Techdirt. Stories filed under "artists"

Bringing Artists & Entrepreneurs Together To Help Each Other

Mike Masnick — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:02:32 PDT

As we mentioned, a week ago on Wednesday, October 10th, we spent the entire day in an "Artists & Entrepreneurs Working Group" brainstorming session. For me, personally, it was a truly fantastic experience: a chance to get together a bunch of people who don't normally talk -- and then to actually work together in an open fashion to listen to each other, to understand each other and to look together for actual solutions to challenges we all face. The day was basically a blank slate, with a very loose agenda: in the morning, we'd discuss challenges, in the afternoon brainstorm thoughts about how to deal with those challenges, and then conclude by seeing if there were any specific things that we could start doing now.

The whole thing was very much an experiment. Unlike conferences that segment themselves down to one-hour increments of panels and interviews, here was a chance to spend a day together, without specific agendas, focused on really talking and brainstorming with the goal of doing something productive and helpful. In many ways, the experience was exhilarating. It's something you don't often get to experience: lots of really smart people, with very different experiences and perspectives, not giving prepared speeches or covering the same old ground but actually discussing things openly, making connections, brainstorming new ideas and actively thinking about big problems.

Part of the idea behind this event was that for too long the discussion has basically been the same: get a few people who disagree about something to sit opposite each other on TV, on a panel, on the web, or anywhere else, and argue with each other for a short period of time. In such events people too often come with lots of prepared points and then talk past each other, with nothing productive coming out of it. Panels and debates can be good, and they have their place -- but we thought that entrepreneurs and artists are a lot more similar than they are different. We're all running out own businesses in many ways. And we're all creating something new and wonderful. It seems like there's tremendous common ground in our shared situations.

And yet, at the same time, there are some very real differences. So we thought, if we looked at that as an opportunity and sought to better understand those differences, with a focus on looking for ways to help each other, could we create something that wasn't "the same old debate?" Could we, instead, focus on doing something productive?

That was an ambitious goal -- but it's one I think we accomplished. The event itself exceeded my own expectations (by a wide margin). Bringing together a large group of really smart people (many of whom have very strong opinions) for an entire day, without an agenda, and saying "hey, everyone, talk!" seemed like it had the potential to be a complete disaster -- but it was the exact opposite. It resulted in a beautiful, inspiring, thought-provoking discussion that is going to continue, and will hopefully lead to many more wonderful things. The group was impressive. We shamelessly piggybacked on SF Music Tech (with encouragement from SFMT's master of everything, Brian Zisk, who also allowed us to host a sort of "preview" panel at SFMT). However, we went beyond just music, and the variety of perspectives was refreshing. There were musicians there, but also authors, filmmakers and even a painter and a designer/roboticist, among others. There were those who worked closely with artists, including indie labels and artists' representatives. And, of course, there were entrepreneurs from a variety of companies, including Humble Bundle, Bandcamp, IndieGoGo, Smashwords, CASH music, TopSpin, Pandora, Songkick, Bandzoogle, Bookmooch and a few others.

In the morning we discussed challenges that people faced. That was the extent of the official agenda -- and after briefly introducing the event and highlighting some responses from the survey I'd asked people to fill out earlier, the group was off and running, bringing up a variety of different issues and challenges and discussing their own experiences openly.

It will be interesting to see some of the other attendees share their thoughts about the event, but the key challenges that I heard as the discussion went on were:

Resources: It's tough to do what you want to do if you don't have the resources to do it. This is kind of a universal one, and not at all surprising. Obviously, this applies to both artists and entrepreneurs, but in different ways and to different degrees. A lack of resources can be not just a challenge, but something immensely stressful as well.
A missing roadmap: It was interesting just how often this one came up. One of the biggest challenges everyone admitted to facing was the fact that there is no roadmap for what you should do these days, and no single definition of success. The path (especially on the artist side, but also to a degree on the entrepreneur side) is a lot less clear than it may have been in the past -- and that uncertainty can make life difficult. It's one thing to follow steps A, B and C and face different challenges at each. But it's something else entirely if you have no idea where to go next. And part of the discussion was that the roadmap is very different for everyone. There are successful "working class" musicians who make a living day in, day out, and there are big "rock stars." They define success differently. Similarly, there are entrepreneurs who want to build a good, profitable business (sometimes called "a lifestyle business") and there are those who look to be the equivalent of rockstars: raising tons of money, becoming the next big IPO, etc. Plus there are all sorts of personalized dreams that will be a bit different for every person. How you get from here to there changes depending on how you define success, and that makes it all the harder for people to plot out their "roadmap" by finding good advice and sharing strategies with each other.
Education: Perhaps connected to the roadmap issue, this one was about learning what's out there, and what the possibilities are. The challenge here was somewhat different for entrepreneurs and artists, it seemed. Entrepreneurs wanted to figure out how to better educate people about what they themselves were doing, while artists wanted to better educate themselves (and others) about career strategies and the entrepreneurial side of being and artist. For entrepreneurs, some looked upon education as going hand in hand with marketing (which could potentially turn off some artists). For artists, there was a clear desire to better connect with other artists, and some concern that artists don't talk enough about these things among themselves.
Discovery: This is obviously a big challenge on both sides. For entrepreneurs it's about finding new customers and users and for artists it's about finding new fans. Everyone was interested in ways to do more of this, but admitted that it's a very big challenge in a wide open digital world. Too often people think that if you do something great, the people just show up. That happens, but it's rare. You can be a great musician, but people still have to find out about you. You can build a great tool or service, but if no one uses it, what good is it? Having people learn about you and like you is a challenge that many people seem to underestimate.
Policy: There were some concerns about where government policy might get in the way of certain things -- whether it's preventing artists from doing what they want, or making life challenging for entrepreneurs. We had some discussions about areas where artists and entrepreneurs could agree on policy issues. Also, there were significant concerns about who has the most influence on policy, and whose interests they really represented.

Highlighting challenges is one thing, but solving them is another. People seemed quite enthusiastic about taking these challenges and seeing what could be done to ease them, or turn them into greater opportunities, so the afternoon was spent mostly brainstorming -- sometimes tossing out crazy ideas, sometimes digging in on specific details, and openly discussing a variety of possible things that could be done.

In fact, part of what was so encouraging was that the constant theme, throughout the entire event -- from basically everyone, no matter where they came from -- was "what can we do to help." Obviously, not everyone agreed with everything that was suggested -- but in the spirit of brainstorming, people seemed to consistently build on what others were saying, seeking the key insight that we could build on and focusing the conversation on those opportunities.

From my perspective, I learned a lot about where some of the misunderstandings between entrepreneurs and artists come from, where there are often misinterpreted expectations and objectives. As a group we mentally chewed on a variety of ideas, often recognizing that there were no "easy" solutions, but that there had to be something better. Could there be better material to educate each other? Would a unified source for information do that? There was a recognition that different artists have very different experiences.

We had discussions about how people defined success, and how priorities shifted over time. We discussed ways to get more people talking about these things. We discussed concerns about what others might do with things that we brought into the world -- whether it was content or tools and services.

Over time, we began to hit on a few key points, and areas where there were possibilities to actually make a difference. There was a fair bit of interest in the possibility of building a large copyright database, along the lines of what Ian Rogers has suggested in the past, that covers licensing terms for any work, as well as just general ownership info (since sometimes it's not at all clear who owns the rights to certain works for the purpose of licensing them). Some also suggested that such a database could include additional useful metadata as well (prior to the session, one musician pointed out how nice it would be to have a database that would make it easier to find out who did audio engineering on tracks you liked, to make it easier to seek them out for your own recordings).

There was some discussion over whether or not this was something the Copyright Office should do, along with some concerns that there was no way that it could do it without massive, massive changes. And, not to be left out, there were some discussions about US vs. international policy, since although we were mostly a US-based group, we did have at least one foreign-based artist in attendance, who had some different issues to deal with. Out of all of this, we put together a list of things that we thought we could actually do something about:

Continue this conversation: There seemed to be agreement across the board that (1) the all day discussion had tremendous value in a lot of ways, both in generating ideas and getting people to think through possibilities, but that (2) a one day event, no matter how focused on being practical and productive, wasn't really enough time to come to any grand conclusions. But everyone agreed that we, as a group (with some additional folks) should be continuing the conversation in some way, whether it's online or through more in-person brainstorming sessions. That task was put on me, and I'm working on it.
There's an opportunity to create & curate useful info: There's a lot of info out there, with no shortage of advice being offered to artists and entrepreneurs, which is potentially overwhelming and can make it difficult to zero in on what's actually useful. They suggested that the education component could be helped by having better curation of such content. Others suggested that perhaps specific events could serve this purpose, with the example of "filmmaker labs" being tossed out. One concern raised: none of this content will get consumed if it's not presented in a fun and interesting way that attracts people. If it's just piling together a bunch of content into a haystack, that won't help people as much. Figuring out how this could be done and who should be involved is an ongoing discussion, with one concern being how to ensure that such a source doesn't become myopic and start pushing one set of ideas when the landscape is truly open and still evolving.
Getting data: This came up both for the purpose of better education through aggregate data, and also to drive towards a possible rights database. There was a suggestion that, if Apple could be convinced to share its data, that could be a starting point -- though that would cover mostly music (but some TV and movie stuff as well). There were mixed opinions on whether or not Apple could ever be convinced to open up this data.
Standardization: An interesting point that was raised was that part of the reason for a cloudy roadmap and an abundance of choice for artists (that makes things difficult) may be the near-complete lack of standardization. That is, there are a number of startups that often seem to be reinventing the wheel or working on similar types of tools, and that there might be much more value created (for everyone) if there was some standardization at the platform level. Say, for example, a common format for storing and communicating all of the info about an artist and their catalogue between various sites and services. Then different service providers could seek to build tools and services above that, and let the competition occur at that level. This would provide a somewhat more defined setup and less confusion over what services can help in what ways. It might also lead to better integration between different services, allowing artists to do a lot more. This was left as an issue for some of the entrepreneurs to continue discussions over, to see if there was a way to make it happen.
Policy Issues: Going back to the copyright / metadata database discussion, there were some thoughts on whether or not there were ways to get the policy world to recognize how useful and valuable such a database would be for almost everyone. There was some concern about the few players it might disrupt (publishers, for one) who value keeping some of that data proprietary, but a general sense that the overall benefit of such a database for artists and entrepreneurs would be tremendous.

Seeing as the conversation went from 9am to 5pm, there was obviously a lot of other things discussed -- but these were my own key takeaways. I'm sure that some of the others there had their own takeaways as well. For me, the day was really quite energizing. Getting a lot of really smart people together to discuss interesting ideas, opportunities and challenges -- and doing so in a productive manner -- was really a tremendous amount of fun. I'm already working to keep the conversation moving and see where we go next. In total, about 45 people showed up during the day -- with a core group of about 25 making it from start to finish (the absolute troopers) and another 20 stopping in for parts or having to take off early.

This obviously is not the end of the discussion by any means, and one thing that is part of the plan is to continue to get more people involved to get more insights. On the whole, though, considering that this was completely a first-time experiment -- in which we had no clear format and no real agenda, and we mostly just let the conversation go wherever it went -- I think it was quite successful. We haven't changed the world, but perhaps we can start making good things happen.

Special thanks go out to everyone who attended, whether for the whole day or just a part. Extra special thanks to the smaller group of folks who helped me think through the event in the months and weeks leading up to it, letting me toss out ideas and giving me feedback on how the effort might be more productive and fun. Also, thanks to Hattery for providing us with the unique space (with slightly odd acoustics), and to Google for sponsoring, so that we could provide everyone with bagels and coffee in the morning, and sandwiches and chips at lunch.

On the whole, the event has me really excited about possibilities for the future -- including more gatherings like this one. We'll be continuing the discussion between artists and entrepreneurs, and are hoping to hold more events going forward, while also seeing if we can really take some of the ideas and suggestions and help make them a reality. One legitimate concern raised towards the end was that there were a lot of good ideas, but ideas without execution are meaningless, and execution without leadership is rare. I think a big next challenge will be finding people who will step up and take ownership of some of the suggestions to see if they can, with wider support, turn them into something real. That, of course, is the biggest challenge of them all -- but, given the excitement about the possibilities, it seems like a challenge worth tackling.

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Pandora: We're Helping Artists Make Millions & We'd Like To Keep Doing That

Mike Masnick — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:02:05 PDT

For all the talk of new music platforms not paying artists enough, we keep hearing counter stories. The latest is that Pandora has revealed that two artists -- Drake and Lil' Wayne -- will make somewhere close to $3 million in royalty payments from Pandora this year. Lots of other artists make many thousands of dollars as well:

Have you heard of Donnie McClurkin, French Montana or Grupo Bryndis? If you haven't you're not alone. They are artists whose sales ranks on Amazon are 4,752, 17,000 and 183,187, respectively. These are all working artists who live well outside the mainstream - no steady rotation on broadcast radio, no high profile opening slots on major tours, no front page placement in online retail. What they also have in common is a steady income from Pandora. In the next twelve months Pandora is on track to pay performance fees of $100,228, $138,567 and $114,192, respectively, for the music we play to their large and fast-growing audiences on Pandora.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For over two thousand artists Pandora will pay over $10,000 dollars each over the next 12 months (including one of my favorites, the late jazz pianist Oscar Peterson), and for more than 800 we'll pay over $50,000, more than the income of the average American household. For top earners like Coldplay, Adele, Wiz Khalifa, Jason Aldean and others Pandora is already paying over $1 million each. Drake and Lill Wayne are fast approaching a $3 million annual rate each.

Of course, while all of this is happening, Pandora is not yet profitable, and may never be profitable -- as it is required, under current webcasting rates, to pay about 50% of its revenue out as royalties (while terrestrial radio and satellite radio get to pay much, much less). As Tim Westergren has pointed out, because of the crazy rates, plenty of other webcasting operations have just left the business entirely -- meaning that there just aren't that many players in this space, because it just isn't profitable for the companies, even as they're developing important new revenue streams for artists.

I'll have more on this later, but it often seems that legacy players really have no concept of "the golden goose." They assume that any tech company, who is moderately successful in getting users, simply should be bled dry, paying out just about everything to artists, with nothing left for the companies themselves. They think that the music is the entire value, and the service provided is not very important. And yet, without that service, none of that money would come in at all. At some point, the legacy guys are going to have to realize that they're better off having a healthy ecosystem of services, rather than squeezing the absolute highest rates out of these companies, in a way where they can't survive.

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Bringing Music & Tech Together To Move Things Forward Productively

Mike Masnick — Mon, 8 Oct 2012 16:04:00 PDT

Tomorrow is the latest version of the absolutely awesome SF MusicTech Summit, which happens twice a year, and which I rarely miss. It's always a great place to meet lots of people involved in both music and technology and to have some really great conversations. If you've never been, it's absolutely worth checking out. I asked organizer Brian Zisk about the themes for the event, and he noted that it's really about "working together to move things forward productively." This is great to hear, because that's what's really needed at this point. We've gone through about a decade and a half of finger pointing, but have not nearly had enough effort put into actually focusing on helping each other.

Along those lines, I'll be doing a panel at 9:25am tomorrow morning, with one of my favorite musicians, Zoe Keating and Mike McGeary from Engine, to talk about how artists and entrepreneurs can, are and should be working together to help each other. This session will actually be a brief "preview" into a bigger effort that we're working on. The following day, Wednesday, we're hosting a whole bunch of artists (not just music, but film, books, graphic artists and more) and entrepreneurs, for a daylong productive "working group," to try to help everyone understand each other -- the challenges we all face and the opportunities we all see -- and to figure out if there are specific, actionable things that we can all do to help each other. We haven't set up this working group as a "conference." There are no talking heads. There won't be any panels. There's a very loose agenda. But the focus is on having an open discussion and finding common ground -- recognizing that entrepreneurs and artists are often more alike than different. In many ways, we're all running our own businesses -- and creating something new and wonderful.

At the same time, obviously, there are some very real differences between being an artist and an entrepreneur -- and one issue that both sides often run into is a failure to fully understand those differences. So part of the goal of the one day event will be to foster better understanding of those issues, but with a focus on figuring out how we can actually get something done to help each other, rather than just talking about it all. We'll give a glimpse into that discussion tomorrow, and then will spend most of Wednesday working through these issues with a wide range of artists and entrepreneurs. We'll then be taking what we learn from the working group and creating a paper out of it, that we'll (of course) release to the world. It should be an exciting week!

Oh... and don't forget, if you're in town, come by our Happy Hour on Wednesday evening!

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Three Artists On Piracy: Sharing, Disruption And Turning Filesharers Into Your Street Team

Tim Cushing — Fri, 7 Sep 2012 19:39:00 PDT

There's a lot of discussion here at Techdirt about filesharing. Much of the discussion focuses on various legacy industries and their efforts to fight infringement, as well as their continued cultivation of artificial scarcity, which often sends potential customers towards unapproved sources. Various artists have also weighed in on the matter, offering their perspective as those most directly affected by filesharing. Some embrace it. Others view it as a threat to their chosen professions. No matter which side they take, it's largely viewed as inevitable or inescapable. But inevitable or not, the discussion continues.

In the interest of furthering the discussion, I'd like to draw your attention to three separate posts on the subject of filesharing, each one written by an artist with "skin in the game," as they say.

The first post is very timely, considering the recent rumor that Bruce Willis was taking Apple to court to secure his ability to pass his iTunes library on to his next-of-kin. Dessa, a rapper and member of the Doomtree Collective, draws a parallel between Monsanto and Apple and their sale of licenses rather than goods in order to better "secure" easily duplicated items and prevent sharing. Dessa also makes a further connection (filesharing to seed-sharing collectives), showing that these restrictive licenses fly in the face of normal human behavior.

Peddling a product that consumers can duplicate for free is a tricky business. With affordable consumer technology, you can now copy a song a hundred times, with no degradation in the sound quality—and most people seem to immediately recognize why that’s gonna make it harder to get paid for songs. But my first experiences with lossless, duplicable technology didn’t have anything to do with my career as a rapper. My first encounter wasn’t with a torrent site. Or a bootlegged disc. It was a tomato.

Seeds, quite obviously, are the mechanism of plant duplication. You drop a sunflower seed in wet dirt and, bang, you get a brand new one. Essentially, you just 'burned’ a sunflower. The seeds of this new plant can then be harvested and planted to create an infinite, almost lossless supply of flowers and seeds.

The connection continues. Monsanto sells licenses for the technology in the seed, not the seed itself, explicitly forbidding the resale or transfer of its seeds to unlicensed "users." iTunes does the same. Purchasers are forbidden from doing anything with their library other than what is explicitly allowed by the EULA. The right of first sale is stripped away because the purchasers have nothing to sell. They own nothing.

In addition, she points out that users agree to stipulations they'd never agree to with physical goods (as opposed to licenses), like being monitored (Apple says "technologies" will be used to verify compliance with the license terms; Monsanto's verification method is even more Big Brother-ish -- "aerial photography").

These rules and regulations can undermine our fundamental ideas of what it means to actually own something. In most of our purchasing lives, we pay for product and then we can do with it as we like... So If I’m only allowed to interact with my purchase in meticulously prescribed ways...it starts to feel less like mine. Like a pet I'm not allowed to touch or see.

Losslessly reproducible technologies are just complicated things to own... In many ways, the whole ownership model just seems poorly suited to duplicable technology... When we try to force new technology into the old model, our contracts end up sounding really, well, creepy. Instead of asking, Whose is this, who gets paid for it, and how much?, the conversation might be better reset by asking What is this, who made it, who uses it, and what’s fair?

The second post features the writing of recording artist and netlabel co-founder Bunny Intonamorous (presumably not his real name). His post goes long, spurred on by a statement made by a different set of artists, a pair that create likenesses of recording artists using the artists' own CDs.

Mirco Pagano and Moreno de Turco were quoted in the article as saying that "Piracy infects and destroys music, preventing artists to succeed and become idols as in the past."

My fury is two-fold: piracy of music prevents no-one from succeeding let alone infecting and destroying music, and also this (frankly outdated) notion that to be successful in music you have to be some kind of mega-stadium-level superstar money-machine.

There's a lot in Bunny's post (which runs a few thousand very entertaining and informative words) discussing what's wrong with these assumptions. While piracy has affected some artists ability to sell music, for the most part, that wasn't where they were making the most money anyway. Touring is where the money was and still is for many (though not all) artists. Piracy can't touch that.

The other positive aspect of piracy is that it has changed the music landscape from an industry that sold artists (and their art) to consumers, presenting the artists as "idols" and "icons," to something more democratic, more varied, and perhaps most importantly, more personal:

For better or worse (read: better) piracy is here and it's changed things. These days an artist has to have a presence over data-rich streaming sites such as soundcloud and bandcamp if they accurately want to gauge the size of their audience and tour efficiently enough to get money out of it and start building a reputation. And even then, it's risky, but it negates the main problems with piracy and money can, and will, still be made. I certainly wouldn't say that piracy is killing music. In fact, it's making a lot more music more widely available, which increases the amount of different breeding grounds there are, technically (though not necessarily) increasing the amount of interesting acts and artists out there.

In fact piracy of music software has broken down boundaries even further. Not only can people hear and experience a wider range of inspirational existing music, but now musical creation has become more widely available.

Just as there are those whose musical stasis prompts them to ask questions about who the next "Dylan" or "Led Zeppelin" or "Beatles" will be, there are those who wonder how today's severely fractured market and wealth of distractions will ever produce another 25-million-album seller like Michael Jackson (or even $35K a year). Those that blame this lack of multimillionaire chart dominators solely on piracy, rather than on underlying cultural shifts, economic woes, a multitude of new distractions and other disruptions are merely settling for a convenient whipping boy, rather than actually working on fixing their problems.

And this is one of many reasons I really appreciate how piracy has changed the face of musical culture (along with the internet in general, of course): it has forced musicians to stop the whole rock 'n' roll, "untouchable", get-the-fuck-away-from-me attitude that beleaguered "legends" for some time, and encouraged artists to interact with their fans. This not only creates entirely new platforms for interaction other than just through audio, but has also de-fangs and de-mystifies these people, which then decreases the amount of "artist anxiety" someone faces when looking to create.

Yearning for idols and blaming piracy for today's "weak" music market is nothing more than rose-tinted nostalgia rewriting the history of the recording industry, turning it from an exploitative commercial venture into the deflowered victim of millions of basement dwellers. Those who rail against the "level playing field" are constantly working to conform this disruption to fit their favored narrative.

My biggest gripe with the whole "legends" argument, however, is that there needs to be some form of monopoly on 1) record sales, and 2) the public consciousness in terms of music. The second point, I fear, is the impulse of monoculture - that same impulse that abhorred subcultures in times past (which is slowly also being eroded, thankfully - be who you want! choose your friends! etc. - another wondrous example of what technology can bring you). Either way the suggestion is that, the way musical culture has been headed for the past few years is utterly wrong.

Granted, musical culture and money are in a strange state of flux at the moment, but the trends have been leaning towards a more aware, more (arguably) moral state of business: that you pay for what you enjoy so that these musicians - who generally tend to be very thankful - get if not all the cash you gave them, then at least a fairly sizeable chunk.

There's a thought: Support your favorite artists directly, rather than hoping a small portion of your $14.99 makes its way to them after passing through an entire office full of unrelated staff and a multi-level supply chain.

The final stop on this filesharing three-fer is over at Feral Intensity, home of self-published author Gayla Drummond. If you're not familiar with her, all you need to know is this: she is one of the few authors who came to the defense of LendInk during the Twitter-fed witch hunt.

Drummond begins her filesharing saga by describing herself as someone who originally felt piracy was "bad," but unlike others, she didn't just make the assumption and move on :

I researched to discover what the major reasons for piracy were, and came up with three: availability, DRM, and price.

Her reaction?

As a result, I distributed my work to as many sites as possible, made it DRM free where I was able to, and experimented with pricing to find what people were willing to pay for it. I stated more than once that I was totally okay with people loaning my ebooks to others (before lending systems on Amazon, etc), but did ask that they please not put my work on file sharing sites.

This is a refreshing change of pace from so many other stories that begin and end with "there's no excuse for piracy" and result in the ratcheting up of various piracy countermeasures until they reach the "draconian" level. However, the story continues:

Then someone did. Tria’s Tale ended up on one in January 2011.

My reaction was something along the lines of ‘Jeeze, the one thing I ask people not to do!’ and then it was ‘Oh, well’. Except when I checked the file sharing site, I discovered they required people to pay a membership fee in order to download anything. That got my back up; the site was making money from offering access to my, and others’, content. They weren’t selling the actual files themselves, just access to them. That was not okay with me. I sent a DMCA notice and within 72 hours, the site removed the link to Tria’s Tale.

So far, par for the course. Sharing is one thing, piracy is quite another, etc. DMCA served and content removed. Except... this isn't the end of Drummond's brush with piracy. First, she noticed this:

I can’t say whether it’s related or not, since I actually just realized it last night, but my sales doubled in 2011. That link was only up for 10 days at the most, but for all I know, it was related to the sales increase.

Anecdotal. Correlation and causation, etc. It would be easy to dismiss this as a coincidence, but rather than just wave it away, Drummond decided to pursue this angle. Discouraged by a lack of feedback and the grind of self-publishing and self-promotion, she decided to turn over her books to the dark side. Her thought process was basically: why kill myself handling all the promotional work when so many others are willing to do it for me?

When everything you’re doing isn’t producing the desired results, it’s time to try something different.

That is why I’ve become a ‘self-pirate’.

I want readers. Readers who will enjoy my work and let me know in some fashion. So when Ashen made his suggestion to me after the Lendink mess, I said YES.

While he was busy doing the heavy work of file prep and ‘seeding’ (the FSM bless him for putting up with my stupid questions and general cluelessness!), Google alerts notified me that The Contract Bride was mentioned on a certain forum. I always check out my Google alerts, and went for a look.

Lo and behold, file sharing links to it had been posted.

For just a second, I was all petulant about it: ‘That’s not one of the titles I picked out!’, but I got over that and ran with it because someone thought it good enough to recommend to others, AND THAT IS WHAT I WANT! Joined the forum to leave a comment with a link to a newly created page on my author site.

The next day, I had 3 new sales on Amazon and had received a donation from someone from that forum. That is the most action I’ve seen in a single day in regards to my ebooks since March, people.

It has been said that filesharers purchase more music, ebooks, etc. than non-filesharers. The argument goes back and forth on this, but one thing's for sure: pirates know how to get your work in front of thousands of people you'd never reach otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, I by no means think doing this is going to catapult me into fame and fortune. But file sharing is widespread, and may possibly be the most effective, least time consuming method of getting my work in front of eyeballs.

It’s not any different than offering freebies through Amazon’s Select program or other sites when you decide to put your own work out there, and it’s certainly not going to have anymore negative of an effect than doing that. It’s a different platform with content hungry people.

It's not exactly advertising but it's certainly better than locking your creative efforts up behind DRM or endless legal threats. And if you feel piracy is unstoppable/inevitable (no matter which side you come down on "morally"), why not start seeding your own stuff? If you think you can't stop someone else from doing it, get a step ahead of them and become your own worst enemy/best friend. Let the system work for you.

Drummond's put her money where her mouth is:

Wanna pirate some of my ebooks? Go here.

As she points out, the Harry Potter books were being passed around on the internet long before official ebook versions were (finally) made available and yet, millions of copies were sold.

Filesharing will continue to be villainized by certain industries and members of various creative fields, many of whom would rather find someone to blame than actually deal with massive disruption. But to see only the negative is to miss out on a lot of the positive effects while also scapegoating potential fans.

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Inexplicable: Jeff Price Pushed Out Of TuneCore, Despite Tremendous Success In Helping Artists

Mike Masnick — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 15:43:46 PDT

We always talk about how various industries are changing such that gatekeepers are history and enablers are the future. One of the most impressive enablers around in the music industry has been TuneCore, a company built up over the last half-decade or so to provide artists with direct access to various digital distribution channels that were previously closed to them. TuneCore, co-founded and run by Jeff Price, had a singular vision of doing everything to make life better for musicians. They didn't take a cut of the royalties -- you just paid a flat-fee to use their service. They had very clear reporting and payments for artists -- basically the exact opposite of how major labels worked. Most recently, they set out to revolutionize the publishing business, and were well on their way towards that goal as well.

And, because of that, TuneCore, in many ways, surprised much of the industry while upending much of the industry. Many of the core functions that artists previously relied on labels for, TuneCore did better, in a more useful way, without asking the artists to hand over all their copyrights and 85% of their revenues. It became such a standard thing that almost every indie musician I spoke to used TuneCore, and many big-name musicians started moving in that direction as well.

The company was founded by Jeff Price, Peter Wells and Gary Burke a little over six years ago, and achieved some impressive things in that time. Jeff, as CEO, was pretty famous for his outspokenness -- and we've quoted him multiple times. He was certainly quick to point out all of the fallacies of the old RIAA way of doing business, which upset some of those legacy players, but it was clear from the beginning that what Jeff Price wanted most was to help artists. He, unlike so many, recognized the challenges and the opportunities musicians faced, and wanted to help get them past the challenges and reach the point of enjoying the opportunities.

I only met Jeff for the first time a few months ago, and saw him one more time after that, but he was one of those people that never seemed to stop focusing on a singular goal: making things better for artists, and helping them embrace what the internet enables. And from everything I've seen and heard, he was amazingly successful in doing so. Multiple artists I've talked to have spoken highly of TuneCore and what it enabled them to do. I didn't always agree with Jeff on everything (though I probably did more often than not), but even when we disagreed, it seemed to be over our interpretations of which way forward would actually be best for the artists themselves.

So I was surprised to find out that Jeff Price (and Peter Wells) have both been pushed out of TuneCore. I've spoken to a number of people associated with the company, and all of them are shocked and dismayed that Jeff and Peter are gone from the company. I've tried, multiple times, to get the main VC backing the company, Gill Cogan from Opus Capital, to comment on the situation, to no avail. But, many, many people stepped up to speak out strongly on Jeff's behalf. You can read Jeff's open letter linked above, in which he talks about all the company accomplished:

Under our tenure, TuneCore took significant market share away from the traditional major labels. As of July, 2012, TuneCore artists represent over 4% of all US gross digital music sales revenue and have sold over 610,000,000 units of music generating over $310,000,000 in gross music sales. More than four songs a second are sold on iTunes somewhere in the world by a TuneCore artist. Through the execution of the vision and the trust of the artist, TuneCore achieved about 40% of the market share of EMI and 25% of the market share of Universal in regards to digital music sales in the United States.

We were also able to attract artists across the spectrum: from emerging artists to the older legends and the new legends. Artists such as Drake, Soulja Boy, Sonic Youth, Nine Inch Nails, Zac Brown Band, Hoodie Allen, Civil Wars, Lecrea, Boyce Avenue, Kelly, Colt Ford, Ed Sheerhan, Alex Day, Aretha Franklin, Jay Z, Girl Talk, Blood On The Dancefloor, Jason Mraz, Nice Peter, Tiesto and hundreds of thousands more used TuneCore to place number one albums and songs on iTunes, Amazon and many other digital stores, breaking the control of the traditional industry while democratizing it.

I spoke to Jeff to get a bit more background. While no one is willing to say why or how Jeff and Peter got pushed out, it seems pretty clear that this was not what Jeff wanted -- and not what many people involved with TuneCore wanted. Jeff highlighted how everything he's done has been about focusing on the artist, and you can tell that he's worried that the company may no longer be able to do so (though, of course, he doesn't say that directly):

We started the company with a mission and philosophy to make the world a better place for artists. I believe the success TuneCore has had under our guidance is based on never losing sight of that mission and philosophy. Stay true to the DNA of the company and no matter how the market changes you can adapt with a rock solid foundation. As the Founder and CEO I tried hard to instill my beliefs and passion into every aspect of the company, to never let the employees or board of directors forget the mission, the "why" of TuneCore's existence. My hope is the philosophies, vision and mission statement that have allowed the company to succeed are so entrenched that it continues on the path created for it. Serve the musician. Thats how you, the artist, the shareholders, the digital music stores and the consumers win.

The challange becomes when a company loses that vision. Neither Peter or I are even remotely in the league of Apple or Steve Jobs, but you look at what happened to Apple when John Sculley came in as CEO. He changed the Apple vision from making "insanely great easy to use products" to one of "making money at any expense". When Jobs came back and reinstituted his vision Apple soared again. Its the vision that drives the success and revenue, not the other way around. We did everything we could to instill the vision as deeply as we could. We just hope it sticks.

I reached out to Peter, as well, who seems equally baffled by the situation, noting that the company had been doing great, hitting all of its goals (and more):

Astonishing success under the original regime, really--that's been TuneCore these last few months. We fulfilled our promise to create a Publishing side, with a new office in Burbank, CA, and it represents another revolution for artists, the next step along the path we started along when the company launched. Back in New York, things have been fantastic, up to and including a launch of the new look of the TuneCore home page, which Gary, Jeff and I helped shape and which I think is superb. This real success makes me all the more puzzled at very recent developments

Peter noted that he was saddened about losing his own job, but that his reaction to Jeff being pushed out was on another level altogether:

"Stunned" doesn't begin to describe it. Okay, so the company asked me to leave--I can accept that, I'm a founder at heart, the company is no longer a startup, perhaps it's time to move on. But Jeff is the heart and soul of TuneCore, and frankly, its brains. No one knows this space like he does, especially when it comes to publishing. I said earlier that TuneCore was having astonishing success--it is, and that's due to a lot of hard work from a lot of brilliant people (whom Jeff found and convinced to come on board). It's also due to Jeff's vision and leadership. Why on earth would Jeff be asked to leave? Why now, in the face of so many successes, and on the cusp of doing for publishing what he'd already proven he could do for distribution? It makes no sense.

I reached out to some others who were intimately involved with TuneCore from the early days onwards, and they too are somewhat shocked at this turn of events. One of the original advisors to the company, George Howard, who is an executive VP at Wolfgang's Vault, told me that Jeff was astoundingly good at accomplishing what he set out to do with TuneCore:

Jeff is one of the few people who has genuinely moved the business forward. So many people talk about what the business could/should/might be, but Jeff actually had a vision and brought it to fruition with his founding and running of TuneCore. That's the key: bringing something to fruition. Jeff actually gets things done - implementing a vision via his role as CEO. In so doing, he, by creating a system that provided access to thousands and thousands of musicians who had - prior to Jeff's implementation of a vision - been denied access by industry gatekeepers, undeniably changed the music business for the better.

Similarly, Dick Huey, a long-time music business insider, who was an early advisor to TuneCore, seemed equally surprised at the removal of Jeff, and reiterated some of the things he'd been able to accomplish in spite of all the odds:

TuneCore was all Jeff. I remember the dinner where he first ran the idea past me, along with the old company name. I thought the idea sounded radical (it was), I thought there was a fair chance it wouldn't work (I was wrong), and I knew I wanted to be involved as an advisor (I am). Jeff didn't doubt the idea from the outset, and since we started talking about this, I'm not sure I've met a more tireless leader who is more singularly focused on executing on his vision. I feel pretty strongly that Jeff came onto this concept in a moment in time, just at the outset of artists starting to realize that digital distribution could be for everyone, not just signed artists. And he executed, and built what I consider to be a successful, remarkable, and growing business. I believe there are few individuals who could have delivered on this business idea the way Jeff has done for TuneCore.

Huey also went to great lengths to highlight the many, many things that Jeff accomplished with TuneCore that most others wouldn't have bothered with, or wouldn't have even thought to bother with. He detailed how he got Apple to allow TuneCore to be a key entry point to the iTunes store for unsigned (and signed) artists, taking control from the gatekeepers. He talked about establishing better standards for reporting and payment. He talked about all of the many artists that TuneCore helped to be able to make a living.

When I asked Huey if he was comfortable with TuneCore without Jeff at the helm, he didn't hold back on his concerns:

I'm extremely concerned about the direction of the company without Jeff at the helm, as a shareholder in TuneCore, especially given the lack of information available about why he is no longer there. It should be clear from my responses to your questions that I consider Jeff Price to be the man who started or drove every major initiative at TuneCore of which I'm aware. I've heard no announcement of a new CEO, and I'm suspect that Jeff could even be properly replaced, given his unusual and unique combination of outspokenness, deep industry knowledge, wholehearted commitment to the company and to its staff. Jeff made you a believer, and even if you didn't believe, detractors largely respected his vision and commitment.

I've been interested in companies that help enable artists for a long time, and I've seen over and over again that these companies almost always succeed on the strength of their leadership -- a leadership that is committed to going to incredible (and seemingly impossible) lengths to actually help content creators, rather than feeding an old industry that looked to feed gatekeepers. I was surprised when I started to hear rumors of Jeff's ouster, and in talking to a bunch of folks, I've yet to find anyone who seems to think any of this makes sense.

I've spoken to some other people as well and may do some followup on this. In Jeff's open letter, he notes that he and Peter "look forward to continuing to change the industry on a global scale" and hints at something new coming soon. Peter, too, seemed eager to get started on something new, so I get the feeling this won't be the last we hear from the two of them, though I do wonder what will become of TuneCore without their leadership.

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Artists Want The Ability To Buy Back Their Copyrights If Universal Is Allowed To Buy EMI

Mike Masnick — Wed, 1 Aug 2012 13:06:00 PDT

As Universal Music Group (UMG) continues dealing with antitrust questions as it tries to close its purchase of EMI, there's a lot of focus on "divestment," or which parts of the combined entity that would have to be sold off. There's even talk of having to sell off the famed Parlophone Records label (home of Coldplay and Radiohead). That would be a big deal, of course, but an even more interesting proposal has been brought up by the Featured Artists Coalition, a UK-based coalition of musicians, who are saying that if the company has to divest, why not let the artists themselves have the opportunity to buy back their copyrights at "fair market value."

Divestments in the wake of mergers should first offer copyrights, at market rates, to the artists who created them. To sell them to other corporations, whether large or small, is just a perpetuation of an old business model, which has seen the recorded music business halve in value over 10 years. During that time, the technological revolution has displaced the old music business players. We do not need to repeat the mistakes of the past.

It would be good to have music business people rather than financiers owning and running music companies again. It would be even better to have artists owning their work and entering into partner relationships with service-providing major and independent record companies with all the finance and expertise an artist needs to develop their own business.

That letter is signed by Ed O'Brien of Radiohead and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd. Of course, I imagine that the labels and the artists might disagree about what "market rates" are. Also, given how focused the labels are on fighting copyright termination in the US (allowing artists to take back their copyrights after 35 years), you have to imagine that they'd fight any such plan equally hard. It's no surprise why, though: if the artists who could afford to buy back their rights did so, that would take away many of the "big name" acts, which are pretty much the remaining money makers under the old system. There's no way the labels would agree to this, even if it certainly puts the artists' interests first. Yet another example of how labels' and artists' interests are not aligned at all.

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Music Labels Have No Plans To Share Any Money They Get From The Pirate Bay With Artists

Mike Masnick — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 07:08:33 PDT

We see this every single time the music labels (usually RIAA or IFPI) "win" a big case against an alleged "pirate" site. They're awarded a bunch of money... and none of it goes to the artists. We've heard about it happening with Limewire and YouTube (though that was payoff to prevent a lawsuit, rather than the result of a lawsuit). And, once again, that appears to be happening with The Pirate Bay. TorrentFreak has the leaked document from the IFPI showing that it plans to reinvest whatever it gets... in the IFPI to continue its "anti-piracy efforts," such as going after other sites to get similar settlements for the same reason.

To be clear, the IFPI notes that it's unlikely to collect much, if any, of the money in this particular case, because (contrary to what it claimed all along), it certainly doesn't appear that TPB made very much money -- and the people sued "have no traceable assets." However, the ruling was clear that the money being awarded to the labels was "to compensate artists and rightsholders for the losses they suffered. But that's not how it would be used:

“There is an agreement that any recovered funds will be paid to IFPI Sweden and IFPI London for use in future anti-piracy activities,” IFPI writes.

TorrentFreak quotes Peter Sunde, one of the four who was convicted, noting that this is a case where money was directly promised to artists and not delivered. That seems a hell of a lot more like "theft" than anything that he did:

“They say that people who download give money to thieves – but if someone actually ends up paying (in this case: three individuals) then it’s been paid for. So who’s the thief when they don’t give the money to the artists?”

According to Sunde the news doesn’t come as a surprise.

“As far as I know, no money ever won in a lawsuit by IFPI or the RIAA has even gone to any actual artist,” Sunde says.

Indeed. I am unaware of any of the proceeds from any such lawsuits ever making it back to artists.

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Why Do The People Who Always Ask Us To 'Respect' Artists Seem To Have So Little Respect For Artists?

Mike Masnick — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 11:59:00 PDT

Over the years, we've posted tons and tons of stories of content creators embracing the internet, exploring the new opportunities it creates and often profiting greatly from doing so. We regularly celebrate the great creativity from these artists, and cheer them on as they succeed and (sometimes) make lots of money. And yet... there is a certain contingency out there who keeps insisting that we "hate" artists, or alternatively, that we have no respect for artists. This is bizarre. I adore artists and creativity. Part of the reason we spend so much time here discussing new business models and opportunities is that we want more artists to succeed. I have trouble understanding why that's so bad. At best, it seems to be a case of shooting the messenger. In order to embrace these new models it helps to recognize that the old models just aren't that good anymore. And that gets some people upset. So they shake their fist at the sky... and blame us because we tell them that having an umbrella might be a good idea.

But one thing I find most troubling in all of this is that the very same people who constantly yell and scream about how we don't respect artists almost always make sure to mock and denigrate the quality of artists who do succeed these days. Take, for example, Jonathan Taplin, who (for reasons that escape me and many others) is the head of an "innovation lab" at USC, despite an apparent lack of understanding of the very basics of innovation. Instead, he pines for a historical fictional world that never existed. We wrote about some of his bizarre claims a few months ago. A few weeks ago, I was able to debate Jonathan at the Tech Policy Summit. Video of that should be going up soon, but it was more of the same. Taplin didn't have the facts on his side (he repeatedly made statements that were out-and-out false) and once he was called on it, he resorted to personal insults directed at me.

Taplin, in the past, has directly accused me of not respecting artists. But, then, we recently had a blog post about filmmaker Nina Paley and how she's dealing with the fact that copyright laws -- if obeyed -- would hold back her own creativity. And, rather than "respect" artists, or even engage in any form of serious debate, Taplin went on a Twitter rampage tossing insults at Nina and the quality of her work. First, he called her talentless:

Text: @techdirt. Only someone as talentless as Nina Paley would excuse theft. She can't even give her work away. Revenge of the nerds

Then he called her thoughts on the matter "half-witted":

Text: @ninapaley-This is truly sad and half-witted. radar.oreilly.com/2012/06/copyri ... via @radar

And finally, he made this confusing statement, which is similar to one he emailed me about how (in his head) my vision of the world is one in which we were all forced to watch videos of cats rather than Hollywood movies:

Text: If @ninapaley gets her way we will be forced to watch crap like Bob, The Angry Flower. The Revenge of the talentless Nerds

First of all, nearly everything he says is wrong. Nina Paley can and does give her work away. You can (and, if you haven't already, should) go watch her excellent movie, Sita Sings the Blues. And, contrary to what he'd have you believe (that no one could possibly make money giving away content for free), Nina does make money. Finally, I'm really at a loss as to how one would ever be "forced" to watch anything they didn't want to watch. In fact, these days, with such a massive explosion in choice, the idea that anyone would ever be a captive audience forced to watch something they didn't like just doesn't make any sense.

But the larger point is this unfortunate trend that we've seen, exemplified by Taplin's childish outburst here. The people who keep claiming that those of us seeking real solutions don't "respect" artists when we cheer and celebrate their successes and praise their artwork and creativity -- always seem to be the same people who mock and insult those very same artists' work for being successful. It's one thing to criticize their ideas. That's perfectly reasonable. But to take it a step further and insult their abilities as an artist is really quite shameful. And that's doubly true when you're talking about someone who is a public figure like Taplin, a representative for USC. Is this really the face that USC wants to show to the world as its "director" of an "innovation lab"? Someone who mocks an artist and attacks her talent?

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Dan Bull, Amanda Palmer & El-P: A Big Week For Artists' Voices On Techdirt

Leigh Beadon — Sat, 5 May 2012 12:00:00 PDT

Today, instead of the usual community favorites post, we wanted to take the opportunity to highlight our own top picks for the week. It was an easy choice, because we love it when artists and creators visit the site to speak about their experiences, and this week we were lucky enough to have guest posts from three different musicians. They all had a lot of great stuff to say, and here are a few highlights.

The first came about as a result of my post on rapper/producer El-P's friendly message to fans who downloaded the early leak of his album. El-P joined the comments, then followed up with a guest post discussing his approach to the music industry, and his thoughts on the popular debates about it:

So how do I feel? What's the right way? Fuck if I know. But I'll adapt and I'll do it with respect and class and not kicking and screaming. There's a hell of a lot I could say about both sides of this particular subject, but honestly does it matter? You all have formed your opinions on it already and in the end people like me are still out here trying to make a living no matter what those opinions are... right, wrong or in-between.

Unfortunately the comment thread on that post was hijacked by one particularly obnoxious AC, but amidst the noise there was also a strong response from some community members who were grateful to El-P for sharing his frank and thoughtful opinion, just as we were.

Next, we got a visit from the one and only Amanda Fucking Palmer! Amidst all the excitement surrounding her Kickstarter project, Amanda deftly employed an allegory about bamboo to describe the campaign's massive success, and the many years of work that made it possible:

There's a great story about how bamboo grows. A farmer plants a bamboo shoot underground, and waters and tends it for about three years. Nothing grows that's visible, but the farmer trots out there, tending to this invisible thing with a certain amount of faith that things are going to work out. When the bamboo finally appears above ground, it can shoot up to thirty feet in a month. This is like my kickstarter campaign. The numbers aren't shocking to me, not at all. I set the goal for the kickstarter at $100,000 hoping we'd make it quickly, and hoping we'd surpass it by a long-shot.

Incidentally, as I pointed out on Twitter, Amanda Palmer is an anagram for A Mr. Panda Meal. Coincidence?

Last but not least, Dan Bull took a break from writing epic raps to write an epic post. After Dan successfully used the Pirate Bay and its Promo Bay program to get his new single on the charts, we wondered what he must think about his country's decision to censor the site. Now we have our answer: he thinks it was pretty damn ridiculous.

Now, thanks to the High Court ruling, no aspiring musician will be able to use The Promo Bay to gain exposure in the UK. Once again, the British Phonographic Industry is throttling any channel of distribution which doesn't allow them the cut to which they believe they are entitled. I'd like to see what the BPI's head, Geoff Taylor, has to say to George Barnett, the unsigned British songwriter whose fanbase skyrocketed after being featured on The Promo Bay. The only thing that the BPI has done for George is to entirely prohibit his primary means of exposure.

Of course, those aren't the only choice words Dan has for the BPI.

Big thanks to El-P, Amanda Palmer and Dan Bull for stopping by and sharing their thoughts! For some other creators featured on Techdirt this week (just not in person), check out game developer Stardock's Jon Shafer on building a loyal fan base, producer Swizz Beatz on embracing technology, My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields on a dispute with Sony, and author Paulo Coelho's stats on his $0.99 ebook sale.

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We Don't Want Everything For Free. We Just Want Everything

Nina Paley — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:39:00 PDT

Recently, I gave a Sita Sings the Blues talk to a roomful of 15-to-17-year-olds. Near the end I explained Free Culture and my stance against copyright, which led to some interesting discussion. Turns out most of them are manga fans, and familiar with publishers’ complaints about scanned and translated manga shared freely online. They all read them anyway (except one, who prefers to read entire manga in the bookstore). I asked them how they would choose to support artists they liked (once they had some disposable income) and they said:

Donate buttons – with the qualification that they want to know as much as possible about where the donation is going. They said honesty and transparency are important.
Kickstarter – They all knew about it (which was notable because none of them had heard of Flattr) and valued pitch videos that explained how the money would be used.
Custom drawings
Merch
Physical copies
Live Shared Experiences, including ballet, museum exhibits, and concerts. The event aspect was important; they wanted to be able to say, “Remember that one time when that awesome show was here…” They agreed seeing things in person is a more powerful experience than seeing things online, and worth spending more on. One said she would buy CD at a live show because “it reminds you of the show.”
One said he would support artists by promoting their work to his friends.

Semi-related, I took an informal poll of how many would prefer to read a book on paper vs. an e-reader. The vast majority said paper, but what they really seemed to want was dual formats: paper copies to read comfortably and collect, and digital copies to search and reference. Makes sense to me. Only two of them had iPads, and none used them for “enhanced eBooks.”

My favorite quote of the afternoon, from a 15-year-old girl:

“We don’t want everything for free. We just want everything.

crossposted from ninapaley.com

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Isn't It Time Artists Lost Their 18th-Century Sense Of Entitlement?

Glyn Moody — Wed, 7 Mar 2012 10:31:31 PST

One of the common assumptions in the copyright debate is that artists are special, and that they have a right to make money from their works repeatedly, in ways not granted to "ordinary" workers like plumbers or train drivers, thanks to copyright's reach through time and space. Of course, when modern copyright was devised in the early 18th century, artists were special in the sense they were scarce; offering them special monopoly privileges "for the encouragement of learning" as the 1710 Statute of Anne puts it, therefore made sense.

But the Internet has changed everything; it has allowed hundreds of millions of people -- soon billions -- to become active creators rather than passive consumers. That, in its turn, challenges the assumption that "professional" artists are special, and deserve special treatment. One prolific creator who seems to have accepted this is Seth Godin, who featured in Techdirt at the end of last year.

In an interview for Digital Book World, he is asked the classic question about how artists can make money if they share their work freely:

Rivera: Many authors hear your message about being willing to give away their books for free, or to focus on spreading their message but their question is: “I’ve got rent to pay so how do I turn that into cash money?”

Who said you have a right to cash money from writing? I gave hundreds of speeches before I got paid to write one. I’ve written more than 4000 blog posts for free.

Poets don’t get paid (often), but there’s no poetry shortage. The future is going to be filled with amateurs, and the truly talented and persistent will make a great living. But the days of journeyman writers who make a good living by the word -- over.

As he notes, although he is a hugely-successful author and speaker today, and hence presumably well paid for both, he started out by giving away stuff -- lots of it. It was only after he had established his value in the market through that free content that he was able to to start asking to be paid for future work. In other words, just because he was a great writer and lecturer didn't mean he had an entitlement to be paid from the start; he had to prove he was worth paying before people did so. And even then, they paid not for what he had done, but what he would do -- just as you pay a plumber or train driver.

Some might dismiss Godin as an outlier, or a provocateur saying outrageous things in order to whip up a little publicity for himself and his projects (and he probably is, to a certain extent.) But as Matthew Ingram pointed out in a piece analyzing the same Godin interview, Godin is not alone. Here's Francis Ford Coppola expressing much the same views a year ago:

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

That's not to say artists shouldn't make money from their work in some way, just that the long-held assumption that artists must be paid directly for everything they do, again and again, and even after they are dead, because they are "special", simply isn't true any more -- assuming it ever was.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

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EMI Sneakily Trying To Pretend Many Of Its Artists Can't Reclaim Their Copyrights

Mike Masnick — Fri, 2 Mar 2012 11:35:00 PST

We've talked plenty about the coming legal battles over "termination rights" in various works. If you're not familiar with it, under the 1976 Copyright Act, content creators have a guaranteed right to terminate any copyright assignments after 35 years. That is, if a musician assigned the copyright to a label, as is standard, they can take that copyright back after 35 years. This is not a right that an artist can give up. Even if they sign a contract saying they give up their termination rights, it doesn't matter. Those rights cannot be taken away from the artist under the law. The exception to termination rights, however, is if a work is classified as a "work made for hire." However, the definition of what qualifies as a work made for hire is very, very narrow:

A “work made for hire” is--

(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or

(2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. For the purpose of the foregoing sentence, a “supplementary work” is a work prepared for publication as a secondary adjunct to a work by another author for the purpose of introducing, concluding, illustrating, explaining, revising, commenting upon, or assisting in the use of the other work, such as forewords, afterwords, pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, tables, editorial notes, musical arrangements, answer material for tests, bibliographies, appendixes, and indexes, and an “instructional text” is a literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities.

There are a lot of specific conditions there. If you're wondering how such an odd list was put together, some have suggested it was basically just who was in the room. Somewhat surprisingly, one of the main parties who apparently wasn't in the room were the major record labels. Notice that sound recordings aren't there, and you'd have to stretch the definition mightily to cover sound recordings. Of course, the labels have been freaking out about this for decades. Famously, back in 1999, Mitch Glazier, a Congressional staffer, snuck some language into a totally unrelated law about satellites to make sound recordings count as work for hire too. He allegedly did this in the middle of the night such that no one -- even the "authors" of the bill -- knew it was there until after the bill passed. This one time, the outcry (especially from musicians) was so loud, that Congress had to go back and repeal that section. Of course, by then, Glazier had jumped ship to a job at the RIAA making about half a million dollars. He's still at the RIAA where he's now the second in command. Remember that the next time anyone pretends the RIAA is about helping artists. Their number two guy tried to screw artists out of their copyrights.

Of course, that hasn't stopped the efforts by the record labels to still pretend that the copyrights they hold are "works made for hire." They've been testing out a few legal theories, none of which seem very strong, but many of which will soon be tested in court. Why now? While there have been a few lawsuits over this (especially in the comic book space), the key aspect of termination rights came into effect in 1978, with that 35 year window. 35 years after 1978 is... 2013. So, a battle is shaping up.

Michael Robertson, who has been involved in a long term legal fight with EMI, is calling attention to the fact that EMI seems to be trying to just declare that music made by bands signed to its labels are works made for hire. How are they doing this? Well, just by declaring that the songs are "made for hire" on the copyright registration. You can see one example of that on a Billy Idol copyright registration embedded below. But, simply declaring it as a work made for hire on the copyright registration is totally meaningless. It doesn't mean the work hits any of the qualifications under the law.

The RIAA has been trying to claim that any albums are really a "compilation" so they qualify as a "collective work" under the law, which does create a work-for-hire situation. But there are other conditions that need to be met, and it's unclear if those have been. Plus, the claim that an album is a "collective work" is a pretty weak one all around.

Either way, many artists probably don't even recognize that their works have been designated this way (or even what it means), so Robertson has been putting together a big list, and seeking artists on that list to proactively challenge the claims, rather than waiting until the 35-year window hits. There are some pretty big names on the list he's dug up already -- including the Beatles, the Beastie Boys, the Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Billy Idol, Coldplay, David Bowie, Duran Duran, Frank Sinatra, Iggy Pop, Janet Jackson, John Lennon, Katy Perry, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins and many, many more. Robertson is hoping at least someone on the list will go legal and claim their own works:

What I'm looking for is an artist who has the courage to stand up on this issue and claim their works, laying the groundwork for them and ALL artists who share their plight to take ownership in the near future and escape this slavery. (Rather like Curt Flood did battling to get free agency for baseball players: See The Curious Case of Curt Flood which should have been called the Courage Case of Curt Flood.)

Of course, some of this may get sorted out by the long list of coming lawsuits for those artists who have actually begun the process of trying to terminate the copyright assignment, starting with The Village People (though that's a weaker case, since the band itself was put together by the label). Either way, it's pretty ridiculous to see how far the labels are going to try to deny artists the ability to take back their copyrights, despite the law being pretty clear that they have that right.

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Protecting The Artists? Disney's Marvel Uses Copyright To Crush Already Broke Ghost Rider Creator

Mike Masnick — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:05:42 PST

Five years ago, we wrote about Gary Friedrich, the creator of the comic book character Ghost Rider, and how he was suing tons of companies, claiming that the copyrights associated with Ghost Rider had reverted back to him in 2001. As we noted at the time, there were some questionable things about his lawsuit -- including the fact that he waited years until after a movie and video game had been created and released before suddenly going legal about it. However, apparently Marvel (owned by Disney), in its ultimate vindictiveness, turned around and countersued Friedrich and won, leading to a ridiculous situation: Friedrich, who is broke, is now supposed to pay Marvel $17,000 for Ghost Rider merchandise he had sold in the past. He also isn't supposed to say that he's the co-creator of Ghost Rider any more if saying so involves him getting any kind of commercial advantage.

The full ruling in the case makes it clear that Friedrich's copyright claims were suspect in the first place, as it appears he clearly handed over the copyrights on the character to Marvel. The legal stipulation covers the specific terms, including the $17k payment, and the injunction against using the words "Ghost Rider" in connection with the sale of any goods, merchandise or services (i.e., "pay to get the signature of the creator of Ghost Rider!").

While Friedrich appears to have clearly overreached in his initial claim, the vindictiveness of Marvel/Disney is pretty ridiculous here. There's simply no reason for the company to demand $17k from a broke Friedrich, and (on top of that) make it that much harder for him to actually earn the money to pay them. As some are pointing out, you should remember this story the next time big companies claim they want to strengthen copyright law to "protect the content creators."

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Largest Artist Community Group Comes Out Against SOPA & PIPA

Mike Masnick — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:54:05 PST

Fractured Atlas, which claims to be the largest organization for artists, has come out strongly against SOPA/PIPA. The group notes that, clearly, it's in favor of helping artists, but that these bills are the wrong way to do so. It discusses both the problems with blocking, as well as the private right of action:

Fractured Atlas has the largest membership of any arts service organization in the country. As a non-profit, our raison d’etre is to support and assist the arts community in whatever ways we can. It should go without saying that we believe passionately in the importance of artists being paid for their work. We fundamentally believe in copyright and think it can and should be enforced. The problem is that these bills are the wrong way to do it.

The enforcement mechanisms in SOPA and Protect IP will have a dangerous, destabilizing effect on the technical fabric of the internet...

Yet, SOPA/PIPA supporters will continue to insist that they're doing this "for the artists"? Will Congress ever realize that the RIAA and MPAA don't represent artists? They represent the big major labels and Hollywood studios, who spend an awful lot of effort to figure out ways not to actually have to pay artists.

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Universal Music Issues Questionable Takedown On Megaupload Video That Featured Their Artists [Updated]

Mike Masnick — Fri, 9 Dec 2011 14:36:23 PST

As a bunch of you have noticed, the video that we had a couple posts ago, involving a bunch of the RIAA's biggest artists singing or speaking along to a song endorsing MegaUpload (which the RIAA insists is a rogue site) has been... taken down due to a copyright claim from Universal Music. Here's a screenshot: We're hearing a few different stories as to what's going on, but some people are insistent that nothing in the video violates a UMG copyright. We will do an update or do a new post once there's more info, but (of course) trying to censor information online only seems to make it that much more popular. And it appears that the video is already showing up elsewhere. Either way, it's quite a story isn't it? RIAA and Universal Music insist that they're trying to shut down this site "for the artists." Then the artists speak up in support of the site... and Universal Music censors them using the same copyright law they're trying to expand...

Update: TorrentFreak has the response from MegaUpload:

“Those UMG criminals. They are sending illegitimate takedown notices for content they don’t own,” he told us. “Dirty tricks in an effort to stop our massively successful viral campaign.”

So did Universal have any right at all to issue YouTube with a takedown notice? Uncleared samples, anything?

“Mega owns everything in this video. And we have signed agreements with every featured artist for this campaign,” Kim told TorrentFreak.

“UMG did something illegal and unfair by reporting Mega’s content to be infringing. They had no right to do that. We reserve our rights to take legal action. But we like to give them the opportunity to apologize.”

“UMG is such a rogue label,” Kim added, wholly appreciating the irony.

The TorrentFreak has some quotes from some legal experts, pointing out that that is exactly why we don't need things like SOPA and PIPA which would go much further and allow significantly more collateral damage on such bogus takedowns.

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Why We Don't Need To 'Think Of The Artists': They're Doing Fine

Glyn Moody — Fri, 2 Dec 2011 08:54:39 PST

Just as politicians routinely invite us to "think of the children" when they want to push through some new liberty-reducing law, so the copyright industries regularly invoke "the artists" when they want to justify longer copyright terms or harsher enforcement laws.

They claim they are being hit so badly by piracy that artists are suffering as a result. But that's a little hard to square with the fact that media companies still manage to pay their CEOs huge salaries. This suggests (a) the media companies are not doing too badly and (b) that if they really cared about the woes of their artists, they could alleviate it by redirecting some of their fat cats' hefty salary downstairs.

Of course, most people have long ago seen through this rather implausible concern on the part of the copyright industries, but that still leaves open the question of how artists are faring. Here's some interesting evidence that in Australia, musicians, at least, aren't doing too badly:

Even though recorded music sales are down, artists are taking a bigger slice of the overall music industry revenue pie - and more total revenue - than they have in decades. Largely fuelled by copyright-based performance royalties collected on their behalf by APRA and AMCOS, artists' revenues from public performance royalties have doubled in Australia from $110 million in 2000 to $220 million in the past 10 years. Compare that with the recording industry, where wholesale sales have dropped from $594 million to $384 million over the past decade and it seems that it is the record labels that are feeling more pain than the artists they claim are the major victims of online piracy.

As the writer points out, this suggests that artists aren't really suffering from the supposed scourge of piracy. And since everyone – even the record labels, apparently – agrees that what really matters is whether creators are able to make a living from their work, and thus carry on creating, this has to be good news. It also indicates politicians should stop trying to prop up the copyright industries' old business models and just let the artists get on with it.

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Why Creative Commons Licenses Help Rather Than Hinder Struggling Artists

Glyn Moody — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 05:52:51 PDT

Creative Commons (CC) has been with us for nearly a decade, so you would have thought people might understand it by now. Apparently not, judging by the title of this blog post: "How Creative Commons Can Stifle Artistic Output."

The author, George Howard, begins reasonably enough:

Now, the servicing of the muse is not compelled by money, but, rather, other impulses. However, absent some type of financial return for the artists’ work, bad things happen: artists begin to believe that their work is without value, and they stop; or, artists have to subsidize their artistic income by working a soul-crushing job that eventually diminishes their ability/desire/time to create…and they stop. In either case, art stops being created. This to me is unacceptable. I defy anyone to give me a good argument against the creation of more art.

Clearly from that description Howard is concerned mainly with artists that are relatively unknown and/or struggling, and his point about their need to make money is a fair one. But from that premise he then makes this extraordinary leap: All of this is why I react negatively to proponents of the so-called “copyleft” movement.
He goes on: As a bit of background, the copyleft movement originated from software development, where hobbyist programmers desired to make software free (or very cheap) in order to reduce/eliminate piracy.
That is wrong in just about every respect. Copyleft, which actually depends upon copyright in order to work, was invented in 1983 by Richard Stallman. Far from being a "hobbyist", Stallman was one of the best programmers of his day. Moreover, copyleft – specifically the GNU General Public License – was devized not to "reduce/eliminate piracy", but almost its polar opposite: to encourage and facilitate sharing.

The author's understanding of how Creative Commons licenses work seems equally shaky:

There are several justifications for an artist or songwriter to give up copyrights. The first is reasonable: that by providing a means for artists to more easily exchange rights, reduces transaction costs, and thus encourages collaboration.

Artists employing Creative Commons licenses do not "give up copyrights": they always retain them. But they grant additional permissions to others – to share, to adapt, to sell. That's not about "exchanging rights" – there's no quid pro quo required, and rarely does this result in any artistic collaboration; instead it's from a desire to see your work enjoyed or re-used more widely. The second — that current copyright law enforces and encourages a restrictive permission culture to the detriment of the public good — is not. By this I mean that the idea that copyright somehow impedes creativity and artistic development is just plain wrong.
The idea that copyright on a work impedes "creativity and artistic development" refers to its effect not on the original creator, but on other artists, since by definition copyright is a monopoly that forbids them from building on the creations of others unless they ask permission – often expensive or impossible to obtain. Creative Commons licenses, by contrast, encourage this kind of activity by granting permissions upfront to everyone, making them particularly beneficial for those rising creators with limited means but plenty of ideas.

Despite this, Howard insists the problem lies not with copyright itself, but elsewhere:

what really impedes creativity and artistic development is the artist’s perception that his or her music is valueless/the inability of the artist to monetize his or her output.

And yet it's copyright that exacerbates this perception among struggling and still unknown artists that their art is valueless, not CC licenses. Copyright places obstacles in the way of sharing your enthusiasm for a creative work by passing it on so that it can be explored and enjoyed by others. All CC licenses permit this, and it is precisely this spreading of the word that is likely to lead to the creator becoming better known and appreciated.

Nor does making works more freely available preclude the possibility of earning money from them. Fans may buy the work in other formats – for example as a book, CD or LP as well as a download. People may want to make direct contributions to support the artist to encourage them to produce more. Techdirt has devoted many posts to the different ways in which revenue can be generated from CC-licensed goods that are made available online.

Howard concludes:

Artists tend to have — at best — an uncomfortable relationship with the monetization of their work, and need no encouragement to devalue it. Rather, artists need to be reminded that their contribution to this deeply troubled world is valuable. The exchange of value between an artist and his or her fans, is a means to allow the artist to continue creating art, and thus is crucial.

His own words emphasise that what is crucial is an "exchange of value between an artist and his or her fans". Copyright, with its ever-expanding range of restrictions and harsh punishments for those who overstep the mark – even unwittingly – hardly promotes that exchange. Creative Commons licenses are the true allies of artists who are struggling for recognition and remuneration, thanks to their broad permissions and explicit encouragement to share and enjoy, which promotes and enhances that exchange - and helps to generate that crucial financial return too.

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New Letter From Artists & Content Creators Against PROTECT IP/E-PARASITE Act

Mike Masnick — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:59:00 PDT

The big entertainment industry gatekeepers have been pushing PROTECT IP and now the new E-PARASITE bill, pretending that it's got the support of content creators. That's why you see bogus grassroots operations pop up, whereby the big gatekeepers, who do everything they can to not pay content creators, pretend that the laws that make them more powerful are actually about protecting artists.

But real artists and content creators recognize that PROTECT IP/E-PARASITE is really about shutting down the innovations and new technologies that have given them more control over their own destiny, a greater ability to connect with fans and many new ways to make money. And that's why they oppose this attempt by the US government to give the gatekeepers more control to hold back artists. A new letter from actual content creators is making the rounds, pointing out that contrary to the claims of the legacy gatekeepers, they do not support censorship bills like PROTECT IP/E-PARASITE, but prefer to believe in the power of new innovation to provide them with more opportunities.

We, the undersigned artists, have all been empowered by the Internet. Today, artists can reach large audiences and make a living because the Internet and digital tools have democratized the means to create, distribute, and promote our work.

We write to you today because we are concerned with S.968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Copyright law exists to promote the arts, but the new penalties in PIPA could be used against the new social media channels we depend on to make a living, and endanger freedom of expression.

If you're an artist, please consider signing on.

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Apparently The Creative Class Is Dead Because No One Works At Tower Records Any More

Mike Masnick — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:34:08 PDT

I honestly had to read Scott Timberg's column at Salon, called "The creative class is a lie," a few times before I was sure that it wasn't satire, and he actually believes the ridiculous things he wrote up. The article mainly tries to pick up on the ideas of Richard Florida, who has been arguing about the importance of "the creative class" in driving the US economy. According to Timberg, the creative class is disappearing. Now, we can debate whether or not that's actually true (and the evidence we've seen suggests the opposite), but the evidence presented by Timberg isn't evidence at all. It's arguing something completely different:

It’s happening at all levels, small and large. Record shops and independent bookstores close at a steady clip; newspapers and magazines announce new waves of layoffs. Tower Records crashed in 2006, costing 3,000 jobs. This summer’s bankruptcy of Borders Books — almost 700 stores closed, putting roughly 11,000 people out of work — is the most tangible and recent example. One of the last video rental shops in Los Angeles — Rocket Video — just announced that it will close at the end of the month.

I keep reading this paragraph over and over again, and it gets no less insane each time. Since when were the folks who work behind the counter at Tower Records and Borders "the creative class?" As far as I can tell, Timberg appears to be arguing that when the people who made buggy whips were put out of work, it demonstrated the death of the transportation industry. He's honestly arguing that the end of incidental jobs, related to an obsolete technology or system, represents the end of an entire industry -- while completely ignoring the (large and growing) entirely new system that has taken the place of the obsolete one. That's ridiculous.

Does he mention that for actual musicians and actual writers there are now many more ways to create, distribute, promote and make money? No. That would involve actually knowing what's going on. He complains about young authors and musicians "struggling through the dreary combination of economic slump and Internet reset." But, was there ever a time that the vast majority of young authors and musicians were not "struggling"? The adjective "starving" typically comes before "artist" for a reason. And the reality is that in the past it was much more difficult to make a living as an author or a musician, because the only way to succeed was to get chosen by one of a very small number of gatekeepers -- the record labels or the big publishers -- and then even after that you'd have to be one of the approximately 10% of creators they sign who they actually decide are worth making successful. Most musicians and most authors -- even those who sign to major labels and publishing houses -- still end up struggling economically. That's always been the case. Pretending that it's something new is a lie.

If Timberg were paying attention, he'd realize that the opportunities for musicians and authors today are much greater, because they don't have to be chosen by the big gatekeepers. They can put out music themselves and monetize it via any number of new and useful DIY platforms, from Bandcamp to Tunecore to Topspin and onwards. And authors have the same opportunity. They can put up their own websites and do self-publishing via Amazon or Lulu. And there are a growing number of success stories of such "direct-to-fan" campaigns in both industries -- people who would have been completely trampled and never accepted by the old industry.

And because of this, we're seeing a massive revival of cultural creativity. And that's because it's not limited to just a few gatekeepers and tastemakers, but everyone can contribute to "the creative class," and people can find their niche and find their audience. It's an amazing era of cultural output... and yet Timberg is missing it all because he's expecting to find it in the counter jockey at Tower Records?

Apparently this is a start of a new "series" from Timberg on Salon to investigate "the hollowing out of the creative class -- its origins, its erosion, the price of 'free,' and offer possible solutions and reasons for hope." But there's a problem there. The very assumption that underpins the entire series is false. If anything, the evidence suggests we're seeing more creativity than ever before. More output. And it's not just amateur content. The size of the creative industries continues to grow, and the opportunities for struggling artists to make a living have never been greater -- in large part because the internet that Timberg doesn't seem to know about has provided the tools to break down the gates and enable large segments of these folks, who never could have made any money at all, to now make significantly more.

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Artists In The US Want To Get Paid Multiple Times For A Single Work

Mike Masnick — Fri, 5 Aug 2011 12:55:31 PDT

Another day, another plan to try to expand "intellectual property rights" into ridiculous arenas. We had thought that the idea of resales rights for artists was a complete non-starter in the US. Resales rights are a ridiculous concept, which effectively destroys the right of first sale and that harms artists but it is often pitched as being for the benefit of artists. The idea is that if you buy the work of an artist, and then later resell it, the artist gets a cut. Every time you resell the work... the artist gets a cut. The simplified and economically clueless rationale for this is that artists often sell their works cheaply when they're unknown, and then it's the collectors down the road who reap the benefits when that artist becomes famous.

This may sound appealing, but it leaves out the much bigger picture. First, this punishes those who invest in young artists by making it more expensive and more difficult to ever resell their artwork. This also means that people will buy less artwork as an investment, because you've automatically cut out a significant chunk of any profit. Limiting the market for a new artist is not a way to help that artist. As for the story of the "poor artist" who gets cut out of the appreciation of his own work... that's also hogwash. Sure they may sell early pieces for less, but the fame does not preclude them from making new works, and charging appropriately for them based on their fame (some of which may have come about because of the risk that early buyers/supporters/patrons took).

Can you imagine if this expanded to other areas? What if you had to pay back the furniture builder when you sold your old sofa? Or the home developer when you sold your house (oops, someone's trying that, too).

The whole thing is a bizarre and counterproductive concept. In past years, we've seen both the UK and Australia look to set up resale rights. Australia eventually put in place a watered down version, which isn't quite as bad, but still has problems.

Anyway, after not hearing a peep about such an idea in the US in years... it appears that there's a new lobbying campaign for a resale right in the US. Of course, it's being pushed for by the Artists Rights' Society, the main copyright licensing agency for artists in the US. Realizing that art galleries have freaked out about this in the past, ARS is trying to get this approved by exempting art galleries from this, not realizing how much worse that actually makes this for artists and for individual patrons of the arts. Now galleries have a favored position regarding terms and individual patrons have to pay an extra tax.

It appears that ARS has hired Bruce Lehman to be the main lobbyist on this issue. Does that name ring a bell? Lehman is the guy who constructed the DMCA. A few years back, Lehman admitted that the DMCA had been a disaster and said that we'd be better off entering a "post-copyright era." Of course, he didn't take the blame himself, but rather blamed the recording industry execs for failing to get digital. He also seemed to think that the DMCA's overreach was a huge surprise, despite the fact that many, many critics brought it up at the time Lehman was pushing it -- and Lehman's response at the time was to threaten to "rip [the] throat out" of James Boyle, who had warned of problems of the DMCA. Lehman also sought to get Boyle denied tenure at the university he was teaching at for pointing out why the DMCA was a bad idea.

Given that history, I'm at a loss as to why he should be trusted when it comes to any form of new copyright-related policy.

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Major Labels Shamed Into Promising To Give Some Of $105 Million Limewire Settlement To Artists

Mike Masnick — Thu, 19 May 2011 12:18:07 PDT

After Limewire settled with the major labels last week, many of us questioned how much of that money would go to actual artists. Many people, quite reasonably, pointed to a quote from a few years ago from the RIAA's Jonathan Lamy saying, "Any funds recouped are re-invested into our ongoing education and anti-piracy programs." That line got a lot of attention, and I wondered if the labels would be forced to actually give some money to artists, and it appears that may be happening. Lamy came out and said that his quote was about something else -- the RIAA's lawsuits against individuals (hurray for suing fans!), rather than this lawsuit against Limewire. Now, the major labels are starting to step forward and say that yes, yes, yes, they'll give some of the money to artists. I'm guessing, at this point, that it's purely a crisis management type situation, where the labels are realizing they need to show that they're giving some of the money to artists (in part because all these stories mean that the artists themselves have started asking). So now that the labels promise to give some of the money to artists, let's see if they ever say how much actually goes to artists...

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Self-Perpetuating Copyright Enforcement

Glyn Moody — Thu, 19 May 2011 07:15:07 PDT

One of the most powerful emotional tricks used by the copyright industry against those seeking to reduce the term and reach of copyright to more rational levels is to invoke the poor, starving artists, who would suffer if this were to happen.

The fact that the vast majority of creators earn most money soon after producing their work, and relatively little years later, means that taking copyright back to the original 14-year term specified in the Statute of Anne would have minimal effect on them, but it's an undeniably clever pitch.

In reality, the copyright industry couldn't give two hoots about the artists it feeds off, as the following makes clear:

RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy previously told TorrentFreak that the ‘damages’ accrued from piracy-related lawsuits will not go to any of the artists, but towards funding more anti-piracy campaigns. “Any funds recouped are re-invested into our ongoing education and anti-piracy programs,” he said.

If the copyright industry *really* cared about the artists, this money would go straight into their deserving pockets.

Moreover, this "re-investment" in anti-piracy programmes makes such actions self-fueling: the money supposedly gained for those poor, starving wretches is actually used to fund the next action, which funds the next action, and so on.

This means that the copyright organisations have a real incentive to choose a strategy that privileges heavy-handed enforcement over new business models. The latter might result in creators getting paid more, while the former ensures that the fat-cats running the enforcement machine continue to lap up the cream....

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Cross posted from Open....

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ASCAP Tells Artists It's Cutting Their Payments As It Brags To The Press How Much More Money It's Collecting

Mike Masnick — Thu, 7 Oct 2010 12:51:00 PDT

ASCAP feels like the gift that keeps on giving to those of us covering it. If you're an artist... not so much. We've covered many examples of how ASCAP's aggressive efforts to shut down venues from hosting up-and-coming singers is harming local musicians. And, we've also pointed out how they use a system to overpay large acts at the expense of small acts. Now it's getting even worse. Just as ASCAP is attacking groups like Creative Commons, EFF and Public Knowledge -- who help artists find more ways to take control over their own careers, it's also cutting back on payments to many of its artists:

ASCAP cut payments to some members of it's ASCAPlus program by 20-30%. "Unfortunately, because of the fiscal climate, less money was available this year for the award program," ASCAP said in a letter to those receiving checks.

Ah, right. The tough economic climate. We do know about that. But... wait. Here's an ASCAP press release from just five months ago, claiming it was bringing in more money than ever:

"Music is performed more often, in more places, in more ways by more businesses than ever before. That expanded music use, combined with dramatic ASCAP Membership growth, market share increases and effective strategic management have led to stunning revenue and distribution growth for 2009."

Okay, so ASCAP is collecting more money and distributing more money, but it's cutting the amount given to ASCAPlus members by a huge amount. What's ASCAPlus? Ah, right, the smaller artists who can't make a big stink about this:

"writer members of any genre whose performances are primarily in venues not surveyed; and/or writer members whose catalogs have prestige value for which they would not otherwise be compensated."

In other words, ASCAP appears to be taking more money away from small artists, and giving it to their biggest artists. No wonder ASCAP's Paul Williams refuses to debate Larry Lessig, claiming he'd rather focus on "fair compensation to music creators." Unless you're a smaller, less well known artist. Then ASCAP wants your share to be a little less fair. Actually, quite a bit less fair. Like 20 to 30%.

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Indie Artists Discuss Dealing With File Sharing

Mike Masnick — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:06:00 PDT

Unfortunately, I can't find who first sent this in, but the site Inieoma recently had an interesting multi-part "discussion" on how independent artists are dealing with the issue of "piracy." Some of the parts are quite interesting. Simon Indelicate has a bit of a bipolar post that does a fantastic job laying out the economic issues of music production and consumption. He notes that the technology has flipped scarcity and abundance on its head -- entirely separate from the file sharing issue. He is pessimistic about new business models working for most musicians (about the only point I disagree with him on), but thinks that the overall world is a better place with the internet and cheaper production of music. Quite a good read.

Then there's an interview of Dan Bull, known around these parts for his musically brilliant open letters to Lily Allen and Peter Mandelson. In the interview, he discusses his views on the music business and things like file sharing. He notes that he's mainly "against... enforcing backwards laws in order to cling onto an obsolete business model."

Next up, is an interview with Matt Stockman who is starting up a new record label, called Sharabang, which plans to give away its music for free to "open up other revenue streams."

No matter what industry you're in, to thrive you must firstly listen to your customers. For Sharabang Music it's about listening to music lovers, how music is now consumed and adapting to this to offer genuine choices. What we're actually doing by offering music fans a choice is trying to put the value back into recorded music by diversifying the product range and offering far more than can simply be sent over the internet.

The whole interview is interesting, as Sharabang is working hard to come up with interesting scarcities. One cool idea is that every concert of a band on the label will be filmed with audience participation encouraged. And there will also be limited edition t-shirts that are tied to a specific event or group, to encourage people to buy more and "wear them with pride." We keep hearing more and more about companies stepping up to help artists embrace new business models, so it's great to hear of one more that appears to understand the best way to face the modern era.

There are some other parts to the discussion as well -- some I agree with and others I disagree with, but overall there are some great viewpoints and thoughts on this general issue of how musicians can adapt to a changing world. Perhaps none of it's really all that different from what we usually discuss around here, but it's still great to see how different people are expressing their opinions on the issue.

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Artist Thinking vs. Lawyer Thinking

Mike Masnick — Thu, 7 Jan 2010 21:35:00 PST

Darren alerts us to an interesting writeup by a performance artist who can't do a certain performance because of licensing issues. It's not that the musicians don't want their work used by the artist. In fact, they've spoken and they would love for their music to be used. But, of course, they don't own the copyrights on their own music, so the performer needs to work through all the licensing issues, which is simply too much of a pain -- so the whole performance gets dropped:

The thing is, I've spent a lot of time learning how to make art. I have spent no time learning how to negotiate the licensing of music. These are very different skills! It's bizarre that in order to share my art, I need to have the latter skill set, or hire someone who does. The lack of that skill set results in my work being kept secret.

It's really backward. I would love to talk to artists directly, and negotiate something that's mutually beneficial. Right? My work calls attention to their work. I'm a big fan of their work. I want to support their art and their livelihood. I want everyone to know about and support their work. It's such a natural alliance, but it's perverted by this system we have now.

Of course, what's really amusing here is that it's the same people who berate us for suggesting that artists need to either become musical entrepreneurs or hire someone who understands the business side of things, who will say that there's absolutely nothing wrong with these same artists having to become experts in the byzantine world of music licensing -- a world in which even many lawyers remain very confused.

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