Steal This Music

I ran into a friend of mine at a local used record store last week.  I was going on and on about a Rickie Lee Jones EP but his mind was clearly somewhere else.  He had just seen the picture of David Lowery's performing rights royalty statement on the Internet; the one where Lowery demonstrated he had received $16.89 for one million plus  plays of his song "Low" on Pandora. 

             My friend is a music aficionado with refined tastes and leftist leanings and he was clearly pissed. "If the artists are making so little money why don't we just steal their music?” he asked. 

            My response to this question usually depends on how cranky I am.  I basically have three answers. 

            First: right, why don't we just steal the music?  That cat escaped the bag a long time ago.  Everything is available on the Internet and if you don't know how to find it, your teenager does.  Despite the fact that stealing music in 2013 is morally no different than when I walked out of a drugstore in 1967 with the latest 45s tucked under my shirt, it's certainly a lot easier. 

            Second: send the RIAA and their army of lawyers out to sue everybody.  Hell, given the kind of month I've had financially I might even sign up.  Despite the ludicrousness of suing college students and single mothers and despite the fact that even the RIAA seems to have stopped pursuing this strategy, until technology develops an effective way to stop illegal file sharing, mass lawsuits or the government taking down Internet empires like that which belonged to Kim Dotcom  (Megaupload)  may be the only truly effective way to stop spreading illegal music.  

            Third, the real answer is that the music business is now on the honor system and whether we like it or not streaming and similar services are not just the future, they are the present.  I don't particularly like this model.  I'm a dinosaur and like to own physical records but I can't ignore reality.  I wrote about this same subject a while back (http://tripaldredgelaw.blogspot.com/2012/07/in-defense-of-emily-white.html.)

            It’s a turf war and a number of battles are being fought right now over the issues between performing rights organizations, publishers, record companies and artists.  The field is a mess but the royalty situation may improve over time as these different battles shake out.  Everybody's fighting for a bigger piece of an ever-shrinking pie, but I can tell you from some of the recent talks I have heard on the subject, the fights are very serious and they are very real. 

            Artists like Lowery, who presumably were at one time signed to major record deals and major publishing deals really don't have much say in the matter, if they signed away their rights to their master recordings and musical compositions.  I could point out that Lowery just displayed his BMI statement which is just one piece of the pie. He should also be credited with royalties from his record label and his publisher but the fact remains, its still not a lot of money. Truly independent artists, those who still own the rights to administer their masters and their publishing interests can choose to avoid being on these sites (if they are careful in selecting their distribution methods).  The downside to this is that they risk losing exposure to a rapidly expanding audience. 

            It is all daunting but it really does feel like the beginning of a major technological shift. Should artists and songwriters be patient? No, of course not; they need to keep up the fight on all fronts…but we’re not helping them or ourselves by stealing.  

In Defense of Emily White

A month or so ago, Cracker front man (and music business school academic) David Lowery wrote "An Open Letter to Emily" which, as most people know by now was a response to a blog by Emily White, a not quite 21-year-old intern at NPR's "All Songs Considered".

            Lowery's piece is a well reasoned, measured and documented explanation of how stealing music has hurt musicians and songwriters. The  article went viral and was "shared" by everyone I know.

            I read Lowery's piece before I read Emily White's blog post so I decided that in all fairness I needed to see exactly what she had to say.  It turns out that as good as the “open letter” is, Lowery almost completely misses White's point.  White's blog "I Never Owned any Music to Begin With" reveals an honest portrait of a young person growing up in the internet world.  White is not championing stealing music (although she admits to having done so).  She is also refreshingly not one of those people who jump on the bandwagon of "the new paradigm" (e.g. give the music away for free so you can sell a ticket and/or a t-shirt).

            As an aside,  the part of White's blog that probably irks Lowery and others is the section where she describes "sitting on the floor of my college radio station ripping music onto my laptop" from the promotional album sent to the radio stations by record companies.  I submit that this has been done forever (through various forms of media) and that anybody who works in the music business at any level will admit that they love getting free stuff.  Also, I think that people like Emily White are  this generation's culture vultures – they love music, they absorb it and in some ways help illuminate what's good and bad for the rest of us.  That's what college radio did before colleges started shutting down these stations. But, I digress.

            White's major point is that while she has 11,000 songs in her iTunes library, she has only purchased 15 physical CDs in her lifetime.  Her point is that she doesn't care about owning the physical artifact.  For someone who grew up in the album era and still obsesses over his record collection, this is shocking.  However I have witnessed the same phenomenon in my teenage daughter, who is a huge music fan and whose tastes are as eclectic as they come.  She listens to music constantly, primarily through Pandora and songs purchased from iTunes.  I just counted and she has exactly 30 CDs in her collection.

            White is not arguing that music should be free and that David Lowery should not be paid.  She is asking for "one massive Spotify-like catalogue of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices".  I can remember fantasizing about the same thing as a kid – now it is very nearly a reality.

            To those who argue that Spotify's payment system is unfair – I am not sure that the issue has been fully and finally determined ,yet but I can think of two initial responses.  First at least someone is providing a mechanism that pays  for music and therefore combats piracy and second, as old line music publishers used to say, music is "a penny business".  For better or worse there are more sources of pennies now.  Also, Spotify is now second to iTunes in terms of generating revenue for record companies – so it's not going anywhere.  It has been said so many times before, we are witnessing a huge change in the way the music business is structured.  It is painful for a lot of people, from performers to studio owners to lawyers but I can't help thinking that the core components of the business – artists and their fans are in a healthy position.  The rest of us need to learn to adapt. I don’t like it any more than David Lowery but it is reality.