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Prince Gets Wordy About Napster
pezpunk sent in a link to an ABC News story about Prince putting his two cents in about Napster. Prince has actually been on the cutting edge of distribution technology for years. Say what you want about his style, but Prince knows where it's at. He's been running his own label, Paisley Park, for a while, and he features artists like George Clinton.
His other rants are available here.
One point that he touches on, which is not commonly expressed, is that motivation- love vs. consumption. If you put in some work (years of it) studying music, production, sound engineering, you gradually become more able to target the median of consumer desires, and you learn how to avoid including anything that would offend a consumer- and then you get to be mainstream, possibly a million seller, if you're properly hyped.
This is not art, but commerce.
Prince has in some ways used 'commercially popular' techniques (good production, intense vocals, high squealy notes and high squealy guitar solos etc etc etc) but he is also one of the few who's genuinely shown an experimental spirit- perhaps best illustrated by one of his monster hits, 'When Doves Cry'. The production of this remains unusual but at the time that it came out, was quite shocking- sparse, largely empty, producing more impact by virtue of the sheer bareness of the track. Prince was known to record many parts in the studio and then work by subtraction, taking out this and that track and seeing what combination of parts worked best- in "When Doves Cry" this subtractive technique was carried to an extreme. It breaks all the rules for 'popular' music production, and breaks them so well that it became a breakout monster hit.
The important thing to remember about art is that it is individual, and it's not possible to achieve artistic peaks and still avoid making enemies of your work. Love and hate are two sides of the same coin- the nearer you come to some person's love, the more another person will hate what you've done. A real artist (and I do consider Prince a real artist) will ignore this, accept the hate, refuse to water down their artistic vision.
Naturally I consider my music art ;) more significantly, _only_ since I started to accept it as art have I liked it worth a damn. I produced music for years, in an agony of trying to tailor it to what I thought people would like. (This is all pre-Internet and little remains of this stuff.) It was OK- never managed to get beyond my own idiosyncracies and never succeeded in making truly commercial music. Then I started again, and for particular reasons (access to mp3.com) I decided to do some music that was just what _I_ felt like doing- to do a lot of different music based only on what I felt like playing and composing and hearing.
Since then, it's been freaking awesome! :) I've talked with a lot of other musicians, made a lot of really rabid fans, a lot of really rabid enemies, and a kinda-lot of money (to me, a couple hundred bucks is a lot). I've seen people fixate on the strangest things and be delighted, and I've had people take GREAT PAINS to convince me and anyone else reading that I'm a complete loser who's not good enough to be commercial. And I love every bit of it. My artist side was long suppressed and restrained, but now when I see someone come off all negative and totally scorn my music, I'll laugh at them and tell them to listen to stuff like the 'Hard Vacuum' noise album, or 'Bone Dragon' or 'Water Dragon' from the Dragons album which are downright weird, or I'll just sneer back at them and go off and produce some more music that they'd hate even worse. Because I do what _I_ like- I do what I think is good, and I like a lot of truly peculiar music :)
I've tried to arrange my mp3.com page so that it explains to people a little better what they're getting into- but what I'm about is not being 'the Microsoft of music' or pinning down the widest possible range of consumers. What illustrates me best is the picture of me running a roaring shortwave radio through homebrewed multiband compression and screwing with the controls to produce a definitive Noise track (White Dwarf), something which most of the world might think is just crap! But there are Noise fans out there, protesting at the tendency for industrial techno to genre-trespass into Noise charts, people who understand _immediately_ just what's being attempted in 'White Dwarf' and instantly recognise it as canonical Noise, from a hitherto unheard source. Or the image might be the composing of 'Water Dragon', spending _days_ painstakingly filling in the froth of flickering piano notes around the spacey lead piano theme, and composing a drum part that is so relentlessly experimental that it seems to stretch and contract in a peculiar disjointed rhythm- which evokes the unforgiving wasteland of the sea. You can't dance to the sea. You could drown in it. You can't understand it. It's not necessarily pretty- but there's a validity to trying to express it in sound and music- and when Prince talks about people listening to music for love of it and teaching themselves to understand it, he's not talking about making more crappy manufactured hits, he's talking about the forces that eventually got me onto my own artistic path- of people exchanging and learning from stuff that's beyond what the major labels feed 'the consumer'.
How many of you have used Napster or something like it to try and find something really _obscure_ or weird or unpopular? Never mind if you found it- that'll come. Have you searched for something that Warner Bros. would not sell you, because there's 'no market' for it? This is what Prince is really talking about. This is the reason I've so often asked for my music to be openly traded on Napster This is the only way towards cultural education now that there's no market for culturally educating people in school...
With apologies to Mark Knopfler ...
...
Look at them yo-yo's, that's the way you do it
You be an exec in the industry
That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
Money for nothing, and checks for free
That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
Let me tell you, them guys ain't dumb
Maybe get a band wrapped around your finger
Maybe get a band trapped under your thumb
We got to exploit popular artists
Keep the rights and delay the release
We got to sign more indentured servants
We got to lower their royalties
That little maggot with the lawyers and the contracts
Yeah buddy, his deals are fair
That little maggot's got his own jet airplane
That little maggot he's a billionaire
We got to exploit popular artists
Keep the rights and delay the release
We got to sign more indentured servants
We got to lower their royalties
No need to learn to play the guitar
No need to learn to play them drums
Let the bands do it, then we'll take all their money
Man, what could be more fun?
Look at that, what's that? MP3 downloads?
We'll sue 'em and we'll squawk like we're chimpanzees
That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
Money for nothing, and checks for free
We got to exploit popular artists
Keep the rights and delay the release
We got to sign more indentured servants
We got to lower their royalties
That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
You be an exec in the industry
That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
Money for nothing, and checks for free
I want my, I want my, I want my SUV
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
The cost of putting together an album is actually quite inexpensive, unless it is the recording companies (as opposed to individual bands) doing it, in which case the prices are artifically inflated by orders of magnitude.
Proof please? The average classical album costs between $100,000 and $500,000 to record (and sells 2,000-3,000 copies in its lifetime). Rock albums take much longer to record. I do not have figure on the cost to produce rock albums, but I suspect that an album which took six months to record, in a world class recording studio, with top name recording engineers, top name producers, and the most talented musicians is extremely expnesive to record. It is intuitively obvious that this is expensive to record, so please provide proof that it is "inexpensive" to record music at the same quality that the most expensively recorded music today.
Napster, GNUtella, and FreeNet have all already addressed (and solved) this issue. Bandwidth is paid by the end user (ISP fees). Servers and clients are peer to peer -- each user is paying for storage of the art, both for their personal use and for the use of others (as "servers") who wish to download said art from their local drives.
The person-to-person stealing technologies are stop-gap measures whose main goal is decetralization for criminal prosecution. The technology cannot scale to widespread music distribution, because it is primitive and fragile. Have you actually ever used Napster? The average success rate from picking a file in the search window, to successfully downloading it, is about 50%, at absolute best. The other problem is authenticity. How do I know the song is the real thing? If I download it from emusic or MP3.com, I know it is real, but if I download it from some college kiddie's dorm room in Kalamazoo, who knows what it is? The final issue is availability: the selection on Napster is dependent on the time you log in. If I log in, and nobody happens to be offering the song I want for download, I'm out of luck. With centralized severs dedicated to offering music, it is always available.
Much music is and will be free. You do not pay for music you hear on the radio, do you? No. You pay for the radio itself, and that is the end of it. When I was growing up, that was my sole source of music. It did not cost me a penny, it was free.
You definitely pay for music on the radio. Every song played on the radio gets pennies put into the copyright owner's pockets. Radio stations pay royalties for playing music, you know. You pay by permitting the mega-corporations play their jingles and sales pitches in your home. Or for college radio you pay with your tuition, public radio you pay with taxes, and community radio you pay with donations.
With digital products, where there is no scarcity whatsoever
Yes, but there is a massive scarcity of the means to professionally produce music, talented songwriters, talented musicians, and (most of all) the time required to produce the music. Look, to me "no scarcity" implies that you want to get a junior high orchestra, record them on your $400.00 Compaq with the mono speaker, and put the file on the internet for everybody to be disgusted with. With the democritization of the music business as you propose, where anybody regardless of talent or skills, can produce, record, and distribute music, the market is going to be so ridiculously saturated with just absolute crap. In some cases barriers to entry are good! As a consumer, how am I supposed to find the best music when I need to wade through five hundred files of old men singing in the shower to find one good track? Even in the current system, with scarcity I am overwhelmed - there are tens of thousands of CD's produced each year that I would like to buy, but only have money and time for a couple of hundred. When anybody can produce music, and when, moreoever, there is no distinction between amateur and professional music, it will be impossible to locate the best music.
For a long time I thought Prince was a joke, patricularly that business where he changed his name. Some time ago, I found out why he'd done it: the contract he had signed gave his masters the rights to the name 'Prince' and any name he later changed to, even if he left the label. Bound by this provision, and wanting to depart, he changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. I presume that, since he's gotten his name back, there must have been some time limit in the contract. No one I've ever spoken to about him has been aware of this story, attributing his name change to some sort of flighty 'artiste' whim. I still don't like his music, but the guy's not stupid. His opinions on Napster are therefore of interest.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Trciky one this. The exec hasn't made himself clear. The media, distribution of media, etc. is all non-free. The people who sell you the music in the store want to make money, the artist who recorded it wants to make money, the execs who look after the logistics (and they do matter - do you think that your favourite artists really could organise world tours, album launches, etc. on their own) all require a salary.
/. readers spend their lives writing algorithms. They spend their time effectively regurgitating mathematics. They often get paid for it. Hang on, does that mean that we are all claiming that mathematical algos. are not free? That you have to pay us for them? Dispicable! Well, in that case, I'd best ask my boss not to pay me anymore because all this stuff should be free.
To argue that all music should be free is a romantic notion, but one that is actually pretty hypocritical when you think about it. I like to drink lots of water, and water is free, and if anybody tried arguing against that I'd get really upset. I'm still prepared to pay for a bottle of Perrier though. In the same sense, the majority of
It is very easy for Prince to argue that the music industry is all messed up and that Napster is fantastic. It's easy because he's so damned rich that he doesn't need any more money. How did he get this money? By any chance would it be because of those execs down at the record company pushing his music? So, after he's made all this money (note: he didn't complain at the time, did he?) he now makes a sweep at the record company. He score a few popularity points, gets his name in the media, and everybody thinks he's great. Does he give his money back to the fans? Ummmm...
Ultimately, the fact music is not, and never will be, free is not due to a limitation of technology. It's because the people who make music have to eat. I know there have been some rumours going around that Michael Jackson is actually run from mains electricity, but it's not true. He eats and craps on the toilet and pays taxes and has friends and family just like the rest of us. Get used to the fact that you have no right to listen to his or any other artists performances, in exactly the same way my boss does not have the right to expect me to write code whenever he wants free of charge.
I hate this argument already. It's so clear to me now that those who insist that music should be free just haven't thought about what the consequences of that.
"The notion of copyright was not invented by artists to protect themselves from honest individuals sharing their enthusiasm about their work," he writes. "It was invented by artists to protect themselves from dishonest and hypocritical individuals and companies exploiting their work without their consent."
I couldn't put it better. It isn't the technology of Napster that is feared, it's the distribution channel.
You've got a company exec who says, "An increasing number of young people don't buy albums, so we are not only losing that immediate revenue. They are growing up with a notion that music is free and ought to be free." Who says that it shouldn't be free? Who appointed this exec God? Or, who appointed "tradition" as fact? The idea that sound is a commodity is a rather strange development that arose due to the limitations of technology and some clever businessmen.
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