Freshman Seminar 43z Final Project

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Point 1: Recorded music is not “free promotion” for a producer’s live shows.

“…Albums take months to create, from conception to the final product, and consist of layers upon layers of sound that I have specifically woven together to get the music from my head to the hard drive.”

This article is written by an independent music producer named Stephen Hummel, who disagrees that independent artists have been reaping the benefits of the crumbling music industry and booming digital age. He refutes the notion that recorded music has simply become promotional material rather than an art form in itself by comparing the situation to the film industry- should the movie be considered advertising for the Broadway play? In his vein of thought, the recorded music is the original product and the performance is an offshoot of the hard work that has been put into every track. Similarly, the “Avengers” movie is a performance of the original comic books, despite the minor aesthetic and plot differences. This is, on a more local scale, the way that derivative works function under US copyright law. Additionally, Hummel pushes the importance of recorded music in everyday life as evidence that they deserve much better treatment than free advertising, especially from an industry that is supposed to celebrate creativity. Hummel also discusses how the differences between how recorded music and live music make it nearly impossible to create an album with a show in mind or produce a show exactly like an album. In fact, encouraging this mindset is actually deteriorating the music industry further, since there are hundreds of artists who don’t perform well live, and just as many whose studio albums are best heard in person. In Hummel’s own words, “People couldn’t come to my shows expecting to hear the tracks off my albums.”

Point 2: Merchandise and licensing shouldn’t have to be a music producer’s main source of income.

“…Why should I have to sell t-shirts, if it is my music that people want from me? Shouldn’t it be about the music? And what if I don’t want to sell my track to a commercial about toilet paper?”

Hummel argues that the idea that independent artists (or even well-established artists with a record deal) should have to do anything other than make, sell, and perform music to survive is ridiculous. Even though there are other opportunities for artists to make money outside of the actual music doesn’t mean that they should have to pretend that seeing their hard work for free makes them happy. Alternately, a restaurant should not have to let a diner halfway across the country sell their award-winning pie, even though they make money every night from all the other dishes on their menu. As Hummel says, “One stream does not negate the other.” Additionally, studies that have shown that illegal music sharing helps reach new audiences and benefits artists are too easy to skew to produce the results the researchers want. Ones done by organizations independent of the music industry go back and forth with the agreement of their results. Long story short, there is not much evidence either way, but what there is points to the idea that illegal sharing hurts artists more than it helps them.

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Point: The RIAA has gone through great lengths to shut down potentially beneficial filesharing applications because of their commitment to preventing illegal downloading.

“In the 2008 trial of the RIAA vs. The Pirate Bay, the RIAA are seeking $13 million dollars in damages for 34 cases of copyright infringement- one per file. If this is true, that means the download of one file… is worth about $382, 353.”

            The technological innovation that began with Napster in 1999 has slowed to a crawl in the past five years due to lawsuits from the RIAA because of the role of illegal downloading in filesharing applications. Alternatively, the industry for filesharing mediums boomed directly after Napster’s takedown, but those start-up sites were also targeted by the RIAA and taken down quickly. The case of MGM vs. Grokster set the precedent for filesharing sites and software creators to be held liable for third-party infringement, even if the sites could serve another, legal purpose. Both Groker and Morpheus, the two filesharing applications on trial, could be used to beta-test video games, find bugs in new software, and generate hype for literature, a difficult market to advertise in. Both included a section of the application specifically dedicated to helping new artists gain recognition as well. In the end, the Supreme Court decided that the creators of the two applications kept distributing their software with the knowledge that most of its content was illegal, and both were shut down. Contradicting this, in the trial of John Deep vs. RIAA the court decided that the ratio of illegal to legal content of Aimster could not be effectively determined, and therefore it could not be shut down. In order to combat the slowing of technological advancement in the realm of music advertising and sharing, the Open Music Model was created. Mainly, the OMM advocates a completely open and free market for music, complete with open file formats. They encouraged the music industry to consider “Playment”, a business model where consumers could download whatever they wanted for a low monthly fee from a comprehensive library, similar to iTunes. The current Apple model, however, costs too much for the average consumer to use as a first option, because prices are determined by the needs of the artists, managers, record labels, and royalty owners all rolled into one 3-minute track. Potentially, streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora can help revamp the innovation that was quelled by the RIAA’s rampage in the early 2000s.