Dear Mr. Girl Talk
I didn’t pay for your new album, and when you had me select a reason explaining why I didn’t pay for it, I chose “I don’t value music made from sampling.”
This is not actually true — I most definitely value music made from sampling — but I’m honestly a bit put off by the way you’ve made a career out of exploiting uncleared samples of extremely recognizable songs, and I’m not eager to support that. If you somehow cleared the samples, I probably would’ve dropped a couple dollars at the least. Either way, I can’t really say that I’m a big fan, though you’ve done a few tracks that I’ve enjoyed.
Matthew- I couldn’t agree more.
We just did a post about that very issue over at Burst Labs.
Copying my comment from Matt’s blog at Burst Labs (I’m too lazy to write another response and I’ve blogged enough about fucking Girl Talk today):
I think this argument [that Girl Talk has huge balls to be asking us to pay for something he stole from someone else, without asking] would hold more water if you were talking about the release of Night Ripper, which had a fixed price. By offering the album in a “pay what you want” format, Girl Talk is saying “hey guys, wanna give me some bucks? no? okay then, party on.” Also, unlike Radiohead (I think) paying nothing gets you the same quality (320kbps) as paying (correct me if I’m wrong).
As a person who is the polar opposite of creative, I can’t empathize with the idea of him thieving someone else’s “hard work/blood, sweat, tears, etc.” I do understand it’s a gray area. But I also really fucking like it, and think that he’s, in a way, giving a lot of these artists free-ish publicity.
I also think in the grand scheme of things, Girl Talk is too small time to matter. It seems like a big deal to us (I had to stop listening this morning because I was getting too pumped, totally inappropriate for work) but people “in the know” with music are a small portion of the consumer market, right?
I agree wholeheartedly with kia on this one. As for the same quality debate, I think there was an option to get lossless (aka. FLAC) tracks if you paid more than $10 for the album, but I just opted forthe mp3s.
Source: perpetua
