Tag Archives: music

The Internet Made Music Free, and Other Wrong Ideas

The real story of the devaluation of creative content, and what we can do about it.

The Devaluation of Creative Content

There is a story making the rounds online right now titled “A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music.” I came across it on the Roots Music Canada site, where it’s described as follows:

“Today’s column from veteran Canadian singer-songwriter Ian Tamblyn is adapted from a speech he gave at a symposium at Trent University.  It’s a long read, but we decided to post it here all at once in its entirety because, well, it’s just that good.”

My two cents, it’s not that good.

Still, it’s gotten a deal of traction. It’s my suspicion this is because it panders to musicians who want to believe some things about their careers that are not in fact true.

To be fair to Mr. Tamblyn, I appreciated his attempt to build an argument into an exhortation, and I’ve no doubt his heart is in the right place. He also makes some decent points along the way, but whatever thematic momentum he manages to develop derails at an all-too-common stumbling point, that being this notion:

“The internet makes music ‘free.’”

If we’re ever to move beyond our current state of affairs, it is REALLY critical we do NOT accept this statement—the internet did NOT make music free. We did. All of us. Listeners and creators alike. The internet introduced a new way for free to be possible, yes, but we didn’t have to use it. Yet we did, and then some, and this renders us the architects of the very changes we so love to complain about. Every artist who has ever made something available for free, and every listener who has ever consumed music for free—we are the culprits.

I have this disagreement with fellow musicians all the time in the context of Spotify. Musicians are generally angry at—and about—Spotify. But if you need an enemy in that scenario, turn your sights away from Spotify, and train them on the 87 million users of Spotify. They’re who make Spotify possible.

in this way

Revenue on the internet mostly follows an elementary model when it comes to creative content. Think of it like a garage sale that never ends, and never charges anything.

Let’s say I put a sign up in my neighborhood that says I’m giving everything in my house away for free. Guess what happens? LOTS of people come to my house! So then, I go to the local coffee shop, and I say, “Did you know there are 1000 people coming through my house, just today? You should really pay me $500 to put a sign for your coffee shop in my living room. Think of all the people who will see it!” Now, obviously, this won’t work in real life, because after the first day, all my stuff will be gone, and I won’t have 1000 visitors anymore. But if I’m YouTube, people will keep coming, because I always have free stuff I’m giving away. So businesses keep paying me money to advertise on my site.

That’s how monetization of creative content now works on the internet. The money doesn’t actually come from the content. The content is just the bait. The money actually comes from the traffic. Because not only are there visitors, those visitors are also generating data. So sites sell the traffic (you should advertise on my site, because I have SO many visitors!), and they sell the data (if you only knew which items in my house people most wanted to take, and which rooms they went to first, and which rooms they stayed in longest, think how much better at advertising you’d be!). This is the result of creators being willing to let their content be used as bait, and this is the result of consumers being willing to have their behavior sold in exchange for free content.

How do we change this? It’s on us, and no one else. Listeners, and creators. Listeners have to stop allowing their data to be sold in exchange for free content, and creators have to stop allowing their content to be used as free bait.

To put this more tangibly, all of us would have to remove ourselves entirely from the current marketplace and take our goods and our business elsewhere, to a marketplace where content itself has value.

The good news is, this is already happening. Sites like Bandcamp allow creators to sell their music directly to consumers, and consumers can make their purchases there without fear of their behavior being re-sold in the form of data. (See Bandcamp’s terms of use for details). And, Bandcamp does not make money through advertising, they make it through revenue sharing with their artists. Full disclosure, I am a commercial musical artist, but I don’t currently use Bandcamp. I just happen to appreciate the value of what they offer.

So, that’s it. The internet didn’t do it. We did. We started it. But we can also end it. But not in the way that Ian Tamblyn honorably—but naively—suggests:

“If we as artists attend to the work at a professional level, if we support the community in every way we can as artists, and you have invested in us, is it not incumbent on the community to support in kind?”

While this may seem noble and right, it’s nonsense. It’s not upon the community to DO anything.

In a content marketplace, value is determined by demand, not effort. You can work really hard to create your music, but if no one likes it or wants it, your effort doesn’t matter—your music still has no commercial value. And as musicians and creators, we’re not OWED anything, just because we created something.

What ACTUALLY needs to happen, is creators need to set a realistic price, and consumers need to pay it if they want it, in a marketplace with no interference from advertising and data tracking. If no one pays, the creator can remove their product, change their product, or lower their price. At some point, ideally, a sweet spot emerges, and the creator and the consumer can, in effect, strike a deal. In this way, creators can create, and consumers can consume, and those that deliver value to those who value what they deliver, will make money.

~

note: the above post began as a comment on the article referenced in the opening paragraph


A Good Song Is …

Song

A good song, insofar as one can describe one’s own creation in such a fashion, is a kind of controlled frenzy,  sort of a bucking bronco ride where a certain kind of practiced, angry madness meets several degrees of deliberate lunacy.

A good song is both much wilder and much more sedate than that. It’s homemade alcohol at 160 proof that burns your throat, and drum mountain white cloud tea that promises you something more than meditation and steam.

A good song is words on a page and notes on a staff.

A good song is right up there with the novel, the poem, the play, the sculpture, the painting, as a great thing.

A good song often comes in a rush so overwhelming you can’t write fast enough to put it down. I don’t mean to suggest that this is objectively a good song, or that it’s a good song to you, but I’ll call it a good song all the same, because I think it’s a good song, and to me, it is, and it’s called “The Fine and The Weak,” and I really can’t understand how it came out, or why it’s like it is, but when I listen to it or read it now, I’m sort of staggered by everything it contains inside it:

The spoils of life are both fine and weak
A circus mirror for the grotesqueries we won’t speak
We won’t speak that name, we won’t name that wound
All the songs that we sing have all come un-tuned
It’s all come un-tuned like a dancer’s slip
Like a drunken old captain down with the ship
Gone down with the ship, as dust to dust
To rejoin all the bones that preceded us
They preceded us to the farther shore
Where the wheel of fire won’t spin anymore
Won’t spin or even light or even offer up change
So farewell to the wild, unruly, and strange
Unruly and strange, like the dreams we duck
Like the black on the glass from the stack of a truck
From the stack of a truck comes a hovering guilt
Blacking in the white lines where somebody got killed
Somebody got killed where the spool melts down
Where the strip of our life comes fully unwound
So fully unwound in an amber slick
That when we try to walk through, our soles all stick
Our soles all stick to the way we were
And the less we know now, the more we once seemed sure
Oh, we once seemed sure that the future was close
As the father to the son to the holy ghost
But the holy ghost plays unholy games
He might blink with hope, but he bets with shame
Yes, he bets with shame on an un-rollable rock
Until there’s no more dust left on anyone’s clock
Now, anyone’s clock has a chance to be right
And still we can’t divine day without invoking night
When we invoke night what we mean is the moon
We feel the tides of our women in the ocean’s womb
In the ocean’s womb every secret splays
For the alphabet of history to spell its own days
To spell its own days, to write its own wrongs
To bend in the pitches of the un-tuned songs
All the un-tuned songs, all the hollowed-out pelts
All the unsung saints, and the way they all felt
That’s the way it all felt, when the patient and meek
Finally came to inherit both the fine and the weak

A good song is an answer that makes you ask the question, “Is the idiot in Idiot Wind actually the narrator?”

A good song has a narrator.

A good song is a built thing, like a model airplane. It starts with a picture and directions, and ends up with glue problems and a missing decal, and a splinter, and a moment of flight so exquisite that you remember it when you’re fifty, along with the smell of grass, and the taste of dandelions.

A good song is more than just a clever couplet, but sometimes, a single couplet is how I convince myself I might have a good song on my hands. Is this a good couplet?

Blister and a bottlecap, fetch my skippin’ stone
Get a bone, get a bone, fetch my skippin’ stone

It might not seem like it, but it healed me from nearly a decade of musical sadness.

A good song is not a melody.

A good song is more about phrasing than it is about words, except when it’s more about emotion than it is about logic.

A good song is a sort of memory ritual that can’t be tested for efficacy until you’re years and years away from the moment that birthed the song. But if you are years and years away, and then you listen to that song again, and it takes you right back to where you were, then you’re onto something, particularly when you can’t even recall what some of the images even mean, or how they came to you, or whether they’re real, or something you imagined:

Deep in the dark Californian night
Driving straight into the stars
Half of the moon sits on top of the hillcrest
To x-ray the clouds and their scars

Spanish accordions dog all the handprints
But changing for change sake was soothing
The bargain begins at the first sight of mountain
To obey the mystery of moving

Damp in the cold Californian morning
The eye behind the wave
Brown into green, into green, into blue
Into blue into some deeper grave

Apple-skin fledglings supine on wood
That’s been waxed to slide over violence
The bargain begins at the first sight of ocean
To obey the mystery of silence

Sometimes I wake with the lightning in my eyes
And the echo of some thunderclap
Jesus, man, what a motherfucker of a storm
I have never seen nothing like that

Deep in the dark Californian night
The iambic frame of the naked
Pushing the screen up against all the water
Listening for sounds that sound sacred

Belatedly praising the roots for their honor
Grateful the earth remains porous
The bargain begins at the first sight of breathing
To obey the mysteries before us

A good song belongs to no one.

A good song is there at the beginning of time—it just needs someone or something to put it together.

A good song is kind of like “Lincoln Logs”; a building toy to build log cabins with, and there were X amount of pieces, and X amount of variation between the pieces, and pretty much just one way you could put the pieces together—notches—and pretty much anyone who played with it built a log cabin or possibly a fort, and once we stopped following the directions and just started building, some of us built paddocks and fences and second small buildings and windows and not-windows and really we all just built log houses.

A good song begins differently when you begin it on piano than when you begin it on banjo.

Cemetery Stout, which is another song that I don’t mind saying is, I think, a good song, began on a piano in Ballyvaughan, County Clare, Ireland, and ended on a National Resophonic in Manhattan, New York. There is, in a shoebox of mine, a cassette tape of the very first demo of Cemetery Stout:

The rain was on the grass, and the wind left a letter.
The morning was a wish, and the dreams got better.
The handles went backwards, and the smoke curled a waltz,
and the lazy conversations turned from true to false.

The nicotine thumbs took the bulls by the reins.
The shovels hit the rust with the passion of saints.
Boys became girls, and the girls became tomorrow,
and the clouds paid me back for whatever they had borrowed.

and Matilda got the coat,
and Mikey got the hat.
Desmond’s gone to the hospital,
and he’s never coming back.

The high rises, elsewhere, expanded their boxes.
We skipped out on the funeral, to sleep with the foxes.
A rifle of wood, and a castle made of plastic.
The night was a wish, but the dreams got too drastic.

Everyone was preparing for yesterday’s battle.
A pint in the boot, and a spike in the saddle.
Let’s bury the laws, and dig up the mugs,
paint shadows on the windows, and footprints on the rugs.

and Matilda got the coat,
and Mikey got the hat.
Desmond’s gone to the hospital,
and he’s never coming back.

There’s a battery in the bath, and the animals are listening.
The radio is out, but the newspaper is whispering.
Put a trunk in the shelter, and title it well,
and no matter who begs you, don’t ever tell.
All the words got smaller,
because the troubles were brewing.
Put a target on the barn,
and quit whatever you’re doing.
Take a moment with the cows,
and get a taste of the dead.
One fed the words,
while the other one said…

…that Matilda got the coat,
and Mikey got the hat.
Desmond’s gone to the hospital,
and he’s never coming back.

A good song is always at least a little bit about death.

A good song is homeless.

A good song is a house that will break somebody’s feelings when it becomes an Estate Sale.

It’s a very common question for a songwriter: “Which comes first, the lyrics or the music?” It’s hard to answer that, other than to say, “Neither.”


Top 11 musical things I DO & DON’T like discovering via social media

Beefheart Video Social Media

Social media is equal parts fascinating and horrifying. For every one gift of a new bit of Mississippi John Hurt footage that gets uncovered and shared, there is … well … everything else. However, in the interest of trying to present a balanced assessment, I’ve done my level best to list out 11 musical things that I DO and DON’T like discovering via social media.

Today’s Top 11 musical things I DO like discovering via social media:

  1. Vintage Captain Beefheart video footage I haven’t seen before
  2. Unearthed guerrilla footage from inside recording studios when legendary albums were being recorded
  3. Anything about Thelonious Monk
  4. Stories about Kid Andersen saving vintage Hammond organs and putting them to use at his Greaseland studio
  5. Any kind of evidence that there are new and excellent songs being written within a broad definition of the blues idiom
  6. Anything about Mance Lipscomb
  7. News that artists I admire are releasing new music
  8. Examples of well-known and amazing artists sharing the music of lesser-known but equally amazing artists
  9. Videos of that that baritone sax guy with the drummer playin’ house music in the Union Square subway station
  10. Evidence that other people also miss and revere Chris Whitley
  11. Excellent quality upright basses for sale, within 5 miles of my house, for less than $400.*

Today’s Top 11 musical things I DON’T like discovering via social media:

  1. Home videos of people performing Beatles covers
  2. Videos of Beatles covers, of any kind
  3. Beatles songs
  4. Videos about harmonica microphones that last for more than 3 seconds
  5. New examples of Joe Bonamassa’s offensive claims to importance
  6. Snarky posts from people aggressively defending the fact that they’re a cover band/act, especially when they presume that “no one wants to hear original songs” but fail to take into consideration that their own original songs might just suck.
  7. Self-righteous posts from record labels posturing pro-artist stances when we all know behind the scenes that they f*&k over artists constantly
  8. Bad lyrics
  9. News about new Tribute Albums that don’t donate all their profits to organizations that work to ensure that new and talented artists don’t have to choose between starvation and giving up, the way the artists they’re paying tribute to did because no one was there to support them when they needed it most
  10. Anything to do with that TajMo album
  11. News about another good music club closing down

*note: this has never happened

 

 

 


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