If I’ve learned one thing from all the responses to my previous post about legalizing things, it’s that people don’t understand reality. You really should read my post about Star Trek and Intellectual Property before continuing. And I really do mean read it; a lot of people apparently commented on it without reading it, which makes their comments seem stupid. This post is an extension of that other one, but this time focusing specifically on sharing music and other art over the Internet, and I outline tons of reasons why it’s a good thing.
Point 1: The end of millionaire rock stars is a GOOD thing.
Imagine for a moment that each Beatle only made $50,000 per year instead of $600 billion trillion. I don’t see anything wrong, here. The sooner we can get it out of our heads (and our kids heads) that “being a rock star” is not a career goal, the better.
Point 2: Artists don’t, and never have, made money.
I consider my blog to be a work of art, and do you know how much money I’ve made off of it? Over the past six months: $1.26, according to Google. Should I:
- Get pissed and make it illegal for people to read my blog without paying me, or
- Realize that blogging is no way to make a living.
Unless I’m one of the very very very very very very very very incredibly lucky few who make it “big” in the blogosphere, I’m always going to need a day job. This is how it is with all art. This is how it’s been, and this is how it always will be. 99% of artists are starving artists. It’s not a stereotype.
Point 3: Money is not a good motivation to make art.
People seem to think (why, I don’t know) that the only motivation to do anything is to become rich and famous. Let’s remember that art comes FIRST and money comes LATER. The Beatles wrote their songs and only afterwards did they become famous. JK Rowling selflessly created Harry Potter for her child and only years later did she get paid for it. It’s great and all that the Beatles and JK Rowling got paid for their work, but even if they never saw a dime their work would still exist. Besides, does anybody want to listen to music written by people who care only about money? I don’t think that music would be any good…
Point 4: Everything is ALREADY free and better because of it.
If you’ve ever heard of DeviantArt.com or YouTube.com then you are aware of how massive an impact the Internet has already had on art, increasing both the quantity and quality all around, and providing free access to everything for everyone. No longer do we have to look at art that critics tell us to, or watch TV that cable companies force us to, or listen to music that record companies want us to. If you’ve ever heard of Linux then you are aware that open source software available for free (as in beer) is superior to proprietary software.
Point 5: Creating art doesn’t cost anything.
“But if artists don’t get paid, how will they make their art? Better yet, why would they even bother?” Did I mention that most art (drawings, music, videos, software, everything) is already online and FREE? The millions of artists putting their art legally and freely online apparently aren’t getting the message about how important money is. Maybe you should go and tell them to stop making art until it becomes illegal to share it. On second thought, they probably wouldn’t understand. Most people, no matter how poor, can afford a pencil or a guitar.
Point 6: Money stifles creativity.
I would much rather have 100 songs by 100 independent artists than 100 songs by a single mega-band like U2 or a teeny-bopper like Miley Cyrus. “If people download music illegally all the musicians will die out.” No, all the mega-rich superstar musicians will die out (hopefully). Think of all the aspiring musicians out there who never had a chance because they were pushed aside by the latest hit thing that the record companies decided to bring out. Once the mega-bands are gone, it won’t mean the end of music, it will simply open up a whole new world of opportunity to a whole new generation of artists. Money also stifles creativity because companies always want to suck you into two year contracts with arbitrary limits, proprietary technology, expensive add-ons, or whatever. Just think how cool it would be to be able to play your legally purchased music on any portable music device instead of just iPods or just Zunes because of the DRM.
Point 7: Artists DO make money.
Contrary to what I’ve said above, artists who are really good will always make money. Everybody knows that Radiohead‘s album In Rainbows was given away for free and yet somehow still managed to hit the #1 spot on both UK and US music charts and sold a “measly” 3 million copies.
Point 8: You cannot download a live performance.
Why do people go see bands in concert? Why do people see movies in the theaters? Why do people go to museums? Why don’t they just listen/watch/look at everything on their tiny little computer screens? Because things are always better live, that’s why, and that’s how artists have always made their living: live shows. Live shows will continue and downloading has exactly zero effect on this. If anything, filesharing will encourage people to go out and see MORE shows because people will be aware of so much more art that is out there.
Point 9: You are not ENTITLED to money. You cannot FORCE people to buy things they don’t want.
Just because you worked hard on something does not mean it has any value or that anybody wants to buy it. It’s very common for someone to spend many hours working on something such as a song or a computer game only to have nobody buy it. They feel that they are ENTITLED to have consumers because they worked so hard and that “life isn’t fair” because nobody is buying their stuff and that “it must be pirates” that are the cause. I have another theory: maybe your song just sucks or your game is just crappy.
It’s also important to remember that some things just don’t have value because it’s available for free. When was the last time you bought an encyclopedia? Or a dictionary? Or a phonebook? Or a newspaper? These things haven’t gone away, they’ve just gone online and become FREE. The same thing will happen with music. It will go online and become free. In fact, it already has. Newspapers are going ape trying to get people to pay for subscriptions but nobody is buying because paying for subscriptions is retarded. I’m really good at making paper airplanes; why won’t anybody pay me to make paper airplanes?! I want a career making paper airplanes, dammit!
Point 10: Bit torrent is the best means of distribution, the best means of advertising, and almost always has a positive effect on the numbers.
Everybody remembers when the pilot for Battlestar Galactica was leaked onto the Internet before it even aired. What happened? Viewers came out in record numbers when it actually aired on TV making it the most-watched pilot in the history of the SciFi Channel and perhaps their best series to date.
I still don’t understand why companies spend so much money on bandwidth and distribution when we consumers are willing to share their files for free using something like BitTorrent. Distributors are no longer needed; we the people can do it for you!
Point 11: The customer is always right. Give us what we want.
As a customer, I have a few choices:
- I can hop in my car, drive a couple miles to the nearest Best Buy, wander around the store for a bit looking for the movie I want, wait in line for 10 minutes, drive all the way back home, spend hours ripping it to my computer and converting it to iPod format, and then FINALLY be able to watch it on the subway on the way to work the next day, or
- I could download it in five minutes.
I’m sorry, but no company will get consumers to pay for poor service at high prices to get things they don’t want.
Point 12: It doesn’t make sense to illegalize something you can do nothing about.
What’s the plan? Throw everybody in the world in jail? Impractical. Sue filesharing sites out of existence one at a time? Really impractical. Censor the Internet? Impossible.
Point 13: People are willing to pay LOTS of money to download things.
iTunes is a BILLION-dollar business. People pay USENET servers like GigaNews $30 per month to be able to download things at reasonable speeds. Internet providers could DOUBLE their revenue by providing a service such as that. Perhaps this is the future of the industry, where services are what’s sold rather than content. Think about games like World of Warcraft which can’t be pirated because they depend on servers run by Blizzard, or companies like 37Signals who sell software as a service which also can’t be pirated. Consumers will always pay for things they are unable to do themselves, such as run their own servers.
Point 14: Stop prophesying the end of the world.
Video killed the radio star, remember? And then VCRs killed TV, DVDs killed VCRs, TiVo killed TV again, and now the Internet is killing TV yet a third time. It’s strange that both TV and radio are still around after having been killed off so many times. Trust me, things change, they don’t die. Maybe artists will have to adapt, but they aren’t going anywhere.
Point 15: Not everyone is a greedy bastard; many people work for free.
I’ve noticed that most people who are against filesharing are greedy bastards who would never get off their butts if they weren’t paid tons and tons of money and they simply can’t fathom how anybody would work for free. Wikipedia is better than a real encyclopedia and it was built by people working for free. It’s actually a good thing that many jobs were “lost” because the people who used to spend their time making encyclopedias can now spend their time productively doing other things. The collaborative effort of Wikipedia and the Internet has freed up humanity from worrying about gathering information and now we can worry about using that information to better mankind.
In fact, the only consequence of people working for free is that we end up with products made by people who ENJOY doing what they do. Instead of having an operating system (Windows) designed to make bank for Microsoft, we will end up with an operating system (Linux) designed to make computers work well. Funny how freedom is good for everyone.
Point 16: Scientists aren’t in it for the money, either.
I put this one in because I’ve actually heard people say such dumb things as, “But who will make medicines and new technologies in the future if they can’t make money off of it?” You do realize that patents and other intellectual property laws PREVENT people from getting the medication they need, right? And that it’s dirt-poor graduate students living in coffin-shaped door rooms and moderately-paid professors who actually come up with the drugs, not the drug companies? Drug companies come up with cures for restless leg syndrome while scientists do the real work. Besides, it’s the BUSINESSMEN who get rich off of the work of the scientists, not the scientists themselves.
Has anybody who has seen Richard Feynman gave a talk or read any of his books honestly say that he was in it for the money? Do you think he would’ve just given up and stopped winning Nobel prizes if he wasn’t paid millions of dollars? Oh wait, he wasn’t and he didn’t.
Conclusion
The freedom of file sharing is the future. Why are we trying so hard to stop it? In the future music will be so abundant that the law of supply and demand will make it impractical to charge anything for it or to make a living off of it. This is a good thing. In fact, it’s a great thing.
EDIT: Food for thought — Why do people generally think that newspapers should be free, but not music? I mean, people were up in arms about the New York Times asking people to login to their site to view the news, let alone pay for it. Why does everyone think that journalists don’t need to be compensated for their hard work and that the news should be public domain, but not music? They’re both digital assets.
Tags: bittorrent, file sharing, freedom, music
I’m the last one to play internet-war but I need to bring up an important point here and go through one of your responses. It sounds like you are mostly talking about independent pop music production: People who write their songs and record them and try to market and sell then. this is only a portion of real musicians.
Real musicians spend around 2 decades with weekly private instruction, and constantly attending competitions and festivals/master classes/etc to hone their playing skills until they can confidently write the word ‘professional’ in front of their particular instrument on their resume/biz card. They take dozens, maybe hundreds of auditions, and if there is an opening and its favorable playing day they may get a seating with a prestigious group. They don’t get to slack off any, and it’s more grueling than most people’s dayjobs. the mental and physical preparation for every concert/show/showcase is comparable to the most strenuous of sporting events.
“If anybody thinks that “there will be no music” in the future because of that, then you are ignorant, and you are forgetting about all the successful free industries: I guess YouTube doesn’t exist, DeviantArt doesn’t exist, Linux doesn’t exist, the radio doesn’t exist, broadcast TV doesn’t exist, Archive.org doesn’t exist, Wikipedia doesn’t exist, Shakespeare in the Park doesn’t exist, and I could go on forever.”
Youtube is owned by Google, and makes plenty of bucks from advertising money. DeviantArt is barely art in any sense. I don’t care about radio or tv or other things, but Shakespeare in the Park is something I do care about.
“Free” concerts and theater are never free. The musicians are always payed (if they have any incidental music), same with the actors. There are sponsors (it’s been this way since the late 1100′s) that put up the majority of the money involved with the production (thankfully its no longer kings and priests, but mostly banks and non-profits). Depending on the piece being performed the rental fees are payed to the publishing company or estate…. skip a few months of planning and preparation and BAM you have your “free” Shakespeare.
You’re approaching music as an economics thing; and that alone might make you a few million enemies Philip. I think most people think of music as a type of food substance, not a vice or past time. There are just simply too many humans that need good quality music. I’ve never heard one song by a hobbyist that is actually decent, If a hobbyist could prove me wrong, I’d promote their music personally.
A lot of people seem to misunderstand the definition of “free.” Since Google makes money off of YouTube, they say that YouTube “isn’t free.” Since Shakespeare in the Park is paid for by sponsors or through donations, they say it “isn’t free.” Since there are ads on radio and television, they say those things “aren’t free.” But, that doesn’t make any sense. As far as the consumer is concerned, all of those things certainly ARE free. There is a huge difference between being “free” and being “not profitable.” In fact, many things are both free and profitable at the same time. Furthermore, I’ve never said that musicians shouldn’t make money, just that music should be free.
(And, yes, I also happen to believe that it will become more difficult to make a career as a musician in the future, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, nor do I think there’s anything we can do about it.)
I guess Brasshole Casserole has never been to DeviantArt.com, because the art there is far better than any I’ve ever seen in a museum.
Also, do a Google search for “legally free music” and tell me that out of the 2.9 million results returned, you can’t find a single piece of music worth listening to? There’s already enough legally free music out there to last 1000 lifetimes.
Q. How to make money as a musician?
A. Make free music, hopefully people like it. Reach out to people – no hermits here. Play a lot of live shows, play for free & charge. Set up a donation model on the internet. Constantly find ways to REACH PEOPLE and inspire them to donate.
I rather donate personally to an artist then pay a company to produce something that doesn’t cost anything. And I always see live shows.
I have to say you are one of the most ignorant people I’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing exist. Your blog here is the only reason I could think of for limiting access to the internet. You’re stupid, non-creative and so misguided. I can’t begin to tell you how pissed I am that you would even think stealing music is cool. I wish only the worst for you! God I’m so angry right now I can’t put togetheer coherent thought, much like the dribble I just read,
It’s funny how you’ll be remembered for how efficiently and conclusively the entirety of your pseudointellectual nonsense has been refuted.