An article at the AV Club by Sam Adams looks at the implications of Netflix's streaming service and the growing popularity of Spotify, a music-streaming company. He begins with an observation that seems unassailable to me -- "Convenience and choice are the watchwords of the digital era, in which content must be instantly accessible and as quickly digested, lest consumers flit off to some more welcoming destination" -- but I was confused by the analysis that follows, which didn't really explain why consumers are so susceptible to novelty and what he calls the "convenience trap," the willingness to consume what's available as opposed to what is presumably good for you. Adams fears we may be "unconsciously downgrading anything that isn’t so ready at hand."
But what does that mean? Why does everything have to be graded? And does an unconscious grade have any meaning? If you can't bother to make the effort to make your tastes conscious, then what difference does it make to you what you watch? And why should anyone else care? Adams is concerned that the great works may be lost to history if streaming services don't assimilate them to their streaming libraries: "Spotify’s great, unless you want to listen to anything Hüsker Dü recorded before its major-label debut. Would you trade New Day Rising for the Black Eyed Peas catalogue?" This doesn't strike me as a serious question. If you badly want to hear New Day Rising, try this. If you care about music, you probably won't let Spotify dictate what you can or can't hear, and digital reproduction has made it fairly likely that digital copies of everything will survive and proliferate. (Our real archival concern should be with the survival of analog artifacts that have yet to be digitized -- even though digitization may lead to a not entirely representative version of a work surviving.) The people who have a lot invested in their entertainment choices will supplement streaming services with ready alternatives. The people who don't diversify their supply basically don't really care, and why should they? Because certain art is good for them, and they should be made to consume it through clever institutionalized market nudges?
Adams's implicit concern seems to be that the tasteless masses will be left to languish in their cultural ignorance because the streaming services they thoughtlessly adopt don't force more redeeming content on them. And he also seems to think that if you are not cleaver enough to make redemptive consumer quests for the great works, you will be too dim or disinterested to understand them: "If you’re not inclined to put forth the effort to get yourself in close proximity to a given artwork, will you be willing to expend the mental energy necessary to understand it?" Apparently if one lives next door to the Prado, Goya's works there become more or less indistinguishable for you from Hagar the Horrible comics.
Working hard to gain access to a work has nothing intrinsic to do with being willing or able to interpret it. Adams offers an S&M take on art appreciation, that art should dominate and master us while we subserviently mold ourselves to its masterful lessons: "the viewer—not, please, the consumer—is fundamentally subservient to a work of art, in which it is our responsibility, and often our pleasure, to come to the work rather than expecting it to come to us. After all, shouldn’t art be inconvenient, if not in the sense of being difficult to access, then because it forces us out of our comfort zones, requiring us to reckon with its way of understanding the world?" I am pretty sympathetic to this, but I don't think my attitude needs to be generalized. It's not the only way to engage with art. And though I may try harder to get something out of a show I have to travel far to see, that doesn't mean I necessarily cruise through a nearby show on autopilot.
The idea that difficulty is necessary to have a "real" art experience is similar to the idea that something more real happens when the art encounter is "spontaneous" -- being surprised by the beauty of a sunset, etc. It is always tempting to extrapolate a dogma out of such experiences when they are profoundly affecting, but that would be a mistake. I don't think there is a prescription for assuring edifying aesthetic moments. Instead, when people try to push some recipe for the aesthetic onto someone else, they are imposing an encapsulated version of a status hierarchy that favors them. Ultimately, whatever they are pushing now (no matter how universal the principles are presented to be) will be repudiated later in pursuit of some fresh form of distinction. Isn't this an extremely elitist question: "How much more likely are you to bail on, say, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, when with a few clicks of your remote you can be watching a favorite episode of Friday Night Lights?" This seems to mean: You dummies should be watching the hard stuff (like me) but instead you are weak and let the technology trick you into watching what is mere middlebrow entertainment. You're trapped in your own lazy tastes.
Adams points out that "we carry around unspoken assumptions about what’s long and what’s short, what’s easy and what’s hard, and when those assumptions calcify, we may no longer be aware they’re there." Yes, this is how ideology typically works, and it extends far beyond how we choose to entertain ourselves. Making ourselves aware of our unthinking assumptions about what is common sense is probably always a good and worthy practice. But we don't encourage people to join in that project when we imply that the reason it is necessary is so that they can conform to some other dogma about what cultural product is correct and appropriate. That replaces one politicized mystification with another. Yes, Netflix -- like may consumer goods manufacturers -- would probably love it if we consumed simplistic mind candy as quickly and as often as possible; that's good business for them. And that incentive contributes to their trying to shape and promulgate a certain ideology about what it is fun to do. Their pay structure contributes to a materialization of that ideology. Convenience almost always serves an agenda of accelerated consumption, which is passed off as maximized happiness or efficiency. (You've consumed more, so you are better off!) But implying that people need to consume the "right" things instead of the convenient things seems to substitute an elitist ideology for a consumerist one, and may trigger reactionary retrenchment among the consumerists one may be trying to rescue with screenings of Bela Tarr films and copies of Metal Circus.
In 2007 I made the argument that subscription services "almost make the idea of having selective musical taste superfluous. Not there is anything wrong with that; musical taste's centrality to identity seems a peculiar quirk. Nonetheless, taste in commercial music comes down to what music you are willing to pay for specifically. If you are paying to have it all, you effectively have no taste." That is, in a consumer society we have this sense that you have to put your money where your mouth is to "prove" your taste. The idea that you need to suffer to acquire access to "real" art in order to appreciate it has a similar inflection to it -- that art needs to be scarce to have an aura of significance, which derives from people earning/paying for the privilege to consume it. But it seems more interesting to break out of the idea that scarcity imposes some mystical meaning on things to see what they might mean beyond that.
Showing posts with label file sharing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label file sharing. Show all posts
Friday, August 19, 2011
Google and goon squads (15 July 2011)
This December 2010 post by Peter Frase, addressing how capitalism might cope with technology's diminishing the need for labor inputs, has deservedly been put into broader circulation by Matt Yglesias and Metafilter. Frase sets up a thought experiment based on the Star Trek fantasy of a world in which productive labor has been rendered unnecessary, energy supplies are inexhaustible, and all humans apparently share in universal prosperity. Given these conditions, Frase wonders "how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?" Would capitalist relations continue to organize society even in the absence of the scarcities that legitimize those relations? If so, how? (Also, are we headed to this sort of society, given the persistence of unemployment and the arguably structural problems with Western economies that economist Michael Spence discusses here?)
Frase imagines that such a society would lean heavily on intellectual property law, presumably enforced by a draconian, all-encompassing surveillance state. It's not too hard to imagine Google facilitating this under the Orwellian auspices of "Don't be evil," especially after reading this article by Evgeny Morozov. "History is rife with examples of how benign and humanistic ideals can yield rather insidious outcomes—especially when backed by unchecked power and messianic rhetoric," he notes, and cites Said Vaidhyanathan's argument from The Googlization of Everything that asserts "the triumph of neoliberalism has made the 'notion of gentle, creative state involvement to guide processes toward the public good ... impossible to imagine, let alone propose.' " As manufacturing increasingly becomes a matter of information rather than manpower, Google's control of the information economy will potentially afford it the opportunity to implement a social structure. We would all essentially work for Google, whether (to draw on Frase's categories of post-productive labor) we are producing, sorting, and circulating content to attenuate its social value -- immaterial labor, by Lazzarato's definition, which Hardt expands to affective labor; I've written a bunch of posts about this sort of thing -- or whether we are muscle for intellecual-property enforcement (lawyers and "guard labor," to use the term Frase adopts from this paper).
Both immaterial labor and lateral surveillance seem to be expanding under the auspices of commercial social media and, as Frase notes, gamification, establishing the infrastructure and the mores to prevent informationalization from leading to an expansion of the commons, as P2P enthusiasts hope. Frase links to Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks, which sounds an optimistic note about the increased role of sharing and cooperation in production. Benkler's analysis resembles in some ways the Marxist theories regarding the "general intellect" that have evolved out of this cryptic section of the Grundrisse. (My effort at decoding it here.) Hardt and Negri extrapolate from the productive cooperation of the "general intellect" -- the development of which capitalists theoretically must foment to sustain productivity -- something they call the Multitude, a emerging political force that transcends state power and instantiates some sort of spontaneously self-organizing communism made of networks and flows. But it seems as though Web 2.0 companies are developing precisely to pre-empt such possibilities, to enclose the emerging commons and fuse them to structures that emphasize competition and individualism in the midst of enhanced sociality, that foreground status hierarchies rather than dissolve them, that articulate class distinctions rather than undermine them, and so on. Social media foster new forms of "artificial" scarcity (in attention, fame, relevance, identity, etc.) at the same time it eases inequalities in access to cultural goods. We can all download all the music and movies we want and remix them to our hearts content, but this doesn't touch the inequalities that form the basis of class. And reproducing class, guaranteeing that pre-existing inequalities in wealth and power can be reproduced and carried forward even in the absence of more-traditional methods of labor exploitation, is capitalism's primary raison d'etre (not increasing productivity or freedom or the "wealth of nations").
That's an implicit point of Frase's thought experiment, I think -- to suggest that no amount of prosperity or labor reduction will get rid of the class system and the exploitation it engenders structurally. It's not a set of social relations designed to promote equality, but its opposite. It creates a dynamic set of values that protect privilege in the face of abundance, in the face of technological improvements, in the face of developments that threatened to invalidate the aristocratic pretenses to inborn and inaccessible superiority.
Frase wonders where the money will come from to sustain the society of the future if zero-marginal-product workers have no right to expect to earn anything (according to neoclassical economic models) in a post-productive economy.
In the dystopian Google-run world of the future, workers will have attention rankings and goon-squad thug power to oppress one another and promote general insecurity; meanwhile real power and privilege will adhere to the corporation, its big shareholders, and those politicians it patronizes to protect itself.
Frase imagines that such a society would lean heavily on intellectual property law, presumably enforced by a draconian, all-encompassing surveillance state. It's not too hard to imagine Google facilitating this under the Orwellian auspices of "Don't be evil," especially after reading this article by Evgeny Morozov. "History is rife with examples of how benign and humanistic ideals can yield rather insidious outcomes—especially when backed by unchecked power and messianic rhetoric," he notes, and cites Said Vaidhyanathan's argument from The Googlization of Everything that asserts "the triumph of neoliberalism has made the 'notion of gentle, creative state involvement to guide processes toward the public good ... impossible to imagine, let alone propose.' " As manufacturing increasingly becomes a matter of information rather than manpower, Google's control of the information economy will potentially afford it the opportunity to implement a social structure. We would all essentially work for Google, whether (to draw on Frase's categories of post-productive labor) we are producing, sorting, and circulating content to attenuate its social value -- immaterial labor, by Lazzarato's definition, which Hardt expands to affective labor; I've written a bunch of posts about this sort of thing -- or whether we are muscle for intellecual-property enforcement (lawyers and "guard labor," to use the term Frase adopts from this paper).
Both immaterial labor and lateral surveillance seem to be expanding under the auspices of commercial social media and, as Frase notes, gamification, establishing the infrastructure and the mores to prevent informationalization from leading to an expansion of the commons, as P2P enthusiasts hope. Frase links to Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks, which sounds an optimistic note about the increased role of sharing and cooperation in production. Benkler's analysis resembles in some ways the Marxist theories regarding the "general intellect" that have evolved out of this cryptic section of the Grundrisse. (My effort at decoding it here.) Hardt and Negri extrapolate from the productive cooperation of the "general intellect" -- the development of which capitalists theoretically must foment to sustain productivity -- something they call the Multitude, a emerging political force that transcends state power and instantiates some sort of spontaneously self-organizing communism made of networks and flows. But it seems as though Web 2.0 companies are developing precisely to pre-empt such possibilities, to enclose the emerging commons and fuse them to structures that emphasize competition and individualism in the midst of enhanced sociality, that foreground status hierarchies rather than dissolve them, that articulate class distinctions rather than undermine them, and so on. Social media foster new forms of "artificial" scarcity (in attention, fame, relevance, identity, etc.) at the same time it eases inequalities in access to cultural goods. We can all download all the music and movies we want and remix them to our hearts content, but this doesn't touch the inequalities that form the basis of class. And reproducing class, guaranteeing that pre-existing inequalities in wealth and power can be reproduced and carried forward even in the absence of more-traditional methods of labor exploitation, is capitalism's primary raison d'etre (not increasing productivity or freedom or the "wealth of nations").
That's an implicit point of Frase's thought experiment, I think -- to suggest that no amount of prosperity or labor reduction will get rid of the class system and the exploitation it engenders structurally. It's not a set of social relations designed to promote equality, but its opposite. It creates a dynamic set of values that protect privilege in the face of abundance, in the face of technological improvements, in the face of developments that threatened to invalidate the aristocratic pretenses to inborn and inaccessible superiority.
Frase wonders where the money will come from to sustain the society of the future if zero-marginal-product workers have no right to expect to earn anything (according to neoclassical economic models) in a post-productive economy.
Thus it seems that the main problem confronting the society of anti-Star Trek is the problem of effective demand: that is, how to ensure that people are able to earn enough money to be able to pay the licensing fees on which private profit depends. Of course, this isn’t so different from the problem that confronted industrial capitalism, but it becomes more severe as human labor is increasingly squeezed out of the system, and human beings become superfluous as elements of production, even as they remain necessary as consumers.He wonders if capitalist ideology would be flexible enough to permit the guaranteed wage system this dilemma seems to require -- people get issued some token amount of money to keep the wheels spinning -- and if this nonetheless implies stagnation, the end of capitalist growth (and possibly capitalism itself). The issue seems to hinge on the difference between that minimal wage paid out (which stultifies its recipients, locks them in class position) and the creation of economic value that continues to accrue to capitalists. The value creators -- the minions of the general intellect -- need some nominal amount of money circulating among themselves to lubricate the gears of the social factory, but enough real value must be extracted from that factory to sustain the class divide -- to forestall redistributive effects. (My postulate is that capitalists will not create or sustain enterprises that redistribute wealth, only ones that concentrate it.) That value probably can't continue to be denominated in the same currency as the wages. Perhaps this is perhaps why more people are becoming content to work for attention, especially in the sectors most transformed by information technology, the ones subsumed by code. Google has indeed rolled out "badges" to reward users for consuming and processing news stories through its interface, as Rob Walker notes here.
In the dystopian Google-run world of the future, workers will have attention rankings and goon-squad thug power to oppress one another and promote general insecurity; meanwhile real power and privilege will adhere to the corporation, its big shareholders, and those politicians it patronizes to protect itself.
Music Cloud (10 May 2011)
The iPod's popularity has always implied the inevitability of a universal music library that anyone can tap into at anytime from anyplace. It would be a realization of the dreamspace in Twin Peaks: "Where we're from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there's always music in the air." I figured people would ultimately pay a subscription fee for "all music anytime" -- much as Netflix is evolving toward a monthly fee for "all movies anytime" (assuming bandwidth can keep up).
Google's launch of a cloud-music service moves us closer to that scenario: "Upload your personal music collection to listen anywhere, keep everything in sync, and forget the hassle of cables and files." That makes for a nice peg for linking to this First Monday article by Jeremy Wade Morris: "Sounds in the Cloud: Cloud computing and the digital music commodity." Morris contends that "the cloud metaphor obscures the fact that the transition is more than a simple shift from music as a good to music as a service. Music in the cloud ... enmeshes users in ... a process of continual commodification of the music experience." The article is mostly an explanation of how cloud computing works and makes some incontrovertible points about the surrender of ownership this implies -- we rent computing power (putting us at the mercy of Big Tech) rather than own the means of production/consumption for ourselves. Morris points out that subscription services make music "contingent" on providers' whims, subject to surreptitious control. But I think this hint is worth following up: "the more ubiquitous music appears, the more difficult it is to conceive of music as a separate and distinct experience from our everyday activities."
It's worth noting how cloud-music services (Amazon has one already) posit that we hate the "hassle" of music as physical object and are liberated by the transformation of hard-to-lug collections into ephemeral lists. The implication is that we yearn to breathe music like air, at all times, and have been waiting for it to be dematerialized, decommodified. To a degree that is an ideological cover for the way cloud services intensify the circulation of music as a commodity. What do I even mean by that? It has to do with this part of the promotional campaign: "Mix it up. Create your own custom playlists with just a few clicks. Or use Instant Mix to automatically build new playlists of songs from your collection that go great together. All the playlists you create and all the changes you make to them are automatically available everywhere your music is."
Doing this sort of thing in the cloud makes that labor available to Google, along with your general preferences, and presumably associates them with everything else you do online while logged into a Google account. Google Music is another tool to keep you signed in, with music serving as another code for generating associative marketing data, regardless of whether or how much we listen to it. In the cloud, music is a much more labile signifier, a more flexible marker to denote emerging demographic niches. So in that realm, music is more commodifed, in the sense that it is enlisted to a more intensive degree as a signifier of nonmusical information. Those signifers circulate in ways we don't even know about, let alone control. Why does that matter? It makes music listening less autonomous an experience, and more an aspect of the online universe of sharing and self-presentation and immaterial labor. That means it is harder to hear on its own terms (if such an approach to listening "purity" is even to be taken as ideal or normative). Cloud music furthers the decontextualization process that commodifying music as recordings initiated.
Google's launch of a cloud-music service moves us closer to that scenario: "Upload your personal music collection to listen anywhere, keep everything in sync, and forget the hassle of cables and files." That makes for a nice peg for linking to this First Monday article by Jeremy Wade Morris: "Sounds in the Cloud: Cloud computing and the digital music commodity." Morris contends that "the cloud metaphor obscures the fact that the transition is more than a simple shift from music as a good to music as a service. Music in the cloud ... enmeshes users in ... a process of continual commodification of the music experience." The article is mostly an explanation of how cloud computing works and makes some incontrovertible points about the surrender of ownership this implies -- we rent computing power (putting us at the mercy of Big Tech) rather than own the means of production/consumption for ourselves. Morris points out that subscription services make music "contingent" on providers' whims, subject to surreptitious control. But I think this hint is worth following up: "the more ubiquitous music appears, the more difficult it is to conceive of music as a separate and distinct experience from our everyday activities."
It's worth noting how cloud-music services (Amazon has one already) posit that we hate the "hassle" of music as physical object and are liberated by the transformation of hard-to-lug collections into ephemeral lists. The implication is that we yearn to breathe music like air, at all times, and have been waiting for it to be dematerialized, decommodified. To a degree that is an ideological cover for the way cloud services intensify the circulation of music as a commodity. What do I even mean by that? It has to do with this part of the promotional campaign: "Mix it up. Create your own custom playlists with just a few clicks. Or use Instant Mix to automatically build new playlists of songs from your collection that go great together. All the playlists you create and all the changes you make to them are automatically available everywhere your music is."
Doing this sort of thing in the cloud makes that labor available to Google, along with your general preferences, and presumably associates them with everything else you do online while logged into a Google account. Google Music is another tool to keep you signed in, with music serving as another code for generating associative marketing data, regardless of whether or how much we listen to it. In the cloud, music is a much more labile signifier, a more flexible marker to denote emerging demographic niches. So in that realm, music is more commodifed, in the sense that it is enlisted to a more intensive degree as a signifier of nonmusical information. Those signifers circulate in ways we don't even know about, let alone control. Why does that matter? It makes music listening less autonomous an experience, and more an aspect of the online universe of sharing and self-presentation and immaterial labor. That means it is harder to hear on its own terms (if such an approach to listening "purity" is even to be taken as ideal or normative). Cloud music furthers the decontextualization process that commodifying music as recordings initiated.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Goodbye, critical consensus (16 Dec 2009)
Reading Simon Reynolds's assessment of best-of-the-decade lists ("musical value and consensus are intimately connected") made me think of how symbiotic the music industry and music critics are; that is, critics can only be as relevant as the culture industry is powerful and univocal. The hegemony of taste that the big labels sought to perpetuate relied on critics' pronouncements, making the release of new Springsteen albums and whatnot seem epochal.
Reynolds shares his hunch that the critical consensus unwound completely in the past decade, leading to a situation where more "good" but "unimportant" records are made.
The future of recorded music, I hope, belongs to microcommunities, small groups of friends who determine their own standards of importance (through listening rituals, what they play for each other in everyday life) and share them internally without needing to promote those standards online and proselytize. For these communities, it is all "best-of," anything that is heard and remembered, that helps the group cohere, matters. Whether it had been released that year, or decade, or was promoted by the music industry or was a demo from a busker, or whatever, won't matter. Taste can potentially be deindustrialized, and the critics will disappear into the multitude of voices. Ideally, artistic provenance will be relevant to us only if we want it to be.
Reynolds shares his hunch that the critical consensus unwound completely in the past decade, leading to a situation where more "good" but "unimportant" records are made.
I reckon that if you were to draw up a top 2,000 albums of every pop decade and compare them, the noughties would win: it would beat the 1990s decisively, the 1980s handsomely, and it would thrash the 1970s and 1960s. But I also reckon that if you were to compare the top 200 albums, it'd be the other way around: the 60s would narrowly beat the 70s, the 70s would slightly less narrowly beat the 80s, the 80s would decisively beat the 90s, and the 90s would leave the noughties trailing in the dust. Yeah, it's just a hunch – but it has the ring of truth. Because I think that the higher reaches of a chart of this kind demand something more than mere musical excellence: there has to be an X factor, the hard-to-define quality that you could call "importance" or "greatness".Musicians make music; critics and A&R people make "importance" or hype, and the latter is what allows music to become the broadly "unifying force" that critics yearn for it to become. Big, broadly popular records with an aesthetic aura (Reynolds and Pitchfork offer Funeral as the epitome) perhaps validate the importance of critics more than the music itself. It lets us then consume the zeitgeist in product form rather than listen.
The future of recorded music, I hope, belongs to microcommunities, small groups of friends who determine their own standards of importance (through listening rituals, what they play for each other in everyday life) and share them internally without needing to promote those standards online and proselytize. For these communities, it is all "best-of," anything that is heard and remembered, that helps the group cohere, matters. Whether it had been released that year, or decade, or was promoted by the music industry or was a demo from a busker, or whatever, won't matter. Taste can potentially be deindustrialized, and the critics will disappear into the multitude of voices. Ideally, artistic provenance will be relevant to us only if we want it to be.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Digital anarchy (17 June 2009)
Generation Bubble reports on the UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities and its most recent manifesto, which proposes an aggressive assault on intellectual property: the digital humanists movement "believes that copyright and IP standards must be freed from the stranglehold of Capital, including the capital possessed by heirs who live parasitically off of the achievements of their deceased predecessors." Thus, the manifesto proposes we "pirate and pervert materials by the likes of Disney on such a massive scale that the IP bosses will have to sue your entire neighborhood, school, or country" and "practice digital anarchy by creatively undermining copyright, mashing up media, recutting images, tracks, and texts." By these lights, Girl Talk is not a lame DJ but a Trotskyist firebrand leading the revolution from his laptop mixing board, one mashup salvo at a time. The manifesto regards media miscegenation as an inherent expression of freedom rather than a perhaps lamentable indication of the trap we are in, at a few stages removed from original creation, doomed to fabricate our material culture from shopworn digital remnants.
The manifesto suggests that eradicating intellectual property will lead to more cooperative intellectual labor, mediated by internet-distributed open-source software tools, while facilitating the "reinvention of the solitary, 'eccentric,' even hermetic work carried out by lone individuals both inside and outside the academy". That sounds somewhat sinister -- fomenting an effort to re-educate decadent individualists, perhaps through some rigorous self-criticism and a few self-denunciation sessions, and make them into better-functioning members of the collective, content to have their anonymous contributions to the new society recognized through its success at maintaining total control.
One need not be especially cynical to question the utopianism the manifesto trades in. Intellectual property is not merely some conspiracy cooked up by Capital but a flawed expression of the individual's pursuit for social recognition, which under capitalism is expressed through wages, salary, or payment of some kind or other. Perhaps we are to believe that in the future everyone will be content to disappear into the mass, to be mashed-up in the grand sociocultural remix to end all remixes, but I doubt it; the would-be technoutopians out there also seem to be those most highly networked, those who are most plugged in to the contemporary means of publicity. And it is not like academics in the humanities eschew recognition; their reputational squabbles seem to matter more to them than any aspect of their scholarly contributions.
So doing away with IP, society's current mode of administering recognition, serves only to alienate the creators the manifesto's writers seek to liberate. What must be found is a way to replace IP with a different system for doling out that recognition -- the attention economy's currency. Generation Bubble points out IP's enforcement problems, which have the tendency to invalidate the concept's moral grounding.
The manifesto suggests that eradicating intellectual property will lead to more cooperative intellectual labor, mediated by internet-distributed open-source software tools, while facilitating the "reinvention of the solitary, 'eccentric,' even hermetic work carried out by lone individuals both inside and outside the academy". That sounds somewhat sinister -- fomenting an effort to re-educate decadent individualists, perhaps through some rigorous self-criticism and a few self-denunciation sessions, and make them into better-functioning members of the collective, content to have their anonymous contributions to the new society recognized through its success at maintaining total control.
One need not be especially cynical to question the utopianism the manifesto trades in. Intellectual property is not merely some conspiracy cooked up by Capital but a flawed expression of the individual's pursuit for social recognition, which under capitalism is expressed through wages, salary, or payment of some kind or other. Perhaps we are to believe that in the future everyone will be content to disappear into the mass, to be mashed-up in the grand sociocultural remix to end all remixes, but I doubt it; the would-be technoutopians out there also seem to be those most highly networked, those who are most plugged in to the contemporary means of publicity. And it is not like academics in the humanities eschew recognition; their reputational squabbles seem to matter more to them than any aspect of their scholarly contributions.
So doing away with IP, society's current mode of administering recognition, serves only to alienate the creators the manifesto's writers seek to liberate. What must be found is a way to replace IP with a different system for doling out that recognition -- the attention economy's currency. Generation Bubble points out IP's enforcement problems, which have the tendency to invalidate the concept's moral grounding.
The age of virtual reproduction, where the costs associated with making cultural artifacts have in many cases become negligible (just about anyone can, with a little bit of know-how, record studio quality music on a desktop, for instance), has engendered an unprecedented situation. Gatekeepers of intellectual property now appear as veritable dogs in the manger. Each time they encode a sound-file to prohibit its copying, or each time they install crippleware on an electronic device to inhibit its full functionality, they betray the fact that scarcity is now more a matter of insistence than fact.That's well put. But the fact that scarcity is is always going to seem poorly manufactured suggests that we'll move on to a different tack: encouraging the deluge and enhancing the value of reliable editor and filters. In such a world, an individual's reputation for discernment will become even more valuable, and the economy within which they exist more hierarchical.
Sundry music-related matters (29 May 2009)
I just crashed through two weeks of blog posts on my RSS reader and my brain has become a bit scrambled. I feel I must now blog about just about everything in the world in one comprehensive post and find some way to tie the 30 or 40 posts I starred together into one master narrative, one grand theory of everything (and that's not even considering all the HRO Exegesis posts I need to write). Maybe I should put another pot of coffee on.
One thing I discovered was that Richard Florida's newish blog at the Atlantic has been consistently compelling over the past few weeks. He has had a series of posts about evolution in the music industry, positing the theory that the music business is a media-industry canary in the post-internet coalmine. In this post, he notes that in some ways the industry is retreating from forms that had become technologically necessary -- the album, thanks to vinyl, the 74 minute CD, etc. -- to the forms that may arguably be more "natural" to pop music:
These ideas tie in to this related lament, from Rob Cox at the Big Money, for the now moribund live album. After valiantly trying to explain the success of Frampton Comes Alive! he argues that the live album was spawned by a specific and now vanished nexus of record-label needs for product and the corporate rock artist's need to produce that product in the absence of inspiration. Now anyone with a phone can bootleg shows, and the labels are more or less finished, so the live album has no purpose. I always thought the function of the live album was to provoke a more-complete fantasy in pre-teens (mostly) of participating in an impossibly awesome concert experience, back when big bands and tours were relatively rare. I can remember staring at the back cover of Kiss Alive! and wishing I could be one of those burned-out kids holding up that sad homemade banner.
But then at some point, live albums became souvenirs of the show you were presumed to have already seen, rather than a hyperidealized presentation of the experience. (Think of the Stones' 14 live albums since 1990.) Cox suggests that YouTube now fulfills that function of making the effort to go to rock concerts seem worth the trouble.
Elsewhere, Florida revisits, via the excellent Carl Wilson, the findings that popular songs are somewhat paradoxically popular because they are popular. Wilson believes this tends to highlight the power of the music editor, or the critic -- the filtering types who are in a position to establish the pop-culture discussion: Of the investment in liking a particular song or other, he writes, "What’s more the ensuing exchange of information and opinion is the primary way that these choices become meaningful." I've long argued that pop music has little to do with the intrinsic music quality but with being able to consume the zeitgeist through an emotionally immediate artifact. I was thinking about this a lot on my recent road trip, during which I listened to hours and hours of radio. I heard plenty of oldies and that sort of thing, far too many songs by Boston. The two songs that really stood out to me, that made me feel aware of being alive specifically in 2009, were "Blame It on the Alcohol" by T-Pain and some song whose chorus runs: "I'm so 3008, you're so two thousand and late." That these songs are ridiculous and totally dated right from the get-go is pretty much the point of them. No one would argue that these are "good" songs, but whenever the station-scan stopped on either of them, we didn't change it. (I guess I would have to lump another ludicrous song in with those two, one that goes "You'r hot then you're cold, you're on then you're off," etc., etc.) The fact that these songs of all things out there had made it onto the radio in South Jersey and South Dakota seemed to warrant some kind of response, seemed to demand that we pay attention, that we ignore them at the peril of making ourselves irrelevant. Much as HRO is a blog worth blogging about, I suppose, these were songs worth talking about, if not all that great to listen to in the abstract. But there are no abstract listening conditions; there is always context, and the context is everything, is the whole of the moon.
Wilson (also via Florida) has a good comment about hipsters/hipster bashing -- it involves "bogus ethnography" (sadly one of my specialties) and speaks to a kind of craving for a real leader to come along and put an end to status anxiety once and for all:
What I found especially interesting, though, was this: "Flamboyant aesthetic display...still makes a lot of people uncomfortable and resentful in itself. At its best the hipster is the new Dandy, the semi-subversive who overloads the system by over-subscribing to it (conspicuously consuming) and yet undermines it by seeming as if the real source of their cooperation is that they can’t take the system seriously enough to bother to oppose it. Sites like 'Look at this Fucking Hipster' reek of a paranoid craving for a restoration of social order." I have written my share of reactionary screeds about hipsters and must acknowledge that some of my anger had stemmed from this anguished sense that they still have youth to squander that I don't. Some of the anger came from the larger structural issue, of how evolutions of youth culture are used commercially and how those standards are seemingly foisted on adults with more efficacy now. I suppose there's enough evidence of past generations heaping contempt on youth style to question whether there is really anything new in this, but it seems that an equal amount of evidence can be marshalled to show how the concept of "adult" has rapidly eroded in recent decades.
I also must admit that "flamboyant aesthetic display" has always offended my sense of propriety, my futile adherence to the anonymity ideal. A certain species of ersatz egalitarianism will always yearn to obviate the superficial distinctions of such display in favor of something "deeper" and more intrinsic to uniquely human capabilities -- it's just not clear whether that is an even more dangerous fantasy. Feel depressed now. Maybe need to start wearing a wig.
One thing I discovered was that Richard Florida's newish blog at the Atlantic has been consistently compelling over the past few weeks. He has had a series of posts about evolution in the music industry, positing the theory that the music business is a media-industry canary in the post-internet coalmine. In this post, he notes that in some ways the industry is retreating from forms that had become technologically necessary -- the album, thanks to vinyl, the 74 minute CD, etc. -- to the forms that may arguably be more "natural" to pop music:
But the enormity of the creative destruction sweeping the industry goes far beyond the iPod killing off the CD. The Gang of Four's Dave Allen argues that we are seeing the "end of the album" - a construct initially created by the limitation of vinyl technology in 1930 - as the organizing principle of musical production. He sees this as potentially liberating for musicians - or those musicians that can adapt. Industry veteran Bob Lefsetz predicts a return to the pre-LP era, when artists constantly pumped out singles and toured. He even draws a comparison to the way that Toyota has succeeded by building a reputation for reliability gradually through word of mouth.
These ideas tie in to this related lament, from Rob Cox at the Big Money, for the now moribund live album. After valiantly trying to explain the success of Frampton Comes Alive! he argues that the live album was spawned by a specific and now vanished nexus of record-label needs for product and the corporate rock artist's need to produce that product in the absence of inspiration. Now anyone with a phone can bootleg shows, and the labels are more or less finished, so the live album has no purpose. I always thought the function of the live album was to provoke a more-complete fantasy in pre-teens (mostly) of participating in an impossibly awesome concert experience, back when big bands and tours were relatively rare. I can remember staring at the back cover of Kiss Alive! and wishing I could be one of those burned-out kids holding up that sad homemade banner.
But then at some point, live albums became souvenirs of the show you were presumed to have already seen, rather than a hyperidealized presentation of the experience. (Think of the Stones' 14 live albums since 1990.) Cox suggests that YouTube now fulfills that function of making the effort to go to rock concerts seem worth the trouble.
Elsewhere, Florida revisits, via the excellent Carl Wilson, the findings that popular songs are somewhat paradoxically popular because they are popular. Wilson believes this tends to highlight the power of the music editor, or the critic -- the filtering types who are in a position to establish the pop-culture discussion: Of the investment in liking a particular song or other, he writes, "What’s more the ensuing exchange of information and opinion is the primary way that these choices become meaningful." I've long argued that pop music has little to do with the intrinsic music quality but with being able to consume the zeitgeist through an emotionally immediate artifact. I was thinking about this a lot on my recent road trip, during which I listened to hours and hours of radio. I heard plenty of oldies and that sort of thing, far too many songs by Boston. The two songs that really stood out to me, that made me feel aware of being alive specifically in 2009, were "Blame It on the Alcohol" by T-Pain and some song whose chorus runs: "I'm so 3008, you're so two thousand and late." That these songs are ridiculous and totally dated right from the get-go is pretty much the point of them. No one would argue that these are "good" songs, but whenever the station-scan stopped on either of them, we didn't change it. (I guess I would have to lump another ludicrous song in with those two, one that goes "You'r hot then you're cold, you're on then you're off," etc., etc.) The fact that these songs of all things out there had made it onto the radio in South Jersey and South Dakota seemed to warrant some kind of response, seemed to demand that we pay attention, that we ignore them at the peril of making ourselves irrelevant. Much as HRO is a blog worth blogging about, I suppose, these were songs worth talking about, if not all that great to listen to in the abstract. But there are no abstract listening conditions; there is always context, and the context is everything, is the whole of the moon.
Wilson (also via Florida) has a good comment about hipsters/hipster bashing -- it involves "bogus ethnography" (sadly one of my specialties) and speaks to a kind of craving for a real leader to come along and put an end to status anxiety once and for all:
There’s also a self-serving decadence narrative where the hipster serves as the negative exaggeration of one’s own apathy, helping to exonerate it. The hipster serves as a locus for fears of lost control, of social disconnection. Yet it’s a hysteria to focus that anxiety on these kids personally rather than on, say, the system of cool and cultural capital, and what’s more the genuine lack of control you have over hypercapitalism, of which their look uncomfortably reminds you. The hipster-monster is the face of a cultural death wish, along the vector of a snarling circle jerk hurtling towards social atomization and collapse.Analysis along these lines reminds me of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, which was his attempt to figure out what made people embrace authoritarian leaders. Here's what I wrote about Hoffer before:
Hoffer regards the rise of mass movements as the almost inevitable consequence of widespread mediocrity coupled with the unreasonable expectations that democracy generates for the common person. “Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of one ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’ “ Democratic ideology leaves the impression that all men are equal, whereas it has the effect of making one’s place in the irrepressible hierarchies in society seem entirely the individual’s fault. Thus the frustrated people in a capitalist democracy “want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.”If I am reading Wilson right, he's suggesting that the hipster bogeyman stands in as a symbol of how freedom can weigh as a burden, or rather how consumerism can reduce freedom to a burden of perpetual self-redefinition along aesthetic lines that seem like someone else's whimsy. But the symbol shouldn't be mistaken for the person behind that facade, who is most likely feeling the same way. Wilson puts this elegantly: "There are no hipsters, only anti-hipsters - or at least the ratio is approximately the same as that of actually existing Satanists to anti-Satanists during the heavy-metal and Goth panics of the 1980s and 1990s.The question is what in turn the hipster allows the anti-hipster to deny, and what’s being lost in that continuing deferral."
What I found especially interesting, though, was this: "Flamboyant aesthetic display...still makes a lot of people uncomfortable and resentful in itself. At its best the hipster is the new Dandy, the semi-subversive who overloads the system by over-subscribing to it (conspicuously consuming) and yet undermines it by seeming as if the real source of their cooperation is that they can’t take the system seriously enough to bother to oppose it. Sites like 'Look at this Fucking Hipster' reek of a paranoid craving for a restoration of social order." I have written my share of reactionary screeds about hipsters and must acknowledge that some of my anger had stemmed from this anguished sense that they still have youth to squander that I don't. Some of the anger came from the larger structural issue, of how evolutions of youth culture are used commercially and how those standards are seemingly foisted on adults with more efficacy now. I suppose there's enough evidence of past generations heaping contempt on youth style to question whether there is really anything new in this, but it seems that an equal amount of evidence can be marshalled to show how the concept of "adult" has rapidly eroded in recent decades.
I also must admit that "flamboyant aesthetic display" has always offended my sense of propriety, my futile adherence to the anonymity ideal. A certain species of ersatz egalitarianism will always yearn to obviate the superficial distinctions of such display in favor of something "deeper" and more intrinsic to uniquely human capabilities -- it's just not clear whether that is an even more dangerous fantasy. Feel depressed now. Maybe need to start wearing a wig.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Performance theft (12 March 2009)
Wired reports on a mobile-phone application that lets a user scan a barcode of a DVD and launch a bit-torrent download of it at their home (link via BoingBoing). Somehow this seems more like stealing than using a search engine to find a torrent in the privacy of one's own home. Handling the object you will no longer have to buy seems to make tangible the notion of intellectual-property theft, which makes me wonder why anybody would bother to do it. Are there those among us gripped by a self-destructive desire to flamboyantly to perform theft in public rather than in the peace and anonymity of their own homes? This would be like defiantly parading to the Adult Books store rather than surfing for porn online.
Perhaps straight-up pirates who are looking to steal everything to sell it subway platforms and the like would benefit from a system in which they could just scan everything on the shelf, but it would seem like these people would have more reason to want not to be on camera in a retail outlet doing this.
It has been a long time since I browsed in a store looking for DVDs or music (one of the major quality-of-life improvements the internet has brought my life is that I never have to go to a record store again), so maybe I have lost touch with that level of impulsivity that would make bar-code-automated stealing seem like a good idea. I suppose it has a poetic flavor to it, using the retail machine's tools against the system itself. (And then I'm going to get a tattoo of a bar code on my arm, to make an important statement about conformity.) It's hard to remember what it was like to have to discover new culture by browsing in stores, though it was once my primary mode of cultural discovery. It still is, to some degree, in book stores and libraries. I'm not nostalgic for learning about music from the import section at Listening Booth -- but it is for that sort of nostalgia that this bar-code-reader
But it seems like most discoveries of new cultural products to want are made online -- a depressing fact is that we have our cultural world expanded not by wandering through the world having experiences and encountering unlikely or unexpected things, but through the systematic and highly rationalized, virtually automated mode of searching online. I could set a schedule by my cultural discoveries -- every week or so I spend an hour or so plowing through newsgroups and mp3 blogs to see if anything sounds interesting. I'm not sure if these count as "discoveries" any more. Instead, I'm merely calibrating my internal novelty-seeking metabolism, rendering the very idea of discovery impossible.
Perhaps straight-up pirates who are looking to steal everything to sell it subway platforms and the like would benefit from a system in which they could just scan everything on the shelf, but it would seem like these people would have more reason to want not to be on camera in a retail outlet doing this.
It has been a long time since I browsed in a store looking for DVDs or music (one of the major quality-of-life improvements the internet has brought my life is that I never have to go to a record store again), so maybe I have lost touch with that level of impulsivity that would make bar-code-automated stealing seem like a good idea. I suppose it has a poetic flavor to it, using the retail machine's tools against the system itself. (And then I'm going to get a tattoo of a bar code on my arm, to make an important statement about conformity.) It's hard to remember what it was like to have to discover new culture by browsing in stores, though it was once my primary mode of cultural discovery. It still is, to some degree, in book stores and libraries. I'm not nostalgic for learning about music from the import section at Listening Booth -- but it is for that sort of nostalgia that this bar-code-reader
But it seems like most discoveries of new cultural products to want are made online -- a depressing fact is that we have our cultural world expanded not by wandering through the world having experiences and encountering unlikely or unexpected things, but through the systematic and highly rationalized, virtually automated mode of searching online. I could set a schedule by my cultural discoveries -- every week or so I spend an hour or so plowing through newsgroups and mp3 blogs to see if anything sounds interesting. I'm not sure if these count as "discoveries" any more. Instead, I'm merely calibrating my internal novelty-seeking metabolism, rendering the very idea of discovery impossible.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Necessary frictions (23 Jan 2009)
These are deep thoughts occasioned by playing 1942, so measure them accordingly. The problem I faced was defeating the first big plane you encounter, about 10 stages in. I found it to be ridiculously hard and was entertaining implementing the cheat code that let's a player destroy it with one hit. But then I began thinking about optimal frustration and about the difficulty game creators must have in finding the ideal balance between frustration and progress. Obviously games need to be just hard enough to keep you pressing reset (or, back in the paleolithic days of arcades, dropping another quarter in) when you are foiled. You have to be persuaded by the game that you can make it past the obstacle even as the game is at the same time thwarting you. What emerge from this apparent contradiction is a sense of how frustration structures the feeling of progress. When the cheat code is enabled, there is no sense of progress in 1942 -- only a curiosity about what's next keeps me going. Oh, neat: the red planes now criss-cross instead of flying in a spiral. The thirst for this sort of novelty only takes me so far, and in fact what's revealed is how idiotic it is to care about what comes next in 1942. (It's like the elementary-school teachers say: "When you cheat, you're only cheating yourself.") A measure of difficulty, of friction, is necessary to transform the arbitrary novelty into progress.
This dynamic perhaps holds true for consumerism generally -- we want more things because we imagine these things will enhance or enrich our lives in some way, offer some sort of progress toward a self-concept or goal. Consumerism seizes upon that impulse as the source of profit and thus seeks to gratify it. But because maximizing the volume of exchanges ultimately suits producers best, their efforts are focused on eliminating the difficulties that impede them -- they seek to enable the cheat code, as it were, and let us get what we want as soon as we think of it (and can afford it). But without any difficulty in accessing more stuff, our pursuit of novelty never gives us a feeling of progress or accomplishment. Without the frustration, our frivolous impulses can't ripen into meaningful desires. If there is no friction, our concentration is not engaged in the same way -- we don't stoke our creative problem-solving abilities or become invested emotionally. The problem (i.e. the new thing we want to integrate into our life) takes on no metaphoric resonance or depth. To make another maudlin videogame allusion: each new impulse remains just another dot to consume as wend our way, Pac-Man-like, through the meaningless maze of existence.
Obviously, as the internet facilitates our access to cultural goods, frustration becomes harder to find. In a recent post (via BoingBoing), tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly argues that more and more culture products will become readily available social goods. He argues that access is better than ownership, and therefore society will move in the direction of providing access while eroding the barriers set up by ownership.
But what also may happen, as the sources of friction that we are accustomed to are eradicated, we will produce new, synthetic ones -- we will create frustration to preserve our sense of making progress. Or we will cast about looking for frustration, though calling it something else to ourselves. My thinking about this is a bit inchoate, as you've probably observed by now, but it seems to me that consumer capitalism, by making it easier to get more and more things (while convincing us that this is life's end-all and be-all), has had the effect of preventing us from experiencing a feeling of progress -- we are trapped instead on a treadmill of novelty. But what makes this painful for us is that we may invent frustrations to make up for the lack of friction in our acquiring things, imposing arbitrary limitations on ourselves in the absence of external limits -- those problems of exchange that our existing social relations had equipped us to deal with. So these arbitrary limits can perhaps take pathological forms -- crippling self-doubt, optional paralysis, inertia, dysthemia.
Essentially, this is a variation on a joke from Manhattan, where Woody Allen's character is tape-recording an idea for a short story (and this is a paraphrase I lifted from an Amazon.ca review) "about people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves, because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe." I think consumerism has distracted us from taking on the existential problems and hung us up with the self-created problems which turn out to be far worse, as they are not constrained by any real facts about our lives.
This dynamic perhaps holds true for consumerism generally -- we want more things because we imagine these things will enhance or enrich our lives in some way, offer some sort of progress toward a self-concept or goal. Consumerism seizes upon that impulse as the source of profit and thus seeks to gratify it. But because maximizing the volume of exchanges ultimately suits producers best, their efforts are focused on eliminating the difficulties that impede them -- they seek to enable the cheat code, as it were, and let us get what we want as soon as we think of it (and can afford it). But without any difficulty in accessing more stuff, our pursuit of novelty never gives us a feeling of progress or accomplishment. Without the frustration, our frivolous impulses can't ripen into meaningful desires. If there is no friction, our concentration is not engaged in the same way -- we don't stoke our creative problem-solving abilities or become invested emotionally. The problem (i.e. the new thing we want to integrate into our life) takes on no metaphoric resonance or depth. To make another maudlin videogame allusion: each new impulse remains just another dot to consume as wend our way, Pac-Man-like, through the meaningless maze of existence.
Obviously, as the internet facilitates our access to cultural goods, frustration becomes harder to find. In a recent post (via BoingBoing), tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly argues that more and more culture products will become readily available social goods. He argues that access is better than ownership, and therefore society will move in the direction of providing access while eroding the barriers set up by ownership.
Very likely, in the near future, I won't "own" any music, or books, or movies. Instead I will have immediate access to all music, all books, all movies using an always-on service, via a subscription fee or tax. I won't buy – as in make a decision to own -- any individual music or books because I can simply request to see or hear them on demand from the stream of ALL. I may pay for them in bulk but I won't own them. The request to enjoy a work is thus separated from the more complicated choice of whether I want to "own" it. I can consume a movie, music or book without having to decide or follow up on ownership.That is a pretty friction-free world that Kelly is imagining, which will may erode some of the meaning that we derive from such cultural goods. Instead of engaging, it will be easier than ever to say, "Next?"
For many people this type of instant universal access is better than owning. No responsibility of care, backing up, sorting, cataloging, cleaning, or storage. As they gain in public accessibility, books, music and movies are headed to become social goods even though they might not be paid by taxes. It's not hard to imagine most other intangible goods becoming social goods as well. Games, education, and health info are also headed in that direction.
But what also may happen, as the sources of friction that we are accustomed to are eradicated, we will produce new, synthetic ones -- we will create frustration to preserve our sense of making progress. Or we will cast about looking for frustration, though calling it something else to ourselves. My thinking about this is a bit inchoate, as you've probably observed by now, but it seems to me that consumer capitalism, by making it easier to get more and more things (while convincing us that this is life's end-all and be-all), has had the effect of preventing us from experiencing a feeling of progress -- we are trapped instead on a treadmill of novelty. But what makes this painful for us is that we may invent frustrations to make up for the lack of friction in our acquiring things, imposing arbitrary limitations on ourselves in the absence of external limits -- those problems of exchange that our existing social relations had equipped us to deal with. So these arbitrary limits can perhaps take pathological forms -- crippling self-doubt, optional paralysis, inertia, dysthemia.
Essentially, this is a variation on a joke from Manhattan, where Woody Allen's character is tape-recording an idea for a short story (and this is a paraphrase I lifted from an Amazon.ca review) "about people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves, because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe." I think consumerism has distracted us from taking on the existential problems and hung us up with the self-created problems which turn out to be far worse, as they are not constrained by any real facts about our lives.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
The future of the music business (20 Nov 2008)
Via Barry Ritholtz comes this transcript of the keynote speech by Ian Rogers, who runs Topspin, an online music distributor, at the Northwest MusicTech Summit. He cites some interesting data with regard to the future of music: Media companies are making less money from music sales, but music consumers are as eager as ever to consume music.
Rogers argues that power in the music business has shifted to artists: "when I talk to managers and artists they feel it, they feel an ability to take their careers into their own hands, to redefine what success means for them, and that is the emergence of the new music business." The redefinition of success seems to me the pivotal idea -- the idea that success is less a matter of money than what it is to most working artists, to be able to make a living through their art and not have to treat it as a passionate hobby. The trouble begins when ambitions begin to exceed that horizon -- art is denatured and brokers seize control. Right now, technology is disintermediating the brokers (from the A&R people down to the record-store clerks), which has given musicians across the board a chance to recalibrate their ambitions on a sustainable scale, rather than going into it for the stardom and the cash.
That's not to say the essence of Rogers argument is an appeal to making art for art's sake. His point is the new music industry promises to remunerate artists more directly, since there is next to no overhead with regard to production and distribution costs. "When your costs are low, your royalty rate high, and your channel direct, the marginal profitability from the artist's perspective can be far different than in the old model, to be sure." Key to the marketing plan Rogers outlines, though, is something I instinctively cringe at -- price discrimination, or letting people decide what they will pay in return for the same product.
I don't why this bothers me so much, since this is the essence of what's probably the oldest form of commercial interaction, bartering. The idea that a fair price for a product is established and applied uniformly is a relatively new phenomenon, a response to the massive problems of information asymmetry that larger-scale production brings on. Still, the idea that someone else can get the same thing for cheaper fires my competitive spirit. It makes me feel like a chump. In other words, I won't be on of the superfans volunteering to pay musicians as much as possible for their music so that I can prove my fidelity or earn their gratitude or whatever the rationale is. When I read about volunteer spenders, I end up thinking that those people are under the sway of some kind of irrational personality cult with regard to the artists they are supporting. Am I really supposed to believe that Trent Reznor gives a single shit about how big of a fan I might be? (Not a fan at all, for the record.) I suppose the idea is that you can prove to other fans that you are more in love with the leader by spending more, but that seems almost worse than the pre-digital star system in which we were told which mass artists were acceptable by A&R people, and at least had to be creative or much more dedicated if we wanted to manifest our superfandom. So when Rogers claims that consumers are "more satisfied" in today's music market, I have to assume he means that we can let our money testify to our devotion -- as opposed to the fact that anyone can get anything they want for free. But since I play music myself (in a total amateur way) I always want trends in the music business to lead away from creating more fans and toward creating more garage bands. I can't tell if the game Rock Band is the beginning or the end of that dream.
That's not to say the essence of Rogers argument is an appeal to making art for art's sake. His point is the new music industry promises to remunerate artists more directly, since there is next to no overhead with regard to production and distribution costs. "When your costs are low, your royalty rate high, and your channel direct, the marginal profitability from the artist's perspective can be far different than in the old model, to be sure." Key to the marketing plan Rogers outlines, though, is something I instinctively cringe at -- price discrimination, or letting people decide what they will pay in return for the same product.
fundamentally I believe the model is shifting from mass-marketed (via radio and TV) and one-size-fits-all (one $15 CD suits fans of all levels of commitment) to a target-marketed approach where fans can self-select where they fit on the scale (when Trent [Reznor] offered Ghosts at five price points he was really asking, “How big a fan are you?”).
I don't why this bothers me so much, since this is the essence of what's probably the oldest form of commercial interaction, bartering. The idea that a fair price for a product is established and applied uniformly is a relatively new phenomenon, a response to the massive problems of information asymmetry that larger-scale production brings on. Still, the idea that someone else can get the same thing for cheaper fires my competitive spirit. It makes me feel like a chump. In other words, I won't be on of the superfans volunteering to pay musicians as much as possible for their music so that I can prove my fidelity or earn their gratitude or whatever the rationale is. When I read about volunteer spenders, I end up thinking that those people are under the sway of some kind of irrational personality cult with regard to the artists they are supporting. Am I really supposed to believe that Trent Reznor gives a single shit about how big of a fan I might be? (Not a fan at all, for the record.) I suppose the idea is that you can prove to other fans that you are more in love with the leader by spending more, but that seems almost worse than the pre-digital star system in which we were told which mass artists were acceptable by A&R people, and at least had to be creative or much more dedicated if we wanted to manifest our superfandom. So when Rogers claims that consumers are "more satisfied" in today's music market, I have to assume he means that we can let our money testify to our devotion -- as opposed to the fact that anyone can get anything they want for free. But since I play music myself (in a total amateur way) I always want trends in the music business to lead away from creating more fans and toward creating more garage bands. I can't tell if the game Rock Band is the beginning or the end of that dream.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
The End of A&R (14 Oct 2008)
This Economist article updates the music business's evolving relationship with the subscription model, in which users could have all the music they wanted indiscriminately, as long as they paid a regular fee. For a while it has seemed to me that such a model was inevitable, given the ease of digital distribution and the fact that music can no longer be played without being, in a sense, copied. But reading this article I started to wonder how it's possible for record companies to compete with each other if all their goods are available for one lump sum. I suppose the intermediaries who run the subscription service would track which songs were acquired and pay the companies accordingly, or one would need to subscribe to each record companies library individually, in which case it would be easier to go on pirating.
But overall, does the existence of all-you-can-eat subscription services eliminate the record companies' incentive to pick and choose the best music to try and sell? Can't they overwhelm us with quantity rather than work for quality, since we end up getting it all anyway? It seems like the fruits of A&R efforts accrue to the artists themselves, who can leverage their brand better, rather than the companies themselves. I wonder if the record companies, recognizing the hopelessness of their moribund business, will effectively give up, become a cabal that collects residuals on its past accomplishments -- just collect the steady income that can be had leasing the use rights to recorded music, 1900 to 2008.
Of course, someone will have to take over the promotional duties for pop music, otherwise it will cease to perform its function of uniting people in the excitement of hype and giving fresh and relevant-seeming expression to common and quotidian feelings. Not sure if individual bands will be up to it, given their tradition of fueling their fires by complaining about commercialism, though they will learn if they want to make money. But maybe if we are lucky, the world will revert to a culture of amateurism with regard to music.
But overall, does the existence of all-you-can-eat subscription services eliminate the record companies' incentive to pick and choose the best music to try and sell? Can't they overwhelm us with quantity rather than work for quality, since we end up getting it all anyway? It seems like the fruits of A&R efforts accrue to the artists themselves, who can leverage their brand better, rather than the companies themselves. I wonder if the record companies, recognizing the hopelessness of their moribund business, will effectively give up, become a cabal that collects residuals on its past accomplishments -- just collect the steady income that can be had leasing the use rights to recorded music, 1900 to 2008.
Of course, someone will have to take over the promotional duties for pop music, otherwise it will cease to perform its function of uniting people in the excitement of hype and giving fresh and relevant-seeming expression to common and quotidian feelings. Not sure if individual bands will be up to it, given their tradition of fueling their fires by complaining about commercialism, though they will learn if they want to make money. But maybe if we are lucky, the world will revert to a culture of amateurism with regard to music.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Is music still a product? (5 Sept. 2008)
Rob Walker links to this long, compelling post by Rhodri Marsden about the difficulty musicians have in making money. Marsden paints a picture of the misery of pre-internet record distribution, when warehousing middlemen absorbed the brute facts of consumer indifference, to contrast that with the current state of affairs, in which the internet lets bands track their own sales metrics. That blessed space of ignorance of the marketplace, which once bred fantasies of stardom, is now gone.
As Marsden points out, despite the hype about the long tail and Web 2.0, the internet doesn't give musicians new ways to make money. It creates conditions in which musicians are paid instead in a different currency, recognition, and whether or not this has any value depends on the context one's working in. If you need to sell music to feed yourself and pay rent, you are not cheered by the number of views your song's video has received. But if you are making money through some other job and make music for a feeling of cultural participation, the clicks count.
The point is that the intense commercialism of our society prompts us to measure the worth of things by their saleability, by their price tag, and it encourages us to regard the value of our effort as residing in a paycheck rather than in the work itself. But making art is its own reward; it's a considerable luxury to be able to have the time to do it at all. It's extremely unsympathetic when artists then complain that the people who spend their own precious time acknowledging other people's art (instead of, say, making some of their own) are somehow ingrates because they won't pay for the chance. Popular music, a social art whose power rests in its ability to be shared, ultimately doesn't lend itself well to becoming intellectual property.
Now that we're put in touch directly with our audience and that distributors can be completely removed from the equation, and replaced by MP3 aggregators who (a) don't need warehousing space for your MP3s, (b) will put them into a range of online stores for a flat fee and, crucially, (c) don't care whether you're brilliant or whether you're bloody awful, we have exactly the same problem selling the music as the distributors had. Just because the songs are available to buy, doesn't mean we can sell them -- in the same way that (and excuse the often-used analogy) installing a landline doesn't mean that the phone is going to ring. And we can't blame the distributors any more. The only people that are left to blame are ourselves. And that hurts.So lots of people may be listening, but these listeners, when consuming music on the internet, are not shoppers. They are not in a mode where they are browsing for something to spend money on. Instead, they are paying for the music by paying attention, and that's all they are willing to give, and really, that should be enough, considering all the competition for it.
It hurts because web technology lets us see exactly how many people are listening to our music. We can see the MySpace hit counters spin round, with the total number of listeners for each track. Our stats pages on our blogs show us how people arrived at our page, which country they're from, even which web browser they're using. We've got information about the reach of our music that we couldn't have dreamed of 10 years ago, and it tells us that thousands upon thousands of people have their ears open, and they're listening. But, by and large, and with a few exceptions, we can't fucking sell music to them. And we're starting to obsess about it. We can't stand the fact that we have 2,739 friends on MySpace, several of whom have posted highly encouraging messages such as "thnx 4 the add", and yet none of them are prepared to dig in their pocket, or Paypal account, and just send us a few quid – despite the fact that we've poured our heart, our soul and our cash into the whole endeavour.
As Marsden points out, despite the hype about the long tail and Web 2.0, the internet doesn't give musicians new ways to make money. It creates conditions in which musicians are paid instead in a different currency, recognition, and whether or not this has any value depends on the context one's working in. If you need to sell music to feed yourself and pay rent, you are not cheered by the number of views your song's video has received. But if you are making money through some other job and make music for a feeling of cultural participation, the clicks count.
In the unlikely event of anyone wanting my advice, it would be to stop worrying about selling recordings. Just give them away. Let them go. Put them online for free, and tell people that they're there. And if, against the odds, you've been given some cash, you've managed to release an album commercially, and you see that someone has posted it on a blog for readers to download – for god's sake don't get angry. Don't see it as being down £20. See it as being up 20 listeners. Yes, your music might conceivably have been stolen, but there are no police. So get used to it. And now you're freed of this burden, pursue all the other things that you want from being in a band – writing songs, rehearsing, doing gigs, building relationships with other bands, going on wallet-busting tours, receiving unmemorable blowjobs. Because seriously, you're almost more likely to get a blowjob after a gig than sell an MP3. And remember – just because music doesn't make you money, certainly does NOT mean that it's worth nothing.
The point is that the intense commercialism of our society prompts us to measure the worth of things by their saleability, by their price tag, and it encourages us to regard the value of our effort as residing in a paycheck rather than in the work itself. But making art is its own reward; it's a considerable luxury to be able to have the time to do it at all. It's extremely unsympathetic when artists then complain that the people who spend their own precious time acknowledging other people's art (instead of, say, making some of their own) are somehow ingrates because they won't pay for the chance. Popular music, a social art whose power rests in its ability to be shared, ultimately doesn't lend itself well to becoming intellectual property.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
The time cost of free goods (20 June 2008)
If goods become free, but consumption takes time, we may find ourselves in danger of being overwhelmed with things we have acquired that are demanding the time to be used. This hidden time cost of seemingly free things is easy to overlook, because we don't customarily think of goods costing us anything but money. But internet distribution is changing the economics of cultural consumption, unleashing the attention economy, and forcing us to consider how we budget our limited time for information intake. In The Harried Leisure Class, Staffan Linder suggests that we will stop collecting information and consume more ignorantly instead in an effort to cram more consumption into our days, buying first and asking questions later, if ever. We buy goods based on whatever information came to us, via ads or advice, rather than expend precious consumption time doing our own research.
But isn't it Google that is supposedly "making us stupid," as Nicolas Carr argues in this Atlantic piece? Though Google is in some ways the ultimate research tool, reducing the time necessary to find information (hence the end of pointless arguments about factual things at family meals; now we just look things up), it also gives us information without much context, without our having to make the effort to organize our investigations. It also gives us way too much information, more or less indiscriminately -- our searches aren't always particularly refined. And Carr's point is that it changes how we read: Citing developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf, he writes,
I think about this sometimes when I'm editing, honing text and deleting words and tightening prose and resolving ambiguities and misleading phrasings so that it may be more easily processed by readers. I'm helping them read it faster so they will understand it more quickly, but at a much more superficial level. As Carr writes, "Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed."
Linder argues that as we become squeezed for consumption time, we'll consume more expensive things over cheaper things when possible to make use of more goods on a total-cost basis. But when the cost of goods is zero, what happens then? As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of "free" stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we'll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we've managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we've set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged. The leisure and unparalleled bounty of a virtually unlimited access to culture ends up being an endless source of further stress, as we feel compelled to take it all in. Nothing sinks in as we try to rush through it all, and our rushing does nothing to keep us from falling further behind -- often when I attempt to tackle the unread posts in my RSS reader, I end up finding new feeds to add, and so on, and I end up further behind than when I started. It's hard enough for me to delete a feed from Google reader; it's even harder to get rid of unneeded stuff I've taken physical possession of, even if it was free to begin with, even if I can remember vividly fishing it out of a pile of garbage on my walk home from the subway. (Sometimes that little self-aggrandizing narrative makes it harder. Such stuff plays into my fantasy of myself as some kind of shrewd scavenger, beating the "system" by living off its cast-off crap -- I tend to forget that the deluded hippies in the Manson family had the same dream.)
One way of coping with the problem of being overwhelmed with free stuff is to voluntarily impose prices, a kind of Pigovian tax that internalizes the time costs of consumption. Steve Randy Waldman, in detailing his idea for a postage system for email, is attacking a related problem -- because emailing is free, there is nothing stopping us from being inundated with unwanted messages, but if the sender was willing to pay, we might take that into account and become willing to read. And if it's a message we wanted, from someone we know, we could refund the postage.
I often feel like I'm strung between two conflicting ideologies, and outmoded one oriented toward getting as much as you can, and a new one oriented toward navigating an endless tide of information. They are basically two different ways of looking at how to anchor one's identity, with the side effect of structuring how we consume. The epitome of the old way was to become a collector, to see yourself in stuff; the new ideology points us toward seeking fame, to see ourselves reflected back in the shimmering pool of digitized information.
But isn't it Google that is supposedly "making us stupid," as Nicolas Carr argues in this Atlantic piece? Though Google is in some ways the ultimate research tool, reducing the time necessary to find information (hence the end of pointless arguments about factual things at family meals; now we just look things up), it also gives us information without much context, without our having to make the effort to organize our investigations. It also gives us way too much information, more or less indiscriminately -- our searches aren't always particularly refined. And Carr's point is that it changes how we read: Citing developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf, he writes,
the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.The advantage reaped by the speed with which we can acquire information is negated by the sheer amount that comes back at us. And the ease at which we get this plenitude tempts us into the shallow, efficiency-oriented pseudo-reading that Carr is concerned about. The time we have to read is limited, and we have so much more to read, that inevitably we start to select the easier stuff to read so we can feel like we are sucking down more of it.
I think about this sometimes when I'm editing, honing text and deleting words and tightening prose and resolving ambiguities and misleading phrasings so that it may be more easily processed by readers. I'm helping them read it faster so they will understand it more quickly, but at a much more superficial level. As Carr writes, "Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed."
Linder argues that as we become squeezed for consumption time, we'll consume more expensive things over cheaper things when possible to make use of more goods on a total-cost basis. But when the cost of goods is zero, what happens then? As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of "free" stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we'll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we've managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we've set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged. The leisure and unparalleled bounty of a virtually unlimited access to culture ends up being an endless source of further stress, as we feel compelled to take it all in. Nothing sinks in as we try to rush through it all, and our rushing does nothing to keep us from falling further behind -- often when I attempt to tackle the unread posts in my RSS reader, I end up finding new feeds to add, and so on, and I end up further behind than when I started. It's hard enough for me to delete a feed from Google reader; it's even harder to get rid of unneeded stuff I've taken physical possession of, even if it was free to begin with, even if I can remember vividly fishing it out of a pile of garbage on my walk home from the subway. (Sometimes that little self-aggrandizing narrative makes it harder. Such stuff plays into my fantasy of myself as some kind of shrewd scavenger, beating the "system" by living off its cast-off crap -- I tend to forget that the deluded hippies in the Manson family had the same dream.)
One way of coping with the problem of being overwhelmed with free stuff is to voluntarily impose prices, a kind of Pigovian tax that internalizes the time costs of consumption. Steve Randy Waldman, in detailing his idea for a postage system for email, is attacking a related problem -- because emailing is free, there is nothing stopping us from being inundated with unwanted messages, but if the sender was willing to pay, we might take that into account and become willing to read. And if it's a message we wanted, from someone we know, we could refund the postage.
The receiver of the mail would set the postage rate and get the money. That is, you do not pay a postal service for delivering mail (that's free in the internet age), you pay the recipient for the burden your correspondence places upon her attention.... It would serve as a guarantee of nonabusiveness, but would rarely be paid. Therefore, people could set their postage rates fairly high without losing mail they care about.But what about when we abuse ourselves, say, by signing up for Rapidshare and downloading every album posted on an mp3 blog? It's hard to imagine volunteering to pay for something you know you can get for free, but then we risk making everything we have accumulated worthless from the sheer inability to find anything or decide among things.
I often feel like I'm strung between two conflicting ideologies, and outmoded one oriented toward getting as much as you can, and a new one oriented toward navigating an endless tide of information. They are basically two different ways of looking at how to anchor one's identity, with the side effect of structuring how we consume. The epitome of the old way was to become a collector, to see yourself in stuff; the new ideology points us toward seeking fame, to see ourselves reflected back in the shimmering pool of digitized information.
The copyright industry arms race (13 June 2008)
At Cato Unbound (an internet publication of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank), Rasmus Fleischer presents what seems to me some irrefutable facts about the troubled future for intellectual property rights in this essay and presents libertarianism in what seems to me to be its most favorable light -- arguing against the consolidation of state and corporate power in favor of the creative use of technology by individuals. The sort of freedom to which the internet accustoms us -- of access and association -- seems to mesh well with libertarian concerns. A platform built not on gun love, tax hatred, and Ayn Randian überselfishness, but rather on a commitment to an agnostic internet, protecting individuals' ability to use technology (the means of production in the information age), and enabling spontaneous organizations to meet needs as they emerge seems to have great potential appeal to a new generation of voters who think in terms of always being online, and always networking at several levels of intimacy at once with a variety of privacy needs to protect.
Anyway, detailing the technological arms race between the copyright industries and pirates, Fleischer foresees "an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties" as governments try to control the use and distribution of digital content. "Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last." The culture industries want to preserve economic advantage by maintaining an artificial scarcity of their goods enforced by the intervening power of the state. But as Fleischer points out,
No matter how draconian efforts to protect content on the internet become, no matter how onerous the burden placed on ISPs to regulate users' activity, they are futile in the face of the "sneakernet" -- the ability of someone to walk over to your place with, say, a hard drive containing all the recorded music from a decade.
Anyway, detailing the technological arms race between the copyright industries and pirates, Fleischer foresees "an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties" as governments try to control the use and distribution of digital content. "Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last." The culture industries want to preserve economic advantage by maintaining an artificial scarcity of their goods enforced by the intervening power of the state. But as Fleischer points out,
We already have access to more film, music, text and images than we can possibly incorporate into our lives. Retreating from this paradigm of abundance to the old paradigm of scarcity is simply not an alternative. Adding more “content” will strictly speaking produce no value — whether culturally or economically. What’s valuable is supplying a context where people can come together to create meaning out of abundance.
No matter how draconian efforts to protect content on the internet become, no matter how onerous the burden placed on ISPs to regulate users' activity, they are futile in the face of the "sneakernet" -- the ability of someone to walk over to your place with, say, a hard drive containing all the recorded music from a decade.
Within 10-15 years a cheap pocket-size media player will probably be able to store all recorded music that has ever been released — ready for direct copying to another person’s device.It seems to me the model is to figure out a way to sell the limitations the copyright industries are trying to impose by fiat. When confronted with overwhelming options, people need them edited down. The personal entertainment budget was once the filter, but that is rapidly becoming negligible. Fleischman's conclusion, though, is apt:
In other words: The sneakernet will come back if needed. “I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. “When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ — what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”
Creative practices, with some exceptions, thrive in economies where digital abundance is connected to scarce qualities in space and time. But there can never be a question of finding one universal business model for a world without copyright. The more urgent question regards what price we will have to pay for upholding the phantasm of universal copyright.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Waiting for the Rhapsody (18 Dec 2007)
In BusinessWeek a few issues ago (I'm just starting to catch up on my reading), Peter Burrows was pushing subscription music services, trotting out some sensible arguments against being tied down to enjoying only the music you own -- you can discover so much new stuff, sample music on whims, and listen to a lot of cheesy songs you wouldn't necessary want on preserve on your hard drive. And you don't have to worry about a hard drive crash erasing your collection, because you won't have a collection: peace of mind through shedding belongings, which bring with them the anxiety of having to protect them. (This always makes me think of Spalding Grey explaining in Swimming to Cambodia how he conquered his fear of swimming in deep water by leaving his wallet in plain view on the beach. He was so worried about the wallet being stolen that he didn't think about the danger of being too far from shore.)
It seems inevitable that eventually a wireless device will be introduced that gives you access to all of recorded music for a subscription fee. The technology seems to be in place; it just requires the right combination of design, promotion and cooperation among what's left of the music industry. And this will seem like a great idea until people realize what a pain in the ass it is to select what they want to hear from the near infinite possibilities, and will long for the simplicity of radio stations one trusts to play good music. This, anyway, is what Sirius seems to be banking on, as their cocky commercials about their portable players implies.
For those who aren't indifferent or open-minded enough to give over control over what music they hear to professional -- to people who must play DJ for themselves (and probably their friends) ownership of music is essential for several reasons. First, making the purchase is a decision-making moment that in itself gives pleasure -- it's a moment in which one gets to make some piece of knowledge one has operational. The decision also invests one emotionally in the thing purchased, increasing the possibility for enjoying it. This is one of the sad realities of consumer societies, that putting money where your mouth is is way to fix your attention on something and be optimistically disposed toward its being about to please you. When you download a bunch of music off a borrowed hard drive, your investment in the music is zilch, and the effort to sort through it all is herculean -- all those little decisions about whether you like this or that song as you weed through has less pleasure attached to it because nothing ultimately is at stake in the choice. In such a situation, when I'm trying to assimilate a large quantity of music, I find myself thrown back on my taste alone, and that taste is nebulous, contingent. When I buy music, I find I have more reason to try enjoying it at different times, trying to find the mood or occasion that suits it.
And the big collection is necessary if you want to impress people with mix CDs. You give yourself a much larger vocabulary to speak with when you have more songs to choose from and consequently more juxtapositions to play with. It's nice to have a lot of music when you want to give it as a gift to someone else. I don't know that any recipient of a mix CD has nearly as much invested in it as its creator, but some of the emotion that gets poured into making mixes must survive into the final product. And that residual emotional is a direct result of someone working hard to make the most out of their music collection. (The friend I visited in Seattle recently had a new friend who made him a bunch of compilations, and reading through the track lists, I almost felt like I was getting to know her without actually meeting her. But I didn't ask to listen to them -- accustoming to making the compilations myself, I get peevish having to hear other people's; sad, really, the joy that I think compilations can give is something that I myself am generally shut off to.)
Collecting is a means for filtering, as is making the compilations, and both of these activities are about bringing knowledge to bear, making decisions with consequences. The subscription service removes the consequences, almost makes the idea of having selective musical taste superfluous. Not there is anything wrong with that; musical taste's centrality to identity seems a peculiar quirk. Nonetheless, taste in commercial music comes down to what music you are willing to pay for specifically. If you are paying to have it all, you effectively have no taste.
It seems inevitable that eventually a wireless device will be introduced that gives you access to all of recorded music for a subscription fee. The technology seems to be in place; it just requires the right combination of design, promotion and cooperation among what's left of the music industry. And this will seem like a great idea until people realize what a pain in the ass it is to select what they want to hear from the near infinite possibilities, and will long for the simplicity of radio stations one trusts to play good music. This, anyway, is what Sirius seems to be banking on, as their cocky commercials about their portable players implies.
For those who aren't indifferent or open-minded enough to give over control over what music they hear to professional -- to people who must play DJ for themselves (and probably their friends) ownership of music is essential for several reasons. First, making the purchase is a decision-making moment that in itself gives pleasure -- it's a moment in which one gets to make some piece of knowledge one has operational. The decision also invests one emotionally in the thing purchased, increasing the possibility for enjoying it. This is one of the sad realities of consumer societies, that putting money where your mouth is is way to fix your attention on something and be optimistically disposed toward its being about to please you. When you download a bunch of music off a borrowed hard drive, your investment in the music is zilch, and the effort to sort through it all is herculean -- all those little decisions about whether you like this or that song as you weed through has less pleasure attached to it because nothing ultimately is at stake in the choice. In such a situation, when I'm trying to assimilate a large quantity of music, I find myself thrown back on my taste alone, and that taste is nebulous, contingent. When I buy music, I find I have more reason to try enjoying it at different times, trying to find the mood or occasion that suits it.
And the big collection is necessary if you want to impress people with mix CDs. You give yourself a much larger vocabulary to speak with when you have more songs to choose from and consequently more juxtapositions to play with. It's nice to have a lot of music when you want to give it as a gift to someone else. I don't know that any recipient of a mix CD has nearly as much invested in it as its creator, but some of the emotion that gets poured into making mixes must survive into the final product. And that residual emotional is a direct result of someone working hard to make the most out of their music collection. (The friend I visited in Seattle recently had a new friend who made him a bunch of compilations, and reading through the track lists, I almost felt like I was getting to know her without actually meeting her. But I didn't ask to listen to them -- accustoming to making the compilations myself, I get peevish having to hear other people's; sad, really, the joy that I think compilations can give is something that I myself am generally shut off to.)
Collecting is a means for filtering, as is making the compilations, and both of these activities are about bringing knowledge to bear, making decisions with consequences. The subscription service removes the consequences, almost makes the idea of having selective musical taste superfluous. Not there is anything wrong with that; musical taste's centrality to identity seems a peculiar quirk. Nonetheless, taste in commercial music comes down to what music you are willing to pay for specifically. If you are paying to have it all, you effectively have no taste.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Post-commercial entertainment (27 Nov 2007)
The Hollywood writers' strike certainly helps throw this in relief, but it seems clear that the commercial entertainment industry is in trouble. Digitization and dispersed internet distribution has made it impossible for them to control supply, and the intellectual property concepts their business models depend on seem likely to come under attack or undergo extreme revision in an era where anonymous collaboration and open-source development become more and more customary. Not to wax too utopian about it, but it seems like the idea of commercial artists working for industry middlemen is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, and as that changes, the means by which our society defines what makes for an artist or entertainer will change as well. Reality TV and blogging are just the most obvious examples of semi-professional and, in some cases, post-commercial entertainment supplanting the work of pros. The expectations we have of polish and high-end production values may continue to become more and more relaxed; what lo-fi indie rock helped pioneer could become acceptable in every genre and every medium, as YouTube would suggest. (Though all I ever seem to use YouTube for is watching old clips of bands from the 1960s and 1970s appearing on European TV; it's become sort of a random-access collective memory. In fact, I can safely say that the internet, by enriching my access to obscure culture detritus from past decades, has guaranteed that I won't pay any attention to contemporary culture for the foreseeable future.) While paid ads still support part of the distribution medium for these works (i.e. Google's ad brokering makes it worth its while to host all this junk), the creators themselves, who are confronted with very little overhead for making and self-distributing their own product, are not necessarily compensated monetarily and seem to have attention (becoming more and more measurable, more and more useful as a means for status competition) rather than monetary reward as their motivation. This seems like a good thing, at first, but is it actually a license or a prod for all art to become even more about ego than communication? in other words, is self-expression as a goal wildly overrated, especially now that it's so easy, now that we are in the so-called age of microcelebrity Clive Thompson notes in this Wired column? Is art being subsumed to an even greater degree by the (commercially derived) ideology of personal branding? Are we getting the worse of both worlds -- the superficial, narcissistic culture without the discipline brought on by the need to make money?
In his book In Praise of Commercial Culture, economist Tyler Cowen points out that on the 18th century, when the printing press was having similar effects on culture as the internet is having now, critics worried that the commercialization of art, the market for books, would erode the power of fame as an incentive, without which writers would produce nothing but trash. But with fame devalued now that the trappings of celebrity are open to all, it seems like money and the professionalization that went along with it were last-ditch means to uphold standards. In Cowen's view, 18th century critics sought to impose aesthetic standards and use fame as the reward that would induce writers to adhere to them. In a similar fashion, centralized cultural production enables a few media corporations, or the state (as in China, Soviet Russia, etc.), to impose similar standards. In a market economy, mass popularity seems to justify after the fact those decisions made early on about which works met the approved standards and were worthy of being supported. But mass popularity, or monetary reward may not be as significant when you can bask in the recognition of a niche audience and feel righteous about not having sold out. The "microcelebrity" thesis perhaps bears out Cowen's argument that there is not a limited supply of fame, and that technology and the density of intertextual references multiplies the amount of fame there is to go around, albeit in ever finer measurements. But conversely, the demands on our attention may be stretched to the limit, leaving us in even greater need for filters and organizers of what's available. Commercial gatekeepers once served this function; perhaps now social networking tools (linked in to targeted advertising) will replace them. Nothing, though, stands to discourage anyone from producing culture and "cluttering" the public sphere with it. I waver between thinking this is a pervasive triumph over passivity and fretting that it's a disaster that's made self-branding and the commercialization of our intimate identity commonplace -- an eagerly sought accomplishment that we hope to confirm in the public sphere.
Having cheered for so long against the culture industry Goliath (without ever really suspecting it was actually vulnerable), it hasn't often occurred to me to consider what we lose with its decline. The need to make art that will sell is usually derided as forcing artists to pursue the lowest common denominator and compromise their vision. But it may also have required artists to focus, to consider how effective their work would be on audiences. Respect for the bottom line typically makes people more receptive to criticism, and criticism from invested parties generally improves things. And the commercial entertainment industry performed a useful filtering service, putting hurdles between artists and audiences that eliminated some poetasters (and, unfortunately, some talented but easily deterred entertainers). One could be critical of what made it through that initial filter, but usually the fact that it made it through meant it was worth taking the time to criticize -- it had been chosen and produced among thousands of other contenders. But free from the restrictions of commercialism, artists can ignore criticism and be as self-indulgent as they choose, selecting self-referential topics and making no effort to generalize subject matter so that others may get more out of them. Instead, artists can develop the expectation that others should be interested in their work for the sake of person making it, that it be interesting only on a personal level, the way Facebook pages are supposed to be.
In his book In Praise of Commercial Culture, economist Tyler Cowen points out that on the 18th century, when the printing press was having similar effects on culture as the internet is having now, critics worried that the commercialization of art, the market for books, would erode the power of fame as an incentive, without which writers would produce nothing but trash. But with fame devalued now that the trappings of celebrity are open to all, it seems like money and the professionalization that went along with it were last-ditch means to uphold standards. In Cowen's view, 18th century critics sought to impose aesthetic standards and use fame as the reward that would induce writers to adhere to them. In a similar fashion, centralized cultural production enables a few media corporations, or the state (as in China, Soviet Russia, etc.), to impose similar standards. In a market economy, mass popularity seems to justify after the fact those decisions made early on about which works met the approved standards and were worthy of being supported. But mass popularity, or monetary reward may not be as significant when you can bask in the recognition of a niche audience and feel righteous about not having sold out. The "microcelebrity" thesis perhaps bears out Cowen's argument that there is not a limited supply of fame, and that technology and the density of intertextual references multiplies the amount of fame there is to go around, albeit in ever finer measurements. But conversely, the demands on our attention may be stretched to the limit, leaving us in even greater need for filters and organizers of what's available. Commercial gatekeepers once served this function; perhaps now social networking tools (linked in to targeted advertising) will replace them. Nothing, though, stands to discourage anyone from producing culture and "cluttering" the public sphere with it. I waver between thinking this is a pervasive triumph over passivity and fretting that it's a disaster that's made self-branding and the commercialization of our intimate identity commonplace -- an eagerly sought accomplishment that we hope to confirm in the public sphere.
Having cheered for so long against the culture industry Goliath (without ever really suspecting it was actually vulnerable), it hasn't often occurred to me to consider what we lose with its decline. The need to make art that will sell is usually derided as forcing artists to pursue the lowest common denominator and compromise their vision. But it may also have required artists to focus, to consider how effective their work would be on audiences. Respect for the bottom line typically makes people more receptive to criticism, and criticism from invested parties generally improves things. And the commercial entertainment industry performed a useful filtering service, putting hurdles between artists and audiences that eliminated some poetasters (and, unfortunately, some talented but easily deterred entertainers). One could be critical of what made it through that initial filter, but usually the fact that it made it through meant it was worth taking the time to criticize -- it had been chosen and produced among thousands of other contenders. But free from the restrictions of commercialism, artists can ignore criticism and be as self-indulgent as they choose, selecting self-referential topics and making no effort to generalize subject matter so that others may get more out of them. Instead, artists can develop the expectation that others should be interested in their work for the sake of person making it, that it be interesting only on a personal level, the way Facebook pages are supposed to be.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
All sold out (25 May 2007)
The question of whether pop musicians have sold out never seems to get old, even though it seems as though no argument is possible: these are professional musicians, who intend to make money by selling their product. Perhaps our joy in music is feels so direct that we can't imagine calculation in its making; we presume the musicians feel as straightforward and unguarded as we do toward the music. We don't want to imagine them calculating just how to manipulate our emotions and coax dollars out of our wallets.
So it's perfectly understandable that we would want to mythologize pop music "artists" and regard them as being true to some autonomous purpose (as Yglesias highlights) other then selling more Coke (though the history of pop-music Coke themes is long). And the listener's vicarious appreciation of a song is radically diminished when a product is shouldering in to claim some of the song's signifying potential, to colonize some of the space for fantasy a good pop song evokes. It feels like theft when you've bought a song hoping to make it about yourself, only to discover that the band's sold it elsewhere to make it about jeans or cars. Of course, there are probably many who feel validated in having something they like be adopted by advertisers -- it suggests maybe they too could make it as musical supervisors. But typically we feel some blend of the two: for example, until a month ago the name Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich meant nothing to me other than that they sang the idiotic "Zabadak" in the 1960s. Then I saw Grindhouse in which their song "Hold Tight" is used. I think the song's pretty great, and I'm grateful to Tarantino for using it, but I'm also annoyed that every time I hear the song I have to think about Tarantino and that idiotic film. I can't form my own mental picture for a song I'd probably never have heard in the first place if not for Tarantino's strong intention to use it to convey his mental picture.
Anyway, I agree wholly with Scott Lemieux, who points out that authenticity is an absurd criterion, since there is not a way of convincingly conveying it without becoming wholly inauthentic in the attempt. Authenticity doesn't sounds like anything in particular; instead we apply it to sounds we like as a way of bolstering them ideologically and enhancing our enjoyment. So I would argue that only listeners can be authentic or not -- working musicians can not be in bad faith. Listeners can knowingly begin listening to music to accomplish something other than aural enjoyment. (It gets more complicated when you admit the possibility that these extra-musical motives could be subconscious.)
And Amanda Marcotte is right that file sharing has permanently altered the terms of conditions of being a professional musician. Without being able to rely on the music companies for a steady income stream, musicians have take money where they find it, and probably need to be open to alternative ways of garnering publicity. I think this is why its harder for musicians to claim to be above commercialization -- they no longer have an effective and powerful music industry to run interference for them and promote the fact that the bands are not selling out.
So it's perfectly understandable that we would want to mythologize pop music "artists" and regard them as being true to some autonomous purpose (as Yglesias highlights) other then selling more Coke (though the history of pop-music Coke themes is long). And the listener's vicarious appreciation of a song is radically diminished when a product is shouldering in to claim some of the song's signifying potential, to colonize some of the space for fantasy a good pop song evokes. It feels like theft when you've bought a song hoping to make it about yourself, only to discover that the band's sold it elsewhere to make it about jeans or cars. Of course, there are probably many who feel validated in having something they like be adopted by advertisers -- it suggests maybe they too could make it as musical supervisors. But typically we feel some blend of the two: for example, until a month ago the name Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich meant nothing to me other than that they sang the idiotic "Zabadak" in the 1960s. Then I saw Grindhouse in which their song "Hold Tight" is used. I think the song's pretty great, and I'm grateful to Tarantino for using it, but I'm also annoyed that every time I hear the song I have to think about Tarantino and that idiotic film. I can't form my own mental picture for a song I'd probably never have heard in the first place if not for Tarantino's strong intention to use it to convey his mental picture.
Anyway, I agree wholly with Scott Lemieux, who points out that authenticity is an absurd criterion, since there is not a way of convincingly conveying it without becoming wholly inauthentic in the attempt. Authenticity doesn't sounds like anything in particular; instead we apply it to sounds we like as a way of bolstering them ideologically and enhancing our enjoyment. So I would argue that only listeners can be authentic or not -- working musicians can not be in bad faith. Listeners can knowingly begin listening to music to accomplish something other than aural enjoyment. (It gets more complicated when you admit the possibility that these extra-musical motives could be subconscious.)
And Amanda Marcotte is right that file sharing has permanently altered the terms of conditions of being a professional musician. Without being able to rely on the music companies for a steady income stream, musicians have take money where they find it, and probably need to be open to alternative ways of garnering publicity. I think this is why its harder for musicians to claim to be above commercialization -- they no longer have an effective and powerful music industry to run interference for them and promote the fact that the bands are not selling out.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Economics of free (19 January 2007)
Julian Sanchez links to this series of posts about post-scarcity economics, the gist of which is this: ideas (and digital copies of intellectual property) do not become scarce once they are thought of, which means they are not subject to the law of diminishing returns. The marginal cost (what it costs to make one more unit of something) for duplicating an idea is nil, implying an infinte supply of the fruits of knowledge once it exists. (See David Warsh's Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations for a thorough explanation of this -- and the history of theorizing about increasing returns to scale -- and the paper by Paul Romer that brought it to contemporary economics.) The upshot of these posts is that an "infinite" supply of a good should cause its price to approach zero in the absence of state-granted monopolies and other "artificial barriers" (copyrights) that are becoming unenforceable (but don't tell these people). Whether there really is an infinite supply of anything is questionable (human attention, if nothing else, is not infinite; neither is server space or the energy to maintain them). According to the management consultant writing these posts, this can be a good thing for producers if they focus on selling the medium rather than the information: "You don't sell 'ideas' you sell books, or consulting services, or reports or conferences (or a bunch of other things). You don't sell music, you sell CDs or concerts or T-shirts or access (or a bunch of other things). Basically, you look at the content itself (which is infinite in supply) to sell something that isn't infinite in supply." This, as is pointed out in the comments, is a matter of using captivating content to distract the customer from the fact that he is paying not for that content but an essentially empty package. (The content, infinite in supply, is zeroed out of the exchange.)
Several different commenters made the point that when post-scarcity economics kick in, so does the attention economy
When too much is available at no expense but your time and effort, you can make money by being the filter on the unlimited supply. If you have figured out how to monetize your filter, its to your benefit to have the spigot of free content opened ever wider. (Which explains why Google wants to digitize everything possible.)
But filterers would still need something to filter. Assume that there's not already too much stuff out there and that we need new "innovative" stuff. (I'm thinking of entertainment industry here, not an industry where "innovation" actually is innovation, like the pharmaceutical industry.) If marginal costs for intellectual property is zero, the fixed costs (what it costs to make the original version, the R&D to come up with the idea) remain, and someone has to pay them. (You don't get a new Metallica record unless someone pays Metallica.) One rather utopian argument is that in the future artists will pay themselves in the sheer joy of creation -- kind of like most bloggers do now. The underlying implication is that anything worth doing in the field of intellectual creation is its own reward.
Another way to recoup fixed costs is via subscription services -- after enough people pay in advance, the musician delivers the new album. (This presents an obvious free-rider problem. Why pay if you are willing to wait for others to pay, and then you'll just copy the product once it's made.) Perhaps artists can go back to finding patrons, as they did in pre-Capitalist times. The Medicis didn't seem to mind everyone reaping the aesthetic benefits from the artworks they sponsored.
Several different commenters made the point that when post-scarcity economics kick in, so does the attention economy
What was missed however, is the premium on end users time - individuals have to deal with the scarcity of time, which forces them to make decisions on which content to spend their time with, or which freeware applications to invest one's time to learn and train on. What is interesting is as scarcity economics starts to fade, network economics starts to take hold. The very best free products will take the lion's share of users attention, which has tremendous value for different economic models. The irony of all of this is it isn't new. Traditional broadcast television lived off of a free to user model for decades, and end users were traditionally faced with the limits of their own time as to which show to watch.
When too much is available at no expense but your time and effort, you can make money by being the filter on the unlimited supply. If you have figured out how to monetize your filter, its to your benefit to have the spigot of free content opened ever wider. (Which explains why Google wants to digitize everything possible.)
But filterers would still need something to filter. Assume that there's not already too much stuff out there and that we need new "innovative" stuff. (I'm thinking of entertainment industry here, not an industry where "innovation" actually is innovation, like the pharmaceutical industry.) If marginal costs for intellectual property is zero, the fixed costs (what it costs to make the original version, the R&D to come up with the idea) remain, and someone has to pay them. (You don't get a new Metallica record unless someone pays Metallica.) One rather utopian argument is that in the future artists will pay themselves in the sheer joy of creation -- kind of like most bloggers do now. The underlying implication is that anything worth doing in the field of intellectual creation is its own reward.
Another way to recoup fixed costs is via subscription services -- after enough people pay in advance, the musician delivers the new album. (This presents an obvious free-rider problem. Why pay if you are willing to wait for others to pay, and then you'll just copy the product once it's made.) Perhaps artists can go back to finding patrons, as they did in pre-Capitalist times. The Medicis didn't seem to mind everyone reaping the aesthetic benefits from the artworks they sponsored.
The end of music collecting (15 January 2007)
Randall Stosser's article in yesterday's NYT Business section complained about the new iPhone perpetuating Apple's DRM scheme, arguing that the system cripples customers' enjoyment while shackling them to Apple players for perpetuity. This seems self-evident to me, always making me wonder who these millions are who bother with the iTunes store -- impulse buyers who can't be troubled with ferreting out mp3s from other (pirate or otherwise) sources?
Strosser is similarly confused, wondering not only why you would want to amass a collection of music that you can't play freely on whatever system you wanted, but why you'd bother collecting songs at all, when subscription services that offer you the entirety of recorded music are just around the corner.
The pleasures of ownership are sometimes hard to separate from the pleasures of experiencing the things we own, since ownership seems to hold the promise of that experience in abeyance. But in the case of music, the subscription model should blow away the clouds of confusion. If this model takes hold and dominates, obviously it would put an end to casual music collecting, and it will make clear once and for all the difference between enjoying music and enjoying collecting. People who collect music may like music, but that's not really what it's about. (The most extreme example of this that I can think of is this guy who collected records and scheduled a methodical routine not for playing them but cleaning them. The idea that he would play them was absurd to him as actually reading a bagged and rated comic would be to a hard-core comic-book collector.) If all the music in the world is available for $5 a month, it will make no sense at all to collect music for the sake of the music.
But it will make plenty of sense to collect if you like collecting; that is, if you like organizing fascinating objects, grooming them, and completing series of things for the sake of it, for the satisfaction that comes with a fleeting sense of finality. You won't have the alibi of really being into music to excuse your obsession, but maybe it won't seem necessary for an alibi -- it hardly seems required as it is. But the coming separation of enjoying music and collecting it hits hard people like me, who thrive on the alibi, who let the dialectic between ownership and experience drive them to keep hearing more, acquiring more. Take away the need to archive, and I may just lapse into listening what I already know and am familiar with. If I don't have to justify keeping something by making myself listen to it first and make an aesthetic decision, I'll go with what I know -- play that John Phillips record again. (Sometimes I romanticize that feeling of being stuck on a record; sometimes it makes me feel stuck in a rut, depressed.) Being a collector drives the pleasures of evaluation over and above those of sensual experience; without the collecting excuse to prefer evaluation over sensual pleasure, it becomes it bit harder to make the effort. I need to collect to keep my taste from atrophying. If subscription services give me everything, I probably would end up wanting nothing at all.
Strosser is similarly confused, wondering not only why you would want to amass a collection of music that you can't play freely on whatever system you wanted, but why you'd bother collecting songs at all, when subscription services that offer you the entirety of recorded music are just around the corner.
In the long view, Mr. Goldberg said he believes that today’s copy-protection battles will prove short-lived. Eventually, perhaps in 5 or 10 years, he predicts, all portable players will have wireless broadband capability and will provide direct access, anytime, anywhere, to every song ever released for a low monthly subscription fee.Is this really going to be the future? Shuffle-play the songs you get from subscription services like the ones foretold here and you get something that resembles a somewhat less futuristic invention: the radio. Still, I can understand a subscription model, which would change the mentality of subscribers from a collecting mentality to a playlist-making one -- you become the DJ of your own individualized radio station that broadcasts to you and you alone wherever you go. If you are too lazy, then some sort of Pandora-like software will pick songs you'll like based on the taste profile you help it build. And how easy will it be to let people judge you by your musical taste? Rather than display your collection to them or laboriously type in your favorite bands on a MySpace profile, you can just export the playlists you construct for computer analysis and decoding. This is already going on -- iLike, for example, is a social-networking tool that allows you to spy on other people's iTunes history, what they've recently played, what they've played a lot.
It’s a prediction that has a high probability of realization because such a system is already found in South Korea, where three million subscribers enjoy direct, wireless access to a virtually limitless music catalog for only $5 a month. He noted, however, that music companies in South Korea did not agree to such a radically different business model until sales of physical CDs had collapsed.
The pleasures of ownership are sometimes hard to separate from the pleasures of experiencing the things we own, since ownership seems to hold the promise of that experience in abeyance. But in the case of music, the subscription model should blow away the clouds of confusion. If this model takes hold and dominates, obviously it would put an end to casual music collecting, and it will make clear once and for all the difference between enjoying music and enjoying collecting. People who collect music may like music, but that's not really what it's about. (The most extreme example of this that I can think of is this guy who collected records and scheduled a methodical routine not for playing them but cleaning them. The idea that he would play them was absurd to him as actually reading a bagged and rated comic would be to a hard-core comic-book collector.) If all the music in the world is available for $5 a month, it will make no sense at all to collect music for the sake of the music.
But it will make plenty of sense to collect if you like collecting; that is, if you like organizing fascinating objects, grooming them, and completing series of things for the sake of it, for the satisfaction that comes with a fleeting sense of finality. You won't have the alibi of really being into music to excuse your obsession, but maybe it won't seem necessary for an alibi -- it hardly seems required as it is. But the coming separation of enjoying music and collecting it hits hard people like me, who thrive on the alibi, who let the dialectic between ownership and experience drive them to keep hearing more, acquiring more. Take away the need to archive, and I may just lapse into listening what I already know and am familiar with. If I don't have to justify keeping something by making myself listen to it first and make an aesthetic decision, I'll go with what I know -- play that John Phillips record again. (Sometimes I romanticize that feeling of being stuck on a record; sometimes it makes me feel stuck in a rut, depressed.) Being a collector drives the pleasures of evaluation over and above those of sensual experience; without the collecting excuse to prefer evaluation over sensual pleasure, it becomes it bit harder to make the effort. I need to collect to keep my taste from atrophying. If subscription services give me everything, I probably would end up wanting nothing at all.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Cultural production for fun and...well, fun (7 December 2006)
Responding to a Wired article about Google's potentially unprofitable purchase of YouTube, Matt Yglesias forecasts the post-profit future of the culture industry.
I find this argument appealing because it gets at how the ease of Internet distribution undermines old, safe assumptions about the profit motive. When distributing goods was difficult, one could safely assume that only those with big money at stake would bother. Thus you could assume that the main point of doing anything at a larger-than-hobby scale, even cultural production, was to make money -- if you were reaching out to a larger audience than your immediate circle, it was because you sought profits. The Internet, however, lets you seek an audience without your having to make much of a financial investment at all, which pushes the pursuit of social recognition much higher on the scale of recognized and accepted motives for making stuff. Consequently it's much easier to assume, as Yglesias does, that the reason why someone made, say, a mashup of Mary Poppins to make it into a horror-film trailer, is because they want people to notice the cool thing they did, not because they expected to get paid. This seems to me a good thing: better to strive for adulation directly through creative intellectual work rather than through the imperfect proxy of money. And better to assume of people that they just wanted to make and/or share something they appreciated rather than simply trying to come up with a "creative" way of getting cash. (This shift in motive attribution could almost be enough to redeem the calculated pursuit of hipsterdom. But it can't redeem "cool hunters" who are essentially poaching the creative spirit and seeking to assimilate it to moneymaking entirely.) This aligns our incentives more toward meaningful work rather than well-paying drudgery. (Of course, that drudgery still needs to be done, but it could perhaps be better balanced with the stuff we do that we and others recognize as meaningful, expressive, etc.)
The Internet thus extends the strategy of having a day job to pay the bills while working the rest of the time on one's real passion to a vaster audience then those in major cities, to which the underground economy of social recognition was once largely relegated.
One of Yglesias's commenters puts this all more succinctly: "It becomes a social good to make the economy less important to the individual, in that additional hours of leisure not only please the individual but also make the individual more likely to produce uncompensated value for society."
But this doesn't make superstars go away or make potential superstars of us all, Warhol notwithstanding. The ease of distribution sharpens the need to manufacture distinction between commercial and non-commercial art. Commercial art now must make a much bigger show of the capital invested in it (whether through technical proficiency and effects or advertising or massive scale distribution) to justify our paying for it or reporting on it if we are not genuinely enthusiastic. Such investment makes that stuff the universal culture (what we must know to be part of our zeitgeist), and the people involved in it become the superstars who can demand the millions, and they soak up the all the money that once trickled out to the middlebrow makers of moderately popular stuff in the past, the stuff that's been subsumed by well-made amateur material.
Update: At the Economist blog, some skepticism about the future of user-generated content, based on a recent report from http://www.trendwatching.com/briefing/. "Trendwatching lists, in its beguilingly breathless pamphlet, a bunch of other ways in which the production of user-generated content is starting to look less like a community service and more like a talent contest in which the winners expect to get prizes, preferably in cash. " If that's so, that's pretty depressing, because it totally undermines my fantasy delineated above about people's motives shifting from money to social recognition, or to put that another way, the possibility of decoupling social recognition from cash rewards. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to argue that media corporations, et al., will put ideological pressure on us all to prefer cash to community because it sustains their power and control (they select winners, they dole out the cash, they maintain the cultural filters, they reap the profits) in the face of Internet-driven amateur production and distribution (I'm tempted to call it democratic.) And the Economist blogger, for one, is delighted: "As a salaried content-provider I start to feel a tiny bit better about my prospects for the first time since I heard the words "Web 2.0."
Peer-production of digital media probably will produce a fair quantity of awesome popular stuff lurking amidst the vast pool of dreck. And well-designed services will let the awesome stuff rise to the top and the dreck fade to the background, rendering those services awesome and popular. But -- and here's the rub -- having something awesome and popular just may not prove to be especially lucrative. In the past, a popular television show or a popular album or a popular film or a popular distribution channel guaranteed you vast sums of money. In the future, that just may not be the case. The very most popular things will generate some income, enough to live off of and continue financing new projects, but not the sort of gigantic windfalls associated with 20th century media hits. And lots of other things -- including reasonably popular ones -- will only generate trivial levels of income. And they'll continue to be made. Made by people who think its fun, or who derive some benefit from their work other than direct monetary income.In other words, making stuff will come to be its own reward, which is what aesthetic purists who deplore artists' "selling out" have long yearned for. And the money once made in performing the onerous editing/filtering function will be all but eliminated by distributing it throughout social networks, with the collective shouting the best material to the top.
I find this argument appealing because it gets at how the ease of Internet distribution undermines old, safe assumptions about the profit motive. When distributing goods was difficult, one could safely assume that only those with big money at stake would bother. Thus you could assume that the main point of doing anything at a larger-than-hobby scale, even cultural production, was to make money -- if you were reaching out to a larger audience than your immediate circle, it was because you sought profits. The Internet, however, lets you seek an audience without your having to make much of a financial investment at all, which pushes the pursuit of social recognition much higher on the scale of recognized and accepted motives for making stuff. Consequently it's much easier to assume, as Yglesias does, that the reason why someone made, say, a mashup of Mary Poppins to make it into a horror-film trailer, is because they want people to notice the cool thing they did, not because they expected to get paid. This seems to me a good thing: better to strive for adulation directly through creative intellectual work rather than through the imperfect proxy of money. And better to assume of people that they just wanted to make and/or share something they appreciated rather than simply trying to come up with a "creative" way of getting cash. (This shift in motive attribution could almost be enough to redeem the calculated pursuit of hipsterdom. But it can't redeem "cool hunters" who are essentially poaching the creative spirit and seeking to assimilate it to moneymaking entirely.) This aligns our incentives more toward meaningful work rather than well-paying drudgery. (Of course, that drudgery still needs to be done, but it could perhaps be better balanced with the stuff we do that we and others recognize as meaningful, expressive, etc.)
The Internet thus extends the strategy of having a day job to pay the bills while working the rest of the time on one's real passion to a vaster audience then those in major cities, to which the underground economy of social recognition was once largely relegated.
One of Yglesias's commenters puts this all more succinctly: "It becomes a social good to make the economy less important to the individual, in that additional hours of leisure not only please the individual but also make the individual more likely to produce uncompensated value for society."
But this doesn't make superstars go away or make potential superstars of us all, Warhol notwithstanding. The ease of distribution sharpens the need to manufacture distinction between commercial and non-commercial art. Commercial art now must make a much bigger show of the capital invested in it (whether through technical proficiency and effects or advertising or massive scale distribution) to justify our paying for it or reporting on it if we are not genuinely enthusiastic. Such investment makes that stuff the universal culture (what we must know to be part of our zeitgeist), and the people involved in it become the superstars who can demand the millions, and they soak up the all the money that once trickled out to the middlebrow makers of moderately popular stuff in the past, the stuff that's been subsumed by well-made amateur material.
Update: At the Economist blog, some skepticism about the future of user-generated content, based on a recent report from http://www.trendwatching.com/briefing/. "Trendwatching lists, in its beguilingly breathless pamphlet, a bunch of other ways in which the production of user-generated content is starting to look less like a community service and more like a talent contest in which the winners expect to get prizes, preferably in cash. " If that's so, that's pretty depressing, because it totally undermines my fantasy delineated above about people's motives shifting from money to social recognition, or to put that another way, the possibility of decoupling social recognition from cash rewards. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to argue that media corporations, et al., will put ideological pressure on us all to prefer cash to community because it sustains their power and control (they select winners, they dole out the cash, they maintain the cultural filters, they reap the profits) in the face of Internet-driven amateur production and distribution (I'm tempted to call it democratic.) And the Economist blogger, for one, is delighted: "As a salaried content-provider I start to feel a tiny bit better about my prospects for the first time since I heard the words "Web 2.0."
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