The coming p2p marketplace
p2pnet.net Feature:- The central question of the p2p debate is – what’s the value of art? And the way we answer it will determine the future of our culture, the art we enjoy, and the marketplace in which that art is bought and sold.
I Was There
When it all started, record companies – and there were many of them, and this was a good thing – were run by people who loved records, people like Ahmet Ertegun, who ran Atlantic Records, who were record collectors. They got in it because they loved music.
Now record companies are run by lawyers and accountants. The shift from the one to the other was definitely related to when the takes started to get big. Somebody in a forensic accounting job could probably establish the exact moment at which it reached the level that brought in the sharks.
- David Crosby from the PBS documentary, The Way the Music Died.
American music of the 1960s, of which Crosby was a significant part, reached a pinnacle of achievement unprecedented in cultural history. Surely it is comparable to the Vienna of Beethoven and Mozart. We need to ask then, how did the music become so rich, so deep, so valuable?
The answer is community – the network that fostered so much brilliant music.
It is no coincidence that the 60s produced an ecosystem that allowed artists like Crosby and others to reach the height of their craft. Even now, their songs still dominate radio, TV, advertisements and their record companies back catalogues.
The 1960s saw a network of locally owned FM radio stations that allowed the new and daring music to be heard. The monolithic media empires such as Clear Channel didn’t exist. Local radio, close to the people it served, nurtured the local community scene and the artists who performed there.
The 60s also saw the rise of a global, interconnected youth movement organized to fight for civil rights and an end to militarism. Like all new, pop music, the kids understood the music of the Beatles and Boy Dylan first. Knowledge and understanding of the new music passed through their networks. In turn, the great 60s bands were part of the network – the themes in their songs reflecting the issues and culture of the day. The Woodstock festival captured this aspect of the network for eternity.
Thus, in the 60s, we had music that became valuable, that is, artistically rich and complex, because it was part of a community that fed and nurtured it. This is the interplay of artist and audience that must be present for works of genius.
An artist never works in isolation, but is always part of a community, and the feelings of its individuals, that he reflects in his work.
Since the music was rich and complex, it became valuable to the community from which it sprang. People part with their money to have it. As David Crosby said above, this was when the sharks got interested. There was a lot of money to be made selling a valuable product to people who wanted it. In part, the technology of the time – expensive recording studios, production runs and overhead for distribution – meant only well-funded record companies could make the product available. At that time, record companies were a necessary evil.
But as Crosby went on to say in his interview, the recording industry is in such bad straights today because one kind of value is squeezing out the other. Crosby described the change this way:
You’d just be dealing with different people. You know, you’d go to a meeting with a record company and it wouldn’t be a guy there who knew that you had written a new song and thought that was cool. It would be a guy who knew that he had moved 40,000 pieces out of Dallas this month, and he had no idea, pieces of what? None.
Perhaps it was inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it has to last forever.
As we all know, the pendulum is swinging back to the value of community with the advent of p2p networks. The pendulum will come to rest somewhere in the middle that again balances the value of art to the community with the monetary value it finds in the marketplace.
The record companies of course are trying desperately to stop this, and so are lashing out like wounded animals.
What is Valuable?
In the new paradigm, how do we decide what has value, both to the community, and in the marketplace?
The record companies don’t want you to know it, but the two types of artistic value are easily measurable in this new digital world.
p2pnet carries a weekly measure of this quantity in the form of the download lists provided by the firm Big Champagne. These lists rank the top ten downloaded songs on the p2p networks, broken out by genre.
Downloading on p2p networks is the new marketplace for music, though the record companies won’t admit it yet. They have their flagship iTunes-like stores that charge per track, but how effective these services are is open to debate. (iTunes doesn’t release its sales figures, which makes its basically useless as a measure of the marketplace, and casts doubt on its status as a p2p network "alternative").
Some online music services are beginning to "get it," however. Among the most important is Yahoo, who began charging a low monthly subscription fee ($5.00) for online access to their catalogues. The deal Yahoo made with the cartels for content hasn’t been made public, but one assumes they’re paid royalties.
based on they number of times a song is accessed. The more a song is streamed, the more money Yahoo would pay to the licensers of the song.
Yahoo hasn’t gone all the way yet – if you stop paying your monthly fee you lose access to the songs. And you must buy individual tracks, as with iTunes, if you want to burn them to CD. But they’ve moved much closer to the way a p2p marketplace works – where value is measured by the number of downloads.
If record companies were to fully embrace the p2p marketplace, they’d go completely to a monthly subscription rate, almost a tax, that would be added to everyone’s internet bill – at least in the developed world (developing countries could be brought on stream later). Yahoo has already established about how much such a levy should be – $5.00 a month.
I think $5.00/month is an amount that would be acceptable to most people – and for that, you get what people have always hungered for: the "celestial jukebox". Many countries, including Canada, already have a levy on blank media that reimburses the cartels for private copying. Extending the levy to internet service wouldn’t be a big stretch.
Measurements such as those provided by Big Champagne would indicate how the levy would be distributed, with the most downloaded songs getting the biggest portion of the levy.
Next then, we must answer the last piece of the puzzle: how is the other kind of value determined, that is, what’s valuable to the community?
The Value of Community
A song doesn’t just show up in charts such as p2pnet’s unique Music Fiile Share Top Ten list over night. As it’s always been, the artist’s music must first connect with the people who want and need to hear it. These are the first fans, and then it moves outwards, as the song reaches more and more people after this initial burst.
Previously, it was the local club scenes, radio stations and communities of like-minded people in the real world that would become aware of a song, coalesce around it and begin its journey up the charts. The real-world communities still exist, but their importance is being supplanted by the internet revolution. More and more sharing and discussion of music now occurs online – and not just in the swapping of files on p2p networks.
The youthful networks of affinity that once spread the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, now have their counterparts on the web. These are online social networks such as MySpace, LiveJournal, and OurMedia.
In these online spaces, users self-organize themselves into groups along the lines of their shared interests and affinities. Word of new ideas, art or events spreads quickly through these like-minded networks. A new song or artist is quickly vetted, and its importance to the community is established. If the music is valuable to the online community, it comes to the fore. If it’s found wanting, it soon drops out of sight.
Artists from Oasis to Weezer have been quick to take advantage of these new networks of affinity. Myspace allows them to host band pages where users can read about them, download new songs and interact with the band. Again, if what the community finds on these band pages is valuable to them, the new music spreads like wildfire through the network.
And what works for major established artists, will also work for those just starting out.
The barrier to entry is low, like it was in the 1960s.
Good music will get heard, and rise to the top, in these new networks. Its value will be established in the community. Only then will it begin its ascent to the other kind of value – value in the marketplace – and maybe one day appear on a "Most Downloaded" list.
Conclusions
All the ingredients exist for a true, worldwide p2p marketplace. Remember: when worldwide communications reached a certain level, the Berlin Wall fell and millions were freed from regimes that controlled what they could see and hear.
Whether, in our own case, our own Berlin Wall will fall and the tyranny of big interests stomping on the little guy will be relegated to the ash heap of history, remains to be seen.
But the tools are there, and if we let the moment slip away, we’ll have only ourselves to blame.
Simon Pole – p2pnet / Home of Stupendous Tales
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May 24th, 2005 at 2:32 am
Good story. As to this:
“Whether, in our own case, our own Berlin Wall will fall and the tyranny of big interests stomping on the little guy will be relegated to the ash heap of history, remains to be seen.”
If history is our teacher the wall will fall. After all, the sale of ink and paper was regulated so that no one who was not authorized by the court of the king could spread their stories.
Now the same minds want to use the courts to regulate the net so the the music cannot be spread except by the gougers who spread the worst kind of music.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
May 24th, 2005 at 9:04 am
This is the same situation that has happened over and over again in the Old Economy vs. New Economy conflict.
Those entrenched in power in the Old economy, who have the resources and the poilitical clout feel very threatened by technology innovations because:
a) they don’t understand them. With this group, if they do not understand it, therefore it is ‘bad’ and must be regulated, controlled, stifled, or made illegal.
b) many of these technologies have the basic design feature of decentralized control. The internet is the prime example of this. There is no one single place that you can go, push a button, and turn off the entire internet, like you could with the Northeast Power Grid, a telephone switching center, etc. This makes it much harder to accomplish a)
c) they don’t understand how they can control it. Well, they can’t, entirely, because of b). To their way of thinking, in order to make money off of it, they need to be able to control it completely, like the studios do now with movie releases (inside leaks aside) where they have the PR and marketing build-up to a release, an opening date, all sorts of foo-furrah at the opening, then plans for overseas distribution, syndication, release on DVDs, TV rights, etc. The traditional control mechanisms (enforced by laws and the Government) are either very ineffective, or simply don’t apply.
As a result, their feelings of being threatened turn into lawsuits, pressure campaigns upon the Government to “do something about these criminals”, and alot of lies, PR, spin, and misinformation to feed the media in an effort to convince the public to stick with the Old way of doing it “because that’s the way it’s always been done, and it’s been working so well up to now, hasn’t it?” Yeah, only because it fills their bank accounts.