Carl the Zealot

It’s the question on everyone’s minds and blogs these days. How are artists going to “cope” with the Internet? When is the RIAA going to stop suing grandmothers and twelve-year-old girls? How are artists going to make a living when the music they produce is practically free? Why would anyone even bother to make art in a world like that? As an amateur musician, and a professional software engineer, I think I have a pretty good idea of how the future of the music industry, and other art industries, might look. The effected industries include music and art primarily.

The coming change isn’t hard to see if you just look at the history of the music industry. The details that follow are largely taken from Cory Doctorow’s Microsoft Talk, which is available in that linked text format as well as a very entertaining video on Google Video. As Cory details in his talk, one early example of change the music industry had to cope with was player pianos.

The player piano was a digital recording and playback system.
Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes
printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape,
which they sold by the thousands — the hundreds of thousands –
the millions. They did this without a penny’s compensation to the
publishers…

The publishers asked Congress to ban the piano roll and to create
a law that said that any new system for reproducing music should
be subject to a veto from their industry association. Lucky for
us, Congress realized what side of their bread had butter on it
and decided not to criminalize the dominant form of entertainment
in America.

But there was the problem of paying artists. The Constitution
sets out the purpose of American copyright: to promote the useful
arts and sciences. The composers had a credible story that they’d
do less composing if they weren’t paid for it, so Congress needed
a fix. Here’s what they came up with: anyone who paid a music
publisher two cents would have the right to make one piano roll
of any song that publisher published. The publisher couldn’t say
no, and no one had to hire a lawyer at $200 an hour to argue
about whether the payment should be two cents or a nickel.

This same initial fear was repeated when *gasp* evil dangerous radio became popular.

This story repeats itself throughout the technological century,
every ten or fifteen years. Radio was enabled by a voluntary
blanket license — the music companies got together and asked for
a consent decree so that they could offer all their music
for a flat fee. Cable TV took a compulsory: the only way cable
operators could get their hands on broadcasts was to pirate them
and shove them down the wire, and Congress saw fit to legalize
this practice rather than screw around with their constituents’
TVs.

Each time technology jumped further, a more significant change in business model was needed to cope.

Jack Valenti, the mouthpiece for the motion-picture industry,
told Congress in 1982 that the VCR was to the American film
industry “as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone.”

But the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in 1984, when it
determined that any device capable of a substantial
non-infringing use was legal. In other words, “We don’t buy this
Boston Strangler business: if your business model can’t survive
the emergence of this general-purpose tool, it’s time to get
another business-model or go broke.”

Hollywood found another business model, as the broadcasters had,
as the Vaudeville artists had, as the music publishers had, and
they made more art that paid more artists and reached a wider
audience.

This is why this blog’s opening question is so important. What is the “next business model”? Will customers really settle for “renting music” rather than owning it? I think not. Rental means “now you have it, now you don’t”, and without involving physical media (which is SO 1994) that means DRM. DRM is doomed to failure for all the reasons Cory lists in his talk, which I won’t repeat here.

So what will the future look like? For all intents and purposes, music will be free. That’s right – free. Not free as in beer, free as in no cost. In case you’ve been living under a rock, here’s an update: right now, someone could make a CD of anything they had already digitally recorded for about 10 cents. What about making that digital recording? Well, I bought an electronic pickup for my cello for $250. Now I can record my cello playing with a $600 computer, and edit the sound files with free and open-source software (like Audacity). Someone could hire a sound engineer (someone with a 2-year degree or 4 years of experience) to do studio quality recording with a couple thousand dollars of equipment. Compare this to 20 or 30 years ago, when you had to pay a couple thousand dollars per hour in a recording studio.

Today music publishers and their promoters spend tens of millions of dollars trying to convince people how great Brittany Spears’ newest album is. Maybe if we need that much convincing, she isn’t such a good singer after all. Maybe music should be a free market. Maybe musicians should put all of their music up for free – and do whatever it takes to get it heard (or, at least have the option to do so if they wish, as opposed to the current restrictive contracts they are all but forced to sign, giving away rights to their own music).

Maybe having large numbers of fans is better for a musician than having fans who already paid them 15$ for a copy of their latest album. Maybe if anyone could listen to a musician’s music for free, ten times as many people would listen than if they all had to pay for it. Then, just maybe, if only 10% of the people that listened to a musician’s music donated a bit, musicians would break even with the other model. But, just maybe, if 20% of the people that listened donated some money, musicians might even do better. And musicians still could go on tours, perform live, and keep a lot more of the proceeds from those concerts with no record label middle man taking their cut.

What this idea suggests is that the next business model may be a return to the *very* old ways. Long ago, artists made art, be it visual or auditory or others, because they loved to. It served no obvious purpose back when people were painting it on cave walls, or playing in primitive town squares, but they did it just the same. But buried deep in the moral code of people is the “golden rule”, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And, for that reason if no other, when someone is truly moved by a street musician, they often donate money or praise, or both. There was no way to sell music before the Internet, before MP3s, before recordings, before sheet music. People were paid for performances – and sometimes, not even that. At first, most likely, musicians were only paid “as thanks”, after the fact, not unlike a street performer today.

Web comics provide some modern-day evidence for the viability of this model. Many web comic authors, as their primary and only career, produce free web comics from the daily to weekly range. They put their art on the web for all to see, free of charge, often under a Creative Commons license or similar terms. They subsist via many methods. One such source of income is the same way Google all but prints money – via ads – although their earnings from that are probably not significant. Most of their income comes from their customers, to whom they “give away free” all the fruits of their labors – how? They sell T-shirts, bumper stickers, prints, coffee mugs, and other paraphernalia on their website stores. Also, almost without fail – web comic authors have “click here to donate” links. Finally, web comic authors go to conventions – the “concert tour” of web comics, where they can draw sketches for their fans, meet them directly, and sell their wares as well.

As you can see, there are plenty of examples here of folks making a career of “giving away” their art – they are supported by their loving fans, via donations, ads, and someone just from selling related merchandise. Also note that these comics are not “financed”. Arguments such as “without the record labels, nobody would make music – nobody could afford to” might have parallel arguments for free web comics. They aren’t quite as expensive as putting together an album, but there is still quite a bit of startup cost. A comic author needs a web server or web host – a website design – drawing equipment and a high-resultion scanner, or a nice tablet and related equipment. Some free software might be used, like GIMP, but many would prefer a license for Adobe Photoshop (easily $400-600). To get the word out, they might take ads on similar web comic sites which already have a following. These comics all started as hobbies initially, grew beyond that, then were finally big enough to support their creators and become their career. The fans decide when an artist is that good, not some record label. Nobody has to be “discovered” and no record exec gets to decide who is “good enough”. Clearly, web comics are perfectly successful without big contracts or funding.

Just in case some readers remain unconvinced of the reality of fan support of artists, I will now relate an event I personally witnessed. The names have been withheld to protect the affluent, but the comic name will be revealed to pay homage to its talented creator. At the 2007 Emerald City Comicon I was particularly excited to meet the author of my favorite comic, Questionable Content. Little did I know, my friends were even more excited to meet the author of a comic I had not yet been exposed to called Dresden Codak, by Aaron S. Diaz. When I say “excited”, what I actually mean is “full of dollars”. I called one friend who was not present and told him “Hey, the Dresden Codak guy is here, do you want me to buy you a print?” He replied, “I want you to buy every single item he has, until you run out of cash. Then I want you to take those items, and do whatever you want with them. Or give them back to him. I don’t care. Give him all your money, I’ll pay you back.” I called my other friend who I knew was a reader of the comic, who said “I’ll be right there.” A few hours later, about 45 minutes before the end of the convention, he arrived and made a beeline for the “Dresden Codak Guy’s table”, and immediately wrote him a check for a large amount. Over $100. He bought a $30 ticket to the con so he could find the guy and give him the check personally. When the guy offered my friend some merchandise he replied “No thanks…but can you show me the next comic? I must have it. Is it done yet?”. It was not done, but my friend insisted the guy take the check, and finish the comic soon. My friend didn’t even so much as give the guy his email address, he expected nothing in return, but hoped the comic creator would feel appreciated and continue his work.

This is the extent to which fans are capable of appreciating their artists. Not everyone can afford to give a huge wad of cash, and it’s certainly true that some people who might save up the money to buy 10 CDs might not give that same amount in donations to the same group if they gave their music away for free – when you think about how many more people might be exposed to said music, it is easy to see how artists might make money, even more money than they currently do after the record labels take “their cut”.

Imagine if you could stream all the music you wanted for free, listen to it, then download any you liked to put on your MP3 player? Imagine the traffic that website might get – that’s some significant ad revenue, even from folks that don’t donate. Imagine if next to your favorite song was a link to a T-shirt with a popular lyric from the song on it – wouldn’t you consider buying that shirt, knowing it supports the artist, and you would have a cool shirt? Imagine that there was a small donate link at the bottom of the page which let you use your Amazon, Google Checkout, or Paypal account to donate money directly to the artist. 100% goes right to the artist, no middle man. Wouldn’t you consider giving $1 or $2 for a song you liked? $10 for an album that “touches you”?

Here’s another idea – take Transgaming’s Cedega as an example – the program is based on open-source software, but also has proprietary bits. What it does is not particularly important, the short version is it lets you play video games for windows on a Linux machine. In exchange for $5 a month, you can download Cedega and use it on as many computers as you like. If you stop paying, you stop getting upgrades. But the real reason to keep paying is to vote – each month you pay for you get one vote in each poll. Each month there are several polls. “Should we add support for this game?” “Should we work on better DirectX 9 support?” “Should we improve support for Steam games?” If you want, you can pay more than the minimum $5/month and get additional votes. People could just buy a minimum subscription (3 months), then cancel and not pay again until they find an unsupported game and need to download a newer version…but instead, they keep regular subscriptions so they can always vote on what they want improved. This is another fine example of something people could fairly easily “steal” (have one friend subscribe and download it for everyone), but most choose to support it – in part because of the empowering feeling of voting for features – just like voting for the features of the next song might do. Now imagine there was a form you could fill out when you donated to an artist, which let you “vote” on what sort of song or album you want the artist to make next. Maybe you prefer their acoustic work? Or perhaps their most recent collaboration with another artist was great, and you want a repeat. Nothing stops an artist from being creative and artistic, but this way, their fans can vote with their dollars and tell the artist which of their works they like best. Right now all artists get is feedback at the album/single level (except from a few online sales and other non-dollar-related polling methods). Many artists could benefit from this extra feedback (and income).

There is one final question I haven’t addressed – “why would authors bother creating music without the ‘huge fame big dollars’ of record label deals?”. Well, why wouldn’t they? I create my music for free. As we have already discussed, there are plenty of examples of artists creating as an outlet, for fun, with no financial motives (at least, initially), only for their creations to grow so large they must quit their jobs to focus on their art. Most importantly, would it be such a bad idea if money wasn’t encouraging artists to create? If artists were on their own, free of the record labels, you wouldn’t have artists releasing their “yearly album” of rehashed crap nobody wants. There would be no money in it anymore. Artists would try to create something people actually wanted to listen to – because things people don’t want to listen to wouldn’t make them any money anyways.

There have been some discussions of the relatively new concept of music as a disposable product. In my opinion, this practice is the last-ditch effort of a dying business model. If they can’t figure out a way to sell customers their “standard product”, and make it worth the price they want for it, they will overwhelm customers with other “rebuy options”. Pay for the CD. Then pay for the MP3. Then pay for the ringtone. Then pay for the “ringback”. Then pay for the “high definition audio CD”, or whatever technology some day replaces Audio CDs. Maybe I’m wrong – maybe customers love to buy everything three times. Hey, remember that movie you bought on VHS ten years ago? You totally want to buy that again on DVD, then again on HD-DVD, then again on Blu-Ray, then again on Amazon Unbox, right? I didn’t think so.