It's totally true - not meeting your goal is super valuable. And Kickstarter as a platform has MASSIVE potential as a pure market research tool. But the need to put your name on the front of things, combined with hard-as-concrete perception of failure, is an obstacle to using it that way. Most people I know who go to Kickstarter have already decided what they want to do, and are looking for the money. And if you're that committed, a failure to meet the goal really looks like a failure. Feels that way, too.
But people don't want to go to Kickstarter before they're sure that what they're doing is awesome - they want a great pitch that they believe in, after all.
That gap, between the perception and reality of not meeting your goal and failing at something, represents both a set of attitudes that we can work on, and a great business opportunity: to BE the entity that fails on behalf of projects.
Knowing that he licensed it as a cover, and not as a derivative work with co-authorship, is really the key fact. Far more than the actual license he signed, actually.
Legal definitions of musical terms like "melodic" and "harmonic" are notoriously crappy. Courts tend to defer to the terms of the agreement, rather than trying to ferret out the reality that the agreement should have reflected. There are a lot of cover songs, or cover versions, that change the melody and harmony to a greater or lesser extent, but are rightly treated as covers. There are also honest-to-god derivative works that might fall on the windy side of this "cover" definition from Harry Fox.
Courts are terrible at music theory, and everyone knows it, is basically the gist here. So even though he changed the melody and harmony, I'd be stunned if there existed a court that would tell him that he violated the cover license. This is viewed as giving up rights/ownership that he could have claimed or negotiated, not overreaching by violating a license from Harry Fox. But then again, courts do weird things with this stuff.....
...from a group of artists and entrepreneurs was to build something new to fill the need. Bring together information, training, experiences from creative and technical people, cover the convergence of the two fields, teach skills.... journalism, education, interactive demonstrations of the economics.... in-person trainings around the country/world.... yeah. I'd work on that.
Of course, we'd all have to stop what we're doing already int he artistic and entrepreneurial fields to do it. :-)
The discussion on forcing rude geniuses to be less rude is a small piece of a bigger thing. More interactions that used to be structured by big non-social institutions (companies of all kinds, governments, restrictive communication media), are now social. Now the big artist's interaction with the fan is more like being friends, so you have to not be a dick.
This means you can do more stuff in a more comfortable, social way, which is kind of great. But it also means that being friends with people is way more important than it was in the last generation.
As someone who was nowhere near popular as a kid, I look at that trend and think of the downsides. I used to count on my brain to get me past the part of my life where popularity was a thing and into a place where I could just go around being clever and that would be enough. Now you're telling me everything's about social connections, and popularity is MORE important, not LESS thanks to all this cool tech?
It may be unfair, but it's totally happening, so the question is how to get ready for it.
People will keep screwing this up
It's totally true - not meeting your goal is super valuable. And Kickstarter as a platform has MASSIVE potential as a pure market research tool. But the need to put your name on the front of things, combined with hard-as-concrete perception of failure, is an obstacle to using it that way. Most people I know who go to Kickstarter have already decided what they want to do, and are looking for the money. And if you're that committed, a failure to meet the goal really looks like a failure. Feels that way, too.
But people don't want to go to Kickstarter before they're sure that what they're doing is awesome - they want a great pitch that they believe in, after all.
That gap, between the perception and reality of not meeting your goal and failing at something, represents both a set of attitudes that we can work on, and a great business opportunity: to BE the entity that fails on behalf of projects.
Just a thought....
legal definitions of music
Knowing that he licensed it as a cover, and not as a derivative work with co-authorship, is really the key fact. Far more than the actual license he signed, actually.
Legal definitions of musical terms like "melodic" and "harmonic" are notoriously crappy. Courts tend to defer to the terms of the agreement, rather than trying to ferret out the reality that the agreement should have reflected. There are a lot of cover songs, or cover versions, that change the melody and harmony to a greater or lesser extent, but are rightly treated as covers. There are also honest-to-god derivative works that might fall on the windy side of this "cover" definition from Harry Fox.
Courts are terrible at music theory, and everyone knows it, is basically the gist here. So even though he changed the melody and harmony, I'd be stunned if there existed a court that would tell him that he violated the cover license. This is viewed as giving up rights/ownership that he could have claimed or negotiated, not overreaching by violating a license from Harry Fox. But then again, courts do weird things with this stuff.....
(untitled comment)
That's what I thought, too - and let me repeat a giant heap of congratulations for publishing that study!
The first idea for what to do next...
...from a group of artists and entrepreneurs was to build something new to fill the need. Bring together information, training, experiences from creative and technical people, cover the convergence of the two fields, teach skills.... journalism, education, interactive demonstrations of the economics.... in-person trainings around the country/world.... yeah. I'd work on that.
Of course, we'd all have to stop what we're doing already int he artistic and entrepreneurial fields to do it. :-)
more stuff is social, which is good and bad
The discussion on forcing rude geniuses to be less rude is a small piece of a bigger thing. More interactions that used to be structured by big non-social institutions (companies of all kinds, governments, restrictive communication media), are now social. Now the big artist's interaction with the fan is more like being friends, so you have to not be a dick.
This means you can do more stuff in a more comfortable, social way, which is kind of great. But it also means that being friends with people is way more important than it was in the last generation.
As someone who was nowhere near popular as a kid, I look at that trend and think of the downsides. I used to count on my brain to get me past the part of my life where popularity was a thing and into a place where I could just go around being clever and that would be enough. Now you're telling me everything's about social connections, and popularity is MORE important, not LESS thanks to all this cool tech?
It may be unfair, but it's totally happening, so the question is how to get ready for it.