The Atlantic's Derek Thompson asks a reasonable enough question, one (as he points out) the music industry has been asking ever since Napster changed everything, for them (the music industry) and for us (end users). Thompson also correctly points out that the situation extends beyond the obvious one, of people simply finding download sites to steal music from, now more than ever it's the streaming sites such as Pandora that enable and facilitate this sort of consumption of product.
As any current working musician will tell you, the product (you know, the music) has become secondary, almost peripheral, to the overall process. In the past, technological limitations necessitated that the food chain of production, manufacture, promotion, and distribution of the product were where all your marginal costs existed and could be optimized. Obviously, that is no longer the case; bands now cover their nut by touring and selling swag.
This is somewhat ironic, since those four "food chain" costs that were so central to the old music industry revenue model have all been rendered practically null and void; even a modestly talented, ambitious, and entrepreneurial individual can create, promote, and sell quality product for under a couple grand, where even 20-25 years ago bands racked up six figures in debt creating 45-50 minutes of music that still had to be trucked to record stores across the country. Production and supply chains have altered, and radically in favor of the content creators. This is true not only of music, but of books. (And teevee, of course.)
Of course, lowered barriers to entry also enable purveyors of crap to proliferate in all those media. But that is a subjective, aesthetic decision best left to the fabled market to sort out. Someone who's just peddling shit can certainly make some bank, but when has that not been true? The other side of that coin is that the true artist, whose voice can't or won't be silenced, now has an abundance of affordable venues which he or she can easily access to ply his or her wondrous wares. They don't have to sell their souls to some record company that's going to fuck them over and hose them on recoupable costs anyway. Certainly reasonable people can agree that this simple, clear benefit greatly outweighs the nuisance factor.
There are several dynamics at work here, as far as the music industry goes (we'll get back to books). One is the prevalence of selling single tracks for 99 cents, rather than packaged albums for 12 or 15 bucks (which generally means a built-in pricing cushion. From a marketing standpoint, this constrains the producer's ability to test variances and find a viable price-point equilibrium; that is, if the main pool of consumers come to believe that a "song" is "worth" 99 cents and no more, then you'll have a tough time convincing them to pay 12 bucks for a ten-song "album" running about 45-50 minutes, whose length in the first place was determined by the physical and technological constraints of earlier media such as vinyl records and magnetic cassette tapes.
Another ongoing dynamic is that the trend (insofar as to where the money and activity are gravitating) is content curation rather than creation. This is why blogs, to use one example, are a dying model as far as viability goes -- consumers have been herded past mere consumption, and on to aggregation. I think for someone under the age of 20-25, this would make no sense, but for people who have been around long enough to gain a sense of perspective, it is more clear -- not only has the prevalence of computers and software changed the way we think, perceive, and process data, but the changes themselves are coming at an accelerated rate.
So people's attentions have changed from the singular focus to a band or a song or a news factoid, and to a sidebar clutter of external links, an endless daisy chain of distractions. This is what content curation is all about -- being able to provide the quick eyeball fix that the clicker is looking for, and then having something ready to go on the page that the clicker didn't even know they wanted.
When I graduated from high school in 1985 and entered college for a brief attempt, I took a marketing course in the second semester (in fact, I had a marketing minor for my Biz Ad major). I went in and came out of that course with the cynical (but true!) observation that marketing, at its essence, is simply the art of convincing people to spend money they don't really have on shit they don't really want. I wouldn't claim any special insight to this, except to note that I was all of 18 years old when it occurred to me, and my attentions were otherwise engaged, mostly on beer, guitar, and girls (not necessarily in that order). Perhaps a more nuanced way of putting all that would be to say that a good marketer encourages people to find money for things didn't know they wanted, until the marketing made them aware of those things.
Now, in my second, more recent go-round at the university system, I additionally internalized the rather obvious marketing concept that when someone buys a product -- especially a creative product -- they're not just buying that product, but also the experience of buying the product. It could be the affirmation of finding a great new band that hasn't been popularized and diluted yet, or finding a book that you truly think will get you over some hump in your life. It happens to all of us, it's not foolish at all. Marketers realize this essential truth -- that every one of us (including the marketers themselves) wants something, usually something that will get them laid, make them more money, or make them smarter, but it could be any number of other things. Even if you're happy, there's always something you aspire to or want, whether it's travel, better communication skills, to be more fit, have a larger cock, whatever.
The thing is, these are synaptic sensations that are only bought with time and patience, of reading and internalizing whatever it is you felt like you were missing. So the aggregated content curation model doesn't, by design, really feed that well into that particular dynamic. It's a very ADHD dynamic, and as such, requires not an ability to sustain attention and focus, but the ability to divert or even avoid focus, and simply jump among endless lilypads of external stimuli. While many or most or each of those virtual lilypads might be revisited regularly, they are constantly in flux; the whole point of repeated visits is to tune in and find out what new content has been curated.
I know, you're thinking this is where the "Old Man Yells At Cloud" riff kicks in and the tube amps swell to eleven. Not at all -- I love technology, and more than that I love the way it has democratized the ability to produce music, real music made by real human beings. But that technology has also changed the way those same humans -- or at least the potential audiences for the musicians -- perceive the more easily facilitated creations of wonder emanating from those digital fonts.
And that's the problem here, the impasse that what's left of the music industry has not figured out how to ford. See, ever since Muddy Waters invented electricity and white people figured out how to poach good music from black people, the music industry was predicated on middlemen exacting a certain (generally usurious) percentage from the creators of the product. There is no longer much of a role for said middlemen. This is the sum and essence of the dilemma facing the "music industry."
And yet, as any of us who truly enjoy and love music, who derive pleasure and joy and even the occasional transcendent experience of it know, one of the coolest things about real music is that you can listen to it ten, fifteen, ninety times, and still retain the very real possibility of catching something you haven't caught in prior listens. That's an excitement you don't get with most other forms of media, the notion that a four-minute work can have those possibilities, every single time you experience it.
But how do you experience it? That's yet another issue that the "industry" has been unable to address. The previous model relied heavily on programmed radio to disseminate the product. And look, if moron stunts like this aren't evidence enough of why not only that model is dead, but that it deserved to be killed, I don't know what to tell you. I honestly have no idea what sort of asshole would want to listen to the same song for twenty-four hours straight (bearing in mind that the radio model is predicated on keeping people listening for as long as possible), but I hope never to run into such an individual. It's just too sad to contemplate.
But such instances are also indicators of the accelerating frangibility of music fandom, as it were. I don't mean groupies; like the poor, they will always be with us. I mean the ability of some anonymous person out in the boonies to commune with the sounds they hear and use those sounds to reify their deepest, darkest desires. When their mode of access consists of Morning Zoo gabble and the same half-dozen AutoTuned monstrosities spoon-fed in heavy rotation (and syrup), I suggest that their interaction with those things -- those products, tangible objects that can be marketed -- changes substantially.
And in fact, it has changed. We (as in the majority of the marketplace) no longer commune with the existential spirit and angst of the artiste. We interact with their various efforts incidentally, perhaps using their occasional communal efforts (i.e., live shows) as events by which we can get laid. It's not that this is inherently wrong per se, it's that it inhibits our ability (again, in the aggregate) to effectively partake and participate in a truly vigorous musical culture, as opposed to one that relies on weird endurance-based stunts.
In the end, what this is really about is revenue, and the ability to generate it. And our new ADHD virtual lilypad is predicated less on the old experiential heavy-rotation-on-the-one-station model, and more on the aggregate advertising model. There's a risk that curation eventually turns the content itself into a loss leader, something practically given away in order to upsell something else to the consumer (usually advertising).
The alarums regarding the demise of the industry-based models are true enough, and rightly so. In the old days, record companies functioned much like a bank -- or more accurately, a loan shark, fronting money to broke-ass musicians to cover high but necessary studio costs. But again, the previous barriers to entry have disappeared, the loan sharks and their insiders' club of payola and promotion are no longer needed or even useful.
This should have been a blessing for musicians and listeners alike, and to a great extent it is. But the nature of listening, and the modes and habits of consuming that product, have changed, and not necessarily for the better. Once the product became free and easy to acquire, consumers (as they would with any other product) adjusted their habits and needs accordingly.
The book industry is undergoing those same challenges, and it's good for small, independent authors who might otherwise never get a shot, but the trend has hit established publishing houses and their author list like a ton of bricks. Too many people are opting for the ease and convenience of the Kindle book for around five bucks, stored on a small device that can store thousands more, rather than shelling out twenty bucks for a bulky paperweight that they may not even like.
It's a real gamble, and it will be interesting to see how this all plays out, for music and for books, each of which has specific challenges built in. A full-length (250+ pages) book is a time-consuming process, generally accomplished by a single person, who still needs to eat and earn a living while working on the project. While a song, or several songs, can be composed and recorded more quickly, it's also generally a more collaborative effort, and thus needing to provide a living for several people. These things used to be more scalable, but the ongoing attrition of direct revenue for the content itself may discourage many potential creators, who may see that the easier money can be had on the curation end.
The boutique phrase "post-scarcity" gets thrown about perhaps too loosely, but this is a situation where it is more clearly justified. There are, in fact, people who make a pretty decent living still, and without having to deal with the overhead, bureaucracy, and finger-crossing of the "industry." Take a look at what Joe Konrath is doing, or Barry Eisler. (And hell, read Be the Monkey -- it's fast, funny, thought-provoking, and just 99 cents.)
The model is changing -- like gravity or health care reform, you don't have to like it, but whether or not you believe in it or agree with it, it's happening all the same. And as Konrath and Eisler have shown, again and again and again, piracy isn't ruination, for an independent operator -- in fact, it can easily serve as free advertising. The author or musician has to be willing to give their product away here and there.
But advertising also costs money, and the "industry" model, such as it is, gives no artist or author a majority or even decent royalty rate. Publishers assume that readers only buy so many books per year, and at twenty bucks or so per copy, they're right. The old music industry model was even worse, starting with its accounting and deliberate ruination of many a good band.
And again radio, as a system of promoting and distributing great new music, was always useless, and is now worse than ever at exposing listeners to something new and fresh they haven't heard before. It's simply a slow death by quasi-nostalgic scamboogery, merely a reminder that so many of those songs you haven't heard in years, you really could have lived the rest of your life never hearing again. I don't know about you, but as a lifelong music lover, radio makes me hate music, makes me want to tear the damned thing out of my dashboard and throw it out the fucking window. And they wonder why everyone would rather just tap into Pandora, listen to the music they want to hear, and not a bunch of retreaded shit sandwiched in between endless commercials and "morning zoo" jerkoffs. Really, how much do you spend commando-raiding the Kim Dotcoms of the world at the RIAA's behest? Maybe if they had a better model, they wouldn't have to worry about what really amounts to parasitic loss (or in Biz Ad terms, "the cost of doing business").
It's okay to ask questions and be skeptical, the new model is not going to be fair and/or perfect. But once again as with health care, it's not like the old model was worth a hot turd in the first place. It stifled creativity and innovation, and made its participants virtual serfs because of the high barriers to entry. Those barriers are gone. The old model deserves to be killed off, and never discussed again.
As any current working musician will tell you, the product (you know, the music) has become secondary, almost peripheral, to the overall process. In the past, technological limitations necessitated that the food chain of production, manufacture, promotion, and distribution of the product were where all your marginal costs existed and could be optimized. Obviously, that is no longer the case; bands now cover their nut by touring and selling swag.
This is somewhat ironic, since those four "food chain" costs that were so central to the old music industry revenue model have all been rendered practically null and void; even a modestly talented, ambitious, and entrepreneurial individual can create, promote, and sell quality product for under a couple grand, where even 20-25 years ago bands racked up six figures in debt creating 45-50 minutes of music that still had to be trucked to record stores across the country. Production and supply chains have altered, and radically in favor of the content creators. This is true not only of music, but of books. (And teevee, of course.)
Of course, lowered barriers to entry also enable purveyors of crap to proliferate in all those media. But that is a subjective, aesthetic decision best left to the fabled market to sort out. Someone who's just peddling shit can certainly make some bank, but when has that not been true? The other side of that coin is that the true artist, whose voice can't or won't be silenced, now has an abundance of affordable venues which he or she can easily access to ply his or her wondrous wares. They don't have to sell their souls to some record company that's going to fuck them over and hose them on recoupable costs anyway. Certainly reasonable people can agree that this simple, clear benefit greatly outweighs the nuisance factor.
There are several dynamics at work here, as far as the music industry goes (we'll get back to books). One is the prevalence of selling single tracks for 99 cents, rather than packaged albums for 12 or 15 bucks (which generally means a built-in pricing cushion. From a marketing standpoint, this constrains the producer's ability to test variances and find a viable price-point equilibrium; that is, if the main pool of consumers come to believe that a "song" is "worth" 99 cents and no more, then you'll have a tough time convincing them to pay 12 bucks for a ten-song "album" running about 45-50 minutes, whose length in the first place was determined by the physical and technological constraints of earlier media such as vinyl records and magnetic cassette tapes.
Another ongoing dynamic is that the trend (insofar as to where the money and activity are gravitating) is content curation rather than creation. This is why blogs, to use one example, are a dying model as far as viability goes -- consumers have been herded past mere consumption, and on to aggregation. I think for someone under the age of 20-25, this would make no sense, but for people who have been around long enough to gain a sense of perspective, it is more clear -- not only has the prevalence of computers and software changed the way we think, perceive, and process data, but the changes themselves are coming at an accelerated rate.
So people's attentions have changed from the singular focus to a band or a song or a news factoid, and to a sidebar clutter of external links, an endless daisy chain of distractions. This is what content curation is all about -- being able to provide the quick eyeball fix that the clicker is looking for, and then having something ready to go on the page that the clicker didn't even know they wanted.
When I graduated from high school in 1985 and entered college for a brief attempt, I took a marketing course in the second semester (in fact, I had a marketing minor for my Biz Ad major). I went in and came out of that course with the cynical (but true!) observation that marketing, at its essence, is simply the art of convincing people to spend money they don't really have on shit they don't really want. I wouldn't claim any special insight to this, except to note that I was all of 18 years old when it occurred to me, and my attentions were otherwise engaged, mostly on beer, guitar, and girls (not necessarily in that order). Perhaps a more nuanced way of putting all that would be to say that a good marketer encourages people to find money for things didn't know they wanted, until the marketing made them aware of those things.
Now, in my second, more recent go-round at the university system, I additionally internalized the rather obvious marketing concept that when someone buys a product -- especially a creative product -- they're not just buying that product, but also the experience of buying the product. It could be the affirmation of finding a great new band that hasn't been popularized and diluted yet, or finding a book that you truly think will get you over some hump in your life. It happens to all of us, it's not foolish at all. Marketers realize this essential truth -- that every one of us (including the marketers themselves) wants something, usually something that will get them laid, make them more money, or make them smarter, but it could be any number of other things. Even if you're happy, there's always something you aspire to or want, whether it's travel, better communication skills, to be more fit, have a larger cock, whatever.
The thing is, these are synaptic sensations that are only bought with time and patience, of reading and internalizing whatever it is you felt like you were missing. So the aggregated content curation model doesn't, by design, really feed that well into that particular dynamic. It's a very ADHD dynamic, and as such, requires not an ability to sustain attention and focus, but the ability to divert or even avoid focus, and simply jump among endless lilypads of external stimuli. While many or most or each of those virtual lilypads might be revisited regularly, they are constantly in flux; the whole point of repeated visits is to tune in and find out what new content has been curated.
I know, you're thinking this is where the "Old Man Yells At Cloud" riff kicks in and the tube amps swell to eleven. Not at all -- I love technology, and more than that I love the way it has democratized the ability to produce music, real music made by real human beings. But that technology has also changed the way those same humans -- or at least the potential audiences for the musicians -- perceive the more easily facilitated creations of wonder emanating from those digital fonts.
And that's the problem here, the impasse that what's left of the music industry has not figured out how to ford. See, ever since Muddy Waters invented electricity and white people figured out how to poach good music from black people, the music industry was predicated on middlemen exacting a certain (generally usurious) percentage from the creators of the product. There is no longer much of a role for said middlemen. This is the sum and essence of the dilemma facing the "music industry."
And yet, as any of us who truly enjoy and love music, who derive pleasure and joy and even the occasional transcendent experience of it know, one of the coolest things about real music is that you can listen to it ten, fifteen, ninety times, and still retain the very real possibility of catching something you haven't caught in prior listens. That's an excitement you don't get with most other forms of media, the notion that a four-minute work can have those possibilities, every single time you experience it.
But how do you experience it? That's yet another issue that the "industry" has been unable to address. The previous model relied heavily on programmed radio to disseminate the product. And look, if moron stunts like this aren't evidence enough of why not only that model is dead, but that it deserved to be killed, I don't know what to tell you. I honestly have no idea what sort of asshole would want to listen to the same song for twenty-four hours straight (bearing in mind that the radio model is predicated on keeping people listening for as long as possible), but I hope never to run into such an individual. It's just too sad to contemplate.
But such instances are also indicators of the accelerating frangibility of music fandom, as it were. I don't mean groupies; like the poor, they will always be with us. I mean the ability of some anonymous person out in the boonies to commune with the sounds they hear and use those sounds to reify their deepest, darkest desires. When their mode of access consists of Morning Zoo gabble and the same half-dozen AutoTuned monstrosities spoon-fed in heavy rotation (and syrup), I suggest that their interaction with those things -- those products, tangible objects that can be marketed -- changes substantially.
And in fact, it has changed. We (as in the majority of the marketplace) no longer commune with the existential spirit and angst of the artiste. We interact with their various efforts incidentally, perhaps using their occasional communal efforts (i.e., live shows) as events by which we can get laid. It's not that this is inherently wrong per se, it's that it inhibits our ability (again, in the aggregate) to effectively partake and participate in a truly vigorous musical culture, as opposed to one that relies on weird endurance-based stunts.
In the end, what this is really about is revenue, and the ability to generate it. And our new ADHD virtual lilypad is predicated less on the old experiential heavy-rotation-on-the-one-station model, and more on the aggregate advertising model. There's a risk that curation eventually turns the content itself into a loss leader, something practically given away in order to upsell something else to the consumer (usually advertising).
The alarums regarding the demise of the industry-based models are true enough, and rightly so. In the old days, record companies functioned much like a bank -- or more accurately, a loan shark, fronting money to broke-ass musicians to cover high but necessary studio costs. But again, the previous barriers to entry have disappeared, the loan sharks and their insiders' club of payola and promotion are no longer needed or even useful.
This should have been a blessing for musicians and listeners alike, and to a great extent it is. But the nature of listening, and the modes and habits of consuming that product, have changed, and not necessarily for the better. Once the product became free and easy to acquire, consumers (as they would with any other product) adjusted their habits and needs accordingly.
The book industry is undergoing those same challenges, and it's good for small, independent authors who might otherwise never get a shot, but the trend has hit established publishing houses and their author list like a ton of bricks. Too many people are opting for the ease and convenience of the Kindle book for around five bucks, stored on a small device that can store thousands more, rather than shelling out twenty bucks for a bulky paperweight that they may not even like.
It's a real gamble, and it will be interesting to see how this all plays out, for music and for books, each of which has specific challenges built in. A full-length (250+ pages) book is a time-consuming process, generally accomplished by a single person, who still needs to eat and earn a living while working on the project. While a song, or several songs, can be composed and recorded more quickly, it's also generally a more collaborative effort, and thus needing to provide a living for several people. These things used to be more scalable, but the ongoing attrition of direct revenue for the content itself may discourage many potential creators, who may see that the easier money can be had on the curation end.
The boutique phrase "post-scarcity" gets thrown about perhaps too loosely, but this is a situation where it is more clearly justified. There are, in fact, people who make a pretty decent living still, and without having to deal with the overhead, bureaucracy, and finger-crossing of the "industry." Take a look at what Joe Konrath is doing, or Barry Eisler. (And hell, read Be the Monkey -- it's fast, funny, thought-provoking, and just 99 cents.)
The model is changing -- like gravity or health care reform, you don't have to like it, but whether or not you believe in it or agree with it, it's happening all the same. And as Konrath and Eisler have shown, again and again and again, piracy isn't ruination, for an independent operator -- in fact, it can easily serve as free advertising. The author or musician has to be willing to give their product away here and there.
But advertising also costs money, and the "industry" model, such as it is, gives no artist or author a majority or even decent royalty rate. Publishers assume that readers only buy so many books per year, and at twenty bucks or so per copy, they're right. The old music industry model was even worse, starting with its accounting and deliberate ruination of many a good band.
And again radio, as a system of promoting and distributing great new music, was always useless, and is now worse than ever at exposing listeners to something new and fresh they haven't heard before. It's simply a slow death by quasi-nostalgic scamboogery, merely a reminder that so many of those songs you haven't heard in years, you really could have lived the rest of your life never hearing again. I don't know about you, but as a lifelong music lover, radio makes me hate music, makes me want to tear the damned thing out of my dashboard and throw it out the fucking window. And they wonder why everyone would rather just tap into Pandora, listen to the music they want to hear, and not a bunch of retreaded shit sandwiched in between endless commercials and "morning zoo" jerkoffs. Really, how much do you spend commando-raiding the Kim Dotcoms of the world at the RIAA's behest? Maybe if they had a better model, they wouldn't have to worry about what really amounts to parasitic loss (or in Biz Ad terms, "the cost of doing business").
It's okay to ask questions and be skeptical, the new model is not going to be fair and/or perfect. But once again as with health care, it's not like the old model was worth a hot turd in the first place. It stifled creativity and innovation, and made its participants virtual serfs because of the high barriers to entry. Those barriers are gone. The old model deserves to be killed off, and never discussed again.
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