Satellite Predators: My “Sirius XM Sucks” Experience

siriusxmsucks
If you get one of these in the mail, do what I did. 

I have enjoyed satellite radio for the last three and a half years. There’s nothing quite like genre-sorted, slightly random playlists of singles peppered with a few b-sides.

But here’s the truth: Sirius XM sucks.

You bet Top 40 radio is unlistenable! Who wants to listen to advertisements for music sandwiched between advertisements for products when there are so many other options?

Pandora, iTunes, Spotify, Grooveshark, Turntable.fm… they’re all great on a desktop, workable on mobile, but get most into a car and you’re a slave to cell signal strength.

It’s crazy that a world of digital music still can’t compete with satellite radio for convenience in the car. And it’s all because they followed the business model of the 8-track cassette — build the damn thing directly into the dashboard of every American-made car.

Sirius XM has a market monopoly on delivering music via satellite. I’ll admit it, I hated them even before using the service, and I ended up a customer anyway.

In 2008, the FCC approved the merger of Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio, basically saying it was OK to create a satellite radio monopoly because otherwise the companies would go out of business due to competition from digital.

The merger was a profitable move for both companies. Without the government’s blessing on its monopoly, satellite radio might have gone the way of the 8-track. But the industry elite had deemed satellite radio too big to fail.

The merger was not good for artists or fans, but who cares about them, right?

No, this blog post is not about the obvious ethical bankruptcy of the FCC or of large media conglomerates like Sirius XM. It’s about my personal experience with their predatory billing practices, poor promotional ploys and abysmal customer service that led me to cancel my subscription today.

I ended up with satellite radio as most people do — with a free 6 month trial in a new car. When the six months was up, I was offered a great introductory deal. I forget exactly what the rate was, but it was far less than the $18.99/month default payment plan ($227.88 when billed monthly for a year). I made sure that I was purchasing a single year of service, and made sure Sirius XM knew they did not have my authorization to charge my card after my year was up.

$227.88 per year is waaaaaaay too much for satellite radio. And this is the low end of the cost — if you don’t own the hardware or want to access your Sirius XM online, it’s going to cost you extra. If the FCC’s intent was to ignore the issues of customer price fixing and price gouging in order to maintain satellite radio’s profitability, they did a great job.

But nobody pays $227.88 for their first year of Sirius XM. They sign on for 30%, 40%, 50% off or more. And like any bait-and-switch introductory rate, the fine print says that unless you call to cancel your subscription, you will automatically be billed the full $18.99/month in perpetuity.

After my initial free six months and toward the end of my killer one-year deal, I started getting the expected renewal offers in the mail. There seemed to be a new one every two weeks — even before I could consider the 50% off, they were throwing 60% off at me. 70% off. Finally, I got an offer to get 6 months for $25. The regular price for 6 months of service is $113.94. I took it.

Only now, they wouldn’t accept my terms not to auto-bill my credit card. After much insisting, they finally told me that there was no way to have a subscription without it being automatically renewed and billed. I could pay by check, but the service would auto-renew and a new check would be due unless I called to cancel.

So, like your typical idiot consumer, I made a mental note to cancel my account right before the “six months for $25” deal expired, and I forgot. I spent a year paying the $18.99/month like a chump. Had I only taken 20 minutes out of my day to call Sirius XM and threaten to cancel my account, I could have been paying $4.17/mo. instead of $18.99/mo.

Folks, if you like Sirius XM radio and you’re not paying $4.17/mo., put that 20 minute cancellation call on your calendar right now. You can thank me later for saving you a few hundred bucks a year.

I’m not ashamed to admit I probably would have gone on paying $18.99/mo. like a chump had my debit card not fortuitously expired. This required Sirius XM to call be to update my billing information, and that’s when they began to really lose me.

The customer service nightmare began, as it often does, with an underpaid customer service representative in a foreign country where labor is cheaper.

I gave my updated payment information and then asked to have my subscription taken off of automated billing and renewal. I told them straight up that I wanted to stop auto-renewal because in the past I had received attractive offers to rejoin when I let my account lapse. Again, I was informed this was not possible. Even though satellite radio is a luxury, Sirius XM portrays its company as a utility when explaining why every subscriber is forced to auto-renew. And their policy is not to notify monthly subscribers before their subscription is auto-renewed. The policy glistens with slime any way you look at it.

“If I could not stop auto-renewal,” I told them, “I would like to cancel my account.” That’s when the barrage of offers started coming. 60% off, 70% off, all the way back down to six months for $25.

I insisted that unless there was a better offer, I would like to cancel my account and see if I can get a better offer after canceling.

The rep then asked if I would like to finish out my current plan. I said sure, seeing as there were only a few months left and assuming I had already been billed the annual fee. What I didn’t realize was that I was still being billed monthly, this monthly billing was part of a year-long block of billing time. So with a few confusing words, the rep convinced me of finishing out the year with Sirius XM (my “current plan”) and then having my service cancelled. I settled last month’s fee, agreed to pay out the remaining four months of my plan, and then my account would be cancelled.

It occurred to me that I had just accomplished what I was told was impossible — to continue to get Sirius XM service without my subscription being auto-renewed! Success!

Then I got a call on Friday that would be the beginning of the end.

You know it’s one of those calls when you get the awkward 2-second pause between saying “Hello” and hearing the rep saying his or her call script. When I heard the rep was from Sirius XM I couldn’t believe it. Here I had already cancelled my service, and they were calling me to renew. I didn’t mind that I had already received a couple of letters in the mail from Sirius XM offering me the $25 for 6 months deal. But calling me on the phone, direct telemarketing, was just over the top.

I told the rep that it wasn’t a good time and to call back later, but I had my mind made up. Finishing out my plan was not worth it if I was going to be harassed by customer service. I would answer their call and cancel.

They called once in the morning and once at night for four straight days. I admit, I didn’t pick up because I wanted to see how long they’d go for. Finally, this morning, I picked up and got yet another surprise.

Even though I had updated my billing information the previous month, Sirius XM was calling me to update my billing info because the card they had on file was expired. This despite taking and successfully processing new billing info last month. And what happened to the “plan” that I was finishing up? If I was being billed monthly, what the hell was the “plan” the last rep was referring to in any case?

At this point I couldn’t tell the difference between their mistakes and their scams. All I knew was that I wanted out. I updated my billing info (for the second time) and was transferred once again to the cancellation department.

I understand the game. When you call to cancel your service contract, you run the gauntlet of incredible deals meant to coerce you into doing anything but cancel. It starts with the magic question: “May I ask why you are canceling?” From there, your conversation branches off in one of two directions. Say you can’t afford it and they will offer you discounts until you can (at least for the next six months, after which you’ll be auto-renewed at the unaffordable rate). Say you have a problem and they’ll throw the same deals at you, and maybe add on a month or two of free service for your grievances.

I explained that my problem was that I found it unethical that Sirius XM was bait-and-switching its customers, auto-renewing subscriptions for premium fees after getting cards on file at introductory rates. I thought they were being predatory by not clearly disclosing that their business model was to sign you up for $4.17/mo. and then begin billing you $18.99/mo. six months later with no notification. I told the rep that I understand the need for promotional deals, but the sheer number of different proposals, and the universal nature of their deceit, had finally gotten to me. Finally, I told the rep that I knew Sirius XM didn’t care and probably wouldn’t listen to my concerns but maybe, just maybe, she could talk to her boss and relay my concern that Sirius XM’s predatory billing practices are unsustainable.

In most situations, there is nothing you can do to change a corporation other than to not patronize it. Luckily, I can do something more than just cancel my support for the satellite radio monopoly. This blog gives me the platform to let others know: Sirius XM needs to change its billing practices, because more customers each day are realizing they’re complicit in unethical business practices. We see the switch behind the bait. We see through the false empathy of the customer service training. We understand your business exists solely to make a profit and has long since parted with any intention of fostering the greater good of musicians and their fans.

We understand that Sirius XM fights against musicians to pay a lower royalty rate on the music they exploit. We understand that digital devices and connectivity would have killed the satellite radio business model already if not for the enormous (and potentially flagging) support Sirius XM buys from automakers.

Today I cancelled my Sirius XM subscription. I will miss the occasional discovery of a new artist. I will miss the ability to turn on CNN to hear up-to-the-minute descriptions the latest thing to be blown up and/or engulfed in flames. I will miss it on long drives when I most need musical surprises to break up the monotony.

I won’t miss relinquishing control over the terms on which a company takes my money. I won’t miss the incessant attempts to bait-and-switch me back as a customer. I won’t miss feeling complicit in the exploitation of all the artists on the station, whom Sirius XM lobbies against paying. I won’t miss the customer service hold time, or the feeling of having my concerns ignored.

Today, and for as long as people Google “Sirius XM sucks”, this blog will be there to remind the Sirius XM corporation and its employees: The legitimate value of your service is being undermined by the exploitation of your customers and those who made the music that gives your service value. You will profit in the short term, but the business will be unsustainable in the long term. Tomorrow’s headlines are “Sirius XM Goes Way of 8-Track”.

Four Skills Musicians Need to Make Money

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(photo CC-BY jerik0ne)

If you’ve ever asked the question, “How do I make money from music?” this is for you.

Tens of millions of musicians want to make money from their music. Only one percent ever do. Why?

Ask most musicians how they plan to make money and they all say the same thing: I’m waiting for my music to be discovered. I’m waiting for a good manager, a good booking agent, a good label. I’m waiting for my moment, my big break.

Musicians would not be this passive if making money was the primary reason they made music. Almost all musicians would like to make money from their music, but it’s not why we make it. We make music because we have to. We have to express ourselves. We have to communicate something and connect with people. As Henry Rollins once said, “I’d rather be heard than paid.”

But we can get paid. In fact, we have more opportunities today than ever. But waiting for opportunities to come remains a losing strategy. Opportunities are made — our moment will only come if we create it, and only then if we’ve developed our skills to rise to the occasion.

There is a simple formula to making money in music and many other creative endeavors. The greater your skills, the greater your opportunities. Conversely, more opportunities allow you to further develop your skills. Amplifying this feedback loop is the way to succeed.

So what skills does the musician need to tap into the music economy? They boil down to four broad categories, and it’s no longer enough to be competent in one or two. There are simply too many musicians in the world trying to make money from their music. It used to be you could be a master of one of these skills and that might be enough to get you “discovered” and exploited. Today, we must be competent in all four skills, and masters of at least one or two to truly have a shot at making our own breaks and earning significant revenue from music.

Composition

There are more musicians creating more music than ever before in history, and most of history’s recorded music is accessible to anyone with a computer. The bar has never been higher for novelty and originality — it’s the old chestnut of “it’s all been done before.” As we learn more about composition, we realize the challenge is to create an original expression from musical building blocks that seem to have already been combined in every imaginable configuration. And yet out of these seemingly infinite combinations, we put our own spin on the patterns of popular chord progressions, lyrical motifs and song structure that emerge. We create by taking our influences and making something new of them.

Composition is truly an art in and of itself, and too many musicians simply brush it off to focus on performing and recording. Many musicians fail to make money from their music because they are not songwriters. They channel their influences so directly, nothing original emerges. They sell the song short.

The old adage “writers write” applies to composition as well. One must first write songs to write good songs. What album would you rather listen to: the first ten songs a musician wrote, or the best ten songs chosen from the first 15 songs the musician wrote? By the time you are writing great songs, you will have written many.

Composition not just “where the money is” from a copyright perspective, composition is the art of music that gives rise to the other skills: performance, recording and entrepreneurship. You are getting paid for your labor to create something completely intangible, so the profit margin can be enormous. But it’s also highly competitive with a significant “right place at the right time” component. To cut through the noise of more musicians writing songs than ever before, your song needs to be performed, recorded and “shopped” at a professional level.

(photo CC-BY M. Pratter)
(photo CC-BY M. Pratter)

Performance

Performance is the Holy Grail of revenue for musicians. It’s always been where the highest profits have been for the musician themselves. This has only become more true in the Digital Age as selling access to recordings has dried up as a primary revenue stream. Post-scarcity music distribution shows that sharing songs is not stealing, and the only thing a musician loses when their song is copied is a single opportunity to charge the listener a fee that most would not pay. In turn, they gain an opportunity to make a fan, which is far more valuable in the long run. In order for this equation to work optimally, the composition has to be great, and performance has to be a part of your plan, because it’s where fans show their most value.

Touring and T-shirts are nothing to scoff at — even though gas is more expensive and ticket prices have not increased by much, the profit margin is usually greater than sales of any recording. When a fan is at your show they are the most charged up on your music than at any previous moment. They want to leave with a T-shirt and talk about how awesome the show was, marketing your band and paying for the opportunity. It takes great performances to put them in that state.

The same advice for composition applies to performance: perform, perform, perform. Book any gig you can find. Performing is a process of “paying your dues”. There will be awful shows and huge mistakes, but eventually so much of performing will come naturally to you.

To the extent that performance is a challenging skill to learn, working on your show is a fun challenge (unless you have stage freight). What’s more of a challenge are the logistics of putting on a live show that looks and sounds great, not to mention the huge sacrifices that must be made to tour. As the age bracket gets older and older, there are fewer and fewer musicians who find touring manageable. Locked in a traveling vehicle killing time for most of the day, away from family and friends, is not how most people want to spend 200 days of the year. Touring makes it hard to have a normal life, normal relationships, a normal home and job. But performing musicians are not normal, and it’s a big part of why people are so attracted to them. There are plenty of us who feel that hour on stage makes all the sacrifice worth it. And with a properly managed tour, a we can come home with some money in our pockets, having made fans we can count on to support us not just when we come to town, but also in between releases and show dates.

The internet has enabled musicians to book their own shows and tours, but many have not mastered performance. It’s an art in and of itself, a combination of equipment, stage presence, focus, charisma, mystique, emotion, crowd interaction, and a host of other factors. They’re difficult skills to teach, but come naturally as you play more and more shows. To maximize your opportunity to create value from your music, performance is critical to the overall strategy.

Recording

By now you probably see the pattern: the internet affords you incredible new opportunities, but they can’t be taken advantage of unless your skills are well-developed. Recording is no different in this sense, but it is very different from composition and performance in how one develops the skills.

That’s because unlike composition and performance, which are accessible to anyone with an instrument and an imagination, not everyone can record whenever they feel like it. To be sure, home recording technology has completely transformed the way musicians record, and more than ever have the ability to record themselves. But it’s a small minority of musicians who can produce, engineer, mix and master their own recording at a level of quality consistent with professional releases. It is getting easier as the tools get better and listeners being appreciating a wider spectrum of audio fidelity.

Today, every musician should have some way to record at least demo-quality recordings at home. A big part of learning the skill of recording is learning how to perform under the magnifying lens of the studio. There is also the task of “getting a sound” in the studio, a process often wholly unique from its analogue in developing the sound of one’s live show. And there’s no better way to get what you want from the studio you’re paying than to play them a rough idea of the sound in your head.

Every musician should have some way to demo songs in order to work out as much of the recording in advance as possible. Even when done at home, recording a song or album is a big production. It only happens once, in the sense that the recording you make is the recording you’re stuck with until the end of time.”

Ultimately, most musicians will find themselves paying a professional to create a professional-level recording. Your closest fans may accept less, but it’s hard to build a substantial audience around music that is recorded poorly. Fans want to listen to your music all the time, the better the recording, the more attractive it is to listen to over and over again. A chance to be heard is a chance to be paid, and you increase your chances with a great recording.

Entrepreneurship

Most musicians intuitively know they need to write and perform great songs, and record a great version of them to win fans. Entrepreneurship is the art and science of building a business around those fans, and the compositions, performances and recordings they want.

It used to be musicians waited to be discovered and signed by a label. The label would provide the business services to run their careers. Nine out of ten failed, and those who succeeded were often ruthlessly exploited, but it was the only game in town until the internet disrupted it all.

Independent labels can still make good partners for bands that grow their businesses beyond several thousand fans, but increasingly musicians are making their own income directly from fans. Though the Digital Age has made this possible and even easier, but it is still not exactly easy.

Entrepreneurship requires waking up every morning ready to tackle the tasks that lead to accomplishing your goal of making money from your music. It requires understanding and development of the skills needed to accomplish your tasks. You must set specific goals that lead to making money.

In the pursuit of making music, composition, performance and recording come naturally. In the pursuit of making money, entrepreneurship must be learned. You will draw on your natural abilities to be social and network with people, and develop those relationship-building skills if you lack them. You will become a master at exchanging value, the fundamental concept that underlies all business. Marketing and PR follow from the skills acquired in building these connections, and are critical for getting people exposed to your compositions, performances and recordings.

This ultimately leads to building enough fans to finance your business, either directly through crowdfunding or by attracting a working partner who believes in your business, such as a manager, booking agent, producer or promoter. Do it yourself does not mean do it alone, and entrepreneurship is all about making the personal connections that will sustain your music as a business.

(Note: If you’re into learning these skills, you might like the Band as Business course I co-produced.)

Why Vinyl is Going to Help Save Musicians (and Why Fighting “Piracy” Won’t)

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Vinyl is critical and growing revenue for indie labels and independents (like my band Dead Unicorn. (CC-SA)

Vinyl sales grew 39% in 2011 and projections for the future are even higher. This is huge for musicians.

Here’s the dirty little secret you probably haven’t read much about: Look more closely and you’ll quickly realize that the music industry is 75% controlled by four labels. Musicians are not the majority rights holders of music — four labels are.

Does that make any sense in an age when the cost to produce, market and grant access to music is a fraction of what it was 15 years ago?

For the other 25% of rights holders, vinyl is huge. For indies, vinyl is a shining beacon of hope. For independent musicians, vinyl is becoming super-important to their bottom line. For these musicians, charging for access to one’s music no longer makes sense (it quite literally makes cents), particularly when attention is a form of payment in the Digital Age. A chance to be heard is a chance to be paid. A chance to be heard is too valuable to paywall for the 25% who don’t have huge stables of lawyers and lobbyists, or enormous marketing budgets and payola arrangements to manufacture popularity.

Music innovators Feedbands have recently come under friendly fire for this op-ed on Digital Music News in which they slay all sorts of bogus stats that washed-up pro-musician bloggers like to tout when they complain that fans sharing their music are killing their careers.

For those who don’t know of Feedbands, what they do is allow users to vote on a vinyl release for the month. They then pick a winner, press up their EP, and send it out to all their subscribers for the reasonable price of $14.95. For the bands that make the cut, it can be a huge windfall of new fans, not to mention Feedbands cuts them a nice check and does the pressing free.

What I love about Feedbands, and what will save the music industry (at least the 25% that matters), is not the vinyl records themselves, but the ethos:

We at Feedbands believe that music is essential and should be shared.

This simple sentiment has been completely lost on piracy-obsessed blogger-musicians at The Trichordist and I Am A Scientist, who believe sharing music is akin to stealing — a concept that came and went over a decade ago. And anyone who thinks RIAA and IFPI have musicians’ best interests in minds is dangerously out of touch.

There are two simple reasons why “killing piracy” will never save the 25%, or the 75% for that matter.

There is still a healthy demographic of musicians who blame their career woes on their own fans’ sharing of their music and on ad-supported, unauthorized music distribution platforms. They want to eliminate free access to music and force fans to pay. It’s a great way to never be discovered and to piss off the people who love your music.

Instead of incentivizing fans to pay by offering something they can’t get free off the Internet (vinyl is just one example), they would rather kill the free access discovery process in order to get a tiny minority of those fans to pay 30% to the digital distributor and then let the money trickle through an exploitative label contract. They want to increase the deadweight loss and alienate the people in a position to support their careers by dictating the terms on which their art is appreciated. It’s not a winning strategy. Vinyl is.

I don’t need statistics and studies to tell me vinyl will help save musicians. My band raised over $4,300 on Kickstarter to fund vinyl production. Every musician I talk to now is excited by vinyl. It has reintroduced scarcity (vinyl is often released in limited collectible editions feature awesome art and crazy coloring), but more importantly, it’s a way for fans to express their love for a band financially and get something tangible in return.

Some people will tell you that modern digital files sound great and the sound quality of vinyl does not make the difference. I’m not sure what to say to those people. I’m no vinyl snob, not even a collector, but even I can’t argue that for many types of music, vinyl just sounds better. I was so blown away when I heard our band’s vinyl after we got it back from the plant, I went out and bought a record player. Say what you want about sample rate, but analog audio is natural and digital sampling ain’t. You can’t argue with a brain that evolved over millions of years to interpret a continuous sound signal vs. a purportedly indistinguishable succession of digital samples. Whether it’s the “warmth” of the intrinsic distortion of vinyl or any other trick of physics, the sound speaks for itself.

There’s something else the haters are missing, and that’s the ritual of vinyl. Even with cassettes and CDs, there was a ritual. We’d have to select the physical media from our collection, and place it in the physical player, and then we had to listen. Straight up, true fans want to listen to music.

People are having religious music experiences upon hearing vinyl. I first heard our vinyl album on cheap computer speakers via a USB turntable, and it still sounded better than my hi fi car stereo. The ritual helps establish the attention to listening, so I’m not sure how much of it is psychological, but our brains are all we’ve got so I’m going to listen to mine.

So spread the truth. If you want sound quality, vinyl offers an experience wholly different than digital and preferred by many.

The cost of production, marketing and giving the public access to music has never been lower. There are more independent vinyl pressing plants today that before most of us were born, and you can get 250 records pressed up for about $1500, then turn around and sell those for $15 apiece minimum. Higher quantities yield higher profit margins. It just doesn’t even compare to the margins on streaming and downloads, which are only going to shrink as access to music is bundled with telecom service and mobile contracts. With enough litigation and legislation, the major labels might be able to get a bigger cut of streaming revenues, but good luck seeing that income trickle down into all but the most previously successful musicians’ pockets. Isn’t the purpose of copyright to create a healthy music culture, not enrich creators who are no longer relevant creatively?

There’s one more log I’d like to throw on the fire, and it’s last but not least. Fans know that when they buy vinyl, the money is generally going to the artist. Fans know that when they buy digital, a good chunk goes to a large corporation simply for serving up the file. They’re just about as happy with price-fixed digital files as they were with price-fixed CDs.

In this business of music, who are we trying to save exactly? The multi-billion dollar media conglomerates who write off their recorded music losses against military-industrial complex cash cows? Or are we trying to save the actual musicians responsible for creating the music we love?

Nobody wants to save the music industry, the 75% owned by the big four. Well, the pro musicians who profited from it do. The lawyers and lobbyists do. The executives who successfully manufactured the popularity of 1 out of 10 musicians they singed do. But I’m not sure how much clearer of a message fans could send to the music industry than a $3B loss.

To be clear, vinyl alone will not save musicians, inasmuch as they need saving. Last time I checked, there was more music being made and listened to than ever before in history, and so-called “piracy” was still rampant. There are other important revenue streams that copyright-obsessed musician-bloggers like to ignore. Crowdfunding and tipping are growing exponentially. Licensing has never been more in demand and accessible. It’s never been easier for a musician to cut out the middleman on all kinds of merch and physical product and make huge markups. Live music generates more significant revenue now than it has in years. Fans are still paying musicians, they’re just over paying for access. Musicians make music to be heard first, paid second, so where’s the conflict in digital technology finally making that dream a reality?

If you want to save musicians, buy a record, burn it to MP3, and share it with your friends.

Music Brings Beauty to our Sometimes Ugly Brains

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It ain’t much to look at, but it’s all we got. (Image CC-SA. Brain image by _DJ_ CC-BY-SA; headphones by Adamantios CC-BY-SA.)

Why do we continue to power 41% of the world with coal power — a non-renewable, environmentally destructive cancer-on-wheels? Why are we causing earthquakes and destroying natural resources to switch from coal to natural gas?

Why do we insist on basing our country’s economy around endless war, Orwellian surveillance, imprisonment and obesity-inducing diets? Why are we growing these economies instead of doing what’s right?

Why do we insist on basing our music culture around exploiting musicians? Why do we focus on music’s role as entertainment while greatly ignoring the development of its far greater powers of social bonding, therapy, motivation, inspiration and personal development?

Why do we as individuals continue to embrace ideals that concentrate wealth among the already wealthy? Why do we put ourselves in entertainment comas instead of contributing to the betterment of ourselves and society?

Is it because there is no alternative? Hardly.

Is it because we are intrinsically bad people who make bad decisions? I don’t think so.

Is it because the man is keeping us down? I mean, he is, but we the people have always had the power to stick it to him.

Is it because of political, economic, social and technological pressures? Sure, but there’s a force even greater, the very thing that gives rise to these pressures.

Is it because of the wiring of our primitive, susceptible, arrogant human brains? That’s where I’m putting my money.

The neuroscience of free will is a fascinating subject. Scientists and philosophers have been studying it for ages, but in the last few decades we’ve made huge strides in understanding the brain with advanced technology.

The field is highly controversial, mainly because the findings suggest, at least in many cases, that free will may largely be an illusion. Our brains really are just neurochemical bags firing in response to stimuli, and we only become conscious of our actions after our brains unconsciously produce them. In other words, the “I” in us is more of a passenger than a driver.

On the one hand, our brains are fantastic machines capable of incredible feats. Our grey matter is the product of millions of years of evolution and the very organ that puts us at the top of the food chain. As the seat of the soul, brains are the source of all human greatness.

But our brains are also the source of all human fallibility. There is an ugly side.

The neuroscience behind the famous case of the Seekers is a perfect illustration of this ugliness. In the 50s, the Seekers cult formed around the belief that the apocalypse was coming soon but aliens would save the true believers. When the apocalypse date came and went, and no one was tractor-beamed into flying saucers, you might have expected the cult to lose its steam. Instead, followers became even more dedicated to their beliefs. They invented a reason why the apocalypse didn’t happen and doubled down on their beliefs.

The theory behind the story is motivated reasoning. To oversimplify, the idea is that our brains react emotionally and subconsciously before a stimulus enters our consciousness. Input is filtered through previously held beliefs before it is processed. What we think of as reasoning is actually rationalizing. It explains cognitive dissonance and why two opposing sides of an issue can go centuries or even millennia without reconciliation.

This is just one of many studies showing what might be considered the ugly or flawed nature of the brain, like the famous placebo effect in which our brains are quick to believe the lies of ourselves and others. Our brains trick us into going broke. They create false memories. As much as they can be hardwired for good, brains are also hardwired for evil.

Now let’s contrast all of the brain’s intrinsic fallibility with its counterpart: its ability to create beauty. Nowhere is this more present than in the humanities. In art, music, philosophy and the like, the flawed brain suddenly transforms into a vessel of great beauty. Somehow, the humanities pierce the veil of self-deceit which cloaks the brain, and penetrates what feels like the very essence of our being (a pleasant neurochemical reaction).

Our brains aren’t all bad.

Music in particular rises above the rest of the humanities as the most direct conduit to beauty in the brain. Scientists have found that music stimulates more areas of the brain than any other human function. Let that sink in for a second. Nothing else in your life is greater than the power of music to engage multiple areas of your brain, whether you love music or not.

Think about what music has become: a multibillion-dollar industry of vapid pop music that merely serves to tickle our brains. We’ve handed over 75% of the thing that engages the most of our brains to four record labels concerned not with advancing the human condition, but profiting so they can buy another yacht. But I digress.

There are so many other beautiful facts about music and the brain. Music improves brain function from infants all the way up to the late stages of Alzheimer’s. Music moves us by “recapitulating the past and predicting the future”, quite a beautiful concept in and of itself.

We are born musicians. We simply fail as a society and a culture to develop and cultivate that ability (which might have something to do with the music industry hijacking the power and meaning of music). The beauty of music, to a large extent, is hardwired in our brains from millennia of evolution.

Music can make us smarter and make us happier. Music can make us more productive. Music can make us healthier. Music can make us more focused and creative. The list goes on.

As the science behind the beauty of music piles up, we must use our somewhat flawed brains to ask ourselves, does the music industry make sense? Does our market for music encourage us to become smarter, happier, healthier, more productive, focused and creative? Or does it subvert these goals, and use the same neurochemical pathways to keep us in an entertained trance that does little for our personal and social development? If the purpose of making music is to tap into the beauty of our brains, why do we allow money to dictate what people hear? Why do we regard music as a product to entertain us and not a service to enrich us?

To evolve or be entertained — is that the question?

Ad-Sponsored Music Piracy is a Mythical Threat to Musicians

David Lowery, musician with Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven supports Trichordist and is angry that recorded music doesn't pay like it used to. (photo: Clinton Steeds CC-BY)
David Lowery, musician with Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven supports Trichordist and is angry that recorded music doesn’t pay like it used to. (Clinton Steeds CC-BY)

A small but growing number of formerly well-compensated musicians are rallying around a new empty catch phrase: “ad-sponsored piracy”.

As far as I can tell, this idea gestated in the bitter womb of The Trichordist, an echo chamber for musicians who are too scared of changes in technology to discuss solutions. Instead, they spew dangerous propaganda about the “new exploiters” of musicians, namely technology companies. Though they continually remind readers that they’re “fighting for the artist”, though there seems to be no sort of plan or strategy other than complaining.

Look, I think we can all agree all types of businesses exploit people on a fairly regular basis. But I believe I’ve made it clear that technology companies are more ethical that the business forces that dominated music in the past. They are far from perfect, but at least they’re trying to find solutions.

The Trichordist went way out on a limb, grabbing screenshots of ads from major corporations being displayed alongside free music downloads of popular artists. This shock-and-awe tactic is presumably to incite fans to petition the advertisers to pull their ads from these sites.

Unsurprisingly, this attempt has backfired horribly. When the Dead Kennedys and Lou Reed posted the aforementioned Trichordist posts on their Facebook pages, their fans were quick to point out how stupid the posts were, and how out of touch Trichordist and the artists (or more likely, their embittered management) were for posting them.

Eric Kennedy wrote on the Dead Kennedys page: “…that shit is from a year ago, and I can pretty much guarantee that site doled out more viruses than songs. Stick to reposting whatever Black Flag is posting on FB in the future.”

Jay Conner added: “It is utterly astounding that somebody directly involved in the industry on both the business and artistic sides could be this uneducated about how internet advertising works. Particularly since he, you know, runs a blog dedicated to the internet and its ethics.”

Here’s the problem with so-called “ad-sponsored piracy”: it’s a mythical threat. It’s a fake problem cooked up by butthurt musicians who saw their market share crumble when the music business model shifted away from charging for access to recorded music.

I don’t have to get long-winded to prove it. Anyone with a basic understanding of how Internet advertising works understands that these ads appearing on these sites does not equate to companies sponsoring the site or its contents. It’s doubtful they even know where 99% of their ads appear.

And even if they did, anyone with a basic understanding of copyright law and how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act works knows that any site that makes available copyright infringing material must remove it immediately at the request of the rights holders. Reed and the Kennedys can play the victim all they want, but if they feel their copyrights are being infringed, they do have legal recourse to deal with it. Instead they are just complaining, and their fans are totally turned off by it.

Furthermore, even if we assume these sites were committing copyright infringement, most people understand that copyright law — and much of society, really — has been hijacked by corporate interests. In reality, free access to music is a good thing for most musicians because a chance to be heard is a chance to be paid. Pre-Internet, very few artists were heard, a minority were paid, and a tiny minority were paid fairly.

In fact, I think Lou Reed and Dead Kennedys would actually benefit from having their music available as a free download, largely by tech-savvy young people. If you look at the artistic merit of both these artists, I think popular opinion would agree they’ve been on the decline creatively or at least nowhere near the work they’re widely known for. Let’s say nine out of ten kids might come along and download “Walk on the Wild Side” and they hate it, or they like it but not enough to be curious about discovering more Lou Reed tunes (purely hypothetical, because kids stream music these days). One out of ten is going to love it so much they’ll seek out more, and along the way there will be plenty of opportunities to pay the artist far more than what they would make selling the track on iTunes to ten kids. That’s the new business of music, and it’s a much more fair shake for musicians than one given by the labels, lawyers and lobbyists of the past.

As for the Dead Kennedys? I’m sorry, but they’re not the Dead Kennedys if Jello isn’t in the band. He’s on record calling the band a ‘cash scam’ and that’s what the band is purely about now: making money. The art is gone. Forget musicians, fans are being exploited.

So you see folks, the myth of “ad-sponsored piracy” is really just the product of desperate musicians at the end of their careers. The primary purpose of copyright law is to create a rich and thriving culture — economic compensation is a part of it, but not the whole. Why would we deny thousands of musicians the right to be heard and to be paid just so washed-up artists like Dead Kennedys and Lou Reed (more accurately, their buisiness teams and labels) can squeeze some more dollars out of a good run that happened decades ago.

If The Trichordist were serious about fighting against musician exploitation, they would be fighting against the corporate corruption of copyright and fighting for Internet freedom. By their rationale, even Spotify qualifies as ad-sponsored piracy because of its almost non-existent royalty payments in the face of hundreds of millions of dollars of ad and subscriber revenue. But Spotify pays 70% of revenue to artists, just like iTunes. Somehow one is morally bankrupt and the other perfectly legitimate. It’s absurd. I’m no great champion of Spotify, but put up against iTunes they look like Mother Theresa. And like I said, music downloads are approaching their high water mark and will be all but a memory as a new generation grows up on streaming, so the myth is already hopelessly outdated.

In the future, I would like to see The Trichordist discussing some actual solutions instead of throwing tantrums. Talk amongst yourselves. I’ll give you some topics:

• Building a culture of entrepreneurship among musicians
• Crowdfunding as a way to finance an album without signing an exploitative contract with a label
• Marketing as discovery, not as manufacturing popularity or generating music sales
• Music for music’s sake, not as a product but as a service
• How digital services for musicians democratize the industry
• How digital technology dramatically cuts the expense of music production and marketing

Musician Exploitation: Who’s Really Responsible?

PlacidoDominco-IFPI-CC-SA
IFPI chairman Plácido Domingo bellowed as Rome burned.

Hang out for a few minutes and I’ll tell you why Grooveshark may be more ethical than Spotify.

Brief History Lesson

By suing Napster and its kin out of existence, the music industry elite created a “soft landing” for its multi-billion dollar business of selling access to recorded music. They couldn’t kill so-called music “piracy” (also known as song sharing), so they killed the nascent technology companies that tried to build a business around it.

To what extent have musicians benefitted from this business model? Until access to music became free, it was our primary revenue stream. But too often we got such a small piece of the overall pie. The record business was never particularly ethical, with its exploitative contracts, shady accounting and history of corruption.

Free access to music wiped these ethical dilemmas off the table with one click of a mouse, giving us a new debate over the question of whether music should be free to access and share.

Notice I didn’t say “free music”. Music isn’t free to produce or market, though costs have dropped considerably any way you spin it.

At the time of Napster, music suddenly was free to access with an Internet plan and a computer. It took the industry hundreds of millions of legal and lobbying dollars to finally stop the bleeding. In 2013, the slow death of physical media has been largely offset by the rapid growth of digital after a precipitous $3B drop.

The corporate music industry would be quick to tell you that suing innovative digital music companies and individual file sharers was all about protecting musicians’ revenue, that they saved our bottom lines. This is the same industry that coerced us to sign exploitative contracts, that price gouged and price fixed consumers, that bought off radio to play the same songs on repeat.

Nobody’s perfect.

But musicians are starting to wise up as they see the bottom line on their streaming revenue reports. To be fair, Spotify (and iTunes) pay roughly 70% of its revenue to artists (more accurately, “rights holders”, which are primarily the labels who exploit the artists’ copyrights). A lot of the negative reaction can be chalked up to failures in long-term vision — as the decibel point moves right in our royalties, the multiplier grows exponentially. But the current streaming royalty system clearly favors the big four major labels over the short and long term, because it is harder for independent, unsigned and emerging musicians to compete with their massive back catalog of perennially popular music and marketing budget to match.

Some musicians are coming around to bridging the art/business divide and becoming entrepreneurs themselves. They’re sick of having to rely on someone else exploiting their rights for increasingly less money. The Internet allows direct fan patronage in the form of crowdfunding, tipping, or selling both virtual and physical products from one’s own website. Home studio production is getting cheaper and better. Licensees are hungrier than ever for the latest music. Marketing is as easy as creativity > strategy > click. These aren’t empty catch phrases like “downloading music for free is stealing” and “piracy is bad”, these are realities clear to any musician working in the field today.

Yes, there will always be artists who dare not sully their art with business concerns, but they are an increasingly lonely breed. The new musician adapts to the meager streaming royalty stream not by petitioning for higher royalty rates from Pandora, but by embracing business models with far more promise than selling access to recorded music. If only the record business elite would step off. But there’s billions at stake and they like their yachts. Who can blame them? They’re the last generation of the American Dream and they don’t want to wake up.

occupy-london-article
What would Jesus stream?

Occupy the Music Industry

Revolution is blowing in the wind among musician culture, and the industry elite can smell it. The chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is acclaimed opera singer Placido Domingo. In the IFPI’s 2012 annual report, Domingo titled his introduction, “A digital world that rewards artists and creators”.

Really? What about “a digital world that rewards the gatekeepers between artists and creators”. That’s really what the IFPI is concerned about. It doesn’t represent the interests of musicians, it safeguards the commercial exploiters of musicians’ recorded music copyrights. Let’s tell it like it is — the money trickles down through the cracks in their multi-billion dollar pavement. The markup on music remains artificially high to justify the expense of major label production and marketing. They also need to even out the variance from gambling on bands like derivatives traders.

What’s concerning is to see musicians jumping on the IFPI’s bandwagon, supporting the suing of technology companies, demonizing their own fans for sharing music. I mean, what do these musicians think is going happen? Are we going to all of the sudden roll the music industry back to 1996 when a CD cost $14.95 and you were forced to buy 9 crappy songs for every hit single?

“Of course not,” these skeptics will tell you. They love new technology, it just has to be applied fairly to musicians. Technology companies, they say, are even worse than the exploitative record labels, because they want to use your music for their own gain and pay you nothing!

It’s not even remotely that simple. Of course, there are plenty of digital music companies exploiting musicians’ copyrights. But it’s precisely because we’re still working within the model of copyright exploitation established by the labels.

Grooveshark is an exploiter. Spotify is an exploiter. And on the face of it, Grooveshark would appear to be screwing artists far worse than Spotify. Google has decided to blacklist them from certain search functions under pressure from the IFPI and its minions to fight so-called “piracy”. But Grooveshark has only been convicted in the industry, not in the court. They’ve literally been blacklisted from the industry for daring to question the status quo of corporate-hijacked music law and technology.

Corporate Hijacking of Music Law and Technology

The majors and some indies have refused to license their music to Grooveshark. As a result, the majors are trying to sue Grooveshark to death just like Napster or all of the other -ster’s they shut down with copyright infringement lawsuits. We know how well that worked — unauthorized song sharing only grew more popular. The industry’s well-documented and cyclical fight on piracy is the same kind of endless war the US is engaged in overseas. The industry has been fighting it for 100+ years and the only true goal has been to co-opt the developments of independent innovators rather than truly eliminate piracy, which is quixotic. (See the book Pop Song Piracy.)

Spotify and its ilk only use officially licensed music. But what happens when the legal system is broken? Copyright is supposed to protect our right to profit from our labor and to express one’s personhood. It’s also supposed to promote social and cultural welfare, and benefit the greater good by making creative works accessible to the widest possible audience. The cost for access is supposed to be high enough to incentivize creators to keep creating, while low enough to prevent a large deadweight loss, depriving the least amount of citizens from access to the work. These are the moral and economic foundations of copyright, and they’ve been hijacked — just like the political process, the food supply and our media — by large corporations.

In 2011, the four major labels controlled 88% of the market share for recorded music. That’s enough to make the Monopoly Man jealous. These labels own the rights to the vast majority of the music we listen to, and use their enormous legal and lobbying resources to keep it that way. It’s not some sort of conspiracy, it’s standard American capitalism, and the American way of music business is increasingly the way of the world.

Don’t Bring Back the $14.95 CD, Bring Back Napster

People rallied around Napster for two reasons. One was that it made it possible to access all of society’s recorded music for free. The second was that many music consumers knew they themselves were being exploited by major labels almost as much as musicians were. They witnessed a history of major music industry settlements for price fixing, price gouging and payola. They heard the stories of great musicians suffering because a label coerced them into an onerous contract. They paid $14.95 for one good song.

The music industry was incapable of embracing a world where all of society’s recorded music was available for free, even if that’s clearly what consumers wanted. (Most people at this point will say, “of course that’s what people wanted, people want everything to be free” to which I reply, “Yes they do.”)

As a quick aside, I believe music is closer to a necessity than a want — closer to food, affection, sex, shelter, etc. than a new TV or a Snickers bar. As a society we should endeavor to provide free and fair access to music — a Right to Music — on a humanitarian level. (Follow the link for more.)

Free access to music is good for musicians for one simple reason: An opportunity to be heard is an opportunity to be paid. Anyway, the best musicians make music in order to be heard first, paid second. The motivating factor of copyright and the potential of being the 1 in 10,000 musicians that become a rock star have been greatly exaggerated. If copyright law evaporated tomorrow we’d still be making music. That the music industry lost half its value and we have more artists creating more music than ever before is testament to this fact.

David and Goliath.
David and Goliath.

Grooveshark vs. Spotify

This all relates to the Grooveshark vs. Spotify ethics question, because Grooveshark is pretty much the only company of its size that believes access to music should be free (or nearly so.)

Spotify, and the dozens of other streaming services (many of them restricted to certain geographical regions because of licensing rights restrictions) believe that the way to save musicians is to increase payments to the labels that exploit them.

Sound familiar?

Let’s contrast two opinions, the first from IFPI chairman Domingo:

“…policymakers better understand that the internet does not make music “free”.”

Here we have a straight-up threat by the IFPI to stop funding politicians’ re-election campaigns if they don’t pass legislation protecting major labels’ ability to exploit musicians’ rights for maximum profitability. Spotify et. al. would agree with this statement. As we’ve observed, just because the Internet provides free or near-free access to music, that doesn’t make the production and marketing costs of music zero (though costs have inarguably dropped significantly).

Storm the Gates

It seems we are left with two solutions. The one proposed by the IFPI is to protect the gatekeepers by charging a monthly subscription fee for access to music.

I have no problem with this business model, nor do I think should musicians.

I had no problem with it back in 2000 when Napster brought us the technology and proposed the exact same business model. But too many salaries built from exploiting musicians were on the line, and they were sued out of existence. It wasn’t done for the musicians. It was for the executives, the lawyers, the lobbyists and the other business associates at the multi-billion dollar multi-national corporations. Any musician who thinks these companies have their best interests in mind are deluded. It’s not entirely black and white — I’m sure there are plenty of employees who do good and mean well. But even the legends that deserve our respect, like David Geffen, eventually had their ethics compromised by commercial forces. A cursory glance at music industry history clearly demonstrates why gatekeepers between the artist and fan are a really, really bad idea from an ethics standpoint.

Musicians had no choice but to put up with it to get paid. This is no longer true.

That’s why I like option #2 — free access to and sharing of music. (Free as in freedom not free as in beer.)

Let’s contrast Domingo’s threat with Grooveshark SVP Paul Geller’s vision on where the music industry out to be headed:

“…I think that we have to be creative about how to get more money into this ecosystem, because I don’t think anyone sees those numbers [streaming payments] and is really inspired by them, I think people look at them and say ‘well this is a soft landing for the music industry,’ it’s ‘hopefully we don’t have to lay off too many people.’ And that’s why I think that Grooveshark is out there trying to be creative about how to infuse the industry with more money in ways that I don’t think are commonplace right now.” (from Digital Music News)

Grooveshark’s technology and innovation was neck and neck with all the other streaming music sites a few years ago, prior to having to dedicate an enormous chunk of their time and revenue to fighting legal battles with the majors. They recently rolled out some nice new features to compete with the Spotifies, but it’s clear they are living in a legal and fiscal nightmare. Their CEO Sam Tarantino admitted as much while doing an interview for Grooveshark’s new Broadcast feature. I can only surmise by statements like the one above that the people at Grooveshark truly believe they are fighting the good fight. And why shouldn’t they?

Grooveshark does pay artists, it’s just that they haven’t reached a licensing deal with the majors because as of yet they’re unwilling to bend over far enough. To Grooveshark, the majors are just trying to extort them and screw musicians anyway.

If you’re an independent artist or label, you can register your music with Grooveshark and they will pay you a share of their advertising and subscription revenue. These payments may be even smaller than what Spotify can offer, but Grooveshark is also much smaller, and draining their pockets just fighting to exist. Legally, they are in the right, because the DMCA allows for a safe harbor to exist for copyright-infringing, user-generated content, provided the company removes this content upon request and the platform has other significant uses beyond so-called “piracy” (really just unauthorized sharing of songs… does that sound so bad?)

Nobody knows right now if Grooveshark will give out and sign away their seemingly sinking ship to the majors, or if they’ll keep fighting the good fight until the courts deliver a predictably narrow, safe harbor-eroding decision. Law was never good at keeping pace with technology.

Toward a Two-Way Music Industry

The majors would like to continue collecting 88% of the market share for recorded music (and then pay a fraction of it to musicians because they signed exploitative contracts at low points in their career). How does consolidating wealth in media gatekeepers accomplish the IFPI’s mission of achieving “A digital world that rewards artists and creators”?

Stayin’ Alive

This fits into the larger context of corporations and governments trying to kill Internet freedom. Ask yourself, “Why wasn’t radio two-way? Why couldn’t the listeners also be the broadcasters? What about television?” At a glance this seems to be a technology and cost issue, but it’s not that simple. There are powerful commercial forces that ensure these technologies are developed in a way that maximizes profit for corporations, creators and consumers be damned. That’s why we have a long history of gatekeepers in all creative industries, not just in music.

The Internet changed all that with one simple feature — the consumer is now also the broadcaster. Large corporations have spent the last 15 years trying to litigate and legislate their way back to one-way media. Discouragingly, they continue to make gains every day.

This is why I believe Grooveshark may be the more ethical approach on balance. Spotify may talk a good game on paying artists. They may be expanding the pie we take our little piece of. And we can’t rush to conclusions that just because a single stream payment looks small today doesn’t mean it will add up in the long haul. Ultimately, any discussion of musician’s revenue share is taking place within the context of what their revenue share will be after the technology company takes their 30%, and then the label takes its majority share. Spotify and the IFPI are really only innovators in repressive legal maneuvers and artist exploitation. They’re profiting from a 15-year-old idea Napster first realized.

How can I say Spotify and the IFPI are exploiting artists when they’re trying to collect more money for them? Because it perpetuates the old model of exploitation on new technology. It’s repeating the same cycle of co-option that happened with the phonograph, with radio, with cassettes and with CDs. It’s a smokescreen to prevent you from thinking like an entrepreneur, from adapting to free access to music, from finding new opportunities to profit without the gatekeepers and stealing their market share. They desperately want to continue the same systematic exploitation and price-fixing that the record industry has been guilty of for the last 100+ years.

Grooveshark is more ethical because it rejects this corruption. They aren’t saints. They’re certainly pariahs. They haven’t figured out how to improve upon tiny streaming music payments, but they’re trying so hard they’re sacrificing their personal lives, their livelihoods, their reputations and quite possibly their sanity.

The vast majority of musicians will see no significant increase in revenue until the major labels lose their market monopoly, and their revenue share drops considerably. In this sense, Grooveshark is using loopholes in the DMCA to kick the IFPI in the nuts — pretty much its only defense against the obscene legal might of the industry elite.

As a musician, do you really think the IFPI or Spotify (if they can stay in business) are going to solve your revenue problem? Of course not. They’re looking out for #1: the record industry elite.

The solution for musicians is to start looking out for #1 too. That means building a culture of entrepreneurship. That means direct patronage from fans via crowdfunding and tipping. That means cutting out the gatekeeper and giving fans exclusive access to products that are still scarce. Selling access to music is no longer viable, and only by corrupting copyright do corporations make it so. The ethical foundation of copyright is sound, but it has been corrupted.

The greatest lie told by the IFPI is not that their mission is driven by musicians (they have musicians in mind, maybe, but certainly not a priority). The greatest lie told is that they are somehow going to bring musicians back to a world where they were fairly paid for their labor, where they are free to express their personhood without exploitation, where society can access and share music freely, and where more music of higher quality and greater diversity is listened to with greater frequency.

That world never existed. But it can today, with free access to music as the great equalizer.

The only way to fairly solve the musician revenue problem is for musicians to reject the century-old system of exploitation and fight to keep the Internet free so we can build a new culture and economy of direct fan patronage and musician entrepreneurship.

Until that happens, I’ll be rocking out to Placido Domingo on Grooveshark and waiting for the next Napster.