Just after the earliest rays of sunlight broke through the clouds at the ungodly hour of 6am this past Saturday morning, a young girl started up her computer. She was a music fan, a senior at American University (where she manages their radio station), and an intern at NPR. Opening up NPR’s blog, she began to type a new post for the day.
Meet Emily White. In short, her post focuses on the fact that while everyone is sentimentalizing the beauty of physical records (ah, the smell of dusty vinyl!), she has trouble relating to this since “I’ve only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.” Alright, Emily. We get it. You’re young and unable to appreciate what an older generation is missing more and more. Fair enough. On my first read, I assumed that she’s paid for most (if not all) of her music. Perhaps I was naive. Here is what comes next.
Emily talks about her 11,000 songs. “A few are, admittedly, from…Kazaa. Some are from my family. I’ve swapped hundreds of mix CDs with friends…” She even describes how “I spent hours sitting on the floor of my college radio station, ripping music onto my laptop.” It is certainly shocking that a self-described music fan would steal thousands of songs, let alone publicize this to the world on NPR’s website. But let’s face it– it’s not too shocking. The second part (writing about it) is more shocking than the first. We all had friends (or friends of friends) who came over our house in high school or college with a thumb drive loaded with songs they were ready to spill out into friends’ computers. I’m proud to say I’ve paid for maybe 97% of the 5,000 songs in my library, but only some of my friends could say the same.
But Emily stated this in a brief, nonchalant way. While that in itself is indicative of a new mindset about music we can rant and rant about (as many have and do), this was not the focus of her article. She goes on.
She closes with the main point of her article. While she has “come to realize the gravity of what file-sharing means to the musicians I love,” and she “can’t support them with concert tickets and T-shirts alone,” she explains that “I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience.”
What kind of convenience, Emily?
Finally, she calls for a “massive Spotify-like catalog of music” that she can synch to her devices, so that everyone can have access to an infinite playlist, and artists will get paid performance royalties, as she explains, “hopefully with more money going back to the artist than the present model.” This is what she would pay for. Hell, I would too. I myself have wished for one site I can (sign up with for a fee and) go to where I can watch any television show or movie ever recorded. I’m not sure how much I’d pay for a movie, but I’d be happy to pay for the convenience of watching them.
Innocent enough, right? Apparently not.
There has been a tremendous outcry (think Occupy Wall Street on steroids) against Emily’s post, as if she is evil incarnate. At The Trichordist, David Lowery (Cracker’s frontman) uses Emily’s post as a soap box upon which to (extensively) lecture the younger generation that their “small, personal decisions have very real consequences,” (they do), and that “it is up to us individually to examine the consequences of our actions. It is not up to governments or corporations to make us choose to behave ethically. We have to do that ourselves.” This in turn, resulted in angry responders to Lowery, including one from another “Emily White”, ironically. An angry responder at The Lefsetz Letter spends hours blasting Lowery for (making crappy music and) “wasting his time” spending hours beating up on an intern that has no power. And I’m here “wasting my hours” doing the same thing. The irony does not stop.
It’s as if Emily wrote an article entitled “Why We Should Steal Music” as opposed to the article she wrote, on “How Much I Want To Pay For Convenience Through A Model That Will Give Artists More Money Through Performance Royalties.” Emily has been grossly misinterpreted by David Lowery and other writers (unless they intentionally used her brief aside about having stolen music as a soapbox to lecture against that generation’s mentality…but I’d like to give them more credit than that.) No, she’s not as bad as they make her out to be. She just wants convenience. And more, she wants to pay for it!
Granted, Lowery makes some great points about how convenient it really is, dispels many notions about file-sharing (that I am unsure Emily had in the first place), and pointedly brings thoughtful criticism to models like Spotify’s or Grooveshark (though he goes too far listing Grooveshark along with other pirate sites, and makes the bold statement that they’re playing songs against artist objections? The truth is, it is not up to the artist anyway, but rather the entity who owns the recording copyright, namely, the label. Lowery makes other errors as well. But I digress.) But Emily was not even thinking about these matters. She was merely wishing for a site on which she can pay for any music (to stream) she wants.
Granted, Grooveshark and Spotify pretty much do. I wonder why she is unhappy with those. But that is not the point. Artists like Lowery are using trivial posts like Emily’s to shout to the world that “they are doing it wrong,” and then attempting to tell them just how the industry works (without any facts to back up their statements). Lowery makes some good points, but chooses the wrong time, place, and manner to do so.
So David, don’t tell us not to steal music. Sing it to us!
You can sing, right?
Don’t tell us we are doing it wrong, and then go blast the entire system we’ve worked out with this new thing we call the internet. Rather, bow your head to this new technology, and explain how we can make it better. Sing it! (’Low,’ if you must.)
One analogy I favor, used by Lawrence Lessig: Before the airplane was invented, the law gave a property owner ownership over his land, the soil below, and the sky above. But airplanes came along, scaring many farmers’ chickens who ran into the barn wall to their death. Farmers sued for trespass, and the Court acknowledged that “it is ancient doctrine that common law ownership of the land extended to the periphery of the universe.” But Judge Douglas saw that with new technology, the law would have to change. Now we (obviously) do not require an airplane owner to “ask permission” before flying over another’s property. Rather, we just took that property away from them. (They no longer own it- airspace is now for the public). So this example would take artists’ ownership away from their sound recordings.
Obviously a bad idea. But still a great analogy.
So my solution is different: as the net makes it so EASY to rip a recording (as planes made it so easy to cross over other’s land), we have to make it even easier to pay for music, and significantly harder to steal it. When the radio (and other performance mediums) came out, we had the same problem we have now: how can one radio station conveniently play all music ever recorded? We all know the blanket license (via ASCAP, BMI, etc.) was the perfect (well, almost perfect) solution.
This is what Emily wants on a website!
Indeed, we have such a license for the performance of sound recordings on the net (through SoundExchange). How about for the purchase of them?
We have to produce ideas that embrace the net and make it work for all of us. Educating consumers to empathize with ‘starving artists’ might help, but it won’t be enough. Certainly blasting female interns who write about their love of digital music and lecturing them on the royalty calculations of Spotify or on the Google ad system will not help. If we want things to change we have to appeal to the Googles and Spotifys of the world THEMSELVES (or their regulators) with concrete ideas that make is easier to purchase music than steal it.
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