11.13.12
Accumulation by Dispossession
“You’re doing a performance for a website and you know they have almost no readership, but you do it anyway,” reads one line from Rolling Stone, in a piece on how to make money in the music industry. “You’re in somebody’s garage doing a taping and you know no one will see it …”
It focuses on a few semi-famous artists, people and groups who were able to sell records in the old industry, but can no longer because no one buys music.
The Rolling Stone article notes: “Record sales were never a major income generator for musicians, thanks to high recording and promotion costs that were charged against the artists’ accounts.”
Which is true. However, the old label structure did not shovel all the risk on the artist and saddle them with an enormous debt if it didn’t work out. It also worked to get the artist, at least initially, in front of a potential audience.
Now this is all gone, replaced by a winner-take-all model. In the winner-take-all system you’ll have noticed one of the major features is the astronomical success of a few artists. These acts wind up so ubiquitous, legions of people make videos, all the same, miming to their music. It’s wall to wall, impossible to escape.
“Digital streaming sites like Rhapsody and Spotify are not yet proving to be viable financial substitutes for CDs,” continues the Rolling Stone article. “[Typical] digital-streaming royalty checks are minimal: ‘You’ll get a check for $100 in six months.’ Managers are equally skeptical. ‘You have to sell a thousand copies to equal a few cents …'”
While the video makes a joke of it, it’s the model of accumulation by dispossession, in which Apple, Google and the web industry have effectively given a relative few haves all the tools to take everything off everyone else.
Apple is more important, more powerful and more controlling than any old music industry label. Yet it has nothing to do with artist development.
Apple was able to position itself as the maker of the best portable jukeboxes, its iJunk the portals everyone must pay for before getting their “free” music. Apple, and web companies in related business, have made their fortunes by transferring what people used to pay for music to themselves while putting little to nothing back in.
It’s a model that’s in place throughout the American tech infrastructure from the development of collective job bidding sites for squeezing the most service work for the least possible amount from desperate labor to automation software expressly to eliminate labor, never to be replaced while those workers remaining boost productivity figures by being stretched to do even more for less. And the profit taken by the dispossessions is split between the purchaser and the maker of the automation.
As far as innovation goes it means less for the good fortune of mankind than the discovery of penicillin.
(In a side note, the leadership, public and private sector, have dealt with the labor disenfranchisement horridly. They have fostered a collective belief that it’s possible to have a country of 312 million in which substantial parts are reduced to poverty and indigence, rationalized under the excuse that the economically displaced all lack the skills and education to be viable human beings in the 21st century.)
Putting the Apple-mediated modern music industry another way: It’s as if one company making a transistor radio had become all that people paid for their rock ‘n’ roll in the early Sixties. And how is that spectacular?
So are Apple and the web now gateways or parasites? It’s the latter.
None of this is quite so funny as the man posing as an MTV exec telling off a young woman in the comedy skit. Thank heaven for those clever enough to make such, not like this dumb sod, eh?