Yourself versus Your Zombie-Self

This is not about Halloween. It is about a strange world with a bizarre copyright system and record industry: Your own work can be used to compete with your own work.

 

Here's news: It's Radiohead versus Radiohead! While Radiohead had previously announced to release their new album "In Rainbows" on their own on December 3rd, their previous record company decided to release all the previous Radiohead album, which they own the rights of, as a box-set just 7 days later, as an aggressive response to the fact that Radiohead decided not to continue the contract with them.

Can an ordinary person tell the difference? Can even a fan tell the difference? In fact, can a fan even be zealous enough to follow through the band's principles, i.e. not support their previous record company by not buying the box-set, instead of succumbing to their own desires?

Of course, it's not like Radiohead will lose money in this case. It's still their work. The difference is, in the former case they earn 100% of what they created, while in the latter they earn perhaps less than 10%.

A record company is supposed to be simply a company that helps an artist to advertise, reproduce and distribute his work. Back in the days, it was necessary because it would be impossible for an artist to raise money to get their own record reproduction equipment, and to get a crew to advertise and distribute their records. And of course, after decades of lack of negotiation skills, artists lose their grounds to entrepreneurs, and nowadays artists only earn less than 10% of what they created, and get locked into long "six album deals". Six albums is most band's or singer's lifetime, if they are lucky enough to release two.

I can foresee this happening to anybody, including myself, because I hardly own any rights to my current works either. Say, if my company were bought, I would own nothing more, despite 100% of the artwork and user interface design comes from my hand.