'The internet will suck all creative content out of the world'-David Byrne
"This is is like the last fart, the last desperate fart of a dying corpse." -Thom Yorke
875 "Written music will destroy music!"
1473 "Printed sheet music will destroy hand written music!"
1877 "Cylinder recording will destroy sheet music!"
1896 "The Player Piano will destroy cylinder recording!"
1909 "Radio will destroy the Player Piano!"
1910 "Disc recording will destroy Cylinder Recording!"
1924 "Electrical recording will destroy Acoustic Recording!"
1948 "Tape Recording will destroy Disc Recording!"
Stereo, 45s, LPs, 8-tracks, cassettes, home recording, digital recording, CDs...........................................................................THE INTERNET!
Every new technology that has come along has struck fear into the heart of the music business that existed in the infinitesimal point in time. Yet, with minor bumps and dips, the music industry continued to grow over the last century.
"...appearing to be elitist and Luddite is not a good way to win over today’s music fans to one’s cause..." -Dave Alvin
December 7, 1999 was the day the music died, for a generation.
When BMG filed their suit against Napster, it showed that they were willing to keep fighting the long, hard, slog with the same Generals, soldiers, weapons, and ammunition that they had been using since the era of World War 1.
Byrne and Yorke - great artists, I love their music - are each experiencing life as an already successful musician, with a certain audience, a revenue stream, and marketing that is fairly easy since the hard work was done decades ago. Alvin, similarly experienced, but never on the same level as Talking Heads or Radiohead.
The other 10,000,000 musicians in the world putting music out there, live a different existence.
There is more music being created by more people than at any time in history (good? the same percentage of good to bad as there has ever been) and we now, have for the first time, a means to distribute one-to-all. In the past, distribution was few-to-many.
The filters that existed were many: technology limited recording and distribution to the few, individuals or corporate, with enough money to have the equipment, make the distributable media, and to get that to consumers. Record stores and radio stations couldn't possibly play everything, so they filtered by what they could get, what they liked, what sold toothpaste, what they were bribed to play...Teh media couldn't write or talk about all music, so they filtered by what would sell magazines, etc.,
Yet, through all the filters, what came out was, in many but not all cases, the cream rising to the top.
As the interned grew from a few defense department messages to the post-Compuserve wild west it was in the '90s, files of all sorts were trades as they could be, dependent on bandwidth limitations. Alta Vista was my favorite search engine at one time, and it had Audio and Video search, where you could find snippets of things people were sharing. Did this violate copyright? Even though law, like the DMCA, has been passed, it is still a gray area. Our copyright law is very liberal and very protective of creative artists, and does need to be upgraded from time to time, but Congress has shown their ignorance to art and technology while handing exclusive copyright protection to distant heirs and gigantic corporations - the exact opposite of what our Founding Fathers envisioned with their masterful take on copyright, one of the few rights enumerated in the original Constitution.
Kids trading song files on the internet did not profit from this trading - only the magnificent industry giants who supplied the bandwidth did. These kids might have deprived record companies and artists of some revenue, but this is the glaring example of where the entrenched industry did not recognize a change in technology and, fat and happy with their '70s and '80s success that surely would never go away, refused to embrace and monetize for themselves and their artists.
Instead, the industry plowed along as if physical media was the only media, replaced LPs and Cassettes with CDs, and forgot that once the audio was digital, they themselves had opened the barn doors wide.
The dream I have had, echoed by many technologists and artists, is to have every work of audio or video in what we now call a Cloud. These would be protected by copyright law, and as such their trading would be monetized as allowed by law. Things would be allowed to fall into the Commons as our Founding Fathers intended, to encourage more art to be made. Don't tell me you can't compete with free, unless you have never bought air, water, dirt, a bible...
The RIAA owns a technology called BigChampagne.com. It tracks audio files being traded. It shows consistently that the files that are traded most are the songs that are purchased most. Does this argue that without file trading they would be purchased more or that with file trading they are marketed better? Let's discuss that for the next few lifetimes.
I can tell you, David Byrne and Thom Yorke, that while Spotify might pay you a pittance, it's actually more per-listen that radio pays you per-listener. We need to collect and distribute a Performance Royalty in the US the way the rest of the civilized world does, but that's another discussion. I can tell you that, as hard as you worked in the beginning of your career, you had a record label that didn't want a 360Deal from you, that would have dropped you before Psycho Chicken and Creep caught on - today's reality.
We, who are not yet household names, have always had like you a few independent radio stations to take a risk on playing new music, but basically, opportunity is unavailable in 2013 that was available in 1976. What we have is a much cheaper way to distribute physical media - I did that independently in 1984 and it was much more expensive for studio time, disc pressing, etc. than replicating CDs is today - and a nearly limitless, though fragmented, way to reach anyone with a computer, tablet or mobile phone.
Bob Lefsetz may be right, the tail may be shrinking, but it's our tail. We need to generate our own success stories, and not rely, as with established artists, on a failed business model that only supports the 1% of artists who can immediately enrich the existing industry.
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