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Reflections On the Less-Cool Effects of Filesharing
surpeis writes "This snub is an attempt to point the finger at something I feel has been widely ignored in the ever-lasting debate surrounding (illegal) filesharing, now again brought in the spotlight by the Pirate Bay trial. I should state that I am slightly biased, as I have been running my own indie label for some years, spanning about 30 releases. It's now history, but it was not filesharing that got the best of us, just for the record." (surpeis's argument continues below.)
I try as far as humanly possible to view the debate from all angles, and before entering the music biz myself, I was a strong believer in Internet as the driving force to develop new markets. Since then life has taught me a lot, and as said I will try to share one of my major concerns in this (hopefully) short snub.
My observation is based on a lot of trying and failing, as well as being a moderate user of filesharing myself — mainly to check out stuff I read about but cannot get my hands on in the local store back here in Norway.
My concern is about this argument, which has been seen in most any debate about this subject for the last 10 years, usually formulated roughly as below:
"Filesharing will provide massive marketing to new artists, and drive forward a new and more dynamic music market."
I beg to differ.
One thing that has become more and more obvious to me is that the power of the market more than ever is still safely held by the biggest corporations in the music biz. I will try to explain why.
If we use TPB as an example, they have about 10M visitors per day, which gives us a good base for pulling out stats. If you look at their Top100 list at any given time, you will find exactly 0.00% artists that are not (major) label signed. This might not be very surprising, as TPB naturally would reflect the music market in general.
But if one starts thinking about it, it has the ironic effect that TPB is a driving force of consolidating the market power of the major labels rather than driving forward any new music. The conclusion has to be that "pirates" are just as little resistant to the major label marketing as any other person. Even though there are thousands and thousands of artists out there that want their music to be shared and listened to, they are widely and effectively ignored by the masses. In fact, one might say that TPB and the likes are countering the development of new markets, simply because the gap between the heavily marketed music and 'the others' is wider than ever, when the bare naked truth about peoples taste in music is put into such a system.
This puts a heavy responsibility on the pirates, one that I don't think they are aware of nor able to handle. The day we find the top crop of the aforementioned artists that are actually free to share on the top 100 list, we have a winner. Until then the only thing that we will see "die" is the small indies that cannot benefit from heavy marketing. Thus, more market power is given to the major labels, and all of us reading this will be dead and buried long before they stop making a reasonable income from selling oldies and goldies, radio play, publishing, etc.
The actual 'mystery' is why the major labels don't see this themselves, and continues to take services like TPB to court. They are, and I'm pretty sure about this, the actual winners in the ongoing war. The price paid is extending the status quo when it comes to growing new markets.
So, ladies and gentlenerds: Are we really driving forth the music scene of the future? Or are we actually turning into useful idiots keeping the arch-enemy strong and healthy while the suppliers of correctives (indies, free music) are effectively kept out of the loop? What could possibly be done (technically or socially) to provoke changes to this and hit the major labels where it actually hurts?"
My observation is based on a lot of trying and failing, as well as being a moderate user of filesharing myself — mainly to check out stuff I read about but cannot get my hands on in the local store back here in Norway.
My concern is about this argument, which has been seen in most any debate about this subject for the last 10 years, usually formulated roughly as below:
"Filesharing will provide massive marketing to new artists, and drive forward a new and more dynamic music market."
I beg to differ.
One thing that has become more and more obvious to me is that the power of the market more than ever is still safely held by the biggest corporations in the music biz. I will try to explain why.
If we use TPB as an example, they have about 10M visitors per day, which gives us a good base for pulling out stats. If you look at their Top100 list at any given time, you will find exactly 0.00% artists that are not (major) label signed. This might not be very surprising, as TPB naturally would reflect the music market in general.
But if one starts thinking about it, it has the ironic effect that TPB is a driving force of consolidating the market power of the major labels rather than driving forward any new music. The conclusion has to be that "pirates" are just as little resistant to the major label marketing as any other person. Even though there are thousands and thousands of artists out there that want their music to be shared and listened to, they are widely and effectively ignored by the masses. In fact, one might say that TPB and the likes are countering the development of new markets, simply because the gap between the heavily marketed music and 'the others' is wider than ever, when the bare naked truth about peoples taste in music is put into such a system.
This puts a heavy responsibility on the pirates, one that I don't think they are aware of nor able to handle. The day we find the top crop of the aforementioned artists that are actually free to share on the top 100 list, we have a winner. Until then the only thing that we will see "die" is the small indies that cannot benefit from heavy marketing. Thus, more market power is given to the major labels, and all of us reading this will be dead and buried long before they stop making a reasonable income from selling oldies and goldies, radio play, publishing, etc.
The actual 'mystery' is why the major labels don't see this themselves, and continues to take services like TPB to court. They are, and I'm pretty sure about this, the actual winners in the ongoing war. The price paid is extending the status quo when it comes to growing new markets.
So, ladies and gentlenerds: Are we really driving forth the music scene of the future? Or are we actually turning into useful idiots keeping the arch-enemy strong and healthy while the suppliers of correctives (indies, free music) are effectively kept out of the loop? What could possibly be done (technically or socially) to provoke changes to this and hit the major labels where it actually hurts?"
The assumption is that pirated music should favor the less known artists somehow? Why would anyone be surprised that download statistics mirror sales and radio stats in general? It's just another outlet, but it CAN create awareness if sparked properly by other means
... you run an indie emo music label?
This guy makes a big claim, that filesharing services such as TPB are hurting indie artists, but provides abosolutely no evidence to back it up. There is absolutely no evidence against this either: "Filesharing will provide massive marketing to new artists, and drive forward a new and more dynamic music market."
The closest thing to evidence he has is a list showing that the Top 100 contains only popular stuff. Duh. Not saying he is wrong. I have always thought that the "we are helping indie artists" was overplayed by freeloaders such as myself who like to get something for nothing. But this guy wrote too many paragraphs to supply no evidence.
If we limited commercial copyright to 5-10 years, then it would hugely help new artists. By reducing the value of the back-catalogues, it would mean a strong incentive for publishers and music-labels to support new music.
Unless people are exposed to new music, through word of mouth or otherwise, they won't know its out there. For instance, there might be a song written that resonates with my soul and will change my life, but if its made by an indy artist in norway, how will i know its out there?
File-sharing is an on-demand service, people don't browse through looking for titles of songs that sound nifty (that's what pandora is for, finding music relevant to their interests), they punch the name of a new release dvd into the search box and hope axxo has ripped, encoded, and uploaded it. Why do they seek out these movies? Because they were made aware of it. Say that I tell you to seek out the movie called Brazil. You might seek it out, but why? Because I (someone) told you to.
I thought all of the above was obvious, filesharing is not the step 1 in the following, but it might go something like this:
The hypothetical "P2P as marketing" steps. (not saying this is correct, but it was always my understanding that this was how it worked whenever people argued that p2p was GOOD for artists).
1. People find out about your band(s).
2. People search for those bands in TPB or their p2p client.
3.People fall in love with the music.
4. ???
5. Profit!
Leave out step 1 and there is no Profit!. And no, steps 1 and 2 are not reversible for 99% of the population. Also, i'm not going to go into what is required to fill in step 4.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
That was a very poor argument. You're basing your argument on the top 100 torrents, this is like an inverse of the "long tail" argument. But that's the only data you have, since you can't look at the top 100,000 torrents.
There are other ways to look at this. For example, I used to be active on usenet in some specialist binaries newsgroups. We traded obscure music in our genre, none of this was new or of wide interest, it was definitely a niche. I did one vinyl rip and restoration of a very obscure LP that I might have one of the only existing copies, it took weeks to restore and clean up all the pops and clicks. That rip was traded back and forth repeatedly. Then all of a sudden, a new remastered CD of the album came out. I'm convinced that repeated trading of my vinyl rip proved demand and the record company was watching, and decided to remaster and rerelease it.
Now if that (admittedly anonymous and unsupported) anecdote doesn't convince you (and why should it) then the mere existence of niche trading sites (on usenet and torrent trackers) should convince you. Take a look, there are plenty of them, within easy reach.
If you're going to argue that the most easily available torrents are the most easily available mass-trade products (like top 40 music) then you've found the perfect set of stats to prove your point. Maybe you shouldn't form your hypothesis and then go looking for data to fit it.
I think the poster is making the mistake of trying to pigeon-hole 'pirates' into a category of tech-savvy computer nerds out to liberate the indie musicians from the suffocating embrace of the RIAA and Big Media and enforce a massive paradigm shift upon the distribution and consumption of entertainment. Sure, such a demographic is no doubt largely represented among the 20 million or whatever Pirate Bay visitors, but I'd wager that an equally significant proportion are just your typical Joe Sixpack consumer with enough technical knowledge to download a torrent - teenage girls downloading the High School Musical soundtrack, bored housewives and college students downloading the latest episode of Lost and so on. So bemoaning the fact that the 'pirates' appear to be downloading the exact mass-produced tat that the same 'pirates' are supposed to be railing against seems, to me, to be disingenuous.
On the one hand, it may seem counter-productive that the majority of media being torrented is largely big-label and megacorp product because these 'civilly disobedient' keyboard warriors decry it and should boycott it completely instead. However, on the other hand, it may help the ultimate cause of filesharers by highlighting the fact that the pirate demographic cuts huge swathes and that it is mostly normal people who don't see a problem with sharing files with eachother, rather than a bunch of fringe computer nerds who make a convenient target for media types and politicians.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Special treatment? All the time I've heard about how the labels control music, it's about how they control the radio and tv ads, they control the shelf space, they make sure you don't get heard. So on TBP you're all equal, everybody downloads whatever they want from every label, everyone got access to your music no matter how obscure. Everyone's free to put together their own favorites or collections of music and share it with others without payola to get on the radio station's A-list. TBP is not going to solve the problem that people don't WANT your music, if that's what you think. Even though it's all formula-based, you realize they didn't just come up with the formula by accident right? It's sorta the point to hit the mainstream with it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You're missing the point of the essay. The author's point is that the old promotion models still work pretty damn well; this is why the top 100 on The Pirate Bay is all major label artists. So, overall, even if the major labels are suffering right now because of the breakdown of the distribution models, they're still going to come out as winners.
Are you adequate?
Using TPB's Top 100 is a terrible example of 'pirating's effect' on.... well.... anything. It almost looks like an attempt to use the media hype around the trial as advertising itself, and no real a slashdot substance. Too bad the band wasn't mentioned.
Seriously though. I'm sorry, but little evidence with a bad conceptualization of cause/effect..
I personally have come across 90% of indie bands on bittorrent, because I cant find them anywhere else. Whether I buy after that, is up to me, yes. But theres a 0% chance Ill buy if I never hear or know about them. And I wont hear or know by simply looking at TPB. Or any other similar service.
Are you new to Slashdot? One of the most frequent topics of discussion here for almost a decade is how giving software away under the GPL or similar licenses can work quite well, because one can still sell support.
Personally, most films I rate highly were produced through a substantial amount of private patronage or state arts subsidies. Piracy isn't much of a threat when the bills are already paid.
When music was first (largely) being distributed via offerings like mp3.com and Napster, there was the ability to browse by genre and mine down to find various other bands you might like. There was lots of indie bands making their way to the surface, similar to Apples "genius" feature in itunes.
p2p is only a file sharing protocol, you still need to know what you're looking for before you can download anything, thus people are only going to download stuff they already know about.
If you want to unearth cool indie bands, you'll need a more traditional site with intuitive groupings to showcase them.
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
The less-cool effects of filesharing are by far outweighted by the cool effects of filesharing.
Filesharing is a product of technological advance. As every other technical advance before that, it has a negative effect on people whose business model comprised manual production of a certain product.
That way you also can write lengthy articles seemingly fraught with meaning about the less-cool effects of refrigerators, which made thousands of hard-working and family-feeding ice-collectors and ice-sellers unemployed. You could write about the less-cool effects of mechanized looms, which made hundreds of thousands unemployed and left to starving in the 19th century. In general, you could write general pamphlets against any kind of automatisation technology since it makes manual work not needed any more.
But in the end, you also will have to face the fact that you wont in any way be able to stop and wind back the clock of time and that the general market for "copies" of any kind has ended. With today's technology, we can replicate and distribute works of any kind ourselves and do not need you and your services any more. As somebody here said, "today, we are all printers". It may be true that in such a society there will be less new content created in total, but with free filesharing, we all will have access to more total content. The sole fact that you created something does not give you any kind of imaginary right to control how people will use it and how often they will copy and share it with other people. Also we people do not in any way grant you such rights, absolutely acknowledging that you may stop creating and publishing new works. We simply value our god given rights to free speech and free echange of information and culture than your imaginary, artificial rights to censor such natural human behavior in order to give you an incentive to "increase production".
The age of artificial scarcity and for-profit censorship has ended.
Enter the age of sharing and caring. Don't worry. It's going to be alright. :-)
Using TBP download stat's as a source that people don't want to download non mainstream artists music isn't valid. People download music from TPB because they 1. Don't have access to it in their region, or 2. don't want to pay for it, but they knew what they were looking for ahead of time.
On the other hand with Indie music there are much better sources to distribute music in a p2p setting, such as Jamendo. It's better organized for Creative Commons music searches then TBP, hosts its own tracker, and offers direct downloads for content, in case the seeder ratio is low. Artists can classify their music based on style.
TBP and self promotion have nothing to do with each other. Youtube, and Jamendo are about promotion, TPB is about distributing in mass quantities. Once your indie gets huge overnight and you can't keep up with the requests for downloads, then you put your torrent on TPB, and they'll get it out there for you, but until then, promote.
I have never heard someone call their own actions a snub, and even if I had, this would not be one.
What you have written is a 'rebuttal'. When you 'snub', you dismiss, insult, or frustrate the expectations of someone who has expectations of you specifically.
Mostly I think the accepted linguistic use is that a snub is what the second party or a third party determines. It's not up to the snubber to decide if it's a snub or not.
Can anyone point to other examples of people calling their own actions a snub, in advance?
Probably. But I think the fundamental reason small labels and independent artists are struggling is because they are not publishing music that appeals to a broad range of consumers. The big labels are pretty good about picking out stuff that sells, and artists tend to gravitate towards larger labels. As a result, the smaller independent labels mainly get music that was not accepted by any of the big labels. This is a very narrow niche market that appeals to a very small number of people. All the statistics are saying is that the big labels are doing an extremely good job of picking and promoting music with broad appeal. Of course, that renders such music rather bland, but that's the price of having broad appeal.
I'm not sure how pirates figure into this. If anything, piracy hurts big labels much more than small ones. Small artists typically have more devout fans that would probably be much more likely to support the artists by buying their records. They also don't have a pre-existing business model that's based on selling a small number of hits in extremely large volumes.
what about the ability of major record labels to recruit "indie" music? No matter how you look at it, it's damn tempting to give a good share of the money they promise you'll get in exchange for the publicity that you'll receive. Sure some might just love music and realize that their talent might get them to that point eventually, but we all know too well that most are impatient and see this as an instant "big ticket". The only way to truly get rid of these companies is to have some way for the artists to be massively publicized routinely for nothing (or something close). But we all know that greed will make this extremely difficult.
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The phenomenon described in the article saddens me, but it is supported by theory. I have worried about this based on my limited reading about network theory. The popularity of a cultural work is largely a result not of any inherent qualities of the work itself, but of of the activities of the audience. If I like a piece of music, I am likely to tell my friends. They tell their friends, and so on and so on. (This is preferential attachment in a scale-free network.) So you end up with a small number of hits and a large number of also-rans. This is a power law distribution with its long tail. It explains why success in hit-driven fields is so unpredictable: much of the value doesn't come from the original work. The thing is, the easier it is for the audience to communicate among themselves (whether to talk about the work, or to actually distribute it), the larger the effect can be. When distribution and communication become easier, this enables the further concentration of attention on the hits. That seems to be the phenomenon described here. Someone else perhaps can comment on reasons this might not happen. I certainly find I read more widely as a result of blogs and the Internet, so it's not necessarily all bad. Another consequence of this argument is that copyright is unjust. Popularity is not just an arbitrary metric. It actually reflects real value being created. As people listen to a piece of music, for example, they increase its cultural significance. They associate it with events in their lives. They attach meaning to it. They reinterpret it. When a creative work becomes a hit it is transformed, acquiring significance and meaning and value it didn't have before. Think of the tune to the American national anthem for example: it was once just a drinking song. Here in Canada we can see this clearly with the old theme to Hockey Night in Canada. Over the years people came to see it as the soundtrack to their lives. Well, copyright reserves the profits from and control over a hit for its authors. Nix that: typically it reserves them for a few big media companies. Regardless though, the audience who created so much of that value - indeed in many cases the vast majority of that value - are locked out. The rightsholders free-ride on the effort of others, while those others are not permitted to transmit the meanings and value they gave to the work. From that perspective, one approach might be to open up those hits to reinterpretation by others (i.e. derivative works). Then instead of being locked out by the structure of the network, indie artists can be part of it (and leverage it for their own works). And in fact we are seeing a lot of this with remixes - creativity that copyright places outside the law.
Agreed. The author seems to be implying that he was promised P2P would solve all his marketing needs. As a distribution system there is only one thing it reliably does: distribution.
True, but I think there's more to it than that.
Yes, P2P doesn't solve marketing needs. But it also does something else: drive distribution costs to 0. This is the critical issue: Right now, while the big labels are still fat off of profits from non-P2P, they use those profits to market, and they conquer all markets that way - non-P2P and otherwise.
But once P2P is the main game, and it's just a matter of time, then the situation will be radically different. The big labels and the big artists won't have those non-P2P sources of cash, so they won't be able to flood the planet with their marketing. This will be a huge boon for indie artists.
So, the original argument is valid right now. But not in the long run.
What TPB and other sites like it do is insure that all music is free. Many indie artists would gladly give their music away to get discovered. Major labels and artists would never do this. No matter due to TPB and others all music is free. So without these sites indie artists might have an easer time getting attention.
This is what has kept windows on top for so long. Virtually everyone gets it for free. Either it comes on the computer when they buy it or they have a friend loan them a CD. Very few people buy windows.
Why bother with free things like Linux when what everyone is using is free?
When someone knows he's downloading a Madonna album, he knows he's taking a couple bucks out of a multi-millionnaire...
When someone downloads and learns about a fairly unknown group and he likes what he hears, he know that if he buys a CD from that group, the group won't see his money as useless change while they ligth their cigars with 100$ bills... the smaller groups needs the money and people know that... people commit much more into buying indie albums than buying the latest Celine Dion because they know that if they can make the album more known, the group will want to release more and bigger is usually "better" for the fans
Popular music more popular!
Obscure music less popular!
Regardless of distribution method and media!
Also, sky is blue, water is wet, candy tastes better than cardboard and I am stating obvious things.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Let me add some personal insights to the (admittedly well-thought-out) OP account and try to point out a few complementary facts.
It so happens I have never used TPB, but I have been employing torrents to some extent, and P2P much more so (the "clean" kind: soulseek). The RIAA need not worry [smile]: out of my 10000+ tracks hardly any appear in their Top lists (and, may I add, the majority of what I have downloaded I already own, on CDs and LPs, so it was mainly a matter of convenience). I do, however, have quite a bit of material from new, indie bands and performers, that I met and I happened to like. Some of them I encountered through MySpace, last.fm, vampirefreaks and related sites. And yes, when I find something I like I do buy it, to support the artist and do my bit to ensure more future releases. I prefer models of support where my money goes to the artist and not to the advertisement/distribution network of a large corporation.
Over the years I have met a lot of people in such music scenes -- from all walks of life (and from 4 of the 5 continents). Not all do as I do, of course -- but consider: There are quite a few among them who have just about enough for life's basic necessities. They wouldn't go out and buy CDs one way or another. The day may come, though, when their fortunes improve, and they do start buying... especially if they can do so at a reasonable cost, and not one inflated by hype, pomp and circumstance. Some bands already provide this approach.
It seems to me the large music companies will find the erosion of their stranglehold increasing, and inevitably so. Recording used to need a studio; nowadays a PC is enough. Distribution and advertisement used to require an elaborate (and expensive) edifice; nowadays the realities of the Internet dictate otherwise. Said companies find themselves progressively denuded, more and more so left holding an emptying bag. It reminds me of Eco's comment in a different setting: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.
If the problem is being lost in the crowd -- move away from the crowd.
So instead of relying on a tracker like TPB that carries absolutely everything from everywhere, run a public tracker that handles ONLY indies.
--Filter out the big-name stuff.
--Make it easy to FIND the new artists rather than having them lost behind the high-volume clutter from the label artists.
--Make sure the filesharing world knows your tracker exists. Publicize it everywhere P2P is discussed.
--Make sure everyone knows right up front that no one will be sued for downloading/sharing from your artists.
--Let people post reviews and comments, just like TPB does. Word of mouth is important.
--Offer links to concert tickets, CDs, T-shirts, whatever each indy label or artist has for sale, and do it from the review page so folks can find it again easily.
--Offer inexpensive site subscriptions in exchange for whatever perks seem good, with some percentage being paid to the artists who participate.
And of course, sell ads just like TPB does. If you need to pay a percentage to the artists to attract them, do so. Likely the same artists who already allow royalty-free use for internet radio would be receptive to the concept.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
It's not about indie or mainstream, it's about business models.
The current music business has a business model that is anathema to file-sharing. Regardless of whether you're indie or mainstream, if your business model looks like record:promote:sell then P2P is going to hurt you, because you will be spending money promoting while a share of your sales will be disappearing to P2P.
The business model that P2P helps with is record:share:merchandise (basically making money off t-shirts and concert tickets rather than the actual music itself) amongst others (record:share:donate for example).
The original author needs to rethink his criticisms of P2P, and use P2P as a powerful viral marketing tool for promoting his t-shirt-and-concert-ticket business.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Certainly some works are better - often much better - than others. I only said the popularity of a work is largely due to the audience. The greater the popularity of a work, the greater the effect.
That does not mean that works do not have inherent qualities, nor that those qualities vary greatly, nor that many artists are brilliant people whose contributions to society are essential. Those things are all true. But the greater popularity and hence value (social and economic) of a film like, say, Star Wars compared to, say, Once Upon a Time in the West, is mostly - perhaps nearly all - due to the audience.
Yes, but it is also due in large part to what I bring to the music, the circumstances in which I heard it, how my friends and I relate to each other around music, and so on.
There is a study I read about online which I would really like to locate again. Participants were divided into two groups, and listened to a number of pieces of music. Each then rated the music. In the control group, the listeners did not communicate with each other. But in the experimental group they could see the ratings assigned by other people. The result was dramatic: preferences clustered in the group where the participants communicated among themselves. Furthermore, in different runs of the experiment the ratings for the same songs varied widely.
The field of cultural studies provides lots of support for the importance of interpretation and meaning-making by the audience. The audience is never really passive. In reality, they are active collaborators in art. That's probably why, like artists, they care so passionately about it.
Your last paragraph raises the insidiously upsetting proposition that the RIAA are not the bunch of idiots we all presuppose they are and are cleverly manipulating us all and quite likely laughing at us.
I have to go be sick.
Eeew, MySpace is just dreadful... naked FTP would be better!
One thing MySpace has done... is make me far LESS likely to sample a new or even known artist, if that's their distribution venue. It's just not worth the eye-bleed.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?