Musicians Demonizing Fans for Free Music: You’re Doing it Wrong

“I’d rather be heard than paid.” – Henry Rollins

starbucksI am witnessing a disturbing trend among musicians: they are mindlessly joining the major label chorus and stigmatizing their own fans as criminals for gaining free access to their music.

The trend won’t last that long. If you’re one of these fan-chastising musicians, you will your bread and butter will be toast faster than you can say “filesharing is stealing”.

The approach for most artists is considerably more velvet-gloved than the RIAA, but the message is the same. The graphic pictured at right is a perfect example of the condescending tone some musicians are taking these days. Not surprisingly, I’ve noticed most of these complainers are those who profited from the old recording regime. This includes not only musicians but also producers and engineers, whom have suffered quietly for the most part.

Look, we’re all upset that fans buy $5 cups of coffee daily yet balk at spending the same amount on five songs a month. But guess what? As a Facebook commenter points out, “you can’t download coffee”. It is a scarce commodity. Music is not. Music is everywhere. If musicians suddenly stopped making music today, there would still be more music than anyone could listen to for centuries. But of course that won’t happen, because music will go on whether fans are paying $1 per song or not. In fact, all evidence suggests music will become more frequent, more diverse and more interesting as its price approaches zero.

These are the people who want to support you. Why are you suggesting they are thieves? Why do you think they’re freeloaders who are too lazy to drop you a buck?

Your fans know that the recording business model is broken. They know that when they buy the single for $1.29, a healthy chunk goes to iTunes, and the rest goes to the record label that’s still recouping on your marketing budget.

Your fans know the system of compulsory licensing is broken. They know it concentrates wealth at the top of the industry and creates a tall barrier of entry to those seeking a career as a professional musician.

Your fans know digital distribution costs practically nothing, yet you have to fork over $50/year or 9% annually just to get it on iTunes so they can take their 35% cut.

You’re not giving your fans a way to compensate you fairly. You’re not letting them contribute directly to your projects and to see that contribution reflected back on them and your fan community. You’re not engaging them on a personal level, at a level where you can communicate your financial needs and they can respond. You’re not providing incentives. Albums aren’t incentives any more. They’re advertisements for the experience of being a fan.

But even if you don’t believe any of that, guess what? Deterrence never works. It is a losing battle. Read Pop Song Piracy and learn about the technological arms race the record business has been losing for over a century. It’s not gonna work. All you’re going to do is make your fans not want to access your music for free anymore. I guess that’s what you want, right?

maddsudeLet’s get a few things straight:

• The cost of access to music to fans is approaching free. In many ways it already is. Accept this and move on because it won’t change. Music is a utility, and you’re selling energy. Electrify the audience and they will power your career. Don’t extort them for loving you.

• Sitting back and collecting “mailbox money” no longer cuts it for a music career. Writing one hit and paying your rent for twenty years is a thing of the past. You and your business team are no longer selling a product, you’re selling a service. It’s time to get creative and forge new revenue streams because the old ones aren’t coming back.

• Fans sharing your music are the opposite of enemies — they’re your brand advocates. They’re out there doing unpaid marketing work, spreading your music virally among peer groups faster than you can fill out your ASCAP paperwork. You should be thanking them and listening to their advice.

• Finally, stop whining and go work on your music. You look like Lars Ulrich.

The Living Room Tour Trend: Selling Context, Not Content

Last night, veteran musician David Bazan, known for being the man behind the seminal indie/emo group Pedro the Lion, played for a few dozen people in someone’s living room in Lubbock, TX.

Bazan spent almost half the year playing exclusively for people in living rooms. It’s not like he had to — his music career is quite accomplished. Tickets for his November/December tour of real venues are going fast, in part because he’s embracing another recent trend of playing classic albums in their entirety — in this case, honoring the 10th anniversary of Pedro the Lion’s finest concept album, Control.

Bazan clearly is right at home in yours:

Certainly, not every musician has the kind of intimate, almost humble delivery that makes Bazan’s solo performances a perfect fit for living rooms across America. But he is actually part of a long tradition that dates back to the origins of much louder, more aggressive music than his — punk and indie rock in the 70s and 80s.

Last year, NPR ran a blog post about the re-emerging popularity of living room shows, pointing out the convergence of digital event planning tools like Eventful with the new economic realities for musicians in a world of free or near-free access to recorded music.

Most of today’s unsigned, independent bands that have toured the country with no booking agent and no management have played their share of living rooms. I know I have. But these living rooms are not often the kind of urbane, sitting-down affairs you see Bazan playing for 30-somethings. Rather, the hybrid living room/venue is rooted in “punk houses” where a bunch of high school and college-age music fans get together to hang out, party and host local and touring bands. I can honestly say from personal experience these house shows are some of the most fun and inspiring shows I’ve ever played. Our fans have crowdsurfed into ceiling fans more than once (pictured here). But the reason these shows are so memorable has just as much to do with the performance as it does with the camaraderie of being able to meet and entertain people in their homes.

The real convergence spurring the living room tour revival can be explained by a concept I often use describe the music economy in an era of free music. The record business is no longer about selling content, it’s about selling context.

What I mean by that is, we never really paid for music, we paid for access to it. Now that access is relatively free, we’re paying for the experience of listening to it in a particular context. Besides a heartfelt need to compensate the artist (a sentiment that record labels destroyed through exploitation), pretty much the only reason people pay for music anymore is to have the convenience of accessing it in whatever context they’d like. There are few technological hurdles left in making music freely available this way, but corporate interests in the content industry continue to do everything in their power to prevent us from moving forward culturally. These corporations aren’t protecting the welfare of artists, they’re protecting their own bottom line.

As far as context goes, you can’t beat a live performance. Remember, before the phonograph was invented just over 100 years ago, the entire music industry revolved around live performance. Playing a piece live was the only way to summon music for listening, whether it was a world-renowned opera singer in an ornate hall or a family gathered around the piano in — you guessed it — their living room. With the record, suddenly we could experience music in any context we wanted… provided we paid the price.

But music is going back to the living room, and it’s headed there from two different directions. From the bottom up, more listeners are becoming amateur musicians. When they venture out to perform, they enter a network of home venues ranging from punk squats to the kind of well-kept living rooms Bazan has toured so successfully. Bazan doesn’t come from the bottom up, but nor is it at all accurate to say his career took a dive, requiring him to play living rooms. Rather, Bazan and more professional musicians like him are evolving their touring strategy to embrace modern music listening and consumption habits. He’s essentially an early adopter of a new model for professional music tours, where the idea of crowd sourcing meets a post-recording music industry in which context is the new commodity.

The truth is there’s not a whole lot of difference between the crusty punk squats and their tidier counterparts, dwelled in by young professionals — except, that is, for the money involved. At $20 a head, Bazan is charging a fairly comparable amount to a cover charge at a real venue. But consider that there are no other costs to cover besides food, transportation and lodging (some of which the hosts even provide). The venue gets no cut. The fans don’t have to pay for drinks, and have more money to spend on merch. And Bazan is almost guaranteed to make a killing selling merch because his audiences have a much higher concentration of total fanatics. That he sells out the vast majority of his appearances is a testament to this (although admittedly living rooms fill up pretty quick).

Now, the back-of-the-napkin calculation I come up with is that they’re netting in the low four figures at a sold-out show. A show at a “real venue” might be more lucrative for Bazan, but by what degree? And as a musician, I can tell you there is a certain psychological value in playing for a room full of fanatics instead of the somewhat random lottery of attendees at a “real” venue, not to mention all the business baggage that comes with dealing with promoters.

Bazan has clearly made a decision that these living room shows are the shows he wants to play even if it means taking a slight pay cut. Real musicians make music to celebrate its true meaning and power to move us emotionally, physically and spiritually, and unite us socially. We don’t make music to make money. Most of us simply want a lifestyle in which we can make our music, connect with our fans, and have them support us modestly. As direct musician-to-fan connections become the currency of the music industry, don’t be surprised if more well-known musicians start showing up in your living room.

Do you think today’s living room tours are more of the same, or is there something more there?

Answering the Question, “How Do Musicians Make Money in a Free Culture?”

Thanks to the hundreds of readers who made yesterday the most-visited day for my blog yet! And a big thanks to QuestionCopyright.org for their kind words about the article everyone was reading. If you haven’t checked out their site, it’s great.

As you can imagine I’ve been getting a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. I’d like to respond to a F.A.Q. that boils down to something Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” (thanks to Aaron Wolf for the quote).

In other words, if I’m a musician that acknowledges free or near-free music as an inevitability, and I’m watching my income depreciate thanks to this effect, what the hell am I supposed to do? Isn’t it impossible to make a living as a musician if one’s music is available for free?

It’s an issue that Free Culture advocates should be acutely sensitive to. In fact, I believe most of the negative feedback I’ve received stems from the frustration of artists who don’t know how to approach this new business of free music.

First, I need to dispel this myth that musicians are getting paid by the people consuming their music. In fact, it is the labels, publishers and performing rights organizations that get paid and then distribute money to musicians. Along the way, that money is subject to all manner of recoupment, administrative fees and questionable distribution formulas that favor corporate-backed music enterprises. So forget about this idea that when you buy music, the musician is making money. Too often, musicians making money is the exception to the rule.

Second, I need to dispel another myth — that when musicians make money, it’s because their music is good, or at least popular. It’s certainly much harder to make money off of bad music, though a casual glance at the Billboard top 100 shows it can be done if you throw enough money at the problem.

But creating music people enjoy is only a small part of the business of success as a musician. It’s the musician’s business team that often determines how lucrative and sustainable the artist’s career is. You may be surprised to compare two artists with the same amount of album downloads and see that one is broke while the other is buying an iced-out watch. A good or bad manager or lawyer is all it takes to make the difference there.

So, now that we understand musicians make money when they have a successful business team that knows how to play the game of squeezing money from labels, publishers and performing rights organizations, we are more qualified to answer the question, “How are musicians supposed to make money in a free culture?”

As you can see, it’s the musician’s business partners that first must answer this question. And no matter how well they understand the potential answers, it may be moot if the labels, publishers and performing rights organizations continue in vein to put off changing their old business models to new ones that embrace technology. I probably don’t have to tell you that this is exactly what’s happening to a large extent.

While efforts drag on to reform mechanical licensing and manage the complex micropayment chaos threatening the industry’s ability to compensate anyone fairly, the truth is none of the musician-industry intermediates are going to be making graceful paradigm shifts into a free or near-free music model anytime soon.

Therefore, the onus is on us, the musicians, to work with our business teams in ways that obviate the need for old methods of making money.

In fact this is exactly what’s happening. Steve “Renman” Rennie, manager of the uber-successful band Incubus, has publicly stated that record labels no longer have much to offer a profitable act. The list of bands foregoing labels is huge — keep in mind that it’s not the musicians saying, “we’re fed up with the old way of doing things” but the business team themselves. When the lawyers, wheelers and dealers that have to keep the money coming in are telling the labels they suck, we ought to take note.

Self-publishing is reaching new heights as well, with the ability to license music through any number of democratizing Internet services that aggregate independent music for paying licensees. And while the performing artist organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and SoundExchange here in the U.S.) continue to try to adapt to the changing landscape, musicians and businesspeople alike are starting to question their efficacy in helping small music businesses make money, noticing how much of the spoils are concentrated among wealthily, powerful industry incumbents.

The question is “How do musicians make money in a Free Culture?” and by now you’ve seen they can’t rely on record labels, publishing companies or performing rights organizations like they used to.

You’ve also seen this is a question that musicians aren’t asking rhetorically out into the ether — their business teams are hearing it, probably once a week at least.

Allow me to answer the question with a quick but relevant anecdotal aside. All around me I see people choosing to go into business for themselves rather than get a job at a corporation. In addition to the difficulty of finding a job opening in the first place, they know that we no longer live in a world where you work for 40 years and automatically become a company man/woman with a fat retirement package and full benefits. So I see many people making the smart move to control their own destiny and start their own small business. They know they can no longer rely on the corporations for sustainability.

The same exact thing is happening in music. Musicians and their business teams are realizing they need to aggressively pursue their own small businesses, no longer able to rely on the old methods of making money. They are taking matters into their own hands and taking full responsibility for their own success or failure.

I realize this may be more abstract of an answer than you were expecting. I’m telling you the way to make money in Free Culture is to look outside labels, publishing and performing/mechanical rights, but not giving any specifics as to what those outside sources are.

The Future of Music Coalition’s recent landmark study on Artist Revenue Streams is the best place to start looking for specific money sources. It identifies 42 discrete revenue streams that musicians and their business teams can draw upon. Granted, a bunch of them have to do with labels, publishing or PROs, but plenty don’t. The short, specific answer would be to comb this list for those exceptions — particularly those under the headers ‘Brand-Related Revenue’ and ‘Fan, Corporate and Foundation Funding’.

I have a marketing background, so I’m keen on thinking of everything as a “marketing funnel”. Basically, picture a funnel where the wide end represents casual interest in your band, and the nozzle is where true fans pass through with their money. Somewhere in the middle are your Facebook and other social media followers.

Free or near-free music represents the widest, cheapest funnel entry possible. In fact, it no longer becomes about marketing music in the traditional sense of manufacturing popularity. By democratizing music discovery, small music businesses have a shot at eking out a modest living. (If that’s at the expense of R Kelly having to take a taxi instead of a limo, so be it.)

Social media provides a filter for the funnel to catch and keep people’s attention. Looked at in purely capitalist terms, following a band on a social network or app is akin to saying, “I would consider spending money on this band or a product affiliated with its music”.

If you’re going to push fans into the money-making nozzle of the funnel, this is where you begin. Not somehow interacting with your online following, especially when it’s in the three- or four-figure range, is like opening a retail store and not staffing it. This is where the concept of “band as brand” becomes critical. If that whole idea makes you want to puke, well, you won’t be puking your way to the bank. Besides, that’s what managers are for.

Now that you’ve pulled your fans to the edge of spending money on your band, it’s time to push them over. This is where the formula for making money as a musician is super-easy to understand. Getting them to a live show to buy a T-shirt is your goal now. Clearly this will not add up to rock and roll riches, but will provide the cash-on-hand you need to run the business of your band. The second this basic revenue stream dries up, so does your business. This was true before Free Culture and still is.

Now, give the fans what they truly want: The ability to directly support you, and feel part and parcel toward your success. Patronage through crowd funding and other inventive means is the new label deal — a deal with your fans who are excited to know their money is going “directly to the cause”. They can see their money paying off in front of their eyes through behind-the-scenes updates leading up to the launch of the product they backed. It truly is one of the most exciting things happening on the Internet and if you’re not privy or convinced, read my recent article Top 3 Reasons Musicians are Scared of Crowd Funding and Why They Should Get Over It.

If that’s not specific enough for you, I’ll give you one more. It may be the least specific idea in and of itself, but from it you can draw many specific streams of revenue. My red-letter advice to musicians trying to make a living in a time of ubiquitous, free access to music…

Make something scarce.

Rather, make anything scarce — it doesn’t matter. Make limited edition vinyl. Make original artwork. Do you have a contingent of golf fans in your audience? Make custom golf balls. Make leather dog collars with your band name. Make a custom ringtone on commission. The only thing it takes is imagination to make something scarce — something sorely in short supply. But something tells me this movement to take back culture from the subjugation of industry and oppressive intellectual property law could mean we’ve got a lot more imagination to spare — and that’s a good thing.

Not incidentally, the same idea of scarcity that applies to your business applies to your music itself. The new scarcity in music is not about how many copies are made available — infinite copies have reached near-zero distribution costs on the Internet. The new scarcity in music is, “how awesome is it?”

We have our whole lives to struggle to make a living, but life is too short not to be awesome.

And remember, true musicians don’t make music to make money. We continue to rock whether it pays the bills or not.

In Defense of Free Music: A Generational, Ethical High Road Over the Industry’s Corruption and Exploitation

Note: This was posted as a response to David Lowery’s Letter to Emily White, which was in response to her article “I Never Owned Any Music to Begin With”. White is an intern at NPR’s All Songs Considered, Lowery is a contributor for The Trichordist, a technology and ethics blog.

As a musician and huge music fan, your emotional plea for our generation to renounce Free Culture so that musicians can make a living was indeed stirring. But beyond the choir you’re preaching to, we both know it’s falling on deaf ears. Asking today’s music consumers to kindly start paying for recorded music again because it’s the ethical thing to do isn’t only unviable — it’s not the ethical thing to do anymore. Free Culture is an ethic, and I think I can speak for my generation when I say we believe it to be the high ground over the way the music industry used to be run.

Your heart is clearly in the right place. But unlike you, I think most of us, our generation included, have a deep, unwavering motivation to compensate the musicians who enrich our lives. Here’s the crux of our disagreement: You claim listeners aren’t paying as much for access to music anymore because they’re unethical and no longer find it important to compensate artists. You and many others make this accusation over and over again without providing any clear evidence other than unconvincing anecdotes.

I believe the opposite can be clearly proven: Today’s musicians are held in higher esteem by listeners than ever before, and it’s the industry that has lost their respect (and money), due to a history of unethical behavior. The first point is proven by the sheer unprecedented volume of music now being consumed. The latter point is proven by even a casual glance into the history of the music industry.

Should listeners feel guilty for having free access to music? Of course not. It’s the best thing ever to happen to a music lover. Sometimes I wonder if all the Free Culture-haters are just jealous that they had to pay $20 per CD. You realize that price point had nothing to do with compensating artists, right? That ridiculous number was the product of illegal price fixing, obscene recoupments, payola, unethical ‘breakage’ fees and keeping statutory royalty rates for artists low, to name just a few reasons. Meanwhile, our generation experiences the ecstasy of free or near-free access to the global jukebox.

Should musicians feel threatened by listeners accessing their music for free? Only if their entire business model is based on forcing their fans (and potential fans) to pay for access to music. This is a model that our generation is using technology to reject. The exposure granted by free access to music is exactly what most musicians are after. Free exposure is only a lost profit opportunity for the minority of musicians who succeeded in the pre-digital record business paradigm. Most of the time musicians didn’t profit beyond statutory royalties anyway, because they could never recoup the cost of marketing and advertising. Now good music goes viral for free, and even generates ad revenue for the creator!

I’m going to level with you. You and many other Free Culture detractors are people from social circles with musicians that did well in the past but whose revenue dropped dramatically along with industry profits. I think the driver behind this blithely unrealistic “let’s go back to the way things were in the 90s” movement is pretty straightforward — you tasted profits from a business model that is no longer sustainable. You want your industry back.

We don’t.

Consider for a moment how were the profits of the “old” music industry won: By subjecting listeners and musicians — and indeed, our very culture — to a laundry list of horrendous commercial exploitation. Price fixing, payola, unpaid royalties, market monopolies, ticket surcharges, obscenely exploitative record contracts, manufactured popularity, censorship, perpetual copyright and destruction of fair use and the public domain… the list goes on and on. In short, the old way of doing things sucked and we don’t care if a few of that era’s successful artists no longer get mailbox money for music they recorded decades ago. We certainly don’t care if the record industry, which enabled these injustices, dies a slow, public death.

On the other side of the Free Culture argument, you have people like me: unsuccessful musicians and frustrated music fans. We are by far the majority, but our apathy is high. Critically, this does not translate into consumer apathy for compensating musicians. Quite the contrary, our apathy for corporations is driving a new appreciation for the original creators and producers of music, based on free access to recordings.

I believe my story is somewhat typical of the unsuccessful musician. After years of false starts and bad management I finally “made it” and got signed to an emerging indie. The advance was small, the recoupment high. But we had a great booking agent, nationwide tour support and opened for big bands in NYC. We got a sync license with MTV and some film placements. We had a high-powered manager and one of Britney Spears’s lawyers. Our friends were signed to Capitol, Sony began showing interest in us. We were on the cusp of making a living playing music. But while our fan base was rabid and widespread, it just wasn’t big enough. It wasn’t just a matter of “exposure” as most musicians whine. The business of the band didn’t scale, and eventually petered out. While I never quit playing music or trying to make a business of it, music became more of a hobby and I was now among the vast ranks of unsuccessful musicians.

Guess who was pissed (besides our band)? Our fans. Having supported us all those years, they now saw the apparatus of the music industry whittle away our faith in the business of our band to the point where we quit. It’s easy to look over this fact, but it’s critical not to: Music fans talk to musicians, and most musicians have historically not been happy with the way the industry worked. It wasn’t that we had bad music or bad management — our fan base just wouldn’t scale big enough to support our business team. I can see why those who succeeded in the past want to protect the old business model. It strongly favored the incumbents and built a nearly insurmountable barrier of entry that the average musician had little chance of scaling.

For both musicians and listeners, failure was the common narrative of the record industry. We sat and watched our friends write great music people loved, yet they were unable to make a living doing so, even and especially after they were signed. We saw the rare few musicians who truly made it big falter in the excesses of the industry, becoming drug addicts as the drive for manufactured popularity hollowed out the meaning of their music. Add to that the aforementioned widespread industry corruption. Factor in decades of consumers buying albums of mediocre music for one or two good singles. Pile on a digital distribution cost of near zero. Put a recording studio in every home with a computer. Lastly, drop the RIAA suing music fans for sharing music as the cherry on top, and there you have our generation’s hatred of paying for access to music.

If there is an ethical dilemma here, clearly it is your generation’s music industry, not our generation of listeners, that must bear the brunt of the blame.

I appreciate your statement that “on nearly every count [our] generation is much more ethical and fair than [your] generation”, but I don’t understand why you’d single out musician’s rights as something we specifically don’t respect. After such praise, a claim like that just seems silly.

Free Culture opponents often suggest technology somehow caused our generation’s desire for compensating musicians to evaporate. But it was clearly the corruption and ineptitude of the industry itself that is to blame for this negative attitude toward paying for music. Digital music technology provided the opportunity musicians and listeners have been waiting decades for — to balance the industry’s unchecked power, and maybe eke out a more sustainable living in the process.

Fans formerly had no apparatus to directly compensate artists. Now that they have tools like Kickstarter and Bandcamp, we’re seeing millions of dollars pouring directly into musician’s pockets. This represents a fraction of the so-called “lost value” of paid access to music, but given all the money and lobbyists the old industry has thrown at and against digital music innovation, it’s remarkable nonetheless.

That’s the thing about asking our generation to fix the record industry. We’re already doing it. We’re connecting artists directly to fans and bringing back patronage, a far less exploitative model that is emerging as the foundation of the new music career. We’re using crowdfunding to finance our work. We’re using digital tools to democratize distribution and licensing, with fairer publishing deals. Instead of basing our entire career on one album dropping or flopping huge, we’re ditching the LP in favor of a steady stream of singles, what fans really want. Apps are the new album. Production is going more lo-fi but is becoming more diverse and original in the process. These are the viable solutions I was talking about earlier. It’s all actually quite liberating because none of it involves being exploited by the music industry, and if it does, it’s certainly far less than in the past.

And yes, we’re selling T-shirts. I wouldn’t have to sell ‘em if I had a dollar for every time I heard, “your music is free, so what, you’re going to make a living selling T-shirts?” But the profit margin is good and they’re moving off the merch table like CDs used to. You have to realize that when the physical media that holds the music is no longer a profitable product, there are myriad replacements which tie the music to a physical product that can be profitably sold. The critical thing to realize here: the devaluation of the music recording increases the value of merch for the artist. Our fans are gonna spend $10 at our merch table anyway — should we sell them a T-shirt they will wear everywhere for a 150% markup, or should we sell them a CD they’ll burn and shelve for the statutory rate of 9.1 cents per song?

Besides selling recorded music, there are dozens of revenue streams for us to pursue. Many are accessible to musicians directly for the first time thanks to the democratizing effect of digital technology. For you to blame technology for unfair artist compensation is odd, for it was unethical industry dominance over the technology of vinyl, radio, cassettes, CDs and the overall apparatus of distribution that created the record business in the first place. The only difference with today’s technology is that the exploitation-crazy record business doesn’t yet have a stranglehold on it. Whether musicians succeed or fail is now up to the musicians and the fans themselves, not the industry.

So when you ask my generation to fix the music industry, we shrug our shoulders — but not out of apathy for music or musicians. We know the music industry sucked and can be better, so we’re not going to support the old way of doing things. We are at a crossroads. There will be a period of hardship and confusion. But don’t tell me we ethically don’t support artists. We listen to vastly more music than your generation ever did. We like, on average, a greater diversity of music than your generation ever did. And we’re still spending money, we’re just being attentive to where it’s going. We want to compensate the musicians, not the industry. It’s not only our choice, but our cause and our fight. The industry is throwing all the money, lobbyists and lawyers it can toward legally protecting its right to intermediate the direct fan-to-artist connection we have sought for decades and finally hold in our hands. We’re not going to allow Free Culture detractors to let that slip away just so they can collect royalties and recoup advances on music made in a bygone era.

We’d love to solve the music industry — really, we would — but we kind of need to save our culture first. Not incidentally, we believe artist compensation as critical to saving our culture. Pining for the old days when we enriched entertainment conglomerates instead of technology conglomerates? Who cares which industry is trying to co-opt our culture today, let’s take as much control as we can while technology affords us the opportunity.

I hear lots of crying about the traditions of the old business model, from the beauty of album art to the selling of millions of records. But you know what’s really sad? It will only be a few years before the entertainment conglomerates including the “Big 4″ record labels (or soon to be “Big 3″, how fair is that?) push back against the technology industry with a SOPA, PIPA or CISPA-like bill that passes into law. By then it will be too late and we’ll be crying over a lot more than our lost free access to music. Our culture may be lost in the unsustainable abyss of capitalism run amok if we the people lose too much control over technology during this critical transition.

I think I speak for most musicians when I say I’m going to make the best music I can until the day I die, and that money only determines how much time I can dedicate to that pursuit. There are way too many other musicians out there getting exposure for me to even entertain the argument that the current environment dissuades one from being a musician. I have a $1,000 studio in my basement that would have cost $100,000 a decade ago. I can make and distribute an album for free, and crowdfund a basic living doing nothing but music if I can generate at least 1,000 fans who spend $50/year with me on average (many $20 supporters and a few big backers). All I need to do is write a year’s worth of good music. With fifteen years as a musician under my belt I think I can manage.

(Not incidentally, I have other life skills I am employing to make my living, which is a very underrated issue in and of itself. What percentage of your income must be derived from music to be considered as “making a living playing music?” What about those whose non-music careers enable their music success, like website designers or audio engineers? If you manage a great music career, are you a successful musician or a successful manager? Furthermore, aren’t we all musicians? Most of us have the ability to make music but just don’t practice. Instrument and recording equipment sales are on the rise, so musicianship must be too. Everyone is already a DJ, how long before listeners are considered musicians? But that’s a subject for another article…)

It’s obvious this new music industry is crappy for scaling a band into a big blockbuster. But we are slowly getting over the rock star trip. The new music industry helps numerous smaller bands scale into moderate success. As the success stories mount, fans are starting to believe in supporting music again. Try to tell Amanda Palmer or her 24,883 fans who collectively raised $1.2 million dollars on Kickstarter that the old way of doing things was better. Then realize her story is becoming less of an exception with each passing day.

All this talk about not being able to make a living as a musician is nothing new at best. At worst, it’s dangerous, because it perpetuates the myth that only through charging access to music can one have a music career. It’s that myth that is keeping us from entering a new golden age in music. Emily White was simply telling us the truth. Come on, you know she would not have written the article if she didn’t care about compensating musicians. She works for freakin’ NPR on a show that regularly breaks new acts. It’s time to look inward and consider that Free Culture is our generation’s reaction to the ethical failings of your generation’s music industry.

Musicians and Listeners, Your Mission, if You Choose to Accept It: Save Our Culture

Music evolved alongside language and culture over millions of years to form a universal method of communicating emotion. For most of our species’ history, music’s primary purpose was to unify communities. Over time, various forces conspired to make music’s primary purpose entertainment. Chief among these was the music industry, which subjugated and exploited cultural evolution and unity for profit.

The original intent of copyright law was to protect content creators’ livelihoods while promoting cultural evolution by preserving the creative environment. Instead, the music industry (itself now a subset of a hyper-consolidated military-industrial media oligopoly) corrupted the law to steal musicians’ profits and stifle creativity. While the industry’s rapid expansion of the market during the 20th century certainly helped spread music for and wide, the cost of this commodification on our culture and creativity was heavy.

Over the previous decade, digital technology has disrupted the balance of power between musicians, listeners and industry. The record business is no longer sustainable in an era of free access to music. Unsurprisingly, the music industry, with its history of ineptitude and entitlement, is once again throwing all the money and lawyers it can at changing the laws in their favor. As musicians and listeners, we stand at a crossroads. Do we take advantage of the opportunities technology has given us and actively redefine music in the 21st century to be a force of unification once again? Or do we continue to allow the industry to subjugate the universal method of communicating as a means for enriching corporations?

Rethink Music Conference Recap: Top 5 Lessons

Several weeks ago I attended the Rethink Music conference in Boston. I can honestly say it felt like I downloaded the entire music industry in 48 hours. A non-stop parade of executives and managers concisely detailed the challenges they faced in the digital music age. In panel after panel, their guarded optimism shone like a dull reflection off a classic automobile that won’t start. Between furious note-taking and tweeting, I got all the the insight, confidence and enthusiasm I needed to begin writing the book I’ve been planning for ten years.

I want to extend thanks to the organizers and everyone who made this conference possible. Attending it changed the way I look at music and the music industry forever. Writing a book about musicians, fans, technology and the music industry has been a dream of mine since Napster hit the scene. After spending the beginning of the year cataloging my key thoughts and ideas from the past decade, I am now tackling this monster project every day.

I approached the conference deeply entrenched in my disdain for the overall apparatus that controls access to and thus commodifies music. I believed that technology got us into this mess and could get us out of it. I felt that music should be free like water (and bottled for profit when it serves the artist’s best interests). Most importantly, I felt that our culture had become a wasteland for the benefit of a corporate media oligarchy.

After attending the Rethink Music conference, that smoldering resentment of the exploitative music industry has never been more fully stoked. The trampling of artists’ and fans’ rights in a quest for revenue continues unabated, but you can’t blame the industry. It’s their job. But I’m not writing the book to change the attitudes of the music industry. I’m trying to change the attitudes of fans and artists — it’s the only way to force the industry to change.

Here are my five big “lessons learned” from the conference:

#5 – Lawyer Jokes

I learned what many Americans already know — that lawyers are generally evil, and entertainment lawyers are worse. I always knew IP law was horribly broken, but I never realized how this was the absolute bedrock of the talent exploitation business. he lawmen justify their dubious ethical position by telling musicians, “I’m doing this to protect your rights and revenue”, which rings about as true as a cigarette company telling a smoker they are protecting their freedom of personal choice. What’s worse — with rock and pop publishing deals involving multiple parties, I learned that some big deals just don’t get made. The result? The rights holders can’t afford legal representation to make a deal after the fact, caught in a Catch-22 because the deal isn’t done. Millions of dollars are floating around unpaid because deals don’t get made, period.

#4 – Unintellectual Property

I learned the industry is really as dumb as you think they are when it comes to technology. Incredibly, Napster hasn’t really taught them anything, now 10 years down the road. There were a few exceptions — Open EMI’s pre-cleared license hacker sandbox was the most notable. The Echo Nest is clearly and deservedly well-positioned to become industry tech darlings, enabling the big boys to play with the same tools the small, agile tech startups hold inherent to their hacker talent and creativity. But by and large, the entertainment is a lot like the government — it still doesn’t understand IP in the 21st century, and thinks it can use the old tactics to prevent the freeing of music for the good of fans and artists (to benefit the industry). But without technology in their blood, it’s going to be a multibillion dollar quixotic struggle of epic proportions to try to steer the future of music into conglomerate control. Since they can’t dam Niagara Falls, all they can do is pass laws to make it illegal to visit. But what happens when all the rivers flood? Consider that in the U.S. Apple generates over 100x the annual revenue of all domestic record labels combined, and then you see how badly the music industry needs help in the technology space. This is all so ironic because the entire record industry is based around leveraging technology to make people pay for music.

#3 – Complexity

I learned that one of if not the biggest impediments to the industry generating revenue in the digital space comes from their technological stupidity. One of the main themes of the conference was how screwed everyone will be for years to come because of the industry’s inability to manage the information that is responsible for profitability. There are an infinity of micro payments flying around for songs with different metadata and all manner of licensing, publishing and other exploitation rights and rates to be tracked. Though there are myriad solutions being put on the table, the industry seems to have collectively shrugged its shoulders, hoping the geeks will figure out eventually if they throw enough money at the problem. I heard a lot of guarded optimism as a facade for folks who were clearly flummoxed by the complexity of digital music analytics.

#2 – Gamification of Social Music Advocacy

I learned that what I believe to be most exciting and promising thing happening in music today — the gamification of social music advocacy — is something the industry is largely oblivious to. While the conference’s Genesis award winner Have You Heard was honored for proposing such a system, it’s insanity that the big players like Spotify had nothing specific to show in that regard. Perhaps they thought they were protecting “trade secrets” but I’ve got news for them: this is exactly why the music industry is choking. someone smarter than you is going to beat you to it. You need a Turntable.fm to come along and flout licensing until the Big 4 say, “why, look at how you’ve grown! Accept our terms or we’ll kill you.” That’s the industry’s current model for innovation — let the geeks figure it out, then buy it or sue it out of existence. For the young entrepreneurs fresh out of Harvard who proposed the “FourSquare for fans” idea at the conference — I’m afraid this too could be your fate.

#1 – Artist Responsibility

Perhaps the most important lesson of all: I learned that when artists blame the fucked up music industry for their failure to succeed — or worse, their failure to get paid from their success — they’re ultimately blaming the industry for their own failure to understand the music or the business. There are a million “How to Succeed in the Music Industry” books, none of which have ever helped anyone write a good song. Conversely, there are thousands of great songs written by musicians that no one will ever hear, because the artist has no faith, interest or aptitude in the music business. Why should they? The industry is actually OK with its role as artist scapegoat, because if the artists really understood their responsibilities, they wouldn’t have to put up with such exploitation. Being a musician is really about being an entrepreneur, starting a small music business. What we need is millions of small music businesses, not a handful of monopolies trying to squeeze the last dime out of a dying industry, willing only to co-opt and rarely to innovate. Music, like life, is free and alive — and as they said in Jurassic Park, “life finds a way.”