Like many others, last week I waded into the emotionally charged debate set off by the blog post from NPR intern Emily White and the subsequent response from David Lowery.
I found myself conflicted. As a music fan, I was somewhat alarmed and really disappointed by Emily’s admission to piracy, but as a self-professed member of the Free Culture movement and fan of the Creative Commons, I despised the way David developed his argument, manipulating the truth and using scare tactics.
In both cases, I found the authors distracted from their central points with ancillary comments that set off the fire storm. I won’t get into the problems I have with David’s arguments, but I agree with his conclusions – artists are due some compensation for their creative works; piracy is wrong and illegal, and music fans should feel a moral obligation to pay for music, not pirate it.
As a reflection of the attitudes of her generation, Emily’s lack of attachment to the the physical mediums of music (e.g. CD’s) and preference for a limitless stream of digital content a-la Spotify was telling. The music industry should be listening; this is the markets telling you its demands. Her point was lost, however, because she admitted to piracy while remaining fully unaware of her actions and their implications. Ripping a CD you didn’t pay for is as much piracy as downloading from Pirate Bay. It’s just another form of P2P.
It would seem Emily has rationalized her actions as something other than piracy; I don’t think she or anyone else (reasonable) is saying piracy is ok. The real debate, as I understand it, centers on enforcement, not unlike the illegal immigration debate in thew news of late. Does it make sense to go after individual fans for file sharing or might everyone be better off spending less on lawyers and more on developing legitimate paid alternatives to piracy?
The music industry is in disruption; it’s not the only industry that has been disrupted by digital distribution. Unfortunately, sometimes “creative destruction” destroys more than it creates. At the macro level, this is how the free market works. At the micro level, real people are hurt in the process. As Keynes said, in the long term, we’re all dead.
Everyone affected by the music industry disruption would be better served to invest resources in the productive pursuit of new sources of value rather than expend resources on unproductive attempts to hold onto the past. I feel for the artist that has to work a second job or give up entirely on a career in music because he or she can’t make money, but none of us are simply entitled to make money from following our passions. It’s a lucky privilege for a very few.
Lots of people toil away at jobs they dislike, and this notion of career mobility, that is a modern phenomenon. It used to be that you became a farmer because your father was a farmer. Choice (too much of it anyway) has contributed to the general ethos of complacency and entitlement that is now catching up with generations of Americans (mine included). (Of course, people still aren’t taking responsibility; it’s the economy.)
Finding the new business models for making money from music requires first acknowledging that there simply may not be as much money in recorded music as there once was. I don’t know that this merits any great alarm or mourning; digital distribution changed the value chain, and other value added services are now in demand instead. The same thing has happened across countless industries throughout economic history.
Keep in mind that the recorded music industry is also a modern phenomenon. Musicians have been making music for thousands of years without worrying whether someone was buying or pirating their CD’s. Music will survive even this industry disruption. (Come to think of it, shouldn’t the purists be welcoming this change as expunging some of the corrupting influence of commercial interests on art?)
I still believe musicians have a right to control their works and realize a return on their investment of creativity. No one, however, is in a position to say how much compensation they are owed (at least not in a free market), and one cannot just expect recorded music to contribute the same returns as before.
The quickest and surest way to combat piracy at the individual level is to offer legitimate alternatives at an attractive price point given the consumer’s “job-to-be-done.” (Of course this still means using the legal system to prosecute large scale piracy where the cost/benefit makes more sense.) Although I only have anecdotal evidence to prove it, I believe the majority of piracy happens at the edges of nonconsumption – individuals that otherwise would never have bought a particular CD at the regular price but might be willing to pay a price closer to the actual marginal cost of distributing another digital copy, which is to say something near zero.
What might artists and musicians learn from TED, where so much of the content is given away for free? Instead of fighting fans on piracy, how might artists take control over their creative works back from labels and record companies as OK Go and Louis C.K. did? Opportunities to make money are still out there, if you don’t let yourself be distracted by the ones that have already passed us by.
