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The Future of Music Conference
wiredog writes: "The Washington Post reports on the Future of Music conference. A gathering of musicians,labels, music publishers, unions, lawyers and others. There's also an overview of the pay sites, none of which seem worth the effort of looking at." A good recap on the conference that we mentioned earlier.
Most people out there wouldn't mind paying for quality music. But when you combine the watered down crap put out by the majors with the clearly adversarial attitude of the RIAA towards us music buying folks I can't help but think that they are getting what they deserve.
Long live the free market. The genie is clearly out of the bottle.
-- Remember Johnny,
But, then again, maybe not.
Any field which has a future dictated by lawyers, other than the legal field itself (and, maybe, politics), is in trouble. If the industry was interested in giving artists a fair shake, they'd leave their sharks and sheisters at home and deal with the artists as creative partners, not product to be bought, sold, manipulated, robbed, pruned, and dismissed. And that's such a fantasy I can scarcely believe I thought of it.
The artists can't budge (what are they going to give up? They don't have rights to their music, their name, sometimes not even their own style of music. Most of them don't get paid. Many don't get much despite their success) and the studios beat strawmen to death (like Tower-fucking-Records is somehow to blame), never address serious issues, and have their cadre of bloodsuckers sitting at the table the whole time, just to say, "The future of music is the present of music." Nothing's going to change. I'd say it was a game of control, but, well, games have some competition, some odds for the other guys to win out. That's a fat chance, here.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
We all remember the "Tragedy of the Commons" lesson back in basic economics class: the commons is an open green field (common property, hence the name) where all the residents of a village are allowed to graze their sheep free of charge, with no limitations. The tragedy of the title comes about when all the villagers, beholden to no one as to the use of the commons, blithely allow their sheep to overgraze the precious grass. Soon there is no grass for anyone, because everyone got too greedy.
The analogy with the music "industry" is clear.
Excellent point, but there's something that should be made clearer. The reason that the limited land that was the "commons" was overgrazed was because the nobles had already taken most of the land from the people. Now make the analogy and it becomes even better. Corporations (nobles) have taken culture and turned it into a commodity, thus cheapening and plasticizing (overgrazing) it. They keep wanting more and more that once belonged to the commons; a few of the artists gather fortune and fame, while others are ignored and work at other jobs. Before all this happened, artists worked on a small scale for a small audience, and yes, they probably did something else for a living, but they were respected members of the community. Now they are either ciphers or hyped up false gods in the eyes of mass media.
Mark my words, the real terrifying part of what the music industry fears is not song trading - it's artists connecting to the community without middlemen, without "the star-making machinery behind the popular song" (J. Mitchell). It's people deciding that what they download from Joe Blow's web site is as entertaining as what they could buy at Tower Records on an RIAA label. The industry is trying the same kind of freeze-out and trash talking tactics with today's real music and the way it's distributed that they tried in the 50's and 60's with that awful rock and roll and those uppity independent labels that were releasing a lot of it. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. Probably in the '10s they'll learn how to deal with the new world of music, but by that time, much of what they're used to will be irrelevant. I have news for the execs. The reason they can't make money on an artist before they sell 500,000 units is they spend too much money recording and promoting them, too much effort sterilizing and marketing them so they might, might be a big, big hit and make them zillions. Meanwhile, artists who record themselves and throw out their goods to whoever will listen to them often break even after a few thousand sales. They'll never be big, but they don't care.
Gosh, if they have digital rights management on every digital device in existence, I sure hope that doesn't prevent people like me from recording our own music and distributing it for nothing, if we want to. Wanna bet they'll try stopping us?
Yes, the thought that music should be free for the listener scares them. The thought that it should be free for the artist scares them even more.