Music has value! But it lacks price!
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- I’m getting fed up hearing that music has lost its value – to pirates, the internet, goblins or what have you.
Of course recorded music has value! What it lacks is price. It is the nature of the internet to lubricate communication, and it turns out that the apparent correlation between value and price is completely dependent on a certain friction in the marketplace.
If it takes no effort to bring something to you then the actual price of that good is zero. This would be equally true if we could summon bananas to us at will from plantations on the Ivory Coast. It would be tough on the growers, but in a frictionless market they could no longer realise the value they had put in tending the plants.
Of course such banana-summoning is clearly theft by any definition that has meaning today, but if we all suddenly had this Harry Potter-like power, what — short of a sudden outbreak of global altruism — could be done to stop it?
Music may have been the first sector to experience this effect, but it’s not alone. And since the whole issue of music copying is fraught with emotion, consider instead the market in news.
The internet has actually increased the value of news by making it both more immediate and longer-lasting, and by giving readers everywhere the ability to interact with and discuss it. Although there is no such thing as “news piracy”, the true market price of news is also being revealed to be: nothing. This is why News Corp is trying to sue Google, and Robert Thomson of the Wall Street Journal was prompted to say that “Google devalues everything it touches”.
But it’s the internet itself which is to blame for such reduction in cost, even as it ramps up the value – Google is but one of many lubricants which — fantastically! — enable us instantly to find what we want. The downside (if that’s what it is – perhaps we should say, less judgmentally, “side-effect”) of this unfettered access is the stark and unavoidable separation of value from price.
Clearly, long-term, this is going to be a major problem (or opportunity, if you’re so inclined): if journalists, editors and writers, like composers and performers before them, are unable to convert into a living the effort they put into their valuable work, continuing their socially important efforts will become unviable.
Perhaps, instead of the seemingly impossible task of artificially raising prices we should start looking at ways to reduce the cost of living for all content creators (indeed for everyone) by spreading the gift economy into other sectors in a race towards a universal zero price.
Chris Ovenden – The Peer
[Ovenden is a self-confessed technology freak who says he always ends up writing about culture, or who is perhaps a culture nut continually drawn towards the hi-tech, he plays guitar, makes websites and teaches. Editorships of various on- and offline publications lurk in his past, "and possibly his future".]
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
July, 2009
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July 8th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Good post Chris.
Music recordings have a price – if set by the musician and paid to them by their label.
What doesn’t have much of a price any more are copies (usually set by the label and hopefully paid for by the music lover).
So if the musician is missing out the middleman label they have to ask their audience what price they’d put on their recording, and let their audience pay for it.
No-one’s going to pay for copies any more because they cost nothing to make and distribute.
Let’s forget pricing or valuing copies – it’s a mug’s game.
Let’s move instead to valuing and pricing music recordings. That’s where the money is.
Music has value, and in a market, a price.
The market for copies has ended. The market for music resumes.
July 8th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Don’t force us to pay, give us the option to pay what we feel it is worth. Your song may be worth a lot more to you than it is to me, and vice versa. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there are people out there who might view your song worth more than the listed price, and many more who will feel it is worth less.
This makes predictions on sales, thus projections of growth on the stock exchange, nearly impossible to predict, as you can’t model taste very well.
Musicians have ALREADY started this, offering value for a price, a variable price with variable value, including value for free. And they have benefited greatly!
It really puts the onus on the content creator, the artist/journalist/etc.. to handle the direct access to readers/listeners. Many are not too keen on that, but it removes the middle person and thus what you earn is yours!
You will always have people not willing to pay, and even if the ‘Net didn’t exist, they would not pay anyhow. Many would pay if they were not told how much to pay, but instead given the option of try-before-buy (from HOME not driving into the store to listen to a preselected list or having to deal with attitude because you don’t like it and since it is opened it’s now “used”).
It’s all about putting the control back where it belongs, creators and consumers.
And for the record, no one here said Radiohead didn’t have value, they said Britney Spears was not worth what they charge, so less value than the price. There are far to many instances where you have 1-2 good songs but you have to buy an album worth to get it. Now you have iTunes, allows for single song selection and sampling.
But iTunes came in the early millennium and took a long time to reach even Canada. People didn’t want to wait, so voila, they download, they get used to it, it becomes a habit, so even with iTunes now in UK and Canada and other G8 countries, you still have to break the habits.
So maybe all the copyright BS and “you can’t sell that there, we’d have to negotiate payments and royalties first” you’d actually be able to roll out something like iTunes faster, everywhere, without bureaucracy and then you’d actually have people not developing the download for free habit.
Again, trying to control slows you down, trying to grab every dime slows you down! The labels/SOCAN/etc… didn’t adapt fast enough because greed and power was on their minds, so they were left behind!
July 8th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
From time to time the desire to create a marketplace where people are supplied what they need to do the work they want is desired. However, there are two unquestioned fundamental issues at hand that contradict the logical argument put forth so well here.
1. Greed.
2. Laziness.
Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day teach a man to fish and he’ll survive a life time.
But I agree with all my soul that our current systems, organizations, and centers are failing under the stress of the information age. What will come of it? I think we’ll find that the self realized individuals will begin to organize organically into groups that are self sustaining and engaged while the world that holds onto old ideas and beliefs (greed and laziness) are left in the cold dark.
This article is great food for thought today. Thanks.
July 8th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Dave, greed is only a problem if you get fat or otherwise unfit from overconsumption.
Firstly, art and knowledge aren’t consumed by individuals as calories, but intellectually digested into knowledge and cultural enlightenment. Secondly, the more a person reads, listens, thinks, and creates the better.
Copies becoming free is a restoration of liberty, not a collapse of the Victorian work ethic. Copies being free to copy is not the same as art being free of charge (free as in speech, not as in beer). It is art that takes the hard work. The copies are a doddle.
People will not become culturally obese in the negative sense, but culturally rich in the productive sense.
As to laziness, the solution is to make engagement, communication, and the relationship between audience and artist as easy as possible. When we can make bargains a mere click away then we can get down to some good business. Exchanging art for money, money for art.
Do you have any favourite artists?
If it was easy to make a bargain with any of them, to offer them a penny in exchange for producing a new single, would you lift a finger to make that bargain? Remember, we’re talking about your favourite artist here – from whom you supposedly cannot get enough.
The future is to pay artists for their art – not publishers for copies.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
@Crosbie,
If Matthew Good would have barbeques based off a lottery draw for $20, I’d so be there. If he had acoustic concerts in public park, out of the common areas of course, for $20 I’d so be there. The same goes for just about any artist.
If Matt said “hey, i’m kinda shy for this recording…” before he finished the sentence people would have already logged in to PayPal. On his site, back when comments were permitted, people often offered to donate, to help pay for moderators to get rid of the shills/trolls.
That would probably piss of Universal, his label, but hey, like I really care what they think. They haven’t done anything to turn me on to Matthew Good, he did with his site (funded by himself) and interacting with the fans via the site and having a private concert (which I didn’t know about) at his former residence, free of charge too.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
@Robert,
If Matthew Good took advantage of a site such as http://QuidMusic.com that let his fans pledge to pay him $2 each to produce a new single, would you pledge to pay him $2?
That’s an old site of mine (I used as a conceptual prototype), but I’m just referring to it to give you an idea of the point I’m trying to get at. It’s still possible to pay artists to produce art, even if the price attached to copies of it is zero. The art is hard work and costs money. The copies cost nothing to produce and may as well be free of charge (if digital).
July 8th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
I think I implied that with the “before he finished the sentence people would have already logged in to PayPal” — that included me and I”d give him $10-$15 for the entire album if I knew HE collected the cash directly, and I could get a physical CD burned by myself from his released high quality audio files.
So yes, I would pay him $2.
But given the type of person he is, every time we offer to donate, he refuses, doesn’t feel it should be that way.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Well, you can’t force artists to accept money if they don’t want it.
I’m primarily concerned with the artists who want to exchange their art for money – and the audiences who want to exchange their money for art.
Anyway, if Matthew Good was an artist who’d accept his audience’s money (in place of the money offered to him by a label given the prospect of exploiting the suspension of his audience’s liberty to make copies), then hopefully you can see that it would be possible for him to sell his recordings to his audience this way. That audience would then be at liberty to effectively promote him by proliferating copies of his recordings far and wide. They’d also be at liberty to produce cover versions and remixes, etc.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
It would be awesome. And I would be glad to support artists. TechDirt has articles similar to the concept you provide.
The only thing stopping it; the labels that can’t die off quick enough, as in those who don’t want to adapt.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
I’ve seen an interesting business model along these lines but a little different. X number of copies made in Y period of time. Price is whatever you want to pay, at a minimum cost of whatever the artist deems necessary to pay the bills and continue making music. If you so wish, after purchasing a copy of the media you may copy and distribute it infinitely many times.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
I should clarify, the minimum cost basically adds up to enough for the artist to keep paying the bills until the next album is released.