Interesting emotional backlash that kind of misses her point but still is interesting, from David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven/Cracker: http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/
Lowery's response has a distinct "letter you write but don't send" vibe. My biggest beef is how he throws in an anecdote in a very odd attempt to relate Mark Linkous' and Vic Chesnutt's suicides with people illegally downloading their music. I understand how he was close to these people and is probably still completely shocked, but I work in a mental health facility and from my experience peoples' reasons for committing suicide are plentiful and almost always go wayyyyy deeper than things a lot of us can even comprehend. Bringing this up in a music blog is, at best, bold, and at worst, shameful. Lowery tries to comfort our poor NPR intern, but comes off fairly condescending: "I present these two stories not because I'm pointing fingers or want to shame you. I just want to illustrate that 'small' personal decisions have very real consequences." Pointing fingers is precisely what he's doing! If only at a semi-conscious level.
But tone aside, these are things I wonder about: Where does this notion of artists deserving to get paid really come from? Why does Lowery seem to jump directly to the idea that because people download music without paying for it, it means that the music must have no value for them? His overarching point--that downloading music online without paying for it is unethical--is too simplistic. People have and always will find the easiest way to get something they want. I guarantee that if music had been as widely and freely available in 1970 as it is today, the majority of people would have done the exact same thing "young people" are doing now. It doesn't make it right or wrong, it just has nothing to do with it being a different generational mindset. (Before the Internet, I dubbed songs onto cassette off the radio and nobody ever told me I was stealing anything. Maybe I was, but it was probably about the same shitty sound quality as the 128K mp3s most people are "stealing." There's kind of a larger point here: making people pay roughly the same price for what is, aurally-speaking, a worse product--I'm talking mp3 vs CD/vinyl here--you could probably make the argument that that's stealing...).
Soo...unethical? I'll get a tiny bit nerdy: ethics are the study of morals, so take the Latinate moralis, which kind of roughly meant the "proper behavior of a person in society." Lowery argues that technology and its big corporate backers are trying to change our morals. But this is kind of a strange argument, because our morals should be constantly evolving. If we were operating under the same morals as 100 years ago, women wouldn't be able to vote, among many other terrifying things that were just "normal." The recording industry has only been a powerful phenomenon for the past 50 (maybes it's more like 100, I really have no idea--either way not all that long in the grand scheme) years...maybe our morals are slowly starting to line up with the vague idea that artists probably shouldn't be millionaires, and anyway the value of art is really, really hard to quantify. Though it's very tricky because somebody is making tons of money off these folks (he talks about the venture capitalists who front cash for places like Pirate Bay, who then rake in billions in advertising revenue, which is all definitely dirty), and that's where I can certainly understand Lowery's frustration. He makes an eye opening point about how lots of us pay for the iPhone, the MacBook, the high-speed connection, yet don't cough up much money for the artists themselves, and that's a swift punch of truth in the stomach.
But--blame the consumer and call it "stealing"? I don't get it. Words like "steal" or "theft" or anything else like thievery I find very misleading, because the etymology of the words imply someone taking another person's property and calling it their own. In probably 999 out of 1,000 cases a person illegally downloading an album from the Internet is not turning around and telling their friends, "Hey, listen to this album I just recorded!"
Soo...unethical? I'll get a tiny bit nerdy: ethics are the study of morals, so take the Latinate moralis, which kind of roughly meant the "proper behavior of a person in society." Lowery argues that technology and its big corporate backers are trying to change our morals. But this is kind of a strange argument, because our morals should be constantly evolving. If we were operating under the same morals as 100 years ago, women wouldn't be able to vote, among many other terrifying things that were just "normal." The recording industry has only been a powerful phenomenon for the past 50 (maybes it's more like 100, I really have no idea--either way not all that long in the grand scheme) years...maybe our morals are slowly starting to line up with the vague idea that artists probably shouldn't be millionaires, and anyway the value of art is really, really hard to quantify. Though it's very tricky because somebody is making tons of money off these folks (he talks about the venture capitalists who front cash for places like Pirate Bay, who then rake in billions in advertising revenue, which is all definitely dirty), and that's where I can certainly understand Lowery's frustration. He makes an eye opening point about how lots of us pay for the iPhone, the MacBook, the high-speed connection, yet don't cough up much money for the artists themselves, and that's a swift punch of truth in the stomach.
But--blame the consumer and call it "stealing"? I don't get it. Words like "steal" or "theft" or anything else like thievery I find very misleading, because the etymology of the words imply someone taking another person's property and calling it their own. In probably 999 out of 1,000 cases a person illegally downloading an album from the Internet is not turning around and telling their friends, "Hey, listen to this album I just recorded!"
Trust me, as a traveling musician struggling to make ends meet, it would be fantastic to get paid even a decent salary for all the work I've put in. But that isn't really why I got in the game anyway. Either way, blaming the consumer has got to be about the least effective thing anyone can do. There is that maxim, after all, that the consumer is always right; and I'd add an "even when they're wrong" to the end of that. It's up to the artists to continue to innovate and creative something so powerful and meaningful that people feel they can barely survive without it.
What we really need is a massive innovation, some kind of new format that has a wilder audio fidelity than we can even dream of. It feels like right now the music world is overwhelmed with people trying to get noticed (which makes Lowery's claim that "the number of professional musicians has fallen 25% since 2000" seem incredibly odd. How do you define "professional" in a situation where nobody's making any money anyway?! When something like 2,000 bands play SXSW every year I think we can all agree that on one hand that's pretty amazing, and on the other we've got a fucking mess on our hands.). So, my only absolute solution is to try to make myself stand out in any creative way I can, and/or enjoy the hell out of it no matter what.
The artists who embrace this idea rather than complain about how things are deteriorating are succeeding like never before. Father John Misty packaged his new album with a ton of short stories he's been writing; Radiohead has recorded live in-studio video versions of their last two albums to go along with the records; Amanda fucking Palmer is a millionaire!! (??); the list goes wayyyyyyyyyy on (yes, I know Radiohead's an odd example since they were backed very strongly by "the corporate machine," but they are a fantastic example of a band continually innovating, whether you dig them or not).
If you subtract just ONE thing from this equation--$$$--it is the absolute best time to be an artist, and will probably get even better. Besides, when have the majority of artists ever made much money? So, in my open letter to David Lowery I think my point is: Grow up and be thankful you've had the opportunity to creatively contribute to society.
What we really need is a massive innovation, some kind of new format that has a wilder audio fidelity than we can even dream of. It feels like right now the music world is overwhelmed with people trying to get noticed (which makes Lowery's claim that "the number of professional musicians has fallen 25% since 2000" seem incredibly odd. How do you define "professional" in a situation where nobody's making any money anyway?! When something like 2,000 bands play SXSW every year I think we can all agree that on one hand that's pretty amazing, and on the other we've got a fucking mess on our hands.). So, my only absolute solution is to try to make myself stand out in any creative way I can, and/or enjoy the hell out of it no matter what.
The artists who embrace this idea rather than complain about how things are deteriorating are succeeding like never before. Father John Misty packaged his new album with a ton of short stories he's been writing; Radiohead has recorded live in-studio video versions of their last two albums to go along with the records; Amanda fucking Palmer is a millionaire!! (??); the list goes wayyyyyyyyyy on (yes, I know Radiohead's an odd example since they were backed very strongly by "the corporate machine," but they are a fantastic example of a band continually innovating, whether you dig them or not).
If you subtract just ONE thing from this equation--$$$--it is the absolute best time to be an artist, and will probably get even better. Besides, when have the majority of artists ever made much money? So, in my open letter to David Lowery I think my point is: Grow up and be thankful you've had the opportunity to creatively contribute to society.
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