The best way to get a professional recording artist angry is to say that everybody has a right to download their music for free. The outrage is well-motivated. Recording music at the pro level is expensive, in time as well as money. Just because it’s easy to pirate music, why have we as a society all of a sudden decided that it’s acceptable? Shoplifting is easy too, and we don’t condone that. My musician friends sometimes feel like the world has gone crazy, that in the blink of an eye their work went from being valuable to worthless. How could this change have happened so fast?
I have a theory, and if you’re a musician, or you aspire to be one, you won’t like it: people are right to expect music to be free.
In order for music to be stolen, first it has to belong to someone. We take it as a given that a recording is a commodity, a piece of property that can be bought or sold. But in the grand scheme of things, the concept of owning music is a new idea, and one that’s peculiar to modern industrial societies.
In participatory music cultures, music is less like property and more like cooking. It’s an activity that everyone takes in part in to some degree or another, as part of routine daily life. Cooking can be a commercial transaction, but for most people, it isn’t one. When you cook for yourself or for your family, no one is getting paid. There are certainly rules and expectations around food and cooking, but these activities are fundamentally part of a gift economy. For most of human history, music was part of the gift economy too.
Music became a commodity when it became possible to mass produce printed scores. What had previously only been an activity could now also exist a physical object. Because printing was difficult and expensive, and writing longhand even more so, scores were rare and valuable items. It was easy to conflate ownership of a score with ownership of the ideas contained in that score. If I had a score, and you stole it from me, then I didn’t have access to the music inside it anymore. Until the 1960s, recordings worked the same way. A normal person couldn’t produce or copy a wax cylinder or vinyl record, so again, it was natural to think of the medium as being coextensive with the music contained on it.
We usually think of the crisis of music ownership starting with Napster, or home taping, or the copy machine. But the property status of scores and recordings has always been contentious, since people could always lend and borrow them. There was considerable controversy around the idea of borrowing libraries for music back in the 1700s, a debate that uncannily predicted the one around internet downloads hundreds of years late.
Even from the beginning, then, the commodity model of music has been a complicated one. Illicit copying is sometimes simple thievery, but sometimes it’s addressing market inefficiencies. For decades, every jazz musician has had a copy of The Real Book, a collection of hand-written lead sheets put together by students at the Berklee College of Music in the 1970s. It’s a collection of the tunes that (in the opinion of Berklee students in the 1970s) are the most important ones for a student of jazz to know. The nature of the music publishing business makes it impractical or impossible to assemble all of these tunes between two covers, so the Real Book circulates illegally. In the 1990s, Check Sher tried to address the situation by publishing The New Real Book, a legal alternative. It has the advantages of being professionally typeset and edited, but it doesn’t have the tunes you would want, so the Real Book continues to circulate.
Think about times when you’ve violated copyright laws around music. Maybe you were making a mixtape for a friend. Maybe you were making an amateur dance video. Maybe you were singing “Happy Birthday” to a toddler (it’s under copyright!) In all of these scenarios, we treat copyrighted music the way we’ve always treated uncopyrighted music, as part of the basic social fabric. Internet filesharing might be taking money out of musicians’ pockets, but it’s also restoring recordings (and scores) to the status that music has had for tens of thousands of years.
I want musicians to get paid, especially me. We as a society will be worse off if producing recordings can only be made by amateurs, academics, or the independently wealthy. But maybe the free market is not the answer here. The great classical composers were paid by the church and wealthy patrons, when they were paid at all. Maybe patronage is the right model. Maybe it’s panhandling, in the form of Kickstarter. Whatever it is, I doubt that the future of music will look like the 20th century music industry.
Well said. I’ve advanced similar ideas about the state of music making with musicians and non-musicians alike. If I’ve taken any single overarching conclusion away from these discussions, it’s that sensible historical arguments — like this one, which basically echoes Eno’s thoughts on the matter — often fall flat.
For many years, it was the patron or the pub. Nothing much has really changed in the wide view. The industrial era and the industrious views of those pushing it along enabled the industrialization of *everything* from social mores to the arts, not just widget manufacture and carriage building.
What has it enabled? Reduce the intangible beauty of sound (and light, if you’re a synaesthetic sort) floating through space to a physical object — a score, a platter, a digital file — and you’re off & schussing a fast line down the cold, slippery slope to commodification.
Only a century after audio archivists started chasing folk history and the musical roots of the African diaspora we’re well down the hill. “Free” music circles the planet by wire at the speed of light in volumes that would make Alexander Graham Bell blush.
On the one hand, my inner music fiend — a lifelong companion — cackles with glee. Childhood fantasy come true! On the other hand, as a relatively sane individual who realizes if he wants to hear his favorite artists perform they also need to keep the lights on, I don’t expect a free ride.
Were I to play my music behind closed doors to a paying public after first frisking them for recording equipment, I could make money from music. In reality recordings would be sneaked out and I guess they could be considered as free publicity, but once people/businesses sell my tracks and keep the money I am clearly being robbed.
I no longer make commercial music recordings as I fail to see any possible income stream there. Nobody buys my CDs anymore – My first CD shifted nearly a 1000 units whilst my most recent only 50. Whilst I am fairly poor I am not desperate or unhappy. My last project yielded 24 hours of original music made from quadraphonic recordings of my peformances in ancient churches and a Cathedral. This seems unlikely to offer me any commercial success, but I am proud of the music and I would not have made it if I had a financially viable musical alternative.
I don’t believe that any art should be free. Not until the artist is guaranteed an alternative income. We live in a world full of cheap thrills and bland experiences. The most exquisite artistic experiences that I have had in my life have cost me money. I have always paid for my music, but am clearly in a tiny minority.
Dave Stewart (British Keyboard Player) is possibly my favourite “Rock” keyboard player. In the 1970s he asked Virgin records for an advance and was told to “get a proper job” by Bransons’ Secretary. I am very grateful that he somehow managed to continue his musical career. There must be others who were less lucky that we shall never enjoy.