halo twenty six
So far on this blog, I’ve been rather preoccupied with the wonders of the modern internet age – the things that we can do now that we couldn’t have dreamed of in the past. In most cases, I believe these things, these tools, are wondrous new means of communicating, sharing, and connecting with others on […]
So far on this blog, I’ve been rather preoccupied with the wonders of the modern internet age – the things that we can do now that we couldn’t have dreamed of in the past. In most cases, I believe these things, these tools, are wondrous new means of communicating, sharing, and connecting with others on wide-band and niche levels, and unreservedly consider them good things. I suppose it’s roughly time to consider some of potentially negative impact of these new tools, then. But not really.
If you’ve lived under a rock for the past few years, or wonder why you don’t see as much Vinyl in the record shops these days, or why the Dead hasn’t come by on tour lately, you may be unaware of the supposed scourge of the music industry – online file sharing.
In short, file sharing can allow people to steal anything that is not physical. Whether it’s video, audio, text – if it can be reduced to 1s and 0s, it can be stolen wholesale and instantly copied in perfect clarity as many times as the world’s magnetic, optical and flash media can store. With 8 gigabyte microSD cards and terabyte hard drives readily available in big box consumer stores, this is a hell of a lot of copies. Consumer broadband is now providing the plumbing to allow these copies to reach these storage devices at breakneck speed.
The actual means of online file sharing is irrelevant to this particular article. As it is possible to steal copyrighted material via the Internet, those who hold lucrative copyrights have been actively pursuing those who do so, making file sharing even of legal materials a game of cat and mouse. The struggle for the water to continue to find the cracks has created many innovations in the way the typical person uses the Internet, but again, this is for once not the point of this article. The simple fact is, it’s possible, and it will continue to be possible as long as the copyright holders fight an engineering and philosophy battle using lawyers, who in addition to not being engineers or philosophers, are outnumbered by a ratio of several thousand to one. And these people employ a lot of lawyers.
So, if we accept that it’s possible to steal intellectual property, and it’s not particularly likely that that will change, what do we do? Sue anyone who transmits an mp3 via a network? Tried it. Implement punishing copy protection that cripples product and leaves consumers thirsty for blood? Tried it. Leave the world of the “useful arts” to anarchy? Give up on trying to sell anything that can be stolen so easily and quickly? That’s crazy!
Or is it?
I was directed to an article by Kevin Kelly saying perhaps not, by the oft-praised-on-this-blog Jonathan Coulton. You should go read it. It posits a simple and elegant set of conclusions to take from all of the premises above:
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
This is a more refined idea than the much-ballyhooed experiment by famed musicians Radiohead, when they allowed the unwashed masses of the internet to download their work, without copy protection, for whatever they wanted to pay, down to and including a big fat nothing. While I applauded this initiative, it was too simplistic for my taste. It cut out middlemen, yes, but it it was still essentially just adding a degree of granularity to the shiny-rocks-for-property system. There was a premium package announced, wherein one received nice physical copies of the album as well, but this made the digital release appear more of a leak-prevention preemptive strike than a bona fide rethinking of the artist-consumer relationship. There was no license granted to share, no “free sample” to try out (aside from just paying nothing, which many did not want to do out of fear that those watching this experiment would point and say “See! The cheapskates don’t want to pay!”) and most importantly, still no embracing of the above concept: sell what can’t be copied. Kelly’s “8 Generatives Better than Free” are a tremendous read, but one that Radiohead would have had to wait several months for.
Nonetheless, Radiohead inspired many artists, many pundits, and many fans to reevaluate the system. One of those artists was Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who shortly afterward announced NIN was going label-free. NIN had previously flirted with viral marketing that gave away tracks without copy protection, but sites that picked up on this and promoted the tracks were shut down by the RIAA. It seemed Trent’s solution was to tell the RIAA their services were no longer needed.
Fast forward to this week. Trent reveals his take on direct-to-consumer sales, building on Radiohead’s deluxe physical collection concept, and embodying many of Kelly’s qualities. The collection is all Creative Commons licensed, so fans are free to destruct and share and generally play with the material as long as they give credit and don’t try to cash in on it. There’s a 9 track free taste that is lighting up torrent trackers worldwide, as well as 4 very logically designed tiers of paid patronage, all building on the prior tier – the basic download, for those who are happy with slapping stuff on their portable device, the physical disc package, the deluxe physical package, and a 300 dollar package with lithographs and DVDs and a limited, signed run. Of course, no one would buy the crazy package, but it was nice the option was available, right?
Or perhaps it could sell out in one day, grabbing a tasty 750,000 dollar revenue stream from run of 2500. The linked article, and many others, pretend as if Trent will be taking a giant novelty check for 3/4 of a million dollars down to the bank this week. Obviously, he had to eat and power his equipment for the 10 weeks it took to create Ghosts I-IV, he had to fund the commerce engine on the site that sells the material, there are materials and manufacturing costs involved in this ultra deluxe package. These things will take a huge bite out of the 750 grand, but it makes for a more dramatic headline. However, this is still a pretty amazing chunk of cash coming his way, and it is far more likely that when all is said and done, the digital copies at 5 bucks a pop, and the 10 and 75 dollar editions will sell enough to be far larger in profits than the novelty check from the 300 dollar edition would have been. Why do I think that? Because I plopped down 10 bucks for something I won’t get until April, and this:
There’s a clear argument to be made here that this story is only applicable to those who already have massive audiences and fanbases. This is certainly the case for the more exotic packages NIN is offering, but I can think of several acts doing fairly well off free samples and direct paid downloads, while making physical discs available to those like me who like to see album art and have a tangible result of a transaction. Allowing free copies to be made under the license the music is published under doesn’t seem to have killed them, and in fact has inspired a sense of goodwill and word of mouth advertising that is vital to their success.
On top of this, Wil Harris posts a story about a method acts of any size can use:
After the show, the band sells a gift back for £10 – a blank CD, sleeve liner and a PIN code. The next day, you can use the PIN code to download the whole performance from the night before in high quality, DRM free MP3 – then burn it to the blank CD you bought.
[…]
With 25,000 people at a large gig like the O2, and just 10% of those buying the CD, that’s an extra $50,000 a night the band is making in CD sales. Who said paid-for music couldn’t prosper?
Certainly not that crazy ass Kevin Kelly. You just have to sell something that can’t be copied, whether it’s a philosophy of goodwill, a set of lithographs, or a memory of a great show.