04.06.14
The Other Side of the Digital Coin
Sean Parker, one of the “inventors” of Napster, thanks musicians for sharing their music so he could have this beautiful wedding.
From RockNYC Live and Recorded, one of the first pieces I’ve written on music in years, continuing riffs I made here last week:
Streamed music is regarded as a commodity of little value. And, very quickly, it’s developing into a worthless good, the kind of “stuff??? produced in the economy of the old USSR. That’s my takeaway from an essay posted earlier on rock nyc and it’s apt, I think.
One can add a few things to the assessment.
The other side of this digital coin is those who benefit from it.
Here’s who gets fabulously wealthy off the deal: The owner of the pipe, in a perverted utility model where people or the essence of them in art, if you will, not water, are what’s shared at low price. Water, however, doesn’t care about or suffer from rock bottom pricing, that it gets nothing back. Water can’t be destroyed. People, their work and lives, however, can.
I’ve become expert on having my stuff distributed by others in the sharing economy, you know, the chiseling system in which the tools of technology take everything for a few at the top of the economic pyramid while everyone else gets shit.
“Arrogance,” my first record in 1985, became part of the “music blog pirating whole records” fad. (Using Google and DD it’s easy to find. If you take a peak you’ll find that, as noted previously, those performing the public service of gifting your work to the world always know precisely who and where you are when they take it.)
You will recall the rock music blogger nerds who quickly realized no one wanted to read their crap. But they could depend on Google to deliver them audiences of people searching for the semi-popular and obscure in their vinyl and CD collections if they ripped them to the Internet. Those “music bloggers” with a little good fortune were even able to peddle ads from miscellaneous internet swine ™, under the radar.
When Blogger and the powers that be stepped on a lot of that it was just moved to YouTube where Google monetized it with digital overlay and film advertisements.
On the corporate American side, Tribune — ahem, the Morning Call newspaper — took all my pre-web journalism, most of which was freelance (without a contract or any rights given on ownership), a lot of work, and put it on their website where it’s peddled with ads from miscellaneous internet swine ™.
And, last week, I wrote of the philanthropic gift of my 20-year old book, The Virus Creation Labs, to the web in its entirety.
From music to prose, the digital economy sure has been great to me. As it has been to so many.
“The Other Side of the Digital Coin” came about as a reaction to an earlier essay dealing with the social attitude toward digital music.
“The problem with [digital music] streaming is just about precisely that: nobody owns it, it has no life outside itself and its value is so minimal the majority of the world can’t make a living from it,” it reads.
Those who do make a living from it, grand ones, are those who own the means of distribution and who developed the technology for it.
See photo of Sean Parker, above. Boy, he’s sure made the good life for everybody.
And that brings up another thing about the marvelous inventors and programmers of our advancing world.
Some of them really seem to believe the bathwater that in making it convenient for everyone to have digital stuff, like music, they’ve made a better world, that they’ve fixed something that was broken.
You see this miscellaneous internet swine ™ creepy tech geek megalomaniac world view all the time.
Today from the New York Times, on an HBO sitcom about tech start-ups alleged to be funny:
Rather than money or power, what motivates Richard and the other coders of “Silicon Valley??? — to the extent that they’re motivated at all, which is sometimes debatable — is something quite prosaic. They seem to be in love with the intellectual puzzle of creating better code, and they genuinely believe that their technologies will benefit humanity.
This sounds hackneyed, and the show does use some of the tech set’s soaring, world-changing rhetoric for comic grist. Yet, in a way that feels unusual on TV and the movies, “Silicon Valley??? buys into the central dogma of Silicon Valley: Finding new methods to make everything faster, cheaper, more convenient and more efficient will be good for the world.
“This sounds hackneyed” is right. Instead what happened is the opposite.
The technology has empowered those with the most to grab even more.
And there are now some obvious and easy measurements on how well the idea of furnishing abundance and convenience through coding for the global networks have made the world a better place.
You’ll recall the old idea from the early days of Napster and the beginnings of “free??? music: The creators would benefit from gaining exposure to a new and appreciative audience they didn’t have and their boats would be lifted thereby. That was about fifteen years ago. Hilarious, in view of how things have turned out.
Anon said,
April 7, 2014 at 4:18 pm
Is it me? It seems that the only things missing from that wedding picture are two robots, a Wookiee, and a meteorite shower from a certain former space station.
Ted Jr. said,
April 8, 2014 at 7:51 am
But it’s not just the digital distribution which is screwing creators, the publishers/distributors/producers have been doing the same for about a century.
And this same legacy media resists any attempt to monetise the free distribution scheme for fear that they will lose 100% control of 100% of the revenue.
And people like you are just the bottom of the food chain, the shock troops or cannon fodder which are needed before the valuable members of society swing into action.
George Smith said,
April 9, 2014 at 1:25 pm
Not only Wookies, Ewoks.
I didn’t mention or show the freelance copyright civil suit I’m part of. A bunch of free-lancers launched a class action suit against a good number of publishers over a decade ago over electronic database rights. None of the publishers had negotiated rights for these but had been selling their database collections for years. Finally, some people went after them and opened it up to class action for anyone who had contributed to these publications.
I had. And courts judged in favor of the free-lancers but one day, back in 2005, it came up before an asshole judge who probably objected to having his afternoon golf outings interfered with by peons and he threw it out on a filing technicality. This sent everything back to point zero.
Over a decade later, I get a notice a couple months ago that finally settlements are being processed for completion this summer, if nothing else intervenes.
Over a decade. I don’t even have the computer the original filings were made on anymore. You really have no chance unless you’re famous or have a lot of money. People just take crap off you as a matter of course.
And, good old Silicon Valley tech, inventing the machines to make it more convenient and efficient.
It wasn’t enough that I committed substantial years to making A LOT of material available publicly and free of charge in cyberspace.
You’ll also have noticed the deafening silence that accompanies stores such as mine.
Ted Jr. said,
April 10, 2014 at 6:06 pm
http://www.jagshouse.com/music/billnelson.html
I bought his vinyl in the 1970s. Paid big bucks to import the CD’s from the UK. Sure glad I helped make him rich.
George Smith said,
April 10, 2014 at 7:19 pm
So did I. I even have the Air Age Anthology and the separate albums on CD. Robert Fripp had a long horror story to tell too until he got his stuff away from EG Editions.