Dear Lily, Why you being this silly?

[...] economics, record labels — Ben Werdmuller @ 8:56 pm There were some great comments on this weekend’s guest post for Media140 about Lily Allen and sharing, so I’ve written a follow-up, exploring some ideas (and [...]

A counter argument to Mark and Steve's point. I too am a musician, and a founder of (we believe) the UK's first fan funded record label Alamo Music. While I agree that using The Beatles and Madonna as a model for new/emerging artists is flawed, I don't think that's the point that Ben was making. I strongly believe that now is the most fruitful time in terms of opportunities for emerging artists. It involves a lot of work, but that only means that we don't have to rely on labels to make or break a new artist. We can have a direct route and a direct relationship with our fans, and the key to making money from this is to give people a reason to buy. I've written more on this here: File sharing Pt 1 Lily Allen http://bit.ly/42Lggo And Pt2 - the FAC miss the point http://bit.ly/4AgcA As regards how to (cough - baulk) "monetise" art, it's a case of not only being brilliant at your art, but also being interesting. As regards the "industry is in tailspin" - it's clear to me that the reason that the old way of label thinking is what's killing large labels, not file-sharing. Remember "home taping is killing music"? It didn't, and neither does file sharing. Sharing spreads music. If you love it, and love the artist, you'll buy something - a t-shirt, a poster, the album. Embrace the new technology and use it to your advantage... It's what Lily did with her mix-tapes and it's worked for her. More at www.thehuxcapacitor.wordpress.com

I am no expert. Just someone watching the debate. I know changes have to be made, and lotsa folk don't like change. The media have to adapt somehow, and govt has to get IT. The only suggestion I can throw into the melting pot is that artists give away tasters, the fans download and enjoy, and then pay for higher quality if they like it. Like the shareware and freeware that software developers use to promote their skills and talent. Good stuff will always rise to the top, like cream. There are ways to make the internet work for you instead of fighting a battle you can never win. There is no way you can ever stop pirates, you have to work with the consumers somehow. If I knew the answers I would be very rich and not a farmers wife posting on an interesting blog... ... but somebody out there will come up with IT. The fact that we are discussing it will generate a workable solution? chris

I agree completely with Steve's last paragraph. I'm a little alarmed by his apparent attitude that it's too late to do anything to protect music, but we should worry about film - the principle is the same, and the fact that it's now technically easy to have something for free is no defence for doing it in any medium. Suppose a device emerged that was freely available which let the user pick any lock they liked, untraced, without difficulty, or it became easy to access any bank account - it wouldn't take long for safeguards to emerge, and only the most extreme hard-end of the left wing would object when they did. For me it all comes down to an economic argument. It costs a lot (in time, money and energy) to make music, film, art and books to any degree of quality. Any economy that is based on everybody getting something expensive for free is a bubble, and the result is going to be a collapse in supply. Surely the recent banking/housing crisis is the most stark reminder you could need that if an economic model looks too good to be true, even in the new shiny internet age, it is.

This is actually Ben's Uncle Steve. Belonging to that older, pre-internet generation, and trying to make my living from the business of producing and licensing intellectual property (in my case, motion pictures), I am deeply worried by any attempt to justify uncompensated file sharing as somehow idealistic or democratic. Unfortunately or not, debate about whether uncompensated file sharing on the internet is a good thing or a bad thing as applied to music seems a bit irrelevant. The once-powerful record labels are already fading into history, but it's not as if, e.g. manufactured pop stars (Hannah Montana, anyone?) are disappearing. They are just being manufactured simultaneously across many media by even bigger companies. And while I don't claim to know anything about how much it takes to create music and find a sustainable audience for it, Mark Wilden's comments sound right to me. For better or worse, the music business has already felt the full brunt of this practice, and has been changed forever. What I am concerned about is the transfer of Ben's idealistic attitude about file sharing to my bread and butter, theatrical motion pictures. Yes, the technology is different, and the costs are different, but the same justifications of individual choice and meritocracy can be, and are, easily applied to downloading "free" movies. Sure we all hate the big studios and the terrible stuff they produce (except sometimes we love it), but even "independent" pictures can cost 5, 10, 20 million plus dollars to produce, which reflects the efforts of a lot of people over a long period of time (yes I know you can make a movie in a few weeks with a few friends and a digital camera "borrowed" from the store, but as a moviegoer, do you want that to be your only choice?). So the question is, without resorting to arguments about whether such downloading is morally defensible or not, how will the independent film business and, yes, the studios, adapt to a world in which their multi-million dollar investments can be shared by millions of people for free? I honestly have no idea. Ben, maybe you have figured out a model, given the amount of time and effort you have spent developing software. If you give it away for free (which I know you do), how do you survive? Musicians at a certain level (Prince, Madonna), make up losses on recorded material through massively profitable concerts. You presumably can do some consulting. What's the parallel for a movie? Finally, while it may seem that copyright is the invention of Big Business, created in order to restrict the flow of creativity and information, we should remember that the original purpose (in the US Constitution at least) was to encourage and protect the arts and artists. The underlying assumption was that if artists, musicians, filmmakers cannot control the use of their work, and are not adequately compensated for it, the arts themselves will be in danger of disappearing. So please let's not dress this discussion up as anything other than how to survive and adapt to people's inclination, and new-found ability, to get for free something that they used to have to pay for.

We're seeing the same situation with the book publishing business. Publishers, like record labels, don't know how to successfully utilise the new technology so, instead, slam up their walls to protect themselves, not fully comprehending that this leaves them in the dark ages and gives free reign to the techno-savvy user to exploit them. Instead, both industries should be looking at what the user wants and needs and how best to offer that. Similarly, why pay money for a CD which is of only margninally higher quality than an MP3? The only true hard-media sound is from vinyl record and this is of limited availability these days.

What Ben has written here is laudably idealistic, but (speaking as a musician, composer and small record label owner) also naïve. The business models that apply to Prince, Madonna, Radiohead and The Beatles are in each case unique, and to quote them as examples of new business models is meaningless - no small band will have the clout to make a deal with a concert promoter that will allow them even to break even; no mainstream weekly newspaper will give a struggling band the favourable terms Prince will have managed to negotiate; and there is no act living or dead whose recorded catalogue is as valuable as that of the Beatles. It sounds like you're assuming that what works for pre-internet established acts will work for acts who haven't developed with that investment - a large cash investment that came in each case from record sales. Like it or not, it costs a lot of money to make music to a high degree of quality if you add it up: instrument costs, software, rehearsal space, time, time and more time, and it's only really the wealthy and the already-successful who are able to take that time without living in squalor. That's generally why musicians are annoyed at the attitude that music should be universally available at no cost. What has value is worth paying for, surely. We are not looking at a burgeoning cultural meritocracy. The signal-to-noise ratio of information on the internet is so low that for any band to get noticed it is essential that they have vast resources of time, energy and friends (rather than fans) to devote to maintenance of their online persona - or just cash to buy that kind of promotional coverage on the right blogs and music websites. In that respect, nothing has changed for artists' benefit. Manufactured bands and pop groups are the record labels cash crop in this X-Factor age, now more than ever before, precisely because artists more concerned with creative integrity can't rise above the crowd anymore. The function of record labels has always been investment (and, yes, profit, but that's hardly the exclusive preserve of the music industry). The major record labels will almost certainly go under, or be so fractured as to be totally emasculated. And as a small-time struggling independent musician, I do not see this as being good for music. We adhere to social demographics just as much as we did before the internet, and not just in music either. It just happens that the marketing/targeting/demographic calculations are being done by younger people now, and it all moves faster. But the fact that anyone can access any information they like more easily than ever before does not mean that they are.

You complain that DRM is a problem and that it's easier to download illegaly. All of Lily Allen's music is available in non-DRM MP3s: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-music&field-keywords=lily+allen&x=0&y=0 If people choose not to buy her work because they're buying that of smaller artists then that's great. But they're not - they're choosing to copy it rather than pay for it. Taste is, in fact getting more homogenized, not less: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/22/long_tail_netflix/ It comes down to whether people are willing to pay money for digital music files when they don't have to. And it turns out they mostly aren't. Which is something we have to get used to - but there's no need to disguise it as something it's not.

[...] economics, record labels — Ben Werdmuller @ 1:58 pm I’ve written a guest post over at the Media140 blog about Lily Allen’s file sharing stance, and the wider place of traditional record labels in the [...]

Excellent post, I hope it is read by the powers that be, and that the whole outdated copyright issue is sorted. When will 'they' realise that they can never stop pirates? Perhaps when they get 'IT'. Well done for writing such a good article which helps explain it to 'them'. For too long the fatcats have milked our youngsters and our aspiring artists. Time to redress the balance of power. Social media is giving the power back where it belongs. Soon 'they' will see 'IT'. Power to the people. chris