In The Time Of Theft

Friends,

Below is an essay I’ve written in response to a recent article by Jon Pareles in the NY Times about SXSW. I hope you’ll give it a read. I may well be off the mark on some of my thoughts, but they reflect what I—at least at this moment—believe to be true. In any case, I strongly feel that the one area in which our industry has dismally failed is in getting the mainstream media to recognize, and then convey to the public, the true
costs of illegal file-sharing to the lives of those who depend on copyrights for a living.

Re: Jon Pareles—”1,700 Bands Rocking, While CD Industry Reels”

Jon Pareles’s piece contains several misconceptions that the media regularly reinforces when writing about the ongoing record business troubles—an industry “which has been radically shaken and stirred by the internet,” as he puts it. I attempt here to address some of these misconceptions.

The Rationales
As head-spinningly rapid as have been the changes wrought upon the record industry by the internet, racing abreast of these changes have been several conscience-easing rationales — rationales which blame the industry for its sad state of affairs — rationales that absolve the millions of downloaders of their sins and instead portray them as innocents only doing what comes naturally in today’s brave new world-wide-web.

For instance, always guaranteed to appear somewhere in a typical mainstream piece are words to the effect that the record industry dullards were just too slow to develop a new business model — one that could come to terms with the new web realities. Well, here we are many Napster years later and guess what — the record industry still hasn’t figured it out. Why? –because there’s no such model. No book publisher, no bagel shop, no Wal-Mart can stay in business when the public has decided that their products really should be free and therefore doesn’t feel the least bit ashamed about openly helping themselves.

Another rationale-based, blame-the-victim misconception regularly amplified in media pieces goes something like this: Record labels are made up of greedy, clueless philistines who rob their acts blind and, while so doing, manage to crush the life out of thousands of gifted talents. This ugly caricature of the record industry materialized about 5 minutes after it became possible for the public to get for free what it had previously been required to pay for. Prior to the “free” revolution, for many decades the public valued the record industry and was quite happy to modestly shell out for the miracle of having Nat Cole or Elvis or Prince regularly perform in their homes.

Who Needs A Record Label
“With all due respect for my very great friends who have come up in the record-company environment, it’s nice to see that technology has opened the doors to everybody.” Daniel Lanois

“You have the Internet - what do you need it [a record-label] for?” - Lou Reed

“I don’t want to feel like I don’t have a future” sang the Shout Out Louds.

Well, there are near-futures and then there are long-term futures. The next misconception - and the primary one I wish to address here — is that oft-repeated belief that today’s young undiscovered acts are actually better off without that old big bad record industry.

Because of the internet (so goes this spiel) acts are now free to reach the public directly - the bouncer at the door has been fired - and their futures are all the better for it. Well, perhaps their near-term futures appear rosier, but their long-term futures are, I believe, not so sunny. This has to do with copyrights - those little pieces of intellectual property that our file-sharing enthusiasts casually trample over.

Before I get into copyrights, I want to first dismiss from this conversation any examples of recording acts that, having found success via the traditional record industry, are now able to give their music away and still make a good living by live-performing and the selling of subsidiary goods. These acts are what I call “transitionally blessed” - meaning they came to fame via labels and, in the midst of this revolution, have enough going for them to eliminate the middle-man (the label) and give away their wares. They reason, correctly, that the songs will be stolen anyway. (What they are not giving away are the royalties they’re still receiving from the old business model.) Anyway, they are a temporary anomaly. It is the currently unknown acts, excitedly lurching towards the label-less golden internet portal, whose future I examine here.

Pursuit of the Dream
I thought perhaps the best way to make my case would be to imagine a mid-1970s music biz quest by Joe Blow and a future-quest by Jane Doe in a world free of rigid corporate imperatives — where Jane can take charge of her own destiny and have direct access to global audiences. I will try to show there are some major tradeoffs for Jane that are being overlooked.

Let us assume Joe and Jane are both “winners” — attractive, genuinely gifted and highly motivated. I also want to assume Joe and Jane both have great ambitions of hitting the big time. In Joe’s 70’s quest - to put it as briefly as possible - he leaves Podunk and kicks around, say, LA for a couple of years, performing and pitching demos and networking, and finally gets discovered by someone in the music industry. This leads to a record deal. Long story short, Joe does all right. He releases a few albums, has a few big hits, is flush with cash, and then it’s over — but not entirely. He can still make money performing, although this income will likely shrink fast, and get more and more unreliable as years go by. Luckily for Joe, his career is taking place in a world where copyrights are enforced. His CDs and especially the copyrights on his songs may continue to generate income for many years - even decades beyond his death. Furthermore, down the line new acts may cover some of his songs, generating whole new waves of significant royalties. If he is talented as a songwriter, he may generate new income by writing with — or for — other acts. He also might move into producing. Of course, all this non-performing income materializes only in a world where the public is willing to respect copyrights.

Amazing as it may seem to some, Joe does not get screwed over by the industry, and neither do the majority of music biz people he comes to know during his active career. He finds his successful peers to be a motivated, hip, and intelligent bunch of folks who love being in the business. All in all, during Joe’s era artists with major-league talent, motivation, perseverance, a reasonable amount of brains, and copyright protection, can do very well in this profit-driven industry.

The Flat Part of the Brave New World
“Sooner or later, public forums and private conversations at this year’s festival end up pondering how 21st-century musicians will be paid. For nearly all of them, it won’t be royalty checks rolling in from blockbuster albums. Musicians’ livelihoods will more likely be a crazy quilt of what their lawyers would call “alternative revenue streams”: touring, downloads, ringtones, T-shirts, sponsorships, Web site ads and song placements in soundtracks or commercials.” — Jon Pareles

So now let’s look at Jane’s imaginary quest - one free of a corporate music industry - none of those slime-ball corporate owners craving corporate-size profits, and also pretty much free of copyright royalties. I don’t suppose she’d have to move to LA (or NYC or Nashville) - that’s a plus. Also, she can certainly get - without too much investment — fairly good recordings of her songs and post them on her website for the global audience.

Of course, this is also what her competition will be doing. Millions of acts will be making their music available - for free — to the world. Also on the downside, there will be no star-making machinery. It will have been dismantled. So how, exactly, is Jane’s global audience going to find her little golden needle in the vast Jupiter-sized haystack of millions of websites? I will make another assumption here: her global audience isn’t
even going to try. The percentage of music-lovers willing to spend endless hours sifting through countless unknown amateurs’ lame-music websites before finding Jane will be about zero.

Somehow Jane will have to find a way to publicize herself and her music pretty much on her own. (In the old business model, a label would have gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to get her noticed. They would also have given her, at least initially, a great deal of support - everything from publicity to showing up at her gigs to tour-support money to getting her radio and TV exposure.)

Probably playing live gigs will be her best shot — try to get some word-of-mouth going. This could happen, but I think it will be very tough. But let’s assume she gets over that hurdle and the world begins to download and enjoy her (free) music and flock to her concerts. A major problem, of course, is that she still has no income beyond live performing and no label backing her - and that means no reliable income off the road. If she wants to take a year off from the grind or breaks her leg, her income instantly stops. There may be those fans who will buy her CDs even though they can get her music for free, but realistically, as high-speed connectivity and downloading become commonplace, I think this will be more and more unlikely. Perhaps any real income beyond live performing will come from, as Mr. Pareles suggests, web-site ads and corporate sponsors.

Implied in Pareles’s mention of sponsors is that these corporate types will be better, kinder bosses than the old-style label execs. Forgive my skepticism, but I see many pitfalls here, the foremost being that this seems to me to be a variation of going into the jingle business - a business that has little or no interest in giving the public great music. Believe it or not, sprinkled throughout the old-style record labels were people who
genuinely did care about great music and who busted their butts to find it and staked their careers on championing it. Additionally, I think it highly unlikely Jane can align herself with some corporation that doesn’t attach strings — make that ropes — to their support. Jane may be far more constricted than Joe was at his label - which typically gave an artist a great deal of artistic freedom. Neither Citigroup or Dell (both mentioned by Pareles as music sponsors) is going to want Jane offending anyone or any group with her music (or performance of it) and will drop her like a red-hot cell phone if she does. The same goes if she gets busted for smoking pot or drunk driving — or being photographed immodestly getting out of a limo.

It Gets Worse
Yet another big tradeoff is that she will have largely lost the ability to make overarching musical statements via collections of songs - like the traditional record album. After she has posted, say, 2 CDs onto her website, someone venturing onto her site is unlikely to see her songs as 2 collections. To the downloader it will simply be 20 something songs. Her “blue period” album or her “rock” album will be sliced and diced. (While who knows — perhaps one or more of Joe’s albums came to be genuinely adored as a comprehensive piece of musical art. I have read that Sinatra’s career, which had gone cold, was completely resuscitated by the invention of the LP.)

Which leads me to another overlooked but terribly important trade-off: The “grow-on-you” factor. Fairly early in my record buying youth I realized it was a mistake for me to buy a bunch of albums at one time. This was because invariably I didn’t listen to any one of them with the same patience and focus as I did when I bought a single album. Instead I would listen to the first album of the bunch once and then move on to next and then the next. When I was finished listening to all my new albums I often found I didn’t care that much for any of them. However, when I came home with a single album my tendency was to give it several spins. This - particularly with music that had any complexity and depth - could be vital to my appreciating the music. It was often on that 3rd or 4th listening that certain songs began to work their deeper magic in ways that were far more powerful than the immediate cotton-candy appeal of the more radio-friendly songs.

So, while many of Joe’s fans went to a record store and bought his record and dived deeply into it, Jane’s fans, avid though they may be, will have probably downloaded many other free songs besides hers that same day. Even though she may have reached these unknown fans, holding their attention long enough to get truly involved in her music - especially if it has any complexity — could be very, very, tough. And the final insult may be that when Jane’s career ends, the only physical remnants of her songs will be peoples’ thousands-of-files hard-drives or crudely labeled mix-n-match home-burned CDs.

Retirement
“Be Careful What You Wish For” - Robert Oppenheimer (I’m kidding)

Now comes possibly the biggest negative of the internet-based, non-copyrighted world of Jane. As mentioned earlier, after Joe retired, say in 1982 — because his music was copyright-protected — his post-performing income had great potential long after his artist career ended. In Joe’s era those “royalty checks from blockbuster albums” actually could keep coming. He had, thanks to copyrights, a possibly substantial and long-term retirement income. Alas, Jane’s retirement income will have to come from investments, social security etc. One can only hope she saves and invests wisely - not typical behaviors for artists.

Conclusion
So, back to the mainstream media. We must push, scream, stand on our heads if necessary to get the media to relay to the public that everybody — everybody — loses when copyrights are not honored. The artists are hurt, the writers, engineers, producers are hurt — and ultimately the music-loving public is hurt. In the real world, you really do get what you pay for. If the public doesn’t want to pay for its music, it will eventually be receiving a product commensurate with its “investment.”