p2pnet.net Feature- I was talking to some friends the other day and heard what I thought was a most extraordinary concept. The topic of discussion was the role of trade organizations and I remarked that traditional media trade organizations are loosing their relevance and importance as the world becomes more digitized.

I referred to the MPAA, RIAA and its Australian counterpart, the ARIA, and put forth the idea that these organizations would eventually die out to be replaced with different organizations.

"But the ARIA is important,” said one of the people I was talking to. “It helps keep the Australian people listening to new music and the Australian music industry would start to crumble if ARIA wasn’t around".

I was, ladies and gentlemen, shocked and stunned. Shocked and stunned that I’d hear a musician come out with this kind of garbage.

It’s time to look at some harsh realities:

The RIAA not exist for the benefit of music lovers.
Trade organizations exist for the benefit of their members (or, I should say, owners). Given that ‘members’ of trade organizations such as the ARIA or RIAA are record labels, the ARIA and RIAA are basically clubs for companies in the music business.

The fundamental nature of any business is: it has to make a profit for the people who own it. Certain things can make businesses successful or unsuccessful. And a tried and trusted method of making these things happen (or not happen) is to form a group of like-minded people to ensure situations exist which are favourable to the members of the group.

Some guy called Nash won a Nobel prize for working out how all this works, so it’s not like I’m just making it up.

Anyhow, the problems of the entertainment industry are the entertainment industry’s problem. They’re not yours. And they’re not mine.

The fact that people in the music or film industry say Something is Wrong! – doesn’t mean it applies to us as well.

Most people don’t particularly care what format their entertainment comes in, but they’re inclined to favour something that’s convenient and easy to use one. Such as the p2p networks. The Problem is that the entertainment industry doesn’t work on a p2p based model. Instead, it’s generally based on a physical product model and, therefore, any entertainment format which doesn’t rely on physical product is a "problem".

The entertainment industry cannot fix the problems of the entertainment industry.
An ultra-simple way of looking at this is to ask, "What created the problems in the first place?" And the ultra-simple answer is, "We have digital entertainment in the 21st century and we don’t need physical product anymore."

Because we’re unable to fully comprehend the power of simple 1s and 0s, we tend to think of "digital" as "idea" or sometimes "concept" and it’s quite hard to put a price tag on a "concept".

I remember hearing a story about Bill Gates walking through Customs and Immigration and declaring that he was taking millions of dollars out of the country. He offered up a bunch of floppy disks containing the DOS operating system and the airport officials laughingly waved him through as all clear.

For the entertainment industry to solve its "piracy problem," it would have to completely reverse its business model. To even being to understand the intangible it would have to let go of the physical.

This type of philosophy isn’t called "New Age" without reason.

RIAA press releases are not written for the press.
Going back to the purpose of trade organizations, the RIAA has to prove to its members (owners?) that it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Acting for their benefit and interests.

Internal memos and industry newsletters are supposed to do this, but anything demonstrating something favourable for the RIAA has to be publicized. Anything unfavourable also has to be publicized, along with an explanation as to why it happened, a scapecoat to take the blame, and a plan to resolve the “difficulty”

This shows how good they are when something goes right and how important they are in stopping things from going wrong. And this all has to be done in the mainstream media because internal memos don’t mean much. But if it’s on TV and in the newspapers, it’s really real.

Trade organizations are not creative in nature.
An "organization for creativity" would be an oxymoron, and trying to make one work would be just plain moronic. But trade organizations have figured this out and now they’re political.

Being political is a difficult task because typical trade organizations represent such a narrow band of the political spectrum that they are, in theoretical terms, insignificant to the general population. But money is power. And because the sole raison d’etre of all businesses is to make lots of money for the people who own them, they’ve become pretty good at dealing with money, including using it attain and keep hold of the power needed to make even more money.

Looking at groups of businesses like the RIAA, MPAA, BPI, IFPI, ARIA, and so on, we see they get their money from creations which are entertaining.

They could be making their money from any number of other things, but they’d still act in exactly the same way because a trade organization functions as a lobby group and every industry has lobby groups: tobaccco, retail, hospitality, pharmaceutical, automotive, etc. And they all operate on the same basic principals. So the film and music industries are nothing special.

There are no creative industries.
"Creative industry" sounds good when you’re describing people and companies involved in "show business" which is, in turn, a very small group of people making a very large amount of money by entertaining very much larger number of people.

You can tell show business is a business because one half of the term is the word "business".

But creativity can survive without show business. And the world can survive without show business. Easily. We just keep show business around because it’s entertaining and we don’t mind paying money to be entertained. Something you’ll never hear from an artist is:

"I’m only in it for the shitloads of money, free gifts, luxury hotels, drugs and women being in it gets me". Since very few people start making music for those reasons, it’s safe to assume they’d continue making music if all those things were removed from the job description, kind of like people have done for thousands of years.

Big Media does not like technology.
Even though sophisticated computer programs make it easier for film makers and musicians to create their work, the same technology is also available to anyone with a half decent PC and an internet connection.

This puts the person in direct competition with the large corporations who have traditionally created films and music. Therefore it’s a threat, albeit a small one.

Big Media would ideally like technology to be very expensive just like it used to be so only people with a lot of money could afford to be creative.

In the past, the only people who could make a movie or record an album were, not surprisingly, the big film and record companies. Big Media is trying to make the best of a bad situation by "embracing new media", but given a preference it would like to be in the same place as it was 30 years ago when it controlled all the production.

Artists create things for everybody. They do not create things for their record companies or film studios.

Record companies and film studios exist to make it easier for artists to display their work to YOU.

A "professional musician" may receive money from a record company, but the artist actually works for YOU.

A person can be both a professional musician and an artist. The money received from the record company is actually a payment from the public to the musician. The record company is there to help the transaction to take place smoothly.

And remember this VERY important point:

The record company is very much an "optional extra" because transaction can be performed without it.

In fact, when you get right down to that bottom line so beloved by the entertainment cartels, there are only two groups of people who really count – the artists and the people who experience the art.

Everyone else in the chain is an optional extra.

Alex H, p2pnet – Sydney, Australia
[Alex is an operations manager for an ATM (automatic teller machine) supplier and he specialises in infrastructure development and maintenance, and logistics. He’s also an[other] active member of the Shareaza community.]

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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