks and why the industry (see that word, it's "Industry", not "creative people") supposedly suffers so badly.
Let's get some simple facts straight here. Throughout human history, only a fistful of musicians, writers and artists actually ever managed to make a living with their work. And even those artists who managed to get published always only received a fraction of the money that was made with their work -- most of it stayed with the producers and record labels, what on the streets is nowadays called the "Content Mafia".
As a matter of fact, the mass of professional musicians make their money with LIVE PERFORMANCES - NOT with CD sales. For somebody who is not Metallica, CDs are just another form of marketing that brings people to their concerts. Just ask the next professional Jazz musician that you meet if it's true or not. Some of the greatest names in Jazz barely managed to pay for the bus tickets to get to their own concerts, and having records published didn't help them there either - and I'm talking about a time twenty years before there even was an Internet. Only few get rich by selling CDs - and those few usually have their OWN record labels, like Madonna.
There was a time before the Internet when record labels still had a function: They had a distribution channel, they paid for the ad campaigns, they drowned radio stations in their products and they had the studios.
Well, studios can be rented per day or even per hour, and most bands WITHOUT record contracts do this and pay for it with their own money. An adequate studio can be rented for a few hundred bucks per day, so it's not unaffordable.
Now with the Internet being the default distribution channel for music, nobody needs CD factories anymore.
In other words: The production costs have gone against zero. You still need talent, though. And talent is a rare resource.
So the remaining function of a record label is advertising the "product" - traditional ad campaigns are expensive, but I think that only mainstream garbage really needs those ads because it wouldn't sell otherwise.
It's not the freeloaders that killed the industry. It was modern technology that made that industry OBSOLETE. Like somebody said, nobody uses carrier pigeons anymore, people moved on to using eMail and SMS instead.
So, actually you're right, but for different reasons. The record and book industries are dying because of the Internet. There's a new method of content delivery available now that made them entirely obsolete. This changed everything for the companies, because they are no longer needed. Musicians and Writers, on the other side, have finally become FREE from the power of those big bullies, and especially independent artists are not complaining about the changed rules.
The movie industry will also have to adept to the new media, or it will die, too. I don't know about you, but I don't want to buy DVDs or BluRays anymore and I certainly do not want to go to a movie theater anymore. I want the content delivered directly to my computer, WITHOUT DRM, and at a reasonable price - not the fantasy prices that iTunes still charges for inferior quality rips, and definitely not for the same price that I would have to pay for a physical medium that I don't even want anymore.
Production costs of a movie are MUCH higher than they are for a novel or a music album, but this has always been a problem and it didn't magically appear when the Internet became a mass medium. Interestingly enough, the producers of the James Bond franchise found ways to already have their movies in the black before they even hit the theaters -- product placement pays well, it seems. So apparently there are ways to solve this problem.
The computer gaming industry also enters a phase where it is getting harder and harder for them to sell software licenses. Crytek and other studios are planning to launch their next blockbuster titles FOR FREE and they plan to generate their revenue via in-game sales for certain digital content that hardcore players might want to have.
But traditional software companies face the same challenges. The Open Source Community changed the way how users want to obtain software and software licenses forever. It has become harder to sell Windows Server licenses when you can get Linux Server software for free. It also has become harder to justify license costs for client operating systems when most users spend 95% of their time ONLINE using a WEB BROWSER. Firefox has become the operating system for most - not Windows or Linux or Mac OS X.
The Internet has changed all that, and I think the process is still in its infancy. Companies who want to survive in this so-called "new economy" have to adept or they will extinct like the dinosaurs that most of them actually are.
And yes, I am a content producer myself. I write fiction and software and used to be a musician in my earlier years. But strangely enough, you don't hear me complaining about the freeloaders who "steal" everything.
Steve deserved it years ago!