David Byrne: 'The Internet will suck all creative content out of the world'

True story: David Byrne rode in my Honda Civic. He was doing a studio visit at the UCLA school of art, and he got hungry for lunch and some alone time. My wife, a student there at the time, drove him to a sandwich shop nearby.

He was at UCLA showing some photos he had been taking, and doing studio visits with the MFA (not BFA) students at UCLA's (very prestigious) art school. He's quite unassuming.

He's also not an old fogey. If he says something is wrong, he's worth listening to, even though he's largely repeating other sources and familiar stories.

His message is not what we want to hear. We want to hear that the Internet is a win all around, except for dinosaurs that deserve to be disrupted anyway. It's hard to make the case that indie musicians needed to be disrupted.

It strikes me that the thing that doesn't get discussed in many of these discussions is that it isn't about creativity. He's attaching the view of 'creativity will disappear because the creatives can't get paid'. But creativity isn't a market. They are two distinct things, and the problem with trying to sell your creativity now is that it is easy for anybody to do it. The supply side has changed significantly while demand hasn't. A record store only had so much space to put so many artists, and therefore a label could pick-up an artist, promote that artist and that artist would get bought buy lots of people because that was the album that was available.

The new reality is that the scarcity of prime real estate on the shelf, where all the money was made, is now gone.

In fact, the internet isn't sucking the creativity out of the world, quite the opposite. It is allowing anybody to share their creativity, and as a result, those who used to make a very large income from the scarcity of distribution are no longer able to command the market as they did before.

I'm not going to argue if current music is better or worse than the music during the old ecosystem, that is all personal taste.

If we look back at the age of the big record labels making huge dollars, the artists complained then as well. They complained that the labels took all their money, that the labels weren't letting them express their creativity and forced them to make the same music again and again. It's why many top artists formed their own record labels as soon as they were big enough to get away from the big 4.

Now, maybe artists have been taken advantage of by Spotify, just like they had been by labels previously, but this is the business agreement they've entered. If David Byrne doesn't want to share his creative efforts in this manner, nobody is forcing him to, but I'm sure there are 100 lesser known artists who will take his place. It's simple supply and demand, he's on the wrong side of the equation these days.

He's complaining that the sky is falling when it really isn't. His argument gets circular, but this is a decent microcosm:

>I also don't understand the claim of discovery that Spotify makes; the actual moment of discovery in most cases happens at the moment when someone else tells you about an artist or you read about them – not when you're on the streaming service listening to what you have read about...Why would you click and go elsewhere and pay when the free version is sitting right in front of you?

I've found out about new artists through Spotify's radio service. I 'Discover' new music by clicking around on Youtube or Spotify; I don't read music magazines (amusingly also becoming archaic).

Now, where this is actually kind of cool, is that the artist gets paid when I listen.(1) I didn't go out and pirate it.*(2) I didn't give revenue to a Youtube user that uploaded against copyright. I didn't go with the 'free version.' As a paid subscriber, I pay to keeping Spotify running. As a user of the 'free' Spotify version, I pay by consuming marketing, which in turn generates money to keep Spotify running. Spotify in turn gives money to the label, who are responsible for paying the artists.

If you buy a nice dinner and the restaurant doesn't pay the busboy, you don't kick the waiter. That doesn't make any sense.

Talkies (or records or CDs or eBooks or DVDs or internet or drive-ins) will suck all creative content out of the world.

(1) The artist _does_ get paid. If the contract between an artist or group and his/her/their record label isn't lucrative for the musician(s), it's hardly fair to blame the streaming service, isn't it?

(2)I wouldn't have even known the song/artist existed

disclaimer: I really like Spotify.

I think it's a complex issue but finding ways to extract value from products and services always is.

I think that if you want to mirror the "old" status quo, services like Pandora or Shoutcast stations should be treated similarly to radio: the company doing the streaming pays a license for the music (ASCAP, BMI, etc) but not per-song-per-listener royalties. That's how radio always worked and it was kind of like publicity for recording artists.

There are two big differences now. Streaming services offer much more variety in terms of artists and songs so it's harder for content creators (and their funding companies, the music labels) to focus on the most profitable acts to push. Also, streaming has become very convenient so it is replacing the purchase of "hard copy" encoded material (CDs, etc) for many listeners.

When it comes to on-demand services like Spotify, it's harder to claim that it's the same as radio. With radio, no matter how many independent and college stations you have, you can't just pick any song you want to hear and have it play immediately.

At the same time, it's not the same as a CD. With a CD you pay $10 or $15 and that covers hundreds and hundreds of "listens". I have some albums that I've probably listened to a thousand times or more over the course of my life. If Spotify is equivalent to a CD, then how do you determine the cost of one listen? $15 for a 15-song CD I play 100 times works out to $1 per song or a penny per song per listen.

Even with CDs, artists might only get pennies on the dollar for every CD sold with the label taking the rest to (supposedly) recoup the cost of production and marketing. If I'm essentially paying a penny per song per listen then the artist is getting a fraction of a cent per listen in this increasingly hypothetical situation, it seems to line up roughly with what they are making from Spotify.

I'm not even suggesting that the radio/CD model is the best solution out there. It just seems like more of the same. The selling of recorded music has never really been all that profitable for label-backed artists and the ones who have made a good living that way are an anomaly in the history of the musical profession.

Musicians historically made their money by either charging for live performances or being hired by some sort of benefactor to improve their status. Sounds a lot like selling concert tickets or licensing music for movies, TV shows, and commercials these days.

I don't think it's ever been very profitable to be a professional musician and for better or worse, it seems that is not going to change anytime soon.

I think the point with mr.byrne is that everywhere the old big company labels have equity on the system it will be corrupt. If you 'discover' music through Spotify and every song played will give royalty to an artist you might think there is more possibility that a RIAA song gets 'recommended'.

It might not be the case, though. Music produced my the RIAA labels have always been more popular, thats why they are commercialy successful, thus advertised, and with more possibility to be 'recommended'

But why independent musicians feeding the old monster? There are lots of really good music services without RIAA people involved. (i might be wrong on this) rdio, tunein, grooveshark, tunecore, last.fm, beatport

Today music services are the equivalent record stores. some of them have lots of RIAA produced pop music, some others will get only independent labels.

There might be a future when you earn money playing real instruments before real people. I remember Zappa's "You can't do this on stage anymore' area.

Real instruments of course include computers these days, as long as people are interacting with it (i.e. 'playing')

I really wish he didn't have access to Internet; let's see how that would go