Via. Freeconomics Part I – or who is paying for your Free lunch? — broadstuff and found somewhere on slashdot.
“You must be new, welcome to the Internet. Here on the Internet you are required to view any publicly held company as evil and any effort on their part to charge for a service as pure, unadulterated greed preferably attributed to their CEO or other high-ranking executive. Corporations should provide as many possible services for free, regardless of the time, capital, and human resources required to develop and run those services or products. Any efforts of corporations to charge money in voluntary exchange for their services or products is to be likened to highway robbery, extortion, or in the case of particularly large corporations, rape. I hope these guidelines have helped.”
I work closely in partnership with a music business site, MusicTank, and while those guys might seem like dinosaurs to the 2.0 crowd, there is one key issue that they are acutely aware of that always gets brushed over in the digital world. How do artists get paid? The idea of concert revenues or merchandise taking over from direct sales of music is bullshit. People will not buy things they don’t want instead of things they do. The same arguments are true of all content producers. This stuff, these people, these tracks, articles, pictures, whatever need to be paid for.
There’s so much inventory on the web — so many zillions of pages and zillions of users — that advertising isn’t working for publishers any more. So who pays, and how? I don’t really believe any of us know yet.
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Copyright was never intended to be used to persecute the public. If the public’s enjoyment of their culture is contrary to corporations’ reproduction monopolies and control over communications channels, then there’s a wee tadette of a problem.
Solutions?
1) Draconian enforcement
2) Non-copyright based revenue models
2a) Advertising
2b) Promotion (of artist’s other products)
2c) Sales
Sales? The fricking most obvious deal between artist and audience one could imagine and you can count the number of people working on enabling mechanisms on the fingers of one hand — and some of us aren’t exactly trying to keep our work in this area secret.
I suspect the problem is that no-one believes it is actually possible to sell digital art without copyright, so any lone devs that dare say it is possible are written off as complete loonies… Hi! :)
Hi Ian, you’re sounding a bit like Andrew Keen :)
Your question ‘How do artists get paid?’ assumes that artists *ought* to be paid, but I’m not so sure this is true in the way that it used to be. Until the Internet, intellectual property was inextricably linked to physical formats and the service of publishing physical media and distributing content had a value which people were prepared to pay for. Artists rightly received a slice of this in the form of royalties. But the Internet has reduced the cost of publishing and distributing to close to zero, which has wiped out most of the value of the industry, and of course artist’s royalties with it.
I would argue that for most artists there has never been a better time to be making music. You can self-publish without having to find someone to do it for you, and you can find an audience more easily than ever before. Whist it’s true that few will earn a living from music, the truth is that few people ever did anyway.
Ouch — that smarts, Tom! I never thought I would be compared to Keen, though I am pleased to be thought contrarian.
Extend the argument to writers and designers. Their stuff is on the Internet. So that makes it a free-for-all? Who’d be a musician/writer/designer in that case? Shouldn’t the Guardian sack all its writers and just get some people cutting and pasting from RSS feeds in that case?
Being a musician or writer or designer is a career, not a hobby. Though if you hippy-everything-for-free types have your way, then that will stop. People who create content, of any kind, need to get paid. Otherwise, they won’t create that content except on a hobbyist basis.
Do you want your clients to get sites and content knocked-up by hobbyists?
If artists can’t protect their IP, then their profession becomes something they can only do once they’ve finished their day-jobs at Tescos. That doesn’t sound like a wonderful future for creatives to me.
The trouble is that just because something has been a career or Supply is now practically limitless so the price is driven right down. This obviously creates a lot of losers and I sympathise with anyone whose career has been ruined, but we can’t go back now and so the sooner the music biz adapts to the economic reality and finds new ways to create value, the better. Otherwise it’ll continue to die a slow and painful death.
Anyway, Seth Godin explains this all a lot better than I:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/music-lessons.html
Arrgh, half of my comment was lost! Let me try again:
The trouble is that just because something has been a career or profession in the past, it won’t necessarily be so in the future. Economics has no notion of ‘ought to be paid’ or ‘deserve to be paid’. There’s just supply and demand.
In the past, supply was limited because the music biz performed the services of filtering (to decide what’s good), publishing, promoting and distributing music in physical formats. This limited supply balanced out demand and the industry cleaned up for years. Good for them.
Supply is now practically limitless so the price is driven right down. This obviously creates a lot of losers and I sympathise with anyone whose career has been ruined, but we can’t go back now and so the sooner the music biz adapts to the economic reality and finds new ways to create value, the better. Otherwise it’ll continue to die a slow and painful death.
Anyway, Seth Godin explains this all a lot better than I:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/music-lessons.html
Music has the same value. Nothing has changed music’s value.
Let’s at least let that one fact reassure us that the problem is not creating or adding value (except for publishers who used to add it), but in enabling a musician’s audience to exchange their value of the music, for the musician’s value of their money.
I agree Crosbie. Perhaps the problem is that music has been over-priced for years because of the friction caused by filtering and publishing in physical formats. Now the friction has been removed we’re seeing a big readjustment.
I don’t think anyone outside of the big 4 music publishers would contest the idea that music has been overpriced. The trouble is that artists got jackshit then, and nowadays they get jackshit minus the piracy tax. This is a real problem. Over in the games world Iron Lore recently shut up shop despite their creation and contribution to many great games titles. Many other games developers are switching to console-only or console-first strategies, because they are copy-protected.
To stand back and say that it’s just the way media is nowadays seems like a poor response. Do you really want that?
And lastly, while bedroom studios might suit some types of music, try telling that to a classic 4-piece guitar and drums combo. They need to find the money for studio time.
There are lots of potential solutions, btw, but they come down to internet tax at the moment. I’m prepared to pay that to support artists. Not doing that is like free-riding.
Your Internet tax simply goes 99% to the labels, of which ‘jackshit’ will still end up going to their artists.
And what of those poor artists who, whilst popular, stream their work? They may end up being listened to heavily, but why do they deserve less than a musician whose mp3 files are widely copied?
There are uncountable wrongs and disadvantages with a tax.
Far better for 1% of an artist’s loving audience to pay them directly, and the other 99% of uncaring free riders to get their music for nothing. Zero administrative overhead. No labels required. No taxation, nor census, or disbursement required. Let’s not waste anyone’s money here — despite there being queues of corporations pleading for such money to be wasted upon them.
Further reading:
http://citp.princeton.edu/symposium/?cat=5
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1281