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Of Rainbows And Freeloaders III: Taylor Swift Versus The Internet
Posts
"One of the 4,999 other Picasso-s showed up, and told the women not to pay the other, and drew her a new sketch of her, with equal quality. When she asked him the price, he said $10, and took the money. The other Picasso screamed about how the other Picasso-s were devaluing his work, and conspired to murder all the other 4999 Picasso-s that existed that he could get his $5000."
i do think that major artists abandoning spotify presents a possible opportunity for mid-tier or emerging artists to get ears on their music and hopefully recognized
there's no doubt that it's a blow to spotify, but then again their business model aways relied upon the indulgence of artists balancing losses taken on a substitution market and their pr concerns. so fuck them.
I don't believe anyone has claimed otherwise.
I think the part most people are taking issue with is that the downfall of music/art is nigh.
oh yeah that seems unlikely
if anything, music scenes are becoming more fractured and genre-focused and geographically dispersed. people want to listen to music and if the national producers go away, something else - hopefully better - will take their place.
Just that currently there's a huge amount of content available and, frankly, people are going to pay what they can afford. Which means either waiting for specific artists to sell their stuff cheaper or buying from other artists.
Taylor Swift was willing to keep her music on the paid version of Spotify, which costs $10 a month.
Spotify's response was "But that will encourage people to pirate your music if you don't offer it in the free section as well!"
So. You make luxury yachts. At a rate of about one finished yacht every two years. Each boat takes you hundreds of hours to design, and then hundreds more hours to build and detail, and once each unit is done, you take it all around the world to different boat shows and exhibit it to show off your handiwork and design skills, and drum up interest.
Normally they sell for ten million dollars.
You have just finished your most recent boat, it is of the same quality and level of fitout as all the rest, and there is a great deal of interest in it from all around the world.
Some dude offers you two million dollars for it.
What do you say to him?
Eh, I think it's pretty important to put a strong weight on consumer's access to music, because the entire industry is ultimately government subsidized in the first place by copyrights. If they want to deal with an actually free market, well, then they can do whatever they want, but since they rely on society chipping in to make their business model work, society gets a large say. I think we've been doing this balance wrong for a long time, though I wouldn't put for profit streaming as a top concern.
Copyright is not a government subsidy. It's government creating the conditions for a consumer market for music to exist.
I dunno.
Is there a bevy of other yacht designers selling yachts for two million dollars?
Seriously, analogies are terrible. Just explain your reasoning.
Oh ffs.
No one in this thread.
No thanks, move on, and not expect sympathy or drama to result.
WHY IS EVERYONE SO BAD AT ANALOGIES?
I think it's less "the downfall of music is nigh" and more "streaming services may be a business model that is bad for the funding of music".
Even Taylor Swift didn't have an issue with all of Spotify.
A rich artist wants a different price for her art than a particular rich company is willing to pay.
Sounds like literally business as usual.
The only way it can be bad for the funding of music is if it hurts the overall creation and distribution of music. And frankly there's more available now than ever before.
It's pretty damn close. The major difference is that instead of having the Department of the Arts doling out money, consumers just pay twice as much at the point of purchase, but in both cases the government is effecting a transfer from the general population to a certain class of producers.
That doesn't actually answer the question though. If for no other reason then music streaming services haven't been around very long so the long term impacts aren't necessarily immediately visible.
OTOH music industry profits are on the way down afaik.
*shrug*
Like, if available content shrivels up and dies I'll be just as ardent as the next music executive that streaming is terrible. Currently I literally have more media than I could possibly consume so I'm not especially convinced.
i don't think so. without some sort of legal context for ip ownership there is literally no economic value to discovery, invention or creation. certainly the existence of an IP market that encourages these things is an aggregate benefit to consumers?
I think it's more interesting and more productive overall to ask if that's where the industry is headed before it gets there.
This assumes that people are content-neutral, but most people are looking for things that are good and things that appeal specifically to them. There may be plenty of great Top 40 pop songs but relatively few post-rock instrumentalist groups or whatever niche subgenre you like. Or there might be plenty of music in general but relatively less great music than in prior decades, for a variety of reasons (the market is flush with promising artists who never get the chance to fulfill that promise, or with home recorders who don't get the benefit of professional audio mixing, or whatever).
You're ignoring the role of the online distributor. Unless you're assuming that Spotify already charges the bare minimum necessary to keep the lights on and the servers running and fuck the lights if we have to, it's entirely possible that Spotify can afford to cut its own profits in order to pay a better wage to its content producers.
Your Econ 101 argument can be just as easily and just as wrongly applied to labor in general--plenty of competing workers, supply is high, demand is stable, price goes down--and the issue there is that we have legal minimums making sure that people are paid a fair rate for their labor, even if that fair rate is higher than a simple supply/demand curve would indicate. There's no legal or economic rationale preventing us from doing the same here; just the will to regulate.
(On a side note, the way you keep saying "Starving Artists" in scare quotes and capital letters like it's the term "Welfare Queen" makes me think you have never been an artist, or starving. Actual people exist in those situations and it's offensive to scoff at them.)
From my understanding the music industry globally has roughly flatlined at between ~15-16 billion USD last year(2013) and did so as well in 2012(though I cannot find the figures). IFPI says it went down ~4% in 2013, but they attribute that exclusively to a 16% drop in sales in Japan. What has been happening is people are moving to digital services slowly but surely, and 39% of all music revenue is digital. What's dying is the recorded business, with nearly 10% drop from 2012 to 2013. There's little sign of total revenue going down as music continues the transition.
http://www.ifpi.org/facts-and-stats.php
As a consumer the best business model for the music industry's profitability isn't necessarily the one I want. And since the existence of a business model for the music industry is substantially a creation of public largess, via copyright law, the laws and policies that help shape that paradigm should be configured around what produces the best outcome for the public at large, not the artists/media companies.
Not saying On-Demand, Ad-support music streaming is some key pivot in that discussion, but for what ever reason-on the internet especially- there's a ridiculous amount of Yay Corporatism! framing of the discussion.
I'm not saying it is bad (the general principle of IP is a good one, but a lot of the specifics as they exist in US law in 2014 are terrible), but I am saying that we should be honest about what is happening. $10 CDs is not a free market price, it's a price that record companies only get to charge because the government is giving them special incentives for recording the CD in the first place.
Patents help encourage innovation by rewarding the first person to do something with time limited exclusivity, and also solve the problem of people having to conceal their formula for Panacea Extra Strength! and that complicating medicine, or them getting hit by a bus and losing the specifics.
The thing is, a lot of people like to pretend that IP encumbered transactions are totally free markets (honestly, most markets are fucked up to some degree by government interference or any number of other market failures), when it's not the case. The problem is Big Media likes to use a lot of free market rhetoric, because it resonates (too much) with general audiences, but they try as hard as possible to avoid anything like it.
And most importantly of all, as much as Big Media likes to hide behind the idea of a starving artist being put in the dungeon of Omelas, as was mentioned earlier, a lot of musicians, actors, stage painters, etc. don't own their own copyrights and have minority or exactly zero royalties. So, even in cases where they aren't exaggerating harm out of all proportion, they deliberately use a lot of outright false or very misleading rhetoric to sell it.
sometimes I think that people believe nobody made art for money prior to 1710; societies were recognizing the economic value of art and artists long before the concept of intellectual property existed
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Prior to the 1710s, if you wanted to listen to music, then you would need to find an actual musician to perform for you.
In fact, that's pretty much been the case right up until the invention of the phonograph.
I'm not saying we ought to go back to a pre-copyright model. I just think it's ridiculous to say that there's no economic value in discovery/invention/creation absent artificial monopoly
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
If you look very closely, none of that actually goes against my argument. You can argue all you want that Spotify doesn't offer payments in par with other services or that artists can negotiate better offers. If Taylor Swift just said she could make more money doing something else, very few people would give a fuck about it. But what she's doing is arguing:
"Music/Art is being devalued and that's wrong."
and
"People should pay for art."
The first one is a matter of math and economics; that's the point of "Devaluation is what we should be expecting." As more people make content, prices should go down, and content is devalued. The only way for that to change is either for demand to go up, which as I pointed out, there's a hard limit to, so the only other way to raise prices is to reduce the number of people making content. That hurts the artists at the bottom most, since they're the ones getting removed(since almost definitional they're the weakest competitors)! Do you not see the problem in arguing you're going to help someone by destroying their livelyhoods?
That's why I throw it into scare quotes, because the term "Starving Artist" is a term that only get broken out to serve the interests of already wealthy studios, labels, and artists. "Think of the starving artists" is up there with "Why do you hate freedom", and "Think of the Children!" in meaningless slogans meant to take moral superiority without actually having to a meaning, defined position in anything.
I'm super liberal and all for wealth distribution. If we just want to enact welfare programs so that the poor artists actually have a stable income to pursue their works, I'm actually down for that. What is very dumb is multiple people in this very thread have argued that an artists labor has value, then propose that the product of their labors MUST have value. Which is all kinds of dumb. If I spend 100 hours drawing a stick figure, what is the value of my art, when you've disqualified market forces? Which is the arugment you've made. Market forces have driven the prices down below what you find acceptable, so you disavow market forces, but then when asked how to value the work of someone who made shitty art, you argue market forces. What?
In short, value of labor =/= the product of that labor.
Which gets the the second point. Taylor Swift has explicitly said you should pay for Art as product, not a service. That actually goes against your bit about an artist's labor. Because valuing an artist's labor in of itself is valuing it as service, not a product(art). That's why Taylor's second point is already questionable, since many people and artists have moved to art as a service. That's defacto what Patreon and similar services do, Artists ask for fans to fund their works on a subscription basis, and in most cases that I'm familiar with, that content is released for free.
That's why I disagree with Taylor Swift, and the point my post. No-one here has actually advocated anything that would help a poor artist. What we're talking about largely only effects established brands who in turn already large sums of money.
Now if people want to purpose ways to actually help poor and starting artists? I'm down with that. I'm down with ways of funding content creation(which is separate from paying for content itself!). I'm down with creating redistributive programs so that those with less can take ventures into the artistic sphere. I'm just find everything Taylor Swift argues for has nothing to do with the poor artists(or at least doesn't really benefit them), and find the "Think of Starving Artists" bullshit tedious.
It's dubious that there's literally no economic value to creation without IP protection; as noted, we did in fact have art and music before we had intellectual property. Of course, we probably don't want to actually go back to, say, a patron model, where new art and music is funded by the super-rich for their own flattery, so your overall point is still fair. I don't doubt that it's in the public interest for there to be some IP regime.
However, I have yet to see any persuasive case that it's in the public interest for there to be some very specific IP regime such that it would give musicians like Taylor Swift, or anyone else, a much stronger bargaining position vis a vie entities like Spotify. What would such a regime look like? Why would we want it and how would it be in the public interest to adopt it? Without even a general picture of an interesting or relevant alternative, it's hard for me to see how this is a matter for any particular moral scrutiny as opposed to just business as usual in yet another market sector.
I agree completely with the first part. I don't particularly care what the business model is (frankly the old one was terrible in SO many ways). I just care that it's one that does something akin to maximizing the amount of quality musical output. Which to some extent means a business model that's profitable.
Which is I think where what you call "yay corporatism!" comes from. Which is really just "yeah one kind of corporatism over another kind" because it's mostly just people disliking one kind of business model.
Devaluation isn't happening because (or only because) there are more musicians than before. It's happening because distributors have had to drop their prices in order to compete with piracy. In a world where piracy magically didn't exist (wasn't possible, or was so strictly cracked down on by the government so as to be too risky for most people), do you really think iTunes would have entered the market with a base price of $1 per song, or $10 per album as opposed to $15?
That's a lot of time, effort, money, and upskirt looking, put into devaluing ones own work.
Yeah it's really stupid.
I don't really have a huge problem with art moving back to a patron model, if only because infrastructure exists to make that model more egalitarian. Patreon, Kickstarter, etc, are effectively crowdsourced ways of making the patron model work in today's world. The crowdsourcing model can create great things - the Statue of Liberty and Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square were both beneficiaries of publically crowdsourced funding, and were done well before the Internet age. I think that outside the major publishers, videogames are lurching towards this model, and I think that books, film, and music aren't too far behind.
I find that possibility exciting! My hope is that it can lead us into a market with less of a middle-layer of producers who tell the artists what to make and the consumers what to consume.
i can hope, right?
Yes, actually. Even the music industry admits only 1 out of 4 estimated users pirate music. With that math, it's reasonable to assume prices would only increase 25-33% if piracy was not an option(perfect elasticity) and pirates bought instead. And that assumes pirates always never spend money on music/content they like, which is highly unlikely, given multiple government reports have found heavy pirates spend more on music/content than non-pirates.
To the extent consumers are driving prices down, it's because they have more options plus wages have been stagnant(in the US at least) for 30+ years, so consumers are more conscious about money. That's true even absent of piracy.
As the one to start using the term 'elite' and given I haven't noticed anyone else do so, I must correct you.
It is not that Swift is an elitist, but rather that she is a member of the elite by virtue of having a net worth and yearly income that easily falls within the first percentile.
TL;DR - not an elitist a member of the elite
Edit: and it's "worth way more than 2 million dollars" in a purely business sense in that "the potential profit to be extracted by other means is higher", unless you want to lay out a case for objective measures of appropriate remuneration.