A couple of weeks ago I attended the Music Nova Scotia awards weekend in Cape Breton. The keynote address was presented by Peter Jenner. He's the original manager of the Pink Floyd and his talk was mainly about how he had no professional training as an artist manager and that that was a good thing because he wasn't tied down by the rules and industry standards.
Anyway, as interesting as his keynote address was, he also ran a panel discussion about audio streaming and revenue. Or I should say, he dominated the discussion. Most of the panelists appeared timid and nervous of saying too much or of going on record saying anything disparaging about the major record labels or other large corporations who profit off music and creativity. Mr. Jenner, on the other hand, pulled no punches and was very open about sharing his disgust of radio djs, major labels, governments, corporations, etc. Nonetheless, he did discuss quite a few interesting thoughts and ideas.
One point he made was that it does not make sense to treat online, digital music the same way we have treated physical forms of music (i.e., records, cassettes, cds). He also made some very interesting points about how we need much better organisation globally in order to track and collect the information about what music is being played/streamed/downloaded online. He claims that the large companies (which also would include SOCAN) are able to profit off a lack of information because unclaimed money sits in what he referred to as a "black box" which the companies get to keep because there is no information to track it back to the rightful recipient.
He currently manages Billy Bragg, but as he stated, if Billy's music is being downloaded in certain foreign countries as "Bill Brag" then the money does not get back to Billy Bragg himself. He seemed to speak quite poorly of Spain and China when it comes to distributing royalties.
I cannot recall all the details of everything he talked about so please don't get upset if I cannot repeat exactly what he said and please do not ask me to explain his position in finer detail. But nonetheless, it was a very interesting talk.
One thing I did get from his talk is that he says we need a new system for monitoring and managing online music. The old systems and methods simply will not work. He also said that the solution will not occur in our lifetime. Then again he's in his seventies so some of us might see some improvement. He said we need to develop something similar to the the banks. He said someone can go to any bank anywhere in the world and get money from their account (if they have money) so we should have some sort of global way of keeping track of an artists creation which could be tracked no matter what country the download is occurring in.
I would also like to point out too that we should not simply lump everyone who thinks music should be free into one big group. Not everyone in the world holds the same philosophical belief in such things as "intellectual property." When I worked at a university writing centre helping people write PhD theses as well as undergrad term papers, a frequent "problem" we ran into with foreign students was that they had no idea about citing sources because in their countries a thought cannot be owned. All knowledge is considered to belong to all humans and no thought can be considered to exist in isolation and is instead intricately connected with all other thoughts forming a beautiful whole that is our collective human culture.
Yes, a lot of youngsters in our neck of the woods are grabbing music for free to fill up their iPods, iPhones, etc, but aren't they just doing what our greedy capitalist religion and way of life is telling them to do, since profit is what is of utmost importance. Besides, there is too much music being made nowadays and most of it is redundant and it sucks. It's honestly not worth paying for anyways. Is this a case of supply and demand? There is so much music, nobody can possibly digest it all. We've flooded the market and so the value and price has almost completely dropped to nil. And yes, I am aware that this opinion might put us all out of work, but perhaps music, culture, and creativity should be more important than profits and money. Even if recorded music becomes monetarily worthless, won't the human spirit and drive to create still find ways of creating art? Then again, if we continue to allow the large corporations to enforce their legal rights to intellectual property the way they presently do, I feel like everything creative will eventually be owned by the company with the most money and the best lawyers and then we will truly have the death of art because every thought, idea, and means of expression will be copyrighted and owned.
I know I am rambling now. I don't have the answers. Just lots of questions and thoughts. Don't take anything I write here as my be all and end all stance or opinion. I'm struggling like the rest of you. However, I don't think the answer lies in waiting for the lawyers and corporations to figure stuff out, so until then I say let's continue to steal and pillage all that humans can create. As Paul Gauguin said, "Art is either plagiarism or revolution." And as Picasso may have said (or did he plagiarise this quotation?): "Good artists copy, great artists steal."
By tomorrow, I will likely have a different opinion. Don't quote me. But feel free to plagiarise anything I mentioned. Ha ha!
Here's an old but interesting article about so-called "intellectual property":
http://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Joh ... ticle.html