A musician speaks about acquiring music without paying for it

[firecat]

A professional musician writes about why free music on the Internet isn't really free, debunks some myths about how and where pro musicians get paid (e.g., most don't make much money on touring; Spotify pays musicians almost nothing), and describes some charities you can support if you end up deciding that you did a wrong thing by downloading free music, or if you just want to help pro musicians.

http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

I don't agree with the implication that it's a particular generation of people who are primarily downloading stuff on the Internet in violation of copyright. People of all ages do it.
I also think there are huge problems with copyright law and with the way corporations sometimes go about protecting their copyrights. And I support transformative fanworks, which often involve working with copyrighted material. It's not a simple issue. And I take digital stuff without paying for it sometimes, so I'm not shaking fingers at people.

This issue is also relevant to all sorts of other artists producing material that can be digitized. I find it interesting what justifications people give for their choices. And it's interesting to think about what the availability of free copies of digital stuff means, going forward, in terms of how art is made and who makes art and who can make a living at it and how people get access to art.

Comments

Meandering Musing

[jesse_the_k]

Indeed, I remember a fascinating panel re: copyright at WisCon some time back. There I learned (from the fabulous Laura Quilter) that there was a financial setup that predated Western copyright (i.e., the ability to control who copies your artistic efforts and who benefits from its sale). This was artistic patronage. If you were fortunate, you found a very rich person who was willing to pay for your artistic productions -- painting, music, sculpture, plays. They'd display your work in one of their many houses or palaces. Maintaining a happy relationship with one's patron ensured one's livelihood. There weren't any galleries or public theaters or "music in the schools" programs.

I wonder if the iniquitous privatization of all levels of government has played a hand in the current mess. If the most important metric is transforming every government element into an "enterprise," and squeezing the most money out of it, to boot, then we grow up without knowing how to make our own music and plays and art. I think humans need art, desperately, and so we take it.

[shanaqui]

I use Spotify fairly unashamedly, because I do buy the artists' albums when they come out (so in effect, however little Spotify pays them, they're still earning more money from me, not less), or I'm only listening to the odd song that I'd never buy. It's very handy to use across different computers, too. But at the same time, Spotify concerns me and I want to poke it with sticks. Maybe I should send them some concerned emails.

[lilacsigil]

More importantly, to me, music is now almost always easily available. I no longer download free stuff and keep it - if I try something I either buy it or delete it. I would love to do the same for TV and ebooks, but they're at the stage music was 10 years ago. I probably also have a thousand or more downloaded songs, but none of them are recent.

I do think there is a generational difference in that people now in their late teens to late 20s don't have the idea of paying for music, because they grew up with music sharing while music companies tried to restrict it: as far as they knew, it was always easier to get it free than pay. People younger than that may be growing up with music that is as easy to buy as share. People older than that (like me!) have the idea of buying firmly in place, and it's a much more deliberate choice to do so or not.

[auntie_m]

The kids are not without hope. Moose, 23, recently came up to me and said, "You know the Bejeweled music we love? The artist is selling the tracks on his website for downloading." He had already bought the music for himself, and since I love it to, so did I. We already owned the games, and listened to the music tracks from the games, but giving the money to the musician made Moose happy.
He gets an allowance, and I see CDs and paid for downloads happening. He is trying to make sure the artists he loves get paid for their work. He does get it that Art needs to be paid for.
I hope that when he finally goes out into the world, he gets paid for the things he creates, too.

[firecat]

I'm glad you raised your Moose right!

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith]

That assumes that free is necessarily wrong. It undercuts musicians who find it beneficial to give away some music to attract fans. Sheesh, I've had people set my poetry to music for free, several times, and share the results.

If the current system isn't working, people will try different things until they find something better. That's what is happening now. It's not tidy but it is necessary.

Re: Hmm...

[firecat]

The wording of my post might have created that impression. I believe the article says that giving away music is not wrong but is discussing acquiring music that's offered for sale without paying for it.

[andrewducker]

Great piece here:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120625/01011219455/some-facts-insights-into-whole-discussion-ethics-music-business-models.shtml

[firecat]

Thanks!

[ironed_orchid]

springheel_jack wrote a really good response to that piece where he says that Emily White works for a college radio station, and one of the reasons people work for college stations is access to free music that the labels send them. Also, that exposure to more music is a good thing, and questions some of the figures in the Lowrey article.

I think there are some good points in David Lowrey's letter, but he doesn't seem to engage with the problem of copyright in a critical way.

Also, he says that touring doesn't make much money for artists, but then he suggest buying stuff directly from the artists. One of the reasons I go to see touring acts is to buy the merch at the concert to support them more directly than through retailers (online or otherwise). Online, I love Bandcamp and CD Baby because they with artists for artists.

One other thing that occurs to me is fair use. The last album I downloaded was David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which I love. Now, in the past I have bought the very same album on both vinyl and cd, but through years of living in shared housing, they were lost or rendered unplayable or given away during an interstate move when I was poor. I kinda feel that fair use should extend to getting a digital copy of an album that I have already paid for twice.

[firecat]

I posted a comment over at springheel_jack's post...I had to laugh, because I worked for a college radio station for three years, and I have four cassette-length mix-tapes to show for it. It's not like I was being ultra-respectful of copyright -- I don't remember its even occurring to me to make copies of the albums there. (This was in the days of vinyl, so it wasn't quite as easy to make copies.)

[amadi]

I recall in my college radio days, we routinely had duplicate copies of things, promos from the record companies, and stuff that was culled from the collection. They were dropped in a bin and free for the staff to take. I wonder if anything like that happens any more.

[cleverthylacine]

I have written a rant about iTunes that I have yet to post where I take issue with his notion that all she needs is to buy music from iTunes; if you don't want to use iTunes, and there are good reasons some people don't, it's STILL often easier to torrent than buy.

The reason iTunes is close to becoming a monopoly is that you can't buy music from the iTunes store without allowing them to install their software on your machine. (You can't even own other Apple software without the updater TRYING to install iTunes on your machine--there is no way to set it to stop bothering you every time there is a new iTunes release.) You can't own an iPod or an iPad if you won't use iTunes on your computer. (Which is fine; there are other phones and tablets, but it does concern me that my best choices are Windows phone or Android, which phones home to Google as much as iTunes does to Apple, although I have slightly more faith in Google mostly because, unlike some iPhones, Android doesn't send user biometrics back to Google unless you choose to install apps that do that.)

If he's afraid that Apple and Google and Amazon are taking over the music industry this isn't the way to fix it.

I also, while freely admitting that patronage came before copyright, don't think that means that whatever comes after copyright won't be better. That's like arguing that we shouldn't dismantle repressive capitalistic social/economic/political structures because before that we had feudalism and slavery, or that getting rid of the current mess that's the health insurance industry means nobody will have help paying their medical bills. It's a lie the entertainment companies want us to believe.

Copyright in and of itself isn't a bad thing, but the current push by entertainment companies to expand copyright from lifetime of the author + a few years to basically forever is a new thing and a VERY BAD THING. My feeling is that artists need to realise that the big entertainment companies are not on their side any more than Apple and Google are and remember how badly the record companies used to screw artists over in the early part of the last century.

If Baum's Oz books had been copyrighted under some of the proposed laws, we wouldn't have Wicked. The notion that characters/stories/fantasy worlds that have become part of our shared cultural universe (Disney characters, Star Wars, Oz) should be forever owned by corporations and transformative works that counter the owner's views and perspectives should be either illegal or non-commercial and non-publishable is a really bad idea. It shouldn't be illegal to put naked Tinkerbell in a print because Disney doesn't want its brand associated with sex. Fanfiction shouldn't be legal only if the author approves of it and likes the message; one of the important functions fanfiction can serve is critical.

The corporate ownership of our common culture and "mythos" if you will allows corporations to influence how we think far more than advertising alone does.

Also, in the world of design and fashion, our current intellectual property laws basically function in such a way as to make it easy for companies like Urban Outfitters to steal designs from etsy sellers without crediting them or giving them any form of remuneration because they can't afford the lawyers, and this happens all the time; but try seeing how far you get selling shirts based on an iconic design (even and especially if your art is critical/transformative) or a character everyone recognises without "licencing", and yes, you can always create your own characters and designs if your work is about character and design, but if you are trying to say something everyone around you will understand, they're not going to get it if your t-shirt says "Jessie is a doll not a goal" instead of "Barbie is a doll not a goal" (an actual t-shirt I own produced by a small seller who hopefully hasn't been caught yet) or is a drawing of a cadaverously thin cartoon cat without a mouth that nobody recognises (because I love hello kitty as much as the next kawaii harajuku girl, but it's creepy that she doesn't have a mouth and is a female archetype who cannot talk or eat). Sanrio and Mattel are not going to let you do this if they have that creative control.

I sympathise with artists and I want them to get paid. But I also hate giving money to the big entertainment corps (even though I frequently do), not because I don't think the people who work for those companies deserve to eat, but because those companies are themselves predatory both of artists (there's a reason artists and musicians have unions and more people should join them) and are bankrolling huge armies of lawyers and lobbyists who are trying to set things up so libraries that want to use eBooks can only lend them 25 times without buying new copies, fanvids can't be posted on YouTube, shark law firms can shake old ladies down by thousands of dollars by charging them with downloading gay porn and offering to settle out of court (because naturally they will, as they can't pay for a difficult defence and don't want people to hear about something like that) and t-shirts making fun of Barbie or Hello Kitty can't be sold.

There's also the fact that I would estimate maybe 50% of torrenting would disappear if worldwide release dates were coordinated, because a lot of torrents are things that were released in one country much earlier than in others (usually America, which is why American entertainment companies hate it). Trufax: You can't buy music by Japanese artists on iTunes if you live in America unless there's an American release. If you like Japanese artists who aren't popular with the experimental music or otaku or hipster crowds (i.e. not Ryuuichi Sakamoto, Shonen Knife, Cibo Matto, anime soundtracks) there is literally no way to purchase it legally except to go to a Japanese record store (and most of these are dying). Japanese friends living in the US tell me THEY can't buy Japanese tracks on iTunes without going through elaborate semi-legal BS (buying iTunes credit from people living in Japan either from a for-profit company or people they know) because they don't have a Japanese IP or credit card. Licencing was originally supposed to prevent counterfeiting of foreign music but it currently operates to encourage it because if the corporations don't feel there is enough of a US market to warrant buying it, the only way to get it is to obtain a ridiculously expensive CD and rip it, buy a ripoff counterfeit Chinese CD (if you live in a place you can find one) and rip it, or download it. My Japanese music collection is horrendously out of date because the yen is high and CDs are super expensive. For that matter, it's impossible to be in the BBC Sherlock fandom if you wait for episodes to be shown in the US and don't want to be spoiled.

Even if the entertainment companies remain in control, the only thing that's going to fix torrenting is dismantling the current licencing/release/"localisation" (nobody wants the Philosopher's Stone to be renamed the Sorcerer's Stone or for Sailor Moon to eat pastries instead of sweet potatoes anyway) setup that consumers hate and recognising that markets for music and movies and TV shows are now global because people can talk to each other globally and nobody wants to be the last on their block to understand the conversation because they happen to live in Luxembourg.

[firecat]

I agree with almost everything you're saying.

The only situation where I am tempted to be judgemental is that if a person wants to own a piece of art (music, writing, etc.) and it is available directly from the artist, and the person can afford it, I think the person should buy it, not take it without paying.

But one thing puzzles me: the notion that if a person can't get something offered for sale from a source that they approve of, or can't get it at the same time that other people get it, or can't get it in the most convenient way, that means it's OK for them to take it without paying. I understand wanting to do those things, and I understand deciding "fuck it, I don't care if it's OK." But I don't understand believing that it's a right.

I'm not saying you think it's a right. But I've seen some commentary that makes it seem like some people do think so.

The idea that it's a right to take something if you can't get it in a legally approved manner mostly doesn't seem to be applied to physical goods as often. So I'm puzzled about how it came to be applied to digital goods. Is it just because it's so easy? Or do other things come into play?

[cleverthylacine]

I'm not trying to put you off or evade this question but the problem is that it's a horribly complex question because it goes into the matter of what "rights" are and what "goods" are.

For instance:

1) If I see you leave your bike unattended and I take your bike, you don't have a bike any more. If I make a copy of some music that you own, you still have the music. If you make a copy of the music, and you give that to me, and you still have the music, I haven't stolen anything from you; if you make a copy of the music, and you still have the music, and you put it up on a file sharing site, much like you might put an old bike on the street with a "free" sign, and I download that copy, I haven't stolen it from you. The artist doesn't want the music back. The artist wants to be paid for the effort that went into creating the recording. The only difference between torrents and mixtapes is SCALE. (The record companies have on several occasions tried to restrict the sale of blank cassette tapes and other recordable media for exactly this reason.) What the entertainment company wants isn't the music back, either; they want to be paid (in part for the real work of distributing it and producing the sound if not the physical media, but also for their armies of lawyers and lobbyists who are trying to take over the internet, and let's not gloss over that in an era where corporations are legally considered people.)

2) There is no good argument that anyone has a right to anyone else's labour or the products thereof. But there are a number of very good arguments that full participation in culture is a human (if not currently a legal) right, which I don't have the time to enumerate. Clearly there should be better channels for compensating people for their labour--channels that don't involve scary spyware or scarier lobbyists. But being able to participate in one's own culture, in the global culture, and not being restricted from acquiring knowledge (textbooks are also an issue here) and learning and becoming culturally literate on the grounds of where you live or how much money you have? There's a real issue there. I mean, this isn't just about whether or not Joe Schmo can put the latest Megaman movie on his iPad for free; this is also about whether or not people in countries where the cost of shipping physical books is prohibitive have the right to read textbooks or enjoy science fiction at all.

And the idea that full participation in culture is a human right is relatively new, but the idea of human rights is relatively new, period. I mean, there are lots of places even today where the right to believe what you want to believe and say what you want to say is not acknowledged; there are places in this country where the right to love who you want is not acknowledged; and the idea that some people don't have a right to eat or to basic health care is currently being contested in this very society. I have no doubt that future generations will think we're all pretty barbaric.

(One last thing: I haven't ever downloaded anything I could get direct from the artist and pay for, just FYI. In fact 90% of what I personally have torrented is TV shows I already paid for with my insanely high cable subscription that I don't always have time to watch when broadcast, and/or think I will need to rewatch throughout the season in case I forget something--or TV shows that aren't available legally at ALL because very few people still give a shit about them; some of them took weeks to torrent because so few people give a shit about them that hardly anyone was seeding.)

[firecat]

there are a number of very good arguments that full participation in culture is a human (if not currently a legal) right

OK, that's a reason I can understand for thinking one has a right to download stuff without paying, if paying is onerous. Although I wouldn't want to be responsible for deciding what full participation in culture means.

3) but the idea of human rights is relatively new, period.

Yes. Part of my concern is precisely that the concept of rights, and a bunch of pretty basic rights, are under attack; and groups such as corporations are trying to get the concept of rights to apply to them too. And this is judgemental of me, but I think that (e.g.) downloading your own copy of The Avengers isn't as important as the other rights you mention, and I'm worried that trying to equate that with the other rights will end up harming people's access to the other rights.

Maybe it's not really a zero sum game though.

FYI, I don't judge your use of torrenting.

[cleverthylacine]

I wouldn't want to be responsible for deciding what full participation in culture is either, but I am deeply concerned about corporate cultural control. People need to share stories; we've been doing it since forever, and before there was copyright OR patronage, before there were governments, people supported storytellers and artists by making them sacred. I'm not saying that this was a golden age, far from it; for one thing, if your particular story/art wasn't something the people around you liked, the consequences could range from being completely ignored and having to give it up to make a living, to finding yourself on a bonfire for offending the gods.

The problem is now the corporations want to control distribution of the things people like, and as a result:

1) only the artists they think they can sell get wide distribution/exposure;
2) those people don't hurt for money or lose anything by torrenting/free distribution unless they suck, because people spend a lot of money on them;
3) they want to control the branding of those artists by limiting them to producing art they think will sell and not allowing other people to create derivative/transformative/critical works;
4) they're probably not completely unaware that being culturally literate not just in things like great literature but also in terms of what people who matter are watching and reading and talking about is a door-opener, and that preventing oppressed people from accessing that stuff easily in part prevents them from becoming people that other people listen to;
5) people who don't produce stuff that is popular are actively prevented from making any money off it because they're the ones who suffer from every penny lost to piracy;
6) cultural control is reinforced because access to knowledge and information from other cultures (whether that's the latest Utada Hikaru CD, or someone in Saudi Arabia downloading feminist works or porn) is made very, very difficult;
7) American businesses get to sell the stuff they want to promote at huge bonuses overseas while restricting what we can get here from outside;
8) things like YouTube and fanfiction and sarcastic t-shirts about corporate characters get stomped on;
9) it just goes on and on and on.

So IDK, because I wouldn't argue that getting the Avengers movie for free is in and of itself a human right, I would say that it's problematic to decide people shouldn't be able to see the Avengers movie at all legally until it's shown in their country, or to only sell the Avengers movie on DVD or with DRM to prevent people not just from copying it but also from making mashups of it on YouTube, whether it's because they want to make music videos that imply Tony and Steve make out or music videos that criticise some of the militaristic themes, and that it's a problem when a poor kid who is trying to become a geeky kid and develop intellectual friends and interests not necessarily supported at home can't talk about the Avengers with the wealthier geeky kids at school--that one thing won't hold this kid back, but it's one of a dozen small microaggressions constantly reminding that kid and their friends that they're not in the same class, not supposed to be friends--and that we need to remember that in a very real way the Avengers are part of our cultural mythology.

[firecat]

I agree that the degree of control corporations want is problematic. I also think it's against their own interests; if they were able to limit distribution as much as they think they want to, their stuff wouldn't be as popular as it is.

I would really like to see more art being done outside the control of large corporations. It wouldn't have the same global reach necessarily, but it would be more participatory. I feel more connected to an artist if I buy their stuff directly. Sharing enthusiasm about something made by someone else is important, but I feel more connected to a community if we are sharing what we make with each other.

[cleverthylacine]

I absolutely agree.

And there's no reason it can't be global. That's how the internet works.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I read that this morning, and while there are some valid points, I do have some problems with it. One is the suggestion that composers should consider concert tickets and t-shirts to be the only way to make money. That's fine if you're the kind of band who can sell concert tickets and t-shirts, but it very narrowly defines what music should be allowed to make money. There are a lot of artists who aren't likely to sell t-shirts, and often if you're not a somewhat successful act, you are either giving the venue the ticket proceeds or actively paying the venue to let you play. The second is the suggestion that expecting to sell music is totally unreasonable. Even if it were true that it were currently commercially viable because of the climate of sharing and so on, that doesn't make having the idea that you should be able to do that an unreasonable position. And the last is the suggestion that NOBODY AT ALL pays for music anymore, which is clearly untrue, given the wild continuing success of record labels and of services like iTunes. It's one thing to say that it's a reality that a lot of people are relying on subscription-based cloud services or on piracy. It's another thing (and a clearly false thing) to say that ALL people are.

[firecat]

Either I didn't read it very carefully or you read a different article than I did. I think this article makes all the same points that you do.

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

I read this, and am keeping the tab up because I'm having trouble with some underlying concepts and want to write about my misgivings further -- the "corporate-led Free Culture Movement," what?

There's an ongoing tension among ownership, protest against over-protective copyright laws, public domain and use, deliberate appropriation, and of course laziness and the desire to not expend resources.

A lot of what you wrote speaks for my position. Details to come, I hope.

[firecat]

the "corporate-led Free Culture Movement"

Yeah, that's...odd.

I look forward to seeing what you have to say.

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

Ah, I haven't explored all the links within it, but the article someone mentioned on the Dreamwidth lobe of your post might say a lot of what I mean:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120625/01011219455/some-facts-insights-into-whole-discussion-ethics-music-business-models.shtml