Does Inequality Help Artists? Not So Much

Nor does Matt Yglesias’s (admittedly very tentative) “rising tide will lift all art” hypothesis

I took Yglesias, especially in the part quoted above, to be limiting his claim to the “fine arts”. I’m not sure what counts, exactly, as the “fine arts”, but I expect it doesn’t include most documentary film making or playing in most bands, and lots of other art and culture that is at least potentially quite interesting. I didn’t take Yglesias to be saying that inequality was likely to help that sort of art, so if we care more about that sort of art, we shouldn’t expect it to be helped by inequality. But, maybe he’s saying something broader than he needs to or seems to be saying.

A cheese wrapper for the patrons’ halos, please, as Paul Harvey did for Saatchi! (In the US, do we have any movement of equivalent function and influence to the Stuckists?)

I am a bit confused about the reasoning behind optimism in Google a ways back.

Google actually allowing individual art to be monetized is at least partly separate from the issue of many people being misled – and continuing to be – about the actual value of Google’s “openness initiatives” like linking to DMCA’d results via Chilling Effects, which I make use of, and thieves make use of, but which often harm content providers. The same can be said of Google’s book-scanning initiative. These initiatives are great for preserving openness, but as you suggest they do nothing to scrutinize the problem of production. That’s the main thrust of the section about Google above, as I read it, but I am still left wondering if the people who saw through the first problem weren’t still naiive to think that somehow Google’s business interests would align with those of small-scale content providers.

I agree with your conclusions about high art prices being bad for the average artist, consumer, and for the art scene in general. In fact it seems that we could actually reasonably apply the ‘crowding out’ idea to this market, as with yacht-building: While the existence of an ultra-high-end market is harmless in of itself, the draining away of resources means that many other models and ideas simply don’t get pursued. It is interesting to reflect, though, that many of the world’s best-regarded artworks were made for very wealthy patrons or for monolithic institutions (court painters, the church). Personally I think that the greatnes of such works is evaluated somewhat in a vacuum, since a good deal of personal work and folk art simply couldn’t be grown in such a space to compete with the officially sanctioned-and-paid-for works.

But her impatience isn’t an end – it’s the beginning of analysis.

An analysis which the free culture movement has utterly failed to actually conduct themselves. We’re 14 years into the era of rampant digital file sharing, and yet I still hear nothing resembling a compelling argument for how to replace the old model. I’ve been asking for that for my entire adult life. When I do, the most typical response is for people to say that I’m an apologist for big media corporations or a supporter of current intellectual property law, neither of which is true. Worse, the free culture movement refuses to bring any cultural or social condemnation on the many people– and yes, there are many, many people like this– who don’t actually have a philosophical or moral objection to IP laws, but just want to get free stuff and don’t care that the creators of that stuff go unpaid.

I would love to engage with a mature free culture movement you’re describing, but I’ve never seen any evidence that the actual existing free culture movement is willing to do the hard work that goes beyond “free music for everybody!” Your example of business patrons seems like something worth chewing on. But that kind of idea gets drowned out by all the people who just want to plug their ears and complain about big media corporations, and there’s no discernible effort to arguing against them within the free culture movement.

Frankly, it sounds like Matt is just channeling his inner Mankiw[1], and running a Mankiwian ‘benefit’ analysis[2].

[1] IMHO, 90% of Matt’s problems come from having taken his Econ 101 from Harvard, and therefore from Mankiw.

[2] Meaning that only the benefits of a desired situation were accounted for; costs were deliberately overlooked.

On the other hand, artists can seek support from marketing companies. They are willing to support artists and even to pay them if they are good, in the hope that their material will go viral. However, the price, obviously, is that the art has to support and spread the brand name.

* blank stare *

What kind of arrangements are you thinking of here?

What does “support artists” mean, if not paying them?

High prices for art creates a winner-take-all culture that is very harmful for artistic expression. It results in no one ever seeing the art, which is kept in a vault. What are needed are measures that make artist’s life more bearable and help them to get their work out to the public. Art is a public good – and its positive qualities spill over into other areas such as industrial design and engineering, to name a few. Art education ought to be a human right.

@4 – that was exactly my response. I was hoping it was going to be more original, but alas, I guess it’s pretty obvious.

@8 – yes he did. (In this case I don’t actually think the problem is econ 101, though, but the fact that the study he cites – which is perfectly plausible – has little to do with the question discusses, as he somewhat recognizes)

This reminds me of the documentary film Festival Express, about the moving (on a train) rock festival of that name that played Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary in 1970, with all the musicians traveling together between the shows.

The concerts, especially in Toronto, were disrupted by people demanding that the music be provided for free. The documentary shows Jerry Garcia and other members of the Dead explaining to them that musicians have to be paid. Plus ca change …

I’ve yet to read the book (getting it now, on your rec, Henry), so I’ll confine myself to reacting to your writing here, starting with your framing of the question: “If there isn’t an economic model for producing culture in some kind of self-sustaining way, will it get produced?”

To which the answer is that of course it will get produced. Culture always gets produced, by definition. You can’t have a group of humans living together who don’t produce some artifacts and behaviors that constitute their culture, including cultures who not only don’t have professional artists, they don’t have the concept of money.

Since this answer borders on the tautological, I think that this can’t be what you meant, so I will substitute what I think the question behind that observation is (and you’ll tell me if I’m wrong): If the marketplace that forms around cultural production does not produce, on average, a living wage for the producers of that culture, shouldn’t we expect cultural impoverishment to flow outwards from the impoverishment of the individual artists?

Now part of that answer comes down to personal taste — in the same way Katie Roiphe argues that feminism, as practiced, has ruined the novel, as produced, it would be possible to prefer the art of the ’70s to today’s, and to link that to the ways that, say, the Talking Heads or Robert Wilson’s Byrd Hoffman folks could support themselves in a way that isn’t possible today, and that these circumstances led to art you prefer. (Dave Hickey often advances just this argument.) There’s no real counter-argument, given the lack of taste accountants.

But part of that question is purely economic, and from my point of view, understanding the economics of cultural production comes down to a single home truth: more people want to make things than other people want the things those first people have made.

Always. This is always true. The economy where an artist couldn’t make a killing but could make a living has never existed. Being a working artist is such a desirable state that people are willing to endure penury and suffering for a shot at the big time. The hazing rituals of rejection letters, pawned instruments, and shows closing out of town simply reduced the pool of creators to the point where it looked like supply and demand were more in balance than today. This illusion could only be sustained by ignoring the vast majority of people who wanted to do that work but abandoned hope early and left not public trace of their aspirations.

What the internet does is to decouple fame and fortune*, so that the cadre of people who make things no longer need to ask anyone for help or permission before making those self-same things public. And the resulting flood of public work has revealed that there are many more talented people around than were surfaced when highlighting the work of a young artist entailed significant financial risk on the part of the people who could reach an audience. Now, we makers can reach the audience more directly.

90% of what we make is crap, as has been long noted, but the increased volume and increasingly sophisticated filters mean that the good stuff can be plucked from the crap without subjecting the average viewer to the average quality work. (This is also the answer to Freddie’s question as to what will replace the old model, which is “This. You’re living in the replacement of the old model.”)

And the massively increased denominator of available work means the numerator of cultural spending is spread much more thinly. A handful of stars still do well — some, who produce physical objects or live performances, are doing better than ever — but the pool of people who can share our work for no money, or make a little on the side, has increased so vastly that there is no comparison between the pool of people showing their work in public in the 1970s vs. now.

It is a category error to assume that there has always been some moderately-sized group of creators who are talented but not destined for stardom, and in the old days those people did OK while today they are immiserated.

Many of the people lamenting not being able to make a living from their work today would not have been able to under the old system either, but they imagine that they would have been among that system’s rare winners, rather than being part of the far larger group who was dissuaded from their dreams of being paid to create without ever having even been able to show their work in public.

There has never been a normal way in the US to be a self-supporting creator. The consolation prize today is that does not mean also not getting some of the public attention creators typically crave. The economic side-effect of the widely increased scope for that attention is the economic effects you are wondering about.

*http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html

@12 Journalism has historically been supported by a mix of advertising and subscription income, whereas sound recordings and films have historically been supported by sales and licenses. We can theorize that the internet inherently drives ad prices down because of the infinite expanse of available ad space, and so there are certain inherent impacts on journalism. But art forms like music? Not so much. I get that there are supply and demand issues, but consumers don’t simply trade one kind of art experience for another based on what’s cheapest.

We simply don’t know what it would have been like for the internet to have (partially) solved thorny problems of distribution without having created new problems of compensation associated with unauthorized file transfer. We don’t know how cool it could have been if we all found around the gatekeepers of broadcast and corporate studios & record labels, but not . In the absence of a control group, we don’t know whether indie artists’ lives would still suck. I also think that the file-swapping problem is as much an issue of social norms as of better copyright enforcement–and better copyright enforcement, incidentally, is not the same as copyright maximalism; we could certainly have shorter copyright terms along with a more functional DMCA, for example.

Taylor’s book, at the very least, is a step toward better social norms, puncturing free culture illusions. That said, much more robust state funding for the arts is part of what Taylor ultimately prescribes, so full agreement there.

sorry, (1) was meant to include either the words “anatomically correct” or “naked”

The economics of independent documentary making are even tougher. Documentaries have always been made more for love than money. Their economic prospects – in an economy where online sharing is ubiquitous – are becoming ever worse.

This immediately strikes me as simply a false statement. I would have guessed that the economic prospects of documentaries are becoming ever better, thanks to digital film-making technology reducing costs. Maybe my intuition is wrong, but here is an Economist article that supports it:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/08/rise-documentary-film

4 docs released in the UK in 2001, 86 last year! That’s exactly the kind of proliferation I thought I’d witnessed. Is that a false or misleading statistic?

Bands can’t support themselves through selling their music on independent labels. They can tour, but this is both exhausting and not likely to do more than to break even.

And it goes without saying that this phenomena is technology-driven, not inequality-driven. People didn’t quit buying CD’s because they were suddenly impoverished by changes in the global economy.

It music-makers can’t make a living playing live, is that really a problem? Or a sign that they’re in the wrong line of work? And is it really a new problem? Many of my own favorite artists have not been able to make a living (or a very good one) in the music industry, and this goes back a long time – I wish more people liked the obscure stuff, but they don’t. (Thank God for Japan and Europe).

In 1974 the major labels dominated music and there really weren’t that many bands out there. Nowadays there are literally thousands of Neutral Milk Hotels to choose from – of course it’s harder to build a following. (Plus of course rap and country are now the popular stuff). It’s kind of strange that at once we have this “bands can’t support themselves” idea coexisting with the obvious fact of a massive proliferation of bands. I could be wrong, but I’m guessing Astra Taylor doesn’t address this point in too head-on a fashion.

In 1974 the major labels dominated music and there really weren’t that many bands out there.

1965-1970: Nuggets, Rubble, Pebbles series. There were a dozen bands for every one that could pay for their instruments. The big difference is that though Perry Leopold and Jesus Sixto Rodriguez could get recorded, nobody ever heard their work. Now everybody can hear the niche artist’s work, so the artists don’t see themselves as utterly non-commercial.

Shirky at 17 nails it all.

Socialism and massive redistribution would help a lot, it was the great compression that made living easy enough to give minimal support (including recording access) to fringe and long-tail artists.

There might be another question, leaving socialism aside, as to why the top of the food chain grabs such a disproportionate amount of the sales. As usual, rather than blame the producers and distributors, I tend to ask why are you all going to see Captain America instead of staying home and watching Ida?

Perhaps just as some of us, oh the ones into Tibetan Bell music, can now via the internet find a community of sympathetic enthusiasts, so most of the rest, frightened of the possibility of semi-alienated and isolated consumption practices, deliberately and desperately seek out what everybody else (always some sub-set large than geek and otaku) is watching in order to feel some residual sense of community, in order to not be silent at the watercooler on Monday.

It used to be we all watched Bonanza because we lacked options. Now we (again, for a reasonably large we) watch Mad Men and Orange is the New Black as a way of escaping the oppressive number of options.

Am I mistaking Cowen’s argument? It seems that he is arguing that art revolutionizes through two means:

1. Rich patrons; and/or

2. People who can afford to be independently employed in the arts.

There are exceptions but there has always been a strong amount of truth in number 2. I say this as a former theatre director. The people who generally made it in the arts that I knew generally came from two groups:

1. People rich enough that daily expenses were not a consideration.

2. People who grew up knowing poverty so the Bohemian/hand to mouth lifestyle was nothing new.

People who came from well-off but not independently wealthy lifestyles generally had the hardest time adjusting to the hand and mouth existence of the artistic life. They had parents who supported them emotionally but not enough resources to support them financially in perpetuity. I was in this group and know many others in this group who eventually go to law school and/or stuff like advertising that pays the bills for a decent income.

There are a lot of artists who can basically afford to be paid little or nothing because of their family fortunes.

“Always. This is always true. The economy where an artist couldn’t make a killing but could make a living has never existed. ”

As an unqualified statement this strikes me as sheer nonsense, or rather dogma. What era is Mr. Shirky talking about? What in heaven’s name does he mean by “an artist”?

(And this has reminded me to go hear what’s new at Magnatune, for which I gladly pay. Hey! Something new by Shira Kammen, hurrah!)

Saul: “People who grew up knowing poverty so the Bohemian/hand to mouth lifestyle was nothing new.”

Adding on to Harold’s comment, and riffing off of a comment on a previous thread (about the 1960’s), it also depends on the general economy. For example, in the mid/late 90’s, it was probably pretty easy to do things, because jobs were plentiful. If somebody needed a flexible job, employers were probably willing. If somebody needed to float in and out of the paid labor market as needed, they could.

For contrast, it’s less likely now, in the days of ‘just in time’ scheduling, and massive un- and underemployment.

A. Music preceded speech in human cultural evolution. We sang before we uttered complete sentences.
This discussion doesn’t even go back as far as the wheel in its definition of the artist/culture interface.
It’s the severing of that deep connection that derails any but shallow cursory analysis of art and culture.

B. ” One must scramble relentlessly against the odds to try to reach the top. … ” if ‘top’ means financial success this is an artistically meaningless complaint.
If ‘top’ means artistic success a lot of respectable artists would say that evaluating success isn’t even possible for artists themselves, let alone for their spectators. Personally I think the conflation of financial attainment with aesthetic achievement is dangerously sleazy, however common it is now, however necessary food and shelter are to the artist.
The fame of Turlo O’Carolan, the Irish harper, his reputation still solid and strong 200+ years after his death, could be seen as success, but that has a lot more to do with the culture in which he lived, that cherished his gift and preserved his work, and its subsequent co-optation by a larger culture hungry for authentic art it’s mostly unable to provide for itself.
And the financial side of his success was more about getting enough to eat and a nice bed for the night than anything else economic.
Yet O’Carolan is arguably one of the most successful musicians of all time.
By musicians’ standards.
–
“Now you don’t talk so loud, now you don’t seem so proud
About havin’ to be scrounging your next meal
How does it feel,
how does it feel? ”

In 1965 the exclusive venue of US AM radio, with one or two big channels in/from major urban areas, meant Dylan could get “Like a Rolling Stone” in front of virtually the whole country’s youth.
Yet a decade later that success didn’t seem to have been an unmitigated joy:

“Now everything’s a little upside down,
as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped,
What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good,
you’ll find out when you reach the top
You’re on the bottom”

@19, Kevin, you’re probably right that the econonics of journalism works differently than everything else. Still, I find it striking how often I hear complaints from creators in other media that fit the supply/demand model–such as game devs complaining about prices on mobile app stores and Steam sales, or musicians complaining about Pandora. You are correct that not all media consumption is open to substitution like that. But much of it clearly is, and I suspect that content most able to avoid becoming substitutable commodities are the biggest blockbusters–content with big advertising budgets behind it, able to convince consumers to demand that and only that movie, song or book–the one that everyone else is talking about and they gotta have.

I realize that it’s also possible to escape substitution by appealing to such a narrow niche that there simply aren’t any substitute products. I’m less optimistic than I used to be about what percentage of potential buyers actually belong to any such narrow niche large enough to sustain an artist interested in catering to it.

I’m about 42 pages into a great book related to the topic above:

9.5 Theses on Art and Class, by Ben Davis (2013). A collection of essays in which Davis, formerly the executive editor of Artinfo, talks about Art the way too few critics do these days. You can read the central thesis online here:

Ben Davis

P.S. “download your attachment.”

Hey, what if my attachment is trying to avoid seeing me?

Here.
~

These communities are suffering badly in the modern economy. Their members never expected to be rich, but would very reasonably like to be modestly self supporting. That’s no longer an option for most of them

I would like to see some empirical support for this claim. Is it the case that there are fewer people supporting themselves as musicians, compared with whatever past period “no longer” refers to? Frankly I am skeptical.

Documentaries have always been made more for love than money. Their economic prospects – in an economy where online sharing is ubiquitous – are becoming ever worse.

Again: citation needed. How do you know they’re not becoming better?

From the OP: “Their members never expected to be rich, but would very reasonably like to be modestly self supporting.”

WHEN has documentary filmmaking been a viable career? Maybe the folks at Kartemquin in Chicago are doing well now, but it was a slog to get there; Ken Burns has a great model; Barbara Kopple has done pretty well – but for most documentarians, it’s not really a steady job.

Those who are arguing that today’s alarming shift in greater inequality is somehow “good for the arts” are propagandists for inequality. And they seem focused on painting, which is but one art form.

YouTube/Google DO allow some monetization of creative pieces that in pre-internet days would have never seen the light of day. Some of it should not see the light of day, but for whatever reason, it catches fire. (Kony 2012 is an example – but they had built an extensive social media network prior to that video.)

Art is never self-funded. Hemingway married women with money in order to get his writing career off the ground. Jane Austen made hardly a penny on her writing in her lifetime – and she had the regent supporting her! After Austen’s father died and before her brother started supporting her, life was a little dicey for the Austen women. Literature is one area supported not by the wealthy, but by the rank and file readers who buy the books. I guess Yglesias, et all can ignore that particular art form.

Music has been transformed by the internet. In the early days of radio and records, the profits went to the corporations, not to the Chuck Barrys. Now, someone like Macklemore has a bit more control over his fate – his overnight success was many years in the making. But he didn’t rely on corporate radio or big promoters to reach the public. He relied on YouTube (whose tag is Broadcast Yourself). See Rolling Stone for more on Macklemore’s “Cinderella Story” http://rol.st/Yqzz3J

The great robber barons of today and yesterday built empires on the backs of all those consumers who paid for their Big Macs and CDOs and gas and cheap cotton shirts, etc. So in the end, the people putting up all that money for the art consumed by rich people are the consumers who spend at WalMart and buy BP gas and got screwed by the banks backwards and forwards.

[Here’s a link to a fascinating story about Steppenwolf Theatre’s business model – one that relied on talent to build word-of-mouth to build ticket sales that led to the need for capital campaigns… http://bit.ly/1j9Wlue%5D

To Engels – I love The Third Man! Thanks for posting… need to introduce my children to that movie.

“The mechanism, basically, is that art-buying is mostly done by very rich people so when very rich people get richer, the price of art gets bid up.”

Hmm. Enlightened Holy Roman emperors of the 18th c. probably did have decent taste in arts, I’ll buy that. But the very rich these days? The Donald? Thanks, but no thanks.

The Assignation

Fame singing in the highways, and trifling as she sang, with sordid adventurers, passed the poet by.

And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song, to deck her forehead in the courts of Time: and still she wore instead the worthless garlands, that boisterous citizens flung to her in the ways, made out of perishable things.

And after a while whenever these garlands died the poet came to her with his chaplets of song; and still she laughed at him and wore the worthless wreaths, though they always died at evening.

And one day in his bitterness the poet rebuked her, and said to her: “Lovely Fame, even in the highways and the byways you have not foreborne to laugh and shout and jest with worthless men, and I have toiled for you and dreamed of you and you mock me and pass me by.”

And Fame turned her back on him and walked away, but in departing she looked over her shoulder and smiled at him as she had not smiled before, and, almost speaking in a whisper, said:

“I will meet you in the graveyard at the back of the Workhouse in a hundred years.”

(Dunsany, _Fifty-one Tales_)

You’re conflating two questions: does inequality help artists and does inequality help art. As per Neville Morley’s comment, Damien Hirst etc provides your answer.

re: Main Street Muse and engels above:

I think the questions being conflated (if engels is responding to MSM) are, again, “how does art get around” versus “how is art funded?” I very much like the idea that an amateur like Vivian Maier can make good art – and technology can assist with that.

However, it seems to me the unspoken argument is that more expensive forms of art aren’t worth paying for or doing, because we have all this amateur ‘public culture’ (supposedly). While I’m fine with settling for amateur status in what little poor art I do, and happy for the people who do make their way in traditional, “sustainable” artforms, I don’t think we need to hold this status quo up as an argument that we shouldn’t demand more out of our public allocation of the people’s taxes, or that we should abandon public funding of more expensive artforms.

Sorry- was responding to the OP.

You could just as easily connect art to big government.

From Bach, state employed, to Picasso’s Guernica, state commisioned, there’s probably more art connected to government (and related public organisations) than to private buyers.

And whatever i’ve seen of Damien Hirst (a bunch of pills in Munich i believe) it must have been in a public museum.

it’s mysterious to me how the classical eras of High Church art managed to be so good

Lots of practice? Some of them had two vocations for it (art and faith)? Without a cultural imperative to novelty/originality, they could improve incrementally, and thoroughly fill in the `good parts’ of their, er, solution space?

“many people don’t have any idea how much like the modern corporate-funded art world old church art was, and arguably worse in that you had to hew much more closely to acceptable cliches (in this case, the Ecce Homo), which were not just well-worn but literally centuries old.”

Errr, the Ecce Homo is a depiction of one of the most profound and saddest moments in Christ’s life. It’s a genuinely dramatic and moving scene, and is written to be such, with as much artistry as the author of John’s Gospel could muster (and that author was a talented artist in his own right). There’s no reason to suspect that the artists of the time didn’t believe that the subject wasn’t worthwhile and important.

Haven’t read all the comments here and don’t have time to do so at the moment, so I apologize if this has already been covered…

… but Steve Albini has a quite different view. In his mind the major media conglomerates of the past were far worse than Google or Youtube or Spotify:

“Record labels, which used to have complete control, are essentially irrelevant ,” he says. “The process of a band exposing itself to the world is extremely democratic and there are no barriers. Music is no longer a commodity, it’s an environment, or atmospheric element. Consumers have much more choice and you see people indulging in the specificity of their tastes dramatically more. They only bother with music they like. …

“On balance, the things that have happened because of the internet have been tremendously good for bands and audiences, but really bad for businesses that are not part of that network, the people who are siphoning money out. I don’t give a fuck about those people.””

http://qz.com/202194/steve-albini-the-problem-with-music-has-been-solved-by-the-internet/

I suspect, though I do not know, that there are more “people who are able to piece together some kind of a living centered on making good art, but who do stuff that is unlikely ever to be enormously commercially popular” than ever. At least in the U.S., and at least since the age of recordable media. That seems like a relevant piece of data. If anyone has pointers to sources for it I would be appreciative.

Yes it requires live performance — or patronage, via Kickstarter or something else — but it always did, as Albini described in “The Problem with Music”. Now the process is less controlled by music conglomerates colluding with mass media outlets and venues. I can see how this would be good for consumers and producers on balance, while still being destabilizing in some significant ways.

Stephenson @66:

But if merit is expensive, and thus available only to the wealthy, should we really care if merit is devalued?

I think this is the right question, with one caveat, which is that the notion of merit is itself tied up in interpretive communities, and is difficult to imagine outside a particular culture. (Stanley Fish and Pierre Bordieu walk into a bar…) You can see the difficulty of imagining merit outside of our own culture in this observation about the gap between movie critics and the general public: http://priceonomics.com/why-movie-critics-hate-tyler-perry/

There are certain art forms that can’t last without certain organizational (and therefore economic) forms. Blockbuster movies are one such category, and whenever I hear the people in Hollywood saying “If we don’t have enough scarcity in the visual form, we won’t be able to afford $200M of helicopter explosions!”, I always hear in my head a Pharaoh exclaiming that without indentured servitude, we couldn’t build pyramids.

True in both cases, in other words, but not the dispositive argument it is presented as.

Also, to Harald, a way up there @31, what I mean by “an artist” is “anyone who thinks of themselves as making anything their culture calls art.” This includes bed linens in some cultures and in others not, so there’s no real external definition.

And as a general statement, it was an observation that since the number of people who would like to be supported to make things is larger than any society is able to support, there are always losers. The fantasy that there should be some “normal” way to do the right things and end up with a career as a creator of novel cultural artifacts isn’t something that happens in ordinary society.

LFC – Mankiw advised Romney during his presidential bid and teaches (and reaches) larges numbers of economics students at Harvard. His textbook is used by many students in many universities outside of Harvard. In 2008, more than 25% of Harvard grads slipped into the current that took them straight to Wall Street. And the other Ivies had large percentages of students heading to Wall Street. Though my post was tongue-in-cheek, he is, alas, a significant influence in the world of economics, which is an awful thing to contemplate. The world is very different than today than the 1970s.

I do not understand WHY Mankiw is read as widely as he is. His “Defending the One Percent” was horribly written and poorly argued. “Imagine a society with perfect economic equality. Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product….” Like nails on a blackboard.

FYI – Mankiw also dances… http://bit.ly/SRh07f

Adam Gopnik: When you read the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop today, you are startled to realize that, in their day, Lowell was a god and Bishop still very much of an aspirant, a judgment that has almost been turned on its head now. The forces that propelled the change come mostly from below. No one biography, no one critical text, no one “reading,” and certainly no one publisher altered the view; readers altered it by reading and then talking to one another. It was the suffrage of ordinary readers that rediscovered Barbara Pym and remade Trollop a classic along side of Dickens. The literary marketplace turns profit; the community of readers makes reputations. (And guarantees the value of literary estates.) A study of the literary marketplace is essential in order to be honest about the development of the taste of a community of readers, but it can’t replace it. –Adam Gopnik, “Go Giants: A new survey of the Great American Novel,” The New Yorker, April 21, 2014, a book review of Lawrence Buell’s, “The Dream of the Great American Novel (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Every time this issue set comes up, someone brings up the “old model” vs “the new model” in order to point out “hey the old system was bad too!” There’s an unfortunate tendency to talk about the past primarily to dismiss present concerns.

With music, at least, folks who’ve studied the history of independent music know that the “old model” vs “new model” paradigm is a fairly ahistorical way of viewing things, mistaking a commercially dominant business model for the only one and erasing the historical diversity of business models and scales of operation. Dating back to the 40s at least, there was no old model, and now there is no “new” model. Instead, there have always been a multitude of models and scales and artists pick the model that makes the most sense for them. (It’s worth remembering, for example, that most working musicians have always been obscure by the standards of mass culture–obscurity alone certainly hasn’t been a barrier to making a living.)

Certainly some historic barriers and bottlenecks around distribution have been overcome–Taylor is certainly more than willing to acknowledge this; I read her as trying to leapfrog us past useless “internet good” v “internet bad” foolishness. Meanwhile, we’ve also see more consolidation in media ownership, radio playlists getting less diverse, etc.

My sense is that competition from “amateurs” is generally a red herring rather than an serious factor. This seems fairly clear when you examine actual data on listenership. When you talk to an indie artist who ten years ago had about the same size fanbase he has today but who now struggles because of the loss of recorded music income, he certainly doesn’t mention “amateurs” as a factor. Maybe he’s figured out a streamlined and more profitable means of touring (although, whoops, that meant laying off his entire backing band). And now he has to tour 180 days a year instead of 90. Perhaps it works, but it means being an absent father to his kids 50% of the time instead of 25%. People can argue as Shirky seems to that this phenomenon isn’t real, but it requires denying the lived experience of a whole lot of my peers!

Frankly, the distance between a musician making her living by creating work about her life and identity and politics and a musican creating work about how great it is to eat at Chipotle or whatever is so vast that to reduce that gulf to a question of “personal taste” seems like a serious analytical error.

@67-I have a lot of respect for Albini’s work as an engineer and there’s some grains of truth amid that minefield of falsely totalizing claims. But to be clear, he’s a guy who has decreed that music that uses drum machines is beneath his consideration , so it’s fair to say that his perspective, while sometimes interesting, generally reflects a quite narrow set of aesthetic and subcultural biases. And he seems eager to overlook that Comcast, Verizon, Apple etc are corporations as much as Geffen. Nor does he seem concerned that the majors’ influence over industry-wide business models has by no means abided.

Re a couple of the comments above that touch on govt support for the arts: I’d note that some ‘culture’ is also funded directly by public donations, at least in the U.S. Thinking of, e.g., (so-called) non-commercial classical radio stations: because they depend partly on donations from the listening public (as do other ‘public’ radio stations), they — or at least the stations I’m familiar with — give listeners what some marketing survey has apparently told them listeners want.

I.e., they define classical music as running roughly from Vivaldi to Rachmaninoff or thereabouts, ignoring most music written in the 20th cent, not to mention contemporary classical music. Also, and in interesting contrast to some nationalist bias elsewhere, relatively little American classical music is played: e.g., Ives, Barber, Piston, even Thomson, not to mention more recent American composers, are, istm, almost never heard on the classical stations. Playing Dvorak’s New World Symphony over and over is not an adequate substitute; not that it’s not a good piece, but the same warhorses are played over and over. I can’t really even listen to the New World Symphony any more.

@ 65 (and clew at 63, for that matter)
Excuse me if I seem dismissive of the great art of Christian iconography. Yet for people who have a special religious connection with this art, should it not also be the case that many other forms of art are just as worthy of consideration? No, mere self-awareness about the human condition should make abundantly clear that the traditional form of the Ecce Homo is accidental to a celebration of the life of Christ. Even if you believe that the scene itself is special through all history, and that its traditional depiction is also special (in this day and age of blond, blue-eyed hypercubed Salvador Dali Jesuses?), where is the sense of the all-encompassing nature of the divine, which should be found in all things?

The fact remains that there was very little choice in the subject matter for the artists – for one reason or another – and so the original artist’s voice found original expression in ways that were highly constrained by today’s standards. (Of course some of this was an accident of history and not a conspiracy: This whole discussion would be far different if the Internet wasn’t around and all folk art was doomed to limited distribution and obscurity.)

Other religions have had similar experiences, and I don’t know about the folk-art fringes of Christian art at the time. I can give an example which shows that the tendency of many to specially exalt Christian art, and its various offshoots (especially in painting), actually is quite limiting and may even do the subject a disservice.

Buddhists, at least, have not been blind to the cost of “quality” art. Take the monk Enki, for example. At a time when Chinese and Indian iconography was the standard, and production of this ponderous, “paramount” artform was effectively constrained by its huge costs to capital cities, this monk purposely traveled through the rocky, obscure, and underserved corners and mountain passages of Japan to tend to the people, write poems, and make small sculptures for the people.

For a long stretch of his life he probably carved a dozen pieces of wood per day – sometimes all small figures, and sometimes large interconnected pieces. Strikingly, Enki’s economy of gesture (literally, a few well-placed ax strikes) still makes great and moving art. The Christian art we’re all familiar with tends to be painstaking and demanding to make. Enki’s reputation has been made in part because his sparse work’s qualities seem typically Japanese to his postwar admirers – its broad reflections on emotion tailored for the person or community requesting the piece, ensuring its broad appeal; its dismissal of the lazy dichotomies between nature and artifice, and rough and finished; its bold lines.

But it’s also clear here that Enki willingly turned away, despite being obviously a craftsman of great talent, from the seemingly sure and safe path towards a kind of immortality. Long after many famous statues have been melted down for cannonballs, collections of Enki’s daily dozens still are found in little corners of secluded temples, and still appreciated.

You could insist that artists today have too much freedom, if you like. The fact also remains that we simply don’t know what artistic expression many of those artists would have found if they could have found expression outside the stultifying and inherently exclusive genre of church art – not to mention the many who simply couldn’t fit in.

Who is doing their religious service better – Enki’s lifelong, conscious journey to take carvings to the people, or the reverence of a Christian painter in following the traditional forms of his Church’s art? I hope you will join me in refusing this distinction. To do that, however, requires admitting that one has to make choices in art. If expressing creation’s variety is a virtue, however, there certainly is as much to be valued in the choice to do art as Enki did, rather than to do it in the European model. Maybe this is just a historical accident: In much of Europe, conditions favored the people’s being able to see artworks. In Enki’s Japan (and indeed the pre-modernist Japan before the ~1910s and the arrival of mass media publications), the art had to go to the people. But today, it seems to me downright parochial to insist that the Ecce Homo is exceptional beyond all (or even a majority) of other art forms.

@ Clay Shirky:

Funny, but your example of the Pharaohs and indentured servants (slaves, you mean) probably has more to do with Hollywood blockbusters – like the Ten Commandments. While the pyramids and temple complexes were certainly not “mass culture” in the sense that it didn’t allow just anybody to contribute artistic ideas, it was still a civilization that found a way to make art into a way of life for its people – as far as I know the consensus is now that those massive building projects kept people occupied during the seasonal floods. It was often Hollywood directors who didn’t care if the extras were dying.

The scenes of arbitrary toil and abuse of the workers seen in those films probably are just as accurate in depicting the treatment of the workers. As usual, the directors and owners didn’t realize they were aiming their barbs at themselves.

@ Kindred, 67
That kind of works for art, but there are still lots of kinds of art that we should care about which still cost money to make – possibly more than can be recouped easily. But that’s still essentially my view, quite a bit of the time.

@ bob mcmanus:
Also just wanted to acknowledge your great reply. Yeah, I agree with you on this.

Until a better solution comes along, I humbly submit the Have/Give Licensing model.

We can’t stop file sharing, shouldn’t try (poor children should have all the music and stories they want, and we don’t want cops and lawsuits everywhere), but we can ask those who share to donate if they can.

If the artists buy in, perhaps the population will.

We can’t stop file sharing, shouldn’t try (poor children should have all the music and stories they want, and we don’t want cops and lawsuits everywhere)

Do ‘poor children’ do a lot of file sharing? E.g. according to this page, 70% of people in social housing aren’t online…

http://www.21stcenturychallenges.org/60-seconds/what-is-the-digital-divide/

Kevin Erickson, what caused the loss of recorded music income? Are people copying indie albums? Are people listening on Pandora and spotify instead of buying CDs? Are people buying 1 single on iTunes? Did there used to be cross-subidy from other artists on the label?

Nobody’s mentioned poetry, or Jazz. Hard to make money at either, but hardly the fault of new technologies. And has anyone ever made money from documentaries? Harder now of course because so many more are being made thanks to the invention of the Sony VX1000 (and successors). Is cheaper video production technology a bad thing?

The affect of the internet on musical sales is very hard to separate from other factors such as demographics (teenagers and 20 somethings buy the most music, and there are now less of them), the CD bubble bursting (there was a huge surge in sales of older material caused by the creation of the CD in the 80s that was always going to be temporary) and simply changes in taste (has anyone considered that maybe indie musicians are finding it harder to make a living because indie rock has become less popular). Add to that the surge in video games (expensive), and it seems inevitable that music sales would have always declined.

Technology has caused some changes that have hurt musicians, but some were simply technical. Turns out people would rather spend 99C on the song they like, than buy the whole album. This has had a pretty significant affect on revenue. Technology has also helped musicians. It is way way cheaper to record now than it was in the 80s, or 90s. You can build a high quality home studio now – not an option in the 80s.

This might be the right place to mention that religion has probably never been a major source of inspiration for artists. It’s rather that, for a very long time, churches were their major source of income.

The Raven@80: Music doesn’t seem like it would be that impacted by a lack of net neutrality. The idea is that ISPs will slow down connections unless websites can negotiate a “fast-lane,” but music really doesn’t require very much bandwidth. If entry-level artists can’t even get 192kbps, we’re in deeper trouble than we thought. Net neutrality is more important to high-bandwidth uses like video.

Thanks a lot for the Taylor interview – especially for highlighting the fact that those who actually produce art have curiously been left out of the discussion or relegated to victim status. I cringe every time some “free/amateur culture”-advocate sheds some crocodile tears for artists not being adequately reimbursed by their label or publishing house, only to then conclude that it’s better if consumers like themselves rip them off by not paying anything at all and, hey, they should just get with the program, work for free, get a day job or go on tour more often. Finally someone with some street cred dares to tell them where they can stick it.

We could institute a global wealth tax. Or we could raise high the Red Flag and put the Waltons and the Kochs before a peoples’ tribunal.

You know, whichever.

LFC 77: The US public radio stations (usually NPR affiliates) that know do not actually contribute to artistic production. My classical radio station plays classical CDs all day long, and in the evening they play Jazz CDs. None of that directly benefits cultural production itself (I’m not sure, maybe there is a tiny royalty for playing the records). I always wonder during their interminable fundraisers why it costs so much money just to play records. In contrast, the genuinely public broadcasters that exist in many countries (e. g. Germany, UK, France) do actually support cultural and artistic production. They fund independent film makers, orchestras, commission radio plays, cover non-famous artists that would otherwise not get coverage, often provide a public forum to the local and regional cultural scene. I’m sorry but Americans really need to get out and widen their horizon a bit.

Thank you, TM.

It seems to me that a universal basic income would make a huge difference here. If every U.S. citizen was entitled to, say, $17K-$20K (adjusted for inflation and increasing productivity/automation of society) per year no matter what, then artists would have a much easier time making ends meet. Even a relatively modest amount of ‘top-up’ earnings, from personal performances or selling art on Etsy or whatever, would be enough to avoid poverty.

My comment “Americans really need to get out” is aimed at what I perceive as the general America-centrism of the whole “art and inequality” debate, of which we had three threads now, every one of them (ceterum censeo) an unforgivable waste of time. As an example, it has been repeated here ad nauseam that without rich tycoons there would be no classical orchestras (maybe even no libraries) and so on, claims derived from a very selective perception of American culture that betray profound ignorance of the rest of the world.

STH @100

are people listening to less indie music

I appreciate that this is an old fogey rant, but might this have something to do with the fact that musical fashion simply doesn’t move fast enough to create sufficient demand any more? One can understand the excitement around the Beatles, because nobody had ever seen or heard anything like them before*. Subsequent generations of musicians could claim to be the equivalent of the Beatles of X, where X is some sub-genre, or the Beatles from Y, where Y is a place or a social category. That’s still interesting, because it does offer some fundamentally new combination of ideas. It feels a bit like we’re past that now, and the effect is that whilst we continue to have new music, nobody expects to be surprised by it, or for it to matter in anything beyond the most superficial sense.

I had grown up with the idea that the music charts were a cultural institution of genuine importance, worthy of coverage not just on the radio, where you might expect it, but on television and in the newspapers; then, about 15 years ago, everyone just stopped caring. In fact, the period in which people genuinely cared lasted less than a lifetime. If the KLF turned up now, they might be able to get a #1 hit single, but nobody would want to buy a book about how they did it.

I wonder if part of the problem for musicians now is that they’re not just competing with their own generational cohort, they’re competing with past generations too. Around the mid-2000s there was a big post-punk revival, in which various bands tried to recreate the sounds of the early 80s. The thing is, those early 80s bands are still here and still making records. The same is largely true of the indie scene. If you were making disco music in the late 70s, or hair metal in the early 80s, or electronic dance music in the early 90s, you pretty much had the field to yourself. Even obscure acts could carve out a niche, because people wanted more disco/hair metal/dance music than existed at the time. But now? Who really needs another indie band, because they’ve listened to all of the others?

As a counter-argument, I certainly remember people saying similar things 20 years ago – that indie bands of the early 90s were hopelessly derivative, but they seemed to do OK. Maybe there really is a lot of new and creative stuff going on and I just don’t know about it because I don’t care enough to investigate. Perhaps. But I don’t really see why, if I wanted to listen to something that I haven’t heard before, I should pick up something new rather than try to find something old that I just haven’t got around to listening to yet. There’s almost certainly a lot more good old music out there than good new music. It seems that now, the only reason to buy new music is because you care about the artists because your friends do, because you saw them live recently, or because they’re getting press coverage. The decline in the relevance of the charts may be symptomatic of the fact that “new music” no longer correlates so well with “the most interesting music I can find”.

* That’s not to say that they weren’t derivative of others, merely that they were extremely effective at popularising their sound and many of the people they appealed to had never heard that kind of music before

#105: “But I don’t really see why, if I wanted to listen to something that I haven’t heard before, I should pick up something new rather than try to find something old that I just haven’t got around to listening to yet.”

Back in the late 1980s I had a drunken argument in a pub with a Man They Couldn’t Hang on precisely this issue, and he persuaded me (at that point something of a 1960s blues snob) that one should seek out the new precisely because it’s new, as anything else is cultural death and suffocating nostalgia. Admittedly, at various points this has got a bit difficult, as so much new music reminds me of things that were done better several decades ago – but the answer has often been to switch genre, to find things that don’t. Indie may be moribund; various strands of electronica aren’t.

Sorry, I don’t know why that posted twice; can anyone delete it, and this?

Like Ulysses.

“Well, in fairness, broadening your ‘own horizons’ from *Germany to countries in it’s general vicinity* isn’t exactely pushing the boat out.”

???

Which is itself a deep, pathological parochialism on your part, no?

Regardless of where TM might be from, you are now reading about Germany and America instead of America, and TM reads constantly about America. TM’s horizons, like many of the citizens of this planet, are broadened by default.

Ronan, I know America *plus* a few other countries (in particular Canada, Germany, Switzerland), which is far from representative of the diverse world we live in, I grant that, but it is more than knowing *only America*. Also, the point of citing specific examples e. g. from Europe is not to say that everybody should necessarily follow their example. The point is to show that there are other possibilities that parochial Americans are not even aware of. It just gets annoying to read over and over that institutions like theaters, concert halls, libraries, museums, universities MUST be the result of rich philanthropists because this is how it allegedly is in America – and even here it is a very selective view, most such institutions, whoever they are named after, wouldn’t survive without public funding.

I don’t know if it would really help, but I would like to see a scheme that made it dead easy to make donations to musicians that I listen to. That is, one that takes my spotify/lastftm/pandora/etc data and allows me, with a button click, to donate $X per listen per track directly to the musicians who made that track, after some easy-to-do adjustment per track, or musician.

That is, a voluntary licensing fee scheme that is as easy as possible to use. Here I don’t know what the donation “X” is, but I’d hope that even payments that listeners would regard as negligible would add up to a living wage for music that is not super-popular.

The overhead of such a scheme is likely modest, and would deal with two obstacles to supporting the arts: laziness, and the concern that money is not going to the right place.

More broadly, such a scheme could increase support for blogs and webcomics as well as music, and I’d think other things.

Random Lurker @ 106 and Me @118: Conveniently enough Wikipedia has a List of professional webcomic artists which lists artists who claim to make a living off their work, and it has over twenty-three entries.

And again, this certainly doesn’t mean webcomics are a particularly realistic way for most people to make a living. But considering that it’s sort of a niche medium to begin with, and considering how many people are perfectly happy staying amateur, and considering that the comic strip industry has kind of always been a bit iffy, the success rate seems decent enough.

Kevin Erickson, thanks for the link, but it doesn’t really answer the question of how musicians (or artists in general) actually support themselves. I have a perhaps ill-founded impression that a great many of them have day jobs.

Treating visual art as a stand-in for the arts in general in a discussion of the effects of money, as Cowen and Yglesias seem to be doing, makes no sense. Paintings and sculpture are collectible, which enables speculation. This changes the whole dynamic. The rich person who commissions Terry Riley to write something may get their name mentioned, but the one who buys something by Damien Hirst has a good chance to resell later at a profit. Rich people don’t think of themselves as fools, but they know one another and so are usually willing to bet on a bigger fool. The artists fueling this stand to get rich too, as the wealthy are competing with their money, but only a few of them. Speculators are not just buying what they like but they think other rich people will like in the future. This naturally leads to a superstar system, as everyone is trying to capture, but be one step ahead of, consensus taste (of their peers, not necessarily of the public). This is why Damien Hirst is rich, but Steve Reich and Derek Walcott are not.

Throwing in my pennyworth as a producer of mid-list books. I welcome what I take to be Taylor’s emphasis, as reported by Henry, on institutions and the specific decisions they make and powers they take. In the case of books, there has been a phenomenonal downward pressure on writers’ incomes exerted by Amazon alone, thanks to their ability to use their dominant market position to enforce a corporate decision that books should be cheaper, not because Jeff Bezos has an altruistic desire to reduce the cost of culture to the people, but because he welcomes the crushing effect permanently lowered prices have on the viability of all other cultural intermediaries, gatekeepers, distributors. Damaging publishers is a feature, not a bug. In no meaningful sense are Amazon prices ‘market prices’. They are internally planned. Amazon is a price maker, not a price taker. The efficiencies of Amazon’s reach and system probably do increase my sales a bit, but the market for freaky self-willed prose objects such as I like to construct is not terribly elastic, so the principal consequence of Amazon’s dominance is that I get paid less for the same number of sales. Thanks, Jeff.

I think Francis Spufford points us to something very important.

Many arguments about the effects of internet and other technologies implicitly look forward to a future state where “curation/distribution” is as badly paid as “creation” and yet similarly juiced with improved technological effectiveness. However, at this historical moment, it’s just not the case – we’re handing distributors a lot of power – and some of the abuse isn’t even intended.

Amazon’s search function/website is really great if you know the title or author. It’s really not very good if you don’t. The recommendation engine is subjectively not very good, and objectively tilted towards the top end of the power law distribution – the short head…

And all that is before you get to the price-making.

In less-constrained media – like Youtube, search has broken down completely. Virality still exists, but more and more the “hits” come from cross-promotion – and that cross-promotion costs money…

Ed Herdman:

There is some kind of real value in swapping ideas, and having one’s ideas survive

I’m much less interested in ideas than I am in craft. 10,000 people scraping a living from playing in bands (or writing newspaper columns, or writing mid-list books) are 10,000 people who can devote their whole working week to getting good at it. (Publishers used to pay first- and second-time novelists advances they knew they wouldn’t get back, because it would keep the writer going until they wrote something that would sell. Look at Jonathan Coe’s back catalogue, to name but one.) Out of 50,000 people doing these things in evenings and weekends, how many are going to have the dedication, the energy and the lack of other commitments to put in the same number of hours?

#126

Nothing against taxes funding the arts but your model is horribly complicated and Spotify / Pandora are already functioning along similar lines – with room for improvement of course and the monopoly is worrying, but piracy has gone down as streaming has gone up. I hope it’s only a matter of time until paid legal services will take over and piracy will be regarded as odious rather than hip.

There are great possibilities out there e.g: http://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en

@125 Bento and @127 Spurford
Bringing together these two comments – it seems part of the problem is that filesharing and Amazon et al has “taught” people that miniscule amounts – say $1 is the “right” price to pay for literature or music or at least that’s the right price to pay if you’re willing to pay at all (many seem happy with ‘free’).

Just a week or so ago we had +50 posts of outrage that L&W had plans to take down the works of Marx and Engels from a website, enforce their copyright and try to monetize it….the point is the same, once people get used to ‘free’ as the right price for intellectual work, art, music whatever, its a race to the bottom as to who is willing and able to provide their work at that price.

Its nice to suggest that maybe the public should support all of this activity through guaranteed incomes or any other such mechanism. On the other hand, if consumers of art were willing to pay a fair value for good work the same objective would be accomplished. I don’t see either as likely to occur any time soon, so the proverbial ‘starving artists’ will continue to be with us despite a collective view that art and culture are something good which should be widely available and encouraged.

it’s hard for me to imagine that, for example, software piracy could ever be considered odious.

Why? Are software developers supposed to work for free?

At the end of the day someone has to pay people to do stuff – it’s quite simple really.

Consumatopia,

Does your argument apply to art? Writing? Other things poor people might need?

Since my argument is that different kinds of intellectual property should be considered differently depending on the context, I guess the answer is “yes”, but probably not in the way that you’re thinking.

Consumatopia @122 Spotify’s closer to a marketplace, but it’s a heavily distorted one. The terms of the marketplace are basically set by the majors, who’ve set up a pricing scheme that works for them and the superstar scale and 360 deals they choose to operate with, but which makes things more challenging for artists/labels operating at more of a humane scale. This is a very different problem than if the downward pressure on pricing was fundamentally a result of a flood of new market entrants who don’t care about getting paid.

I agree that piracy isn’t the only problem, and I sort of regret that I’ve spent so much time in this thread on it because Taylor’s book goes so many other more interesting places. I think people focus in on it not because of a naive belief that if the government swoops in and enforces copyright better, artists’ problems would disappear, but because much of the left-leaning side of the conversation of the last 15 years has been stubbornly and insularly disconnected from reality on that particular point. It’s hard to have a serious conversation about the music industry without a baseline agreement that the problems created by piracy aren’t imaginary, aren’t simple to fix, and aren’t only hurting “the bad guys”. (And one of those impacts is race-to-the-bottom pricing to “compete with free”: Spotify’s main selling point for artists has been “even if the rates suck, it’s better than piracy.” Which is a debatable proposition, though it’s certainly better for Goldman Sachs!)

(Side note: one of the ways you can tell CT readers are smart: in the comments section of any other website, someone would have immediately brought up Radiohead’s pay-what-you-can experiment from seven years ago as “the obvious solution.” Wish I was exaggerating.)

But yes, there are other problems too, including: ownership consolidation (in the recorded music sector, the music retail sector, the telecom sector, and the broadcasting sector), weak state support for the arts (and what state support there is frequently mistargeted), etc., and part of the problem with the way people talk about the internet is that it allows us to imagine that these problems have magically been bypassed.

Agreed as well that music is often a poor analog for other IP issues. The one insight of Evgeny’s that’s stayed with me is that “the internet” bundles a bunch of technologies and concepts together in a way that doesn’t always encourage analytical clarity. The same is probably true of “intellectual property.” The dynamics associated with music copyrights are often very different (ethically, structurally, technically, and often legally) from other IP issues like access to academic research, prescription drugs, biotechnology patents. Collapsing it all into one category impedes understanding.

TM — Well, my looney fix-everything plan is to provide a minimum income based on annual supportable use of scarce environmental resources (basically energy, land and water). Can you live on less than your share? Trade the excess for lighter-weight pleasures. Want to get rich? figure out how to make good stuff with scarce material goods. (Is there actually enough for everyone to live on right now? How do we handle population growth, especially between countries? Enforceable without Skynet? It is more of a SF novel than a political plan.)

I’ve embarrassed myself enough in this thread, but I do want to admit that Kevin Erickson and Francis Spufford have convinced me that I underestimated the path-dependence of our current situation. The prices that we end up with aren’t somehow natural or inevitable like I assumed in my first post, but have a lot to do with the bargaining power of various large firms, and piracy has a lot to do with the story of which firms became large.

Driving on the wrong side of the road is wrong. … But … only wrong because we as a society laid down an arbitrary rule that we believe makes everyone better off

I’m not sure that’s a good example. Or do you want to argue that society could have equally reasonably decreed that driving on the wrong side is right?

Cian – the problem isn’t one of technology, but it is a problem which was created, in its current form, by a particular set of technological advances. I’m not sure why so many people find this so hard to say – the idea that new technology might bring far-reaching benefits is fairly uncontroversial, as is the idea that far-reaching changes generally have bad as well as good effects.

Agreed that it’s ultimately all about power, though – specifically, the power to put a price on the products of someone else’s labour. For as long as there are fixed costs of production, duplication and distribution to recoup, there’s a floor below which the retail price isn’t going to go, and the creators can – at least sometimes – nudge it up a bit to get their share, and create a business culture in which it’s normal for the creators to get their share (this is a local & contingent achievement, as the achievements of labour often are). If initial production’s cheap & duplication and distribution are basically free, the retail price can go as low as the seller wants to put it, and the creator’s margin… what’s that?

See also: MOOCs.

First, tremendous thanks to Henry for the generous reading and smart reflections. I’m a longtime fan of Crooked Timber, so this is exciting. I’m also sorry to have not weighed in already, but I’m traveling, seriously jetlagged, and have barely been able to skim all these (very smart) comments.

Clay, it’s extremely nice to see you here, thanks for your thoughts. You do get a bit of a drubbing in the book but nothing I’m sure you can’t handle. I hope you find time to read it, as it engages with your work in various ways. I’d be keen to hear your thoughts.

Though Henry has done an excellent job of communicating the book’s character, I do want to underscore that it is not just about the arts or fine art nor is it specifically about the “plight of mid-list creators.” Rather the book looks at our changing media landscape and asks if, on the whole, it is as democratized as Internet optimists claim. My answer is no, but my real aim is to point readers toward some possible paths we might take to make good on the Internet’s tremendous potential and to foster a more deeply democratic culture. Not to spoil the ending, but in a nutshell I argue we can’t expect a combination of technology and free markets to do this for us (duh). Unlike many eminent tech writers, I see the market as the source of many of our problems (instead of vague condemnations of the “old” ways of doing things) while also envisioning a positive role for the state and recognizing the need for public subsidy.

And, to be clear, I argue that the erosion of the middle/mid-list has implications for our culture that go beyond issues of taste. I think this is really about democracy and the erosion/commercial corruption of our public sphere.

Kevin Erickson@75 brings up some essential points.

As Kevin rightly insists, there are no clear “old” and “new” models. As I say in the book’s introduction, continuity is as essential to the story as change, but less emphasized by tech commentators. The old “dinosaurs” — the big three record labels, Disney, Comcast, you name it — have not become extinct but are adapting, and quite well. Many of the problems that plagued the “old” media system have carried over into the digital domain—consolidation, centralization, and commercialism—and will continue to shape it. The “new” model, if it exists, is evolving in predictable ways. Look at net neutrality and the impending threat of two-tier broadband service (an Internet for the 1%), or the way Facebook is increasingly pay-to-promote. Look at how consolidated the digital sphere has become in a relatively short span of time or the pervasiveness and invasiveness of advertising, from sponsored-content to data tracking/mining. In countless ways, money distorts the online cultural playing field and this will only intensify over time unless we collectively figure out ways to put on the breaks. Thus I think the picture Clay paints is over-simplified. Amateurs are not competing on an even playing field, or a playing field where the old guard has been obliterated.

(Related to this, I don’t really follow Clay’s comment @26 about Amazon. Surely we can support the idea of a publishing platform that allows all manner of writers to distribute their work at low or no cost while also being critical of Amazon’s cutthroat business practices—recall the so-called “Gazelle Project,” in which small publishers were the gazelles and Amazon the cheetah—while also being aware that they prominently feature and promote big players who pay up and that they have incentives to elevate Amazon-produced material).

Kevin also hits the nail on the head with this:
“My sense is that competition from “amateurs” is generally a red herring rather than an serious factor. This seems fairly clear when you examine actual data on listenership. When you talk to an indie artist who ten years ago had about the same size fanbase he has today but who now struggles because of the loss of recorded music income, he certainly doesn’t mention “amateurs” as a factor.”

Clay traces the problems Henry summarizes to the increased “visibility” of amateurs allowed by new technologies. Like Kevin, I think Clay’s framing is misleading. This isn’t a pure supply and demand problem. Clay writes “I think that more people making and showing things to other people is per se good, whatever it’s effect on the market for cultural production.” Of course I think more people making and showing things is good too. I know that other tech critics have disagreed on this point (Keen called amateurs monkeys with typewrites, Lanier writes dismissively about the hivemind) – but I do not share their perspective and am in fact quite critical of them. I think the whole framework of amateurs vs. professional is a distraction from the bigger political economic picture. In any case, critiquing aspects of the digital economy is not the same thing as being anti-amateur. Likewise, pointing out worrying trends does not preclude one from recognizing positive attributes of new technologies or acknowledging the ways some things have improved for creators thanks to the Internet (which I love). My book is not nostalgic for some lost glory days because I am not nostalgic.

I also, of course, completely agree people will produce art and culture for nothing—that’s what human beings do!—and I acknowledge as much. But I also think that pointing out that there are some forms of cultural production that require financial support does not negate the fact of our creative natures.

And finally, at least for this already too-long-comment, I do not agree that buttressing the “missing middle” of cultural production would necessarily require “reducing the freedom of amateurs and audiences to find one another.” I see investing in institutions as a necessary counterbalance to a world where more content is going to be produced by the big tech giants (Amazon, Google, Yahoo and more are all getting into content production) and public relations specialists/marketers who are more empowered than ever. We could, as a society, make the choice to invest in robust publicly subsidized non-commercial journalism, meaning there could, hypothetically, be plenty of paid journalists in towns and cities across the country, without squelching the rights of amateurs to express their opinions online. I don’t see it as a zero sum game and in fact I think amateurs—citizens, all of us—would be better off.

The unquestioning acceptance of music as entertainment commodity, pure and simple start to finish, undergirds this entire discussion.
Something you make that someone else either wants or doesn’t. No different ultimately from shoes or purses.
That’s a completely bogus condition and it’s unraveling, even as the major beneficiaries of that commodification keep the central question off the table.
What is music in our lives?
The default is it’s a luxury, an entertainment, something to amuse, background noise for the real things we do.
A commodity.
Yet every significant cultural moment, except birth itself, has a soundtrack. Because music is a spiritual artifact, not an amusement
Music is not a commodity, it has been commodified.
Just as human beings are not commodities but have been commodified.
Until quite recently that was a consensus accepted thing, and it’s still happening in some of the darker corners of the world. Most of the discussers here strenuously object to that, rightly enough.
But since for all our lives our access to music has been entirely through the channels of commodity, it’s hard to see it any other way. Even though that state of affairs is less than a hundred years old.
That attitude, of commodity and subsequent market control, has led directly to oligarchical dominance, a topic that has, in a larger social context, some serious weight at the moment.
We can all see the changes coming, but it’s the kids who are living them, and they’re struggling to get out from under that dominance.

This guy is 17, and popular:

I won’t compromise
I won’t live a life
On my knees
You
Think
I am nothing
I am nothing
You’ve
Got
Something coming
Something coming
Because

I hear God’s whisper
Calling my name

It’s in the wind
I am the savior
(Bring it again!)

Raury God’s Whisper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPt0LkdM8Bc

TECH N9NE’s Straight Out The Gate’s is moving it that direction too.
I’s not peripheral, it’s at the heart of things. Back to the real place of music in our lives, central, spiritual, confirming.

Oh, and thanks to Astra for following up.

One of the points the book makes is that anyone who thinks “the greed system” has collapsed or is collapsing is not paying very close attention.

Astra, thanks for chiming in. Although I think this comment:

“Clay…it’s nothing I’m sure you can’t handle”

so you’re not *sure* he can’t handle it, but you kind of think maybe he can’t? You’re nicer than that, aren’t you? I think you meant “I’m sure it’s nothing you can’t handle” or “it’s nothing, I’m sure, that you can’t handle”

On more substantive matters.

Novakant, as Kevin and Astra point out, Spotify (and Pandora, Rhapsody, Rdio, et al.) are not really making that much money for artists, so it is not a solution to the problem I was aiming at, at least not yet. But let’s see what a Spotify type solution would look like. I’ll focus on Spotify, because it’s one I use, so I know more about it than some of the others.

According to Spotify’s website, they pay 70% of their revenue to rights holders (artists or labels), yet a stream (instance of a track being played) produces less than a 10th of a cent in such revenue. Why? Well, the bulk of their audience is advertiser-supported (i.e., free), and per-hit advertising revenue on the Internet sucks. Spotify says they need to provide a free service because they are competing with and trying to wean their users from piracy. I find it hard to argue with that. They also say they want over time to move their users to the paid model, also easy to believe as it is clearly in their interest, as well as that of the artists.

If Spotify did transition its users to paid access, could it provide a decent income to mid-level artists? Let’s play with some numbers. Spotify costs $10 a month. If a user plays 2000 tracks a month – and I suspect this is above average, as it is about 130 hours of listening – that’s half a cent per stream. 70% of that is about 5 times what Spotify is paying now. If you have 20,000 fans playing your songs 20 times a week on average – that’s about $1400 a week. For the label, if you are signed, and you get a percentage of that. Still, depending on the size of your band, your arrangement with your label, other expenses, that might be getting viable. And Spotify is internationalizing as quickly as they can, so you have the whole world to draw on to get your 20,000.

So it does sound like something that can work, but it requires people to decide that commercials are annoying enough to pay to avoid, but not so annoying to just go back to piracy. It’s not clear that this sweet spot exists for most folks.

So what if we try to do essentially the same thing on a non-profit or musicians co-op basis?

The fundamental problem Spotify et. al., as well as the record labels, face is that they are asking people to make a moral choice to their benefit while they themselves are for-profit corporations, which are fundamentally amoral entities. It is hard to be guilted into anything by an FPC. A non-profit musician’s cooperative has a much better chance here. After all, the fair trade movement has done surprisingly well, and people don’t feel personally invested in who grows their coffee as they usually do in who makes their music.

OTOH, one advantage an FPC has is that it traditionally can do much better at raising capital – necessary in a field where losing money for several years is a given. Crowdfunding may change this calculus. A lot of it will be artists appealing directly to their fans.

An overall objective, whether the operation is for-profit or not, should be generating a body of work that stays substantially outside the mp3verse. Suppose you make some of your music available only through apps running on iOS, Android, and perhaps some others. To get this particular music, fans would have to use an app; it would not be available on CD or iTunes. On this particular front, the majors have a disadvantage, since they deeply leverage back catalog material, all of which, save real rarities, is well-established in the mp3verse. Only new work has a possibility of staying outside the mp3verse (or newly released, but there probably is not much of that with mass appeal). Whether it will ultimately be possible to keep work from the mp3verse is an open question. Android and iOS have DRM support built in, and both have suffered some defeats. It’s an arms race. However, if the only legitimate venue for a recording is some form of streamed media (whether with one provider or several), then any mp3’s that exist can be presumed pirated. One can bring pressure on ISPs and such much more easily without the ambiguity that people may just be backing up their own CDs.

This, of course, is not ideal either. It means giving up on the CD – if you print it to CD, it could end up as mp3, and, since this can be legitimate and legal in some circumstances, attempts to prevent or sanction it have to look at the specifics of each case, which is deadly to efficient enforcement. It also locks people to streaming media (which can also include downloaded files, of course, but played through an app), which opens the door to all the very legitimate privacy concerns people have. That is another reason to use a musician’s coop people will trust, backed by enforceable guarantees that prevent that trust from simply being monetized through its violation (see Investment Rating Agencies).

But the most serious problem is that what struggling musicians need most is exposure and keeping the music in walled gardens limits this. People will have to navigate this tradeoff. For example, a few songs could be made widely, perhaps even freely, available to try to attract interest in the others. The coop could have a free and paid version as Spotify and others do. The free version, however, would not have full functionality – not all tracks available, and radio format rather than on demand. This is to function as radio traditionally has from the artist standpoint: as a loss leader to attract an audience. One way to compete with Spotify here is to let it be a pure loss: no advertising. It brings in almost no money anyway. It also helps that a huge number of artists can be aggregated into the same service, as at Spotify and others, and paying for the sake of some provides access to all. This means that the marginal cost of any new track or artist to you is still zero. You just have to be dragged across the threshold of paying something.

In any case, I could develop this further, but I don’t even know if anyone is paying attention to this thread anymore, so I’ll set it aside for now.

Well, yes, Those Who Are Always Listening are no doubt listening now. Hopefully, someone (besides you) interesting is listening as well.