Neil Young is right — piracy is the new radio
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Uncompensated sharing in the digital age has been unmoored from some of the traditional limits on sharing, moving it well outside the comfort zone for a lot of people and causing a lot of backlash against the phenomenon. But even though the returns on uncompensated sharing in the digital age are sometimes more diffuse and indirect than for the more traditional forms of sharing we are used to they still exist. Art will survive. Artists will not end up in the poor house. And eventually people will grow as used to what gets labelled "piracy" today as they have to libraries, museums, and radio.
Hollywood's model is broken because it has been dependent on scarcity of distribution. This couldn't be sustainable forever. Internet fixed the distribution so Hollywood is bleeding. Art is getting easier to access and to create thanks to technology. (this is where we, startups, come in)
IMHO, art will become a commodity. In a few decades, you won't pay so much to watch a movie that cost a few millions to produce. You'll pay almost nothing for a movie that cost almost nothing to produce. And it will have much higher quality than today's movies. Thanks to technology. Like you said, art will survive.
[1] http://the99percent.com/articles/6973/Francis-Ford-Coppola-O...
I do not doubt that artists may be compensated in the long run. But the compensation my come through higher ticket prices. I paid $32 to see Molotov, Eminem, The Black Eyed Peas, and Suicidal Tendencies in New York City back in 1999. Those days are long gone. To see those artists now, maybe $120.
Saying "will" seems speculative since the examples are not comparable to piracy. Museums dont give free copies and have collections which are sometimes donated. In radio there is a cooperation between radio stations and the record companies.
The artist will only release if a certain threshold is reached.. Then the released music is completely "free" to share as people please. The artist is compensated as they see fit - they set the price in the first place, and also can use it to justify part of the price (to compensate for recording, hosting etc.).
"Piracy" then serves to generate rep to prove that they can deliver on future releases, there can still be people who make money in the middle - generating PR for the project etc.
The platform could take a small share of the cost, a slightly larger share for hosting, slightly more for promotion on the front page..
Nobody buys their favorite music video (unless it's The Wall). They buy the CD, because all they really care about is the music.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Various-Artists-Warp-Vision-Videos/d...
Thousand Foot Krutch made this project which was easily funded it seems. Although they are an established band already, and I'm not sure if 100k is "good" for them or not. But then again, that's only really pre-orders.
They made enough money to retire off their first album. Under the kickstarter model, they wouldn't have been able to earn anywhere near that much money as no one had heard of them outside of Seattle before their first album release.
Was making enough to retire their goal? Making enough to keep making music as much as they can seems like enough for a lot of musicians. If it could reach that level, I think it would be a "success".
"Uncompensated sharing in the digital age has been unmoored from some of the traditional limits on sharing, moving it well outside the comfort zone for a lot of people and causing a lot of backlash against the phenomenon."
You say radio, museums, and libraries aren't comparable to file sharing. Do you have data to back that up or merely prejudice?
As for your anecdote above, it's rare for the price of a show for a given artist to remain the same over time. The Black Eyed Peas especially are very much more popular today than they were in 1999.
Radio and Record Companies work in conjunction Music-formatted radio stations both commercial and non-commercial get their music for free from record labels.
http://www.musicbizacademy.com/knab/articles/radiostations.h...
Libraries are publicly funded
Why ticket prices have shot up over the last decade
http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/why-rock-roll-slumping-u-21...
Breakdown of ticket prices, bands receive %74to90% of ticket price
http://www.wisebread.com/how-much-a-breakdown-of-concert-tic...
Music sales slump,concert ticket costs jump and rock fans pay the price.
http://www.krueger.princeton.edu/10_17_2002.htm
Ticket price, true they(BEP) were not that popular then but $28+tax in 1999 compared to $45 now is still higher than inflation. The inflation increase is 29%[3], the ticket increase is 60%[4].
[3]http://www.warpedtourtickets.musictoday.com/WarpedTour/calen...
I mean, what do you want? Time to stop? Progress to end? Change to be abolished? This isn't actually a joke. Lots of people with a vested interest in the current extent of intellectual property rights are going to absolutly insane lengths to ensure that a changing society isn't allowed to roll back the extent of IP rights to make them more harmonious with the needs and reality of the present day.
But those people can all go to hell. They're the same backwards looking people who said "but what about property rights" when it came to freeing slaves. "Property rights" were also applied to wives and daughters, and you can just imagine how much consternation was caused when (horrors!) wives and daughters were given the vote.
Property rights are ultimately about controlling others. They're good and necessary in limited circumstances, like keeping unwelcome individuals away from our bedrooms and out of our bank accounts. They're absolutely horrifying when extended to the theoretical maximum. Indeed, the very definition of a totalarian state is one in which all people are the property of the State. At some point, between this and anarchy, there's an optimum. As life changes, this optimum point will move. Some will fight these moves and make life miserable for others rather than suffer change themselves, but if the change is big and clear and beneficial enough, most will peacefully adapt.
I recognize that rapidly evolving ideas about what should and should not be considered property aren't easy for those whose careers are caught in the flux. Believe me, I'm one of them. At the same time, I see Change as being - on balance - a very healthy thing, even if it makes my own life harder than it might has been in a more static environment. Others aren't so sanguine. They really hate Change. But there's some good news for them too; one day, they'll die, and Change will no longer be a problem for them.
Can we try and keep discussions about this stuff serious and intellectually honest?
The idea seemingly lost on you is that while property in some sense has always been fundamental to civilized orders, it has encompassed very different things in different times and places. Indeed, this remarkable flexibility may be the key to its endurance. And this vital flexibility is EXACTLY what anti-reformists try to obscure, deny, ignore, or otherwise wish away when discussing IP.
In their conception the invention of the Internet is irrelevant. They portray the current scope of property rights as rigid, fixed, ever-lasting, and absolutely supreme. And this particular stalling tactic is nothing new. In fact it's appeared time and time again - really, any time that society has evolved in a way that demands a fundamental reconsideration of what is and is not going to be viewed as private property, with its protection provided by the full force of the state.
Of course, the people who take the absolutist view don't like to discuss this history in detail. And why would they? Saying that the current configuration of rights - which evolved over time - cannot be allowed to evolve any further is a conspicuously indefensible position. So when absolutists raise the issue of "property rights" they are not trying to add anything to the conversation. To the contrary, they are attempting to shut it down. The hope is that residual deference to the once-sensible bounds will kick in reflexively, and people will suddenly stop talking about things that are certain to harm their economic interests and / or social standing if discussed openly.
And that pattern has been a consistent problem every time society has felt the need to redefine property rights. When confronted by the kinds of dishonest and self-serving assholes who would try to shut down or derail conversations of this nature, it's important for people to recognize who and what they're dealing with, and what kinds of tactics will be used against them. It's equally important for them to remember just how threatening and powerful open conversation really is, and why it's protected by the 1st Amendment.
I maintain that the conversation surrounding property rights in America circa 1850 is likely to contain an enormous number of parallels with the conversations surrounding IP today. For people looking for a roadmap on how to handle the recurrent problem of inflexible absolutists, it's a fine source. And it's not the only place where they can find echoes of the same losing arguments about maintaining outdated but profitable arrangements. Indeed, I strongly suspect that close variants of the same arguments will appear in every case where the scope of "property" has become a bone of contention.
Regardless, if you still think there is anything "unserious" or even "dishonest" about this perspective, please elaborate.
Yes, what you wrote here:
> They're the same backwards looking people who said "but what about property rights" when it came to freeing slaves.
To me the comparison is too direct and is therefore inflamatory and distracts from your point. It takes the conversation in a Godwinish direction. Oh, also, it's factually incorrect given that the slavery people were mostly white southerners who have been dead over 100 years, and many of the IP people are wealthy coastal types who probably are fairly "progressive" in their politics in other ways, if you look at Hollywood as an example, superficial though they may be in their outlook.
The whole "intellectual property" thing, in any case, really derives from two things: 1) the "moral rights" to control something you brought into being, and 2) that artificial property is a good solution to the public goods problem in certain cases, if the needs of consumers and producers are properly balanced (currently I do not deem that to be the case): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
More to the point, I was asking you if you saw anything unserious and dishonest about my perspective as a whole. And that perspective is not summed up in the single line you extracted. Nevertheless, you felt you could justify a personal attack on the integrity of another by citing this one line in isolation, as though it were a complete summation of the broader argument.
I think you need to be careful with this "intellectually dishonest" tag, my friend. This may be a case of what Peter says about Paul says more about Peter than it does about Paul.
In the meantime, I maintain my position: the Civil War era remains a rich source of examples showing how humans respond when changing norms about what can and cannot be considered property threaten the economic interests of those who are likely to lose their status. Even if the bone of contention is different, the point (which you seem hell-bent on missing) is that the reactions are very much the same.
Indeed, being able to see those reactions in a very different context is essential to recognizing their underlying patterns, and the unifying elements. You, on the other hand, seem to be saying "No! Regardless of the parallels, they CANNOT BE DISCUSSED! No No No No! This is OFF LIMITS!!!!
To which I say, oh go grow a pair.
There's no way I could judge you or your character via one offhand comment on a web site, but I can certainly say that I find comparing intellectual property to slavery ridiculous.
Most of your comment was pretty well reasoned, which made the inflammatory bit irritating as it, IMO, dragged the rest down.
Perhaps a more neutral approach: "what has been considered property through the ages has changed" would have worked better than directly comparing supporters of IP to slave owners.
Exactly where did I say that "people who support IP are just like those slave owners"? (Hint: nowhere)
For the record, I happen to be quite a strong supporter of IP in general (and no, I don't support slavery). However, I also know that IP needs to evolve if it's to retain its value, and that this evolution demands a change in the underlying concept of property itself (a concept which, obviously, extends waaay past IP).
That puts me in direct conflict with people who don't want to make changes in this broader concept a part of the conversation regarding IP, and who back up this resistance by advancing a notion of property rights in general as being inflexible, absolute, and beyond question.
Obviously, this absolutist position has a dramatic narrowing effect on any IP-specific discussion, which is the whole point of taking that position in the first place. It is a suppressive tactic. In THIS regard, what we're seeing now is very similar to what happened in America in the 18th Century; SOME people who were in favor of slavery attempted to steer the conversation about it by advancing an inflexible, absolutist idea of property in general, promoting it as a socially necessary good. Then, like now, the assumption was that the status quo could be protected if property as an evolving concept were kept off the table, and property as a non-evolving concept were kept on it.
And THAT is what I'm talking about. I'm not making ridiculous claims that IP and slavery themselves are commensurate, or that people who support one are like people who support the other. And frankly, you'd have to be very careless or dishonest in your reading to assert that I am.
No, what I am (and have been) talking about are very specific tactics surrounding the rhetorical treatment of the idea of property in general. I'm noting that these tactics appeared when slavery was still seen as defensible, and I'm noting that remarkably similar tactics and treatments are appearing in IP debates today - especially ones in which people are trying to justify increasingly extreme measures to protect an outdated status quo.
These people - who can come from Malibu as easily as they come from Mississippi - aren't simply scared of change. After all, lots of people scared of change don't resort to falsifying the historic flexibility of property as a concept before using it to frame a debate. Only a vociferous and dangerous subset choose to employ this particular strategy.
Fortunately, the historic record contains many examples of this very aggressive response. And because there's a clear pattern to it, this record can be mined for counter examples that show how it was eventually defeated. Of course, it helps to have specific points of reference. Vague and neutral generalities help no one except those who are on the wrong side of this in the first place.
And yes, this is a partisan view. That's because the absolutist idea of inflexible property is also a partisan view. The moment you hear it, you should know that you're dealing with a person conducting their own non-neutral and highly offensive attack, and you should respond accordingly.
"Go to hell" is putting it politely.
We also have commercial radio stations that play disposable child-like pop music (combined with horrible ads and drone-like presenters) that is well suited to 13 year old girls but still becomes popular with the masses. So there is something for everyone.
I don't support SOPA (not that it counts in Australia, or anywhere else for that matter) but I think that artists should get some money from somewhere for their efforts. People listen to the radio free but they still have the option of buying the album. Downloading the album free makes that option redundant.
In Australia people typically pay $40 - $70 a month for their internet which - if they use the allocated capacity - they are using to pirate music, movies and TV without ads. I'd prefer to see part of that money going to an artist fund rather than the ISPs and broadband resellers.
[1] triplej.net.au and www.abc.net.au/classic/
Well, there is NPR (National Public Radio) which is about 15-25% government funded, but that's typically news/talk/classical. Some of the edgier NPR stations might have an acoustic rock/folk set at midnight on a Friday...
Lots of generalising to do here to answer these questions I guess but I figure there's opportunity out there for someone who can make something of the answers.
Mergers and acquisitions. The homogenizing of radio made it such that, while it played the top-40s in each major genre, it become excruciatingly boring because they'd only play the top-40s. You'd literally hear the entire selection of music they'd play within a couple of days of light listening.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_Channel_Communications
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Broadcasting_Corporati...
Here's the history of a great example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHFS_(historic)#Abrupt_format_s...
Top-40 music is by definition the music for the largest possible audience -- or put another way for the lowest common denominator of listener. It's boring, format stamped mediocrity that favors Nickelback over any better band.
Every so often I'll surf the stations and be amazed that songs that were playing and popular 10 years ago are still playing in regular rotation. Songs that have since moved onto regular rotation in doctor's office waiting lounges and elevators.
I remember a time when you could turn on your station of choice, listen for an hour and hear 3 or 4 songs in the top-40, 3-4 in the top-100 and 3-4 new songs as they tried to bring in new material for listeners. There also used to be just better selection in stations representing slightly different formats in the same major genre, it was possible at one time to find a station that played hard rock, classic rock and alternative rock. Now it's just "rock" and all three will play Nickelback at the same time.
Here's the current top-40 in rock http://www.billboard.com/charts/rock-songs#/charts/rock-song...
At least a fourth of these bands I remember getting airplay in the 90s. These are bands so old that the beginning of their careers are starting to see some play on the classic rock stations.
Radio killed itself.
There are exceptions, like the Pacifica network and oddities like KPIG, but they're few and far between.
If you're looking for some corroboration, you could check out documentaries about the early days of hip hop.
For me, commercials are also a large issue--with TV I have a DVR and my browser has an ad-blocker, so I'm just not used to listening to commercials. They tend to start aggravating me after a very short time (10 seconds or so).
Those are the reasons I don't listen to the radio any more.
KPIG is pretty great, but they have ads.
There are lots of college radio stations (check out KDVS and KALX) that are pretty amusing, but they're not so much "community driven" as "driven by the people who show up and pay their dues". That may seem like nitpicking to you, but it seems very relevant after an hour of frogs and Star Trek samples.
NPR stations, Pacifica stations, kind of sort of don't have ads, but they do have sponsors and pledge drives. They are pretty old-people oriented.
I'm sure someone who is slightly less NorCal centric can improve on this list.
NPR and KDHX are the only radio stations I listen to. The rest of them are literally unbearable.
edit: I used to really like XM radio a few years ago, but it was a subscription based service. And I haven't really listened to it much in a few years, so I don't know where it's at currently.
Boston College WZBC
Stanford KZSU
UC Santa Cruz KZSC
KUSF WNYU WUNH
Tons of great music. All free. All available on the net. Throw in Radioshift to record my favorite shows and I have more music than I can possibly have time to listen to.
Why does everyone always forget about college radio?
BTW, I'm using youtube to check the recommendation before getting the album.
Adelaide, where I used to live, has only a population of 1.2 million and had three(!) quite active community stations (subscribers pay a good deal of the cost + a little advertizing, the shows are staffed by volunteers..)
http://radio.adelaide.edu.au/ http://www.threedradio.com/ http://fresh927.com.au/
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/01/31/neil-young-defends...
A great guy, super fun and always a joy to hang out with. A true music fan and appreciative of those that worked on his records. His manager Eliot is a great guy too.
People will listen to something for 'free' even if they aren't sure they will like it, but they won't pay any money for something that they don't know whether or not they will like it.
Radio was a way to introduce new music, but with an iPod/iPhone/mp3 player people can carry around days of music that they already know they like, and it has no annoying adverts in it, so they don't listen to the radio any more. Thus a source of discovery is cut off from them.
'Pirates', listening to music and then giving a copy to a friend who they think might like it, allows new music to be discovered. That seeding is required for artists to develop a following. Pandora does similar seeding, but like radio injects advertisements which are annoying to many.
> but they won't pay any money for something that they don't know whether or not they will like it.
people bought albums for decades without knowing what songs were on the album.
I don't see how it's fair to justify the acquisition of someones property with the pretense that it's gonna be better for you. Even under extreme cases like nationalisation and imminent domain, the owners are compensated. I made this comment on the Neil Young link, but it was censored. If we are so certain that the artist will benefit under the 'new' system, fine, but if he or she doesn't they have to be compensated to bridge the earnings gap.
Comparing music now to music in the 1930's is not fair, artists got paid almost nothing in the 1930-1950's. The whole industry was corrupt.
Lets say you offer to sell someone an 800 page hardcover book about a wizard for $35 [1]. If they have never heard of the author they are going to politely decline. Why? because they can spend $35 on a book from an author they know they like and for whom perhaps their latest book was also read by their friends who liked it. As an economic actor in this transaction they act in their own self interest, to spend their earned income on entertainment for which they have some prediction of enjoying it. Give them a $35 coupon good for any book at Amazon and they might buy it on a whim, make them work half a day to earn that much and they won't.
So your observation about Neil Diamond is absolutely correct, there are a lot of people who have heard his music, like it, and will buy it. More importantly because there are a lot of people who have heard it and like it, the probability that a person knows someone directly who has bought it and likes it is higher. The the perceived risk of the purchase is lower.
So now imagine that you've got got an artist producing a product. Initially, there is this huge barrier to them selling their product because there are many known artists out there (and the new artist is initially unknown), and there are many 'purchase experience' consumers who are reinforcing the quality analysis of the known artists. So our new artist has no way to communicate their value to their potential customers.
So to overcome that lack of exposure, a new artist has to 'be heard' (if we're talking about music) and they do things like play bars, clubs, go to 'amateur night', and try to get a local group of people that like to hear what they play. If they are successful at that they might be able to 'open' for a famous act at their concerts, be the band that 'warms up' the crowd. Now they get to expose themselves to the people who like the main act (and presumably their musical style is similar so they feel they might be liked too) and if enough folks do like them then maybe they can be their own 'headliners'. Of course when you open for Neil Diamond and people are paying $75 to see Neil, not a whole lot of that is going to you, the warm up band.
This whole 'getting the word out' is a process that was filled by radio for years and years. It was so successful in fact that music labels would actually pay the radio stations to play their signed acts music. It was a huge scandal. But instead of thinking the money they paid the radio stations as 'lost profits' they considered it a marketing expense. And they were right. They knew, and pretty much anyone who has tried to market an 'art' product (which is to say a creative work), that people don't buy things they don't know about.
So you can ask what a new artist's work is 'worth' compared to an established artist. And to understand that you have to include the cost of making the set of customers who would buy this new artists work aware of the existence. That is a huge sunk cost, and one that used to be born by a book publisher or a record label. Once the artist is over that hump of course things are much easier. What Neil has recognized is that 'piracy' as defined by the record labels and book publishers is creating more artist awareness these days than the older channels. That is a really really important change, and it is one that artists, especially new artists, have to internalize.
Perhaps in the 'old' days your publisher would pay you $4K for a book, and if that book took off they would make a huge 'profit' on it and you would not see another dime. But on your second book with them you could negotiate better terms. There are many examples of 'hollywood accounting' or 'record label accounting' which show how they do this. The artist doesn't get any benefit early on, and only after being established to they have any leverage in those business negotiations. The 'new' way may be that the early works of the artist get 'pirated' like crazy and spread far and wide. People get exposed to them for 'free' and while the artist gets no monetary remuneration, they are offsetting that barrier of not being a known entity. As they develop exposure they will get more and more pricing control over their work, up to and including the point where people will pay millions in advance to be the first to get their next novel/song/movie what have you.
But the key to understanding this is understanding that 'value' is composed of two parts 'awareness' and 'quality.' And they are multiplicative. So if either is zero, value goes to zero. The thing that makes it still work is that the marginal reproduction cost in a digital ecosystem is also nearly zero.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Deathly-Hallows-Book/dp/0...
There's now a trend for record companies to reposition themselves as marketing agencies (which is what they actually do) where they take a cut of the total revenue (including song writing and concert sales) called 360 contracts. [2]
It'd be interesting if the entire process of songmaking were like a creative commons non-commercial project. You start with a song writer, different people doing mixes, and then when it reaches a stage where it can be monetized all people involved get paid. The question is "how to hell do you monetize this?" iTunes? High Fidelity mp3 ? Live performances? Humble bundle $1 compilations?
[1]Songs of Summer http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/11/137705590/the-frid...
[2] Kate Perry's Perfect Score http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/20/145466007/katy-per...
The radio plays songs interspersed with commercials that thousands of people hear and a handful of those folks are influenced to go buy cars or soap or deodorant or fast food from the advertisements they heard (thus effectively paying the advertisers, thus compensating them for the advertisements, thus providing the radio station with revenue to pay the license fees which get paid to music studios and eventually to musicians). Is that really so very much better or more ethical than millions of individuals listening to music through file sharing and a handful of those folks being influenced to buy albums, go to concerts, purchase t-shirts and other merchandise which directly benefits the artists?
Edit: to add an additional punch to this: how is it that advertisements can be so enormously compelling that they can sustain 4 levels of profit margin (for the company selling the products, for the ad agency, for the radio station, for the music studios) yet the music itself is not sufficiently compelling to support even one level? The answer is that it is. The licensing fees are a token, the ads support the operations of the radio station, the music supports itself. Take away the technological need for a radio station and...
Problem is, the big players are hanging on to the cliff edge by their fingernails, rather than locking into the harness at the bottom ready to start their climb.
(Radio stations cost lots to set up up front, web radio costs kick in when you get bigger, but until then you'd have to operate at a loss, or go ad heavy.
But seriously, I have always wondered how the radio model is supposed to work. Whenever I hear a song I like, just wait an hour, and I'll hear it again. There is simply no reason to buy the CD (or record, or digital download).
Value is, in part, driven by scarcity. When you only have 40 songs in your rotation, there is no longer that scarcity required to drive the high value. It's no wonder people were no longer willing to pay $20 for a CD.
I suspect the big problem with piracy (from RIAA perspective) is that it is teaching those people that its just as easy to get it online. Except that iTunes went and made it even easier to get it for $1, so most people in that market I know just buy it on iTunes.
That's worth thinking about.
In some way, the record industry is doing piracy a service by increasing the perceived value of music. Too bad they don't get a cut for doing that.
Hey hey, my my,
Piracy will never die,
There's more to the torrent
Than meets the eye,
Hey hey, my my.People often hear pirated material and like it so much they immediately purchase it. Not only that one album, but even sometimes substantial amounts of the artist's back catalogue. Which was and still is kind of the point with music radio.
Same with movies.
I wonder how much cash piracy actually generates as substantial income -- quite a bit I believe. And probably more than it denies. Quite a lot of people are exposed to material they would never have encountered, like it and pay up for it.