Jaron Lenier’s “You Are Not a Gadget” is probably well-suited for the zeitgeist of austerity-chic, and I predict endless positive reviews from newspaper writers delighted to have someone unmistakably of the Web somewhat on their side. Lanier joins St. Bono in the list of unlikely critics of the Web’s admittedly dismissive approach towards intellectual property rights. I suspect this will start becoming a fashionable opinion as newspaper writers start to think that heavy-fisted IP would offer their employers some chance at profitability again.
Bono writes,
A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.
What a load of shit. First, blaming ISPs for playing any role in this is more than a bit like blaming the telephone company for taking business away from the post office. If anything, ISPs would love for the BitTorrents of the world to go away and stop using the bandwidth they can’t figure out how to charge people for.
Leaving that aside, Bono is still barking mad if he thinks the environment of today is worse for a “young, fledgling songwriter” than the world that one Paul Hewson walked into some decades ago. The recording business was built upwards from the realities of distribution and promotion, which dictated a strategy focused around a limited number of mass-market products. Because the buying public was fickle and loved novelty, the labels were forced to invest in a large catalog of artists in hopes of finding the occasional winner.
For a very few artists like Paul Hewson and David Evans, there were great rewards to be found once you reached the Mt. Olympus of being a multi-platinum artist signing your second recording contract. That part is important, because it goes almost without saying that the first contract you signed was highly unlikely to put much money in your pocket–the labels had to cover all their losing bets somehow. You could say that it was communism in a fairly pure sense, but I digress. This system worked very well indeed for Paul Hewson, who has enjoyed a life of ego-gratification on a scale not seen since Roman emperors watched lions dining in the Colosseum.
The most likely fate for a young artist–even one of great talent–is not to have his or her work pirated to oblivion: it is to be utterly, completely, and hopelessly ignored. And with the major-label focus on top 40-contender acts, there was nothing worse to be than a cult favorite.
Today, the world seems to be moving towards almost nothing *but* cult favorites. If the Pirate Bay has made the world harder for musicians, it certainly does not seem to have completely discouraged many of them. Not only is music becoming a more pervasive part of life, with 16GB portable players in the pocket of every person under the age of Mick Jagger, the range of sounds, of influences, of voices seems wider than ever before.
Pauli
January 19, 2010
Dude, you are sooooo right on this. Do you know how much it cost me to get major electronic distribution (itunes, napster, amazon, etc.) for my defunct band? $55 per cd. Sure, you have to record the material, but that's easier/cheaper now that it even was 20 years ago.
But this means that anybody who wants to check me out can download a song for 99c. They don't have to go to one of the 10 stores that carried our catalog on the right day before they sold out of the 5 copies in stock and fork over $15 for a CD. If I was still promoting the band, I'd be throwing around handbills and pounding signs on interstate exits with web-links ('til I got a warning) and blogging the band like crazy with free MP3 downloads and cross marketing with musical buddies.
So in most ways, there are thousands more opportunies for exposure now, and like you suggest, people wanting to steal your stuff is a *good* problem. So I honestly don't know what Bono is talking about, nor why anyone assumes that his talent on stage automatically translates into any sort of wisdom about how “young, fledgling songwriters” should be able to subsist. I'll tell you how I did: day job. Glad I kept it, too–we can't all be Bono.