Music Fan Manifesto: 2010
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- “I bet that in Mozart’s time there were many other active musicians in and around Prague and Vienna and there’s a reason we’re not aware of their names and their works. Some of them probably even made their living at it, but many more would have been what used to be called the village band, ready to perform for a fee at special events but earning their wage from something else. Historically, launching yourself into the arts has been a chancy proposition. Cruel maybe, but then life often is. Music has always been an essential component of life, of celebrations, of spiritual exercises, even of battles. The only other art form which comes anywhere close to having the same power as music is poetry, and one could argue poetry is still vibrant, in the form of song lyrics and rap.” – Liz Newton
There’s a discussion thead on a2f2a.com centering on the statement ‘artists need to be paid, and fans want to pay them’.
All the attention is on professional artists — people who make, or want to make, their livings from their music. But without fans – patrons, if you like – they’d find it difficult to succeed, let alone survive.
I wrote here, “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” That’s from The Beatles’ 1967 song I Am The Walrus, I said, going on the words sum up for me what the net is all about. Peers to peers. People 2 people. Sharing. Caring. P2P.
I also said now there’s a chance for two critical masses — those who make songs and those who enjoy them — to meet online. And if they do, it could start a massive chain reaction uniting musicians with fans and fans with musicians, to everyone’s mutual benefit.”
Because music “is meant to be passed around and enjoyed, not owned exclusively by a small band of venal corporate pirates epitomised by Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US, but controlled by a Canadian)”.
That isn’t to say it should be free as in free beer, but it should at least be affordable and within easy reach of everyone.
Below are thoughts from my own, very personal, perspective as a hard-core music lover and fan.
Music Fan Manifesto: 2010
Jon Newton - p2pnet.net / a2f2a.com
- P2P online music distribution is the solution, not the problem. And it’s here to stay.
- Sharing is not stealing. With it, no money changes hands and no one has lost anything s/he used to own.
- Copyright isn’t a right.
- When someone pays good money for something, s/he owns it.
- Once music is set free, it doesn’t belong to the creators. It belongs to the listeners.
- Artists need to be paid, and fans want to see that happen. But it isn’t for music lovers to figure out how. It’s for fans to buy, share, enjoy and spread the word, just as they’ve always done.
- Music is for everyone, not just a very few, relatively speaking, people with $1 (and more) to waste on grotesquely overpriced digital downloads manufactured by the Big 4 labels and their many direct and indirect offshoots, and associated and part-owned companies.
- When conditions are reasonable and prices are fair, people can — and do, and in their millions — buy online music. The proof is the success of AllofMP3.com and the sites which sprang up in its wake, many of them selling by download size, not per ‘item’.
- There are a lot more fans than artists, politicians and corporate music executives and for the first time, thanks to the net, they have a voice. A very loud voice. In Chuck Palahniuk’s book Fight Club the anti-hero, Tyler Durden, declares, Remember this. The people you’re trying to step on, we’re everyone you depend on. We’re the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you’re asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life.
- Music piracy is an artificial concept created by the corporate music industry.
- There is, however, counterfeiting and illegal copying and distribution. Criminal counterfeiters and duplicators are always far more technically advanced than both the entertainment industry and the national police and enforcement units that cynically act for them.
- Crooks use the billions of CDs and DVDs churned out by the music industry as customisable templates for illegal ‘product’.
- Counterfeiters who depend largely on physical product will find it harder to operate when music lovers are buying fairly priced music from sites offering fully, instead of partially, opened catalogues.
- When one ‘illegal’ site is shut down, two more spring up in its place.
- There’s no such thing as DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) consumer control. Anything which can be seen and/or heard in any form can be copied by one analogue or digital means or another. Digital files cannot be made uncopyable any more than water can be made not wet ~ Bruce Schneier
- There’s no such thing as Big Music. There’s only a handful of outdated and outclassed corporations whose dependency on outmoded business systems applicable only in the physical 20th century has condemned to them to die in the digital 21st century.
- There’s no such thing as a corporate music trade organisation — ie, RIAA, BPI, IFPI — acting in the interest of contracted artists. These ‘associations’ exist solely for, and are under the control of, the major record labels. They’ve become dumb weapons, and little else.
- At present, there’s no such thing as a viable online corporate music market.
- There’s no such thing as a music ‘consumer’ in the 20th century. Fans today are active participants in how, and by whom, music is distributed on- and offline. They’re in a brand-new economic territory in which they, and not the corporations, have power of control. It’s called freedom of choice. The days when people will buy whatever’s put in front of them, and pay whatever’s demanded, are gone forever.
- We don’t owe the labels a living.
- The corporate music industry depends absolutely on three (to it) essential elements: Bullshit; Lies; and, Confusion.
- Suing isn’t wooing. If they want us, they have to make us want them.
- Soon, the Big 4 will be competing instead of controlling. They’ll have no choice. And when that happens, all the doors will open.
- More and more people are logging on with every passing hour. The balance is shifting and anything that can be digitized WILL be digitized and sold online. When that happens, many of the existing overheads — cash tied up in storage, print costs, enforcement, PR campaigns, etc — will be drastically lowered or cut altogether. This, in turn, will mean more and more people will be buying more and more reasonably priced product via the net. And they’ll be talking about what’s good and what’s bad in their blogs, in emails, IM, texting, and so on. There’ll be no way for manufacturers to escape the results of releasing shabby product, as they’re able to do until now. We fans — ‘consumers,’ as we’re still contemptuously known — will increasingly find and share our own news and information, completely by-passing lamescream press corpse and the old marketing and sales religions.
- The kids are alright and they’ll do right by artists, once the Big 4 are out of the way.
And finally, # 26 — what it’s really all about, sharing is caring.
Cheers!
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
January, 2010
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January 10th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
This manifesto tells the artist that file sharers won’t pay for music. This is just another example of filesharers pushing artists right into the hands of the RIAA.
January 10th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
^^ “This manifesto tells the artist that file sharers won’t pay for music. This is just another example of filesharers pushing artists right into the hands of the RIAA.”
It says the exact opposite. And the RIAA isn’t a label.
Cheers!
January 10th, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Good overall, though I disagree with item 6 on two levels:
For one thing, as many others have mentioned, I disagree with the statement “artists need to be paid.” No artist NEEDS to make money from producing art. I think this mentality invalidates art produced by thousands of artists employed through other means who don’t seek a cent for their paintings, sketches, poetry, short films, writing, and yes, even music.
Artists may WANT to be paid to be paid for their art, and I’m all for them getting paid for it. But they don’t NEED to be paid for their art. That sense of entitlement is just too similar to MAFIAA mentality to me.
Second, I have a problem with the statement “but it isn’t for music lovers to figure out how.” I would argue that to be involved in this debate in any capacity, one HAS to love music. If I didn’t love music, I would never be motivated enough to boycott the majors or read this site. As you said yourself in #19, “fans today are active participants in how, and by whom, music is distributed on- and offline.”
January 10th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
@ RadialSkid:
“No artist NEEDS to make money from producing art.” IMO, anyone who depends on her/his art very definitely needs payment to survive so they can make the art. No survival no art.
“but it isn’t for music lovers to figure out how”
This doesn’t say, or suggest, people shouldn’t love music. Obviously, they do and if they choose to get into doing more than just listening to it, as many of us have, great. But the average person won’t have anything to do with how musicians get paid.
#19 talks about about distribution, not payment.
Cheers!
January 10th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
I agree with Radial Skid about that wording, “artists need to be paid.” And I’m sure its been said quite a few times before, but it bears saying again. If the musician SUCKS he/she isnt going to get paid, there is no entitlement that says they MUST be paid for crap music. The only way I see “artists need to be paid.” as valid is in the context that the LABELS owe payment to these already contracted musicians!
January 10th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
@ The Walrus:
“If the musician SUCKS he/she isnt going to get paid”. Right. But, talking about people who don’t do anything else, the need still exists outside of the expertise of the musician or quality of the music — requirement as opposed to obligation.
Cheers!
January 10th, 2010 at 5:25 pm
“I bet that in Mozart’s time there were many other active musicians in and around Prague and Vienna and there’s a reason we’re not aware of their names and their works”
They might also have been one or two more Mozart at the time who got forgotten because the distribution capability of information at the time was very limited and because they were already some corporate music parasites around.
By the way Mozart himself had hard time to make a living because of these parasites.
January 10th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
“I Am The Walrus” was written by Lennon because he’d heard that his old school Quarry Bank HS had new classes in them in which the meaning of Beatles lyrics were discussed.
So he set about making the most confusing lyrics possible. Did he rope in McCartney to help write them, like the official authorship betokens? Hell no. He got his friend Pete Shotton to help remember some of the words from some nonsense song they sang as Quarrymen. (Another unsung hero.)
January 11th, 2010 at 12:16 am
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1504130&cid=30708172
I’ve posted most of this before on slashdot; This is just a cleanup of previous posts — it has details of why the ACTA is secret.
A Private War
I used to read stuff like this and get upset. But then I realized that my entire generation knows it’s baloney. They can’t explain it intellectually. They have no real understanding of the subtleties of the law, or arguments about artists’ rights or any of that. All they really understand is there is are large corporations charging private citizens tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, for downloading a few songs here and there. And it’s intuitively obvious that it can’t possibly be worth that.
An entire generation has disregarded copyright law. It doesn’t matter whether copyright is useful or not anymore. They could release attack dogs and black helicopters and it wouldn’t really change people’s attitudes. It won’t matter how many websites they shut down or how many lives they ruin, they’ve already lost the culture war because they pushed too hard and alienated people wholesale. The only thing these corporations can do now is shift the costs to the government and other corporations under color of law in a desperate bid for relevance. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.
What does this mean for the average person? It means that we google and float around to an ever-changing landscape of sites. We communicate by word of mouth via e-mail, instant messaging, and social networking sites where the latest fix of free movies, music, and games are. If you don’t make enough money to participate in the artificial marketplace of entertainment goods — you don’t exclude yourself from it, you go to the grey market instead. All the technological, legal, and philosophical barriers in the world amount to nothing. There is a small core of people that understand the implications of what these interests are doing and continually search for ways to liberate their goods and services for “sale” on the grey market. It is (economically and politically) identical to the Prohibition except that instead of smuggling liquor we are smuggling digital files.
Billions have been spent combating a singularily simple idea that was spawned thirty years ago by a bunch of socially-inept disaffected teenagers working out of their garages: Information wants to be free. Except information has no wants — it’s the people who want to be free. And while we can change attitudes about smoking with aggressive media campaigns, or convince them to cast their votes for a certain candidate, selling people on goods and services they don’t really need, what we cannot change is the foundations upon which a generation has built a new society out of.
Culture Connection
Just as we have physical connections to each other, we now have digital connections to one another. These connections actively resist attempts at control because it impedes the development and nature of the relationships we have with one another. People naturally seek the methods which give them the greatest freedom to express themselves to each other. That is a force of nature (ours, specifically) that has evolved out of our interconnectedness. Copyright law has been twisted to serve as a bulwark against the logical result of increasing social interconnectedness between people and computers: Access an ever-increasing amount of humanity’s history, knowledge, and culture. Ultimately, this is a battle they cannot win — they can only delay, building dams and locks to stem the tide, but they will fail. It’s how, when, and where it fails that will decide the fate of economies worldwide.
Every law advantages one group while disadvantaging another. And every engine, be it physical or social, functions because an energy imbalance exists and by moving energy from one potential to another, we can skim some off to do useful work. Laws work the same way — by creating artificial differences between groups of people, society produces goods and services. This is why we will always have new Prohibitions. It’s not a comfortable or politically correct thing to admit, that for societies to function there must necessarily be inequality between people. It is nonetheless true.
This is not a reason to give up hope or be cynical! We are in the middle of a social revolution that has few outward signs. Unlike generations past, the revolution that is happening now exists in fragmentary communications by a collectivistic movement that lacks any real core. It has been created by an unspoken understanding between its participants. That is to say, the participants of the digital community to varying degrees develop the same coping mechanisms to frame their understanding of this environment. These coping mechanisms develop into ideas and beliefs that we then form the basis of our interactions with other members. Put another way, these coping strategies that we interpose between ourselves and our environment form the basis of culture. The interesting part is, this change occurred without any indoctrination or central leadership to accomplish. Mere exposure to the environment alone seems to predispose people to a certain kind of thinking that cuts across barriers of country, culture, sex, and race.
There are no real leaders for the digital culture, yet the culture is there. This is unprecidented. There are very, very few social movements that organize around principals instead of individuals who exemplify those ideals. Whether you live in Iran or America, Africa or Europe, the same values systems are spontaniously developing in reaction to exposure to the digital environment. And while the state of the art has advanced at an incredible rate, our methods of understanding and interacting within the new social spaces created by that aren’t changing that much. It’s a stable environment evolving at rate sufficiently slow to allow culture to form.
That, in and of itself, is amazing. Forget copyright for a moment and consider all the other social advances that are taking place because of our digital interconnectedness — and then realize that there are only a very few friction points in this revolution! That is also unprecidented in modern history.
The Bubble
Copyright won’t end anytime soon, but I’m suggesting we look at the fundamentals here: it is an artificial construct within the digital environment. It’s something we built extraneous to it, and in fact is antagonistic to it. The exchange of information is fundamental to the existance of the internet. Copyright is not. Copyright is an institution, like marriage, the church, the government, etc. Like those things, it has a maintenance cost. It is a coping mechanism. That’s not a judgement on its sustainability nor its justification for existance (or lack thereof).
Copyright is an institution and like all social institutions remain in existance only for as long as its members continue to support it. There is a substantial and growing number of digital identities (people, organizations, projects, etc.) that exist outside of that institution. Why? Because information is very, very cheap to replicate. Production of that information however can vary in cost. Everybody agrees that there must be some compensatory mechanism, however artificial, to reimburse people for the effort invested in the production of the goods and services that copyright protects. If there is no protection at all, many staples of modern life cease to exist. This is the loci of why copyright exists.
The cost to society now outweighs the benefits and we exist within a market bubble right now: A copyright bubble. Large corporations and governments alike have bought into it and driven up its cost. Like any market-driven force however, it will eventually return to equilibrium. We had the dot com bubble, and the housing bubble, but that’s nothing compared to what’s going on right now — we lost billions when that one burst. We stand to lose trillions when this one does. And, ironically, it will be burst by the very forces that businesses are embracing right now — labor capital in the third world.
Which is exactly why, right now, governments around the world are drafting a copyright treaty between themselves in secret. They know that as soon as the lesser-developed countries have come forward a bit more infrastructurally, they’ll be at a point where they can leverage a free flow of history, ideas, and information to dramatically improve their economies. Just as plans for the machinery that powered the industrial revolution was witheld from countries that didn’t have it, so too have the tools to begin the information revolution been witheld.
Let’s face it — less developed countries are not going to pay licensing costs and fork over the money circulating in their economy back to us: They’re going to pour it back into modernization of their own economies. The only way they can do that is by asserting sovereignty and independence from the global copyright framework being developed. That’s why there’s such a push right now to lock them out if they don’t join in the global copyright racket. If this effort fails, the bubble will burst and trillions of dollars will drain out of the economies of the western world like someone pulled the plug out of the bathtub, because the marketplace will be much, much bigger. That’s why if you ask for copies of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, the government will tell you it’s unavailable for reasons of national security. But you don’t need to have the text to know what it intends to do.
The chinese are already producing very cheap material goods. What do you think’s going to happen when they start producing very cheap services as well? Nobody’s going to pay $400 for an operating system; Not when the Chinese have their own that sells for $5 each on a DVD. They have more honor students than we have students — and each will work for dollars a day.
January 11th, 2010 at 12:21 am
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1504130&cid=30708172
Why copyright in its current form will die with the ruling generation, brilliant comment from a Slashdotter.
January 11th, 2010 at 1:45 am
““This manifesto tells the artist that file sharers won’t pay for music. This is just another example of filesharers pushing artists right into the hands of the RIAA.””
hmm. I don’t think that’s quite correct.
I don’t know if this is a good analogy, but I’ll try.
2 days ago I was working on some plumbing in the basement. I figured I’d listen to some tunes via the computer. I recalled an old topi Jon wrote about. About Jango.com So I hopped over there, mad an account, select the groups and tunes I wanted to hear, and got ready for some renovations (7-hrs worth maybe more).
The first couple of hours what I wanted was playing, except the odd weird tune that made its way in about after every 4-5th song. At first it didn’t bother me, but after 3-5-hours of listening to pure garbage that made its way in to what I wanted to hear while working really got on my nerves. I would put the torch down (or whatever tool I had) and skipped the tune. after 6-7 hrs I couldn’t stand jango I was flooded with garbage tunes, tunes and groups I selected never played, more garbage made its way in and then all the repeats of tunes that already played. Don’t think I will use Jango again. The worse was these commercials of some woman in a kitchen talking, and she was talking over the tune i wanted to hear! It annoyed me to damn much.
Now getting back to what you said, Did I pay for it? Yes. You damn right I did. Bandwidth in Canada is F’n expensive and with low caps. Not only did jango constantly slip garbage to me and played commercials that drowned out the tunes (and you can’t turn it off), the get paid for sending the garbage and garbage commercials. And then I pay my ISP for the B/W used (in the dollars, not pennies) for complete garbage I never wanted.
So I paid.
Next time I’ll just download the tunes of what I want to hear and my ISP will make me pay for the B/W used (in the dollars). Do I pay just the same? I sure do.
Maybe the artists themselves can get together and make their own better working jango type site, w/o having to give their tunes away to jango for free, and to pay them on top of that!
The artist is the loser, the ISP is the monetizer, the best method of distribution is throttled by the ISP in order to monetize (don’t forget you pay the packet loss), and places like Jango get the artist money and the ad money!
We don’t pay? You, sir, are blind. We pay a helluva lot. Where that money goes is not my problem.
January 11th, 2010 at 2:59 am
2 Video Stores(BlockBuster + VideoEzy), and A Record Store(Sanity) closed in My State in the last 12 Months
There is one artist (and others :p) I absolutely enjoy, Jessica Mauboy(L) is one of them!
On the day I get paid I wouldnt mind giving over $30 for Been Waiting If I know it goes directly to her, She has torrents on BitTorrent just like many other Artists, yet she is on her 3rd Album I believe… and shes an Australian Idol
I agree with #20, if there are no labels and moneys go straight to the artists, but maybe BitTorrents just easy and were lazy lol
I love you Jess, GODDESS