You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (14 page)

A little over a decade and a half ago, with the birth of the World Wide Web, a clock started. The old-media empires were put on a path of predictable obsolescence. But would a superior replacement arise in time? What we idealists said then was, “Just wait! More opportunities will be created than destroyed.” Isn’t fifteen years long enough to wait before we switch from hope to empiricism? The time has come to ask, “Are we building the digital utopia for people or machines?” If it’s for people, we have a problem.

Open culture revels in bizarre, exaggerated perceptions of the evils of the record companies or anyone else who thinks there was some merit in the old models of intellectual property. For many college students, sharing files is considered an act of civil disobedience. That would mean
that stealing digital material puts you in the company of Gandhi and Martin Luther King!
^*

It’s true that the record companies have not helped themselves. They have made a public fuss about suing the most sympathetic people, snooped obnoxiously, and so on. Furthermore, there’s a long history of sleaze, corruption, creative accounting, and price fixing in the music business.

By 2008, some of the leading lights of the open culture movement started to acknowledge the obvious, which is that not everyone has benefited from the movement. A decade ago we all assumed, or at least hoped, that the net would bring so many benefits to so many people that those unfortunates who weren’t being paid for what they used to do would end up doing even better by finding new ways to get paid. You still hear that argument being made, as if people lived forever and can afford to wait an eternity to have the new source of wealth revealed to them. Kevin Kelly wrote in 2008 that the new utopia

The people who devote their lives to making committed cultural expression that can be delivered through the cloud—as opposed to casual contributions that require virtually no commitment—well, those people are, Kevin acknowledges, the losers.

His new advice at the time was similar to the sorts of things we used to suggest in fits of anticipation and wild hope ten, fifteen, and even twenty-five years ago. He suggested that artists, musicians, or writers find something that isn’t digital related to their work, such as live appearances, T-shirt sales, and so on, and convince a thousand people to spend $100 each per year for whatever that is. Then an artist could earn $100,000 a year.

I very much want to believe that this can be done by more than a tiny number of people who happen to benefit from unusual circumstances. The occasional dominatrix or life coach can use the internet to implement this plan. But after ten years of seeing many, many people try, I fear that it won’t work for the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists, and filmmakers who are staring into career oblivion because of our failed digital idealism.

My skepticism didn’t come easily. Initially I assumed that entrepreneurial fervor and ingenuity would find a way. As part of researching this book, I set out once again to find some cultural types who were benefiting from open culture.

We have a baseline in the form of the musical middle class that is being put out of business by the net. We ought to at least find support in the new economy for them. Can 26,000 musicians each find 1,000 true fans? Or can 130,000 each find between 200 and 600 true fans? Furthermore, how long would be too long to wait for this to come about? Thirty years? Three hundred years? Is there anything wrong with enduring
a few lost generations of musicians while we wait for the new solution to emerge?

The usual pattern one would expect is an S curve: there would be only a small number of early adaptors, but a noticeable trend of increase in their numbers. It is common in Silicon Valley to see incredibly fast adoption of new behaviors. There were only a few pioneer bloggers for a little while—then, suddenly, there were millions of them. The same could happen for musicians making a living in the new economy.

So at this point in time, a decade and a half after the start of the web, a decade after the widespread adoption of music file sharing, how many examples of musicians living by new rules should we expect to find?

Just to pick a rough number out of the air, it would be nice if there were 3,000 by now. Then maybe in a few years there would be 30,000. Then the S curve would manifest in full, and there would be 300,000. A new kind of professional musician ought to thunder onto the scene with the shocking speed of a new social networking website.

Based on the rhetoric about how much opportunity there is out there, you might think that looking for 3,000 is cynical. There must be tens of thousands already! Or you might be a realist, and think that it’s still early; 300 might be a more realistic figure.

I was a little afraid to just post about my quest openly on the net, because even though I’m a critic of the open/free orthodoxy I didn’t want to jinx it if it had a chance. Suppose I came up with a desultory result? Would that discourage people who would otherwise have made the push to make the new economy work?

Kevin Kelly thought my fear was ridiculous. He’s more of a technological determinist: he thinks the technology will find a way to achieve its destiny whatever people think. So he volunteered to publicize my quest on his popular Technium blog in the expectation that exemplars of the new musical economy would come forward.

I also published a fire-breathing opinion piece in the
New York Times
and wrote about my fears in other visible places, all in the hope of inspiring contact from the new vanguard of musicians who are making a living off the open web.

In the old days—when I myself was signed to a label—there were a few major artists who made it on their own, like Ani DiFranco. She
became a
millionaire
by selling her own CDs when they were still a high-margin product people were used to buying, back before the era of file sharing. Has a new army of Ani DiFrancos started to appear?

To my shock, I have had trouble finding even a handful of musicians who can be said to be following in DiFranco’s footsteps. Quite a few musicians contacted me to claim victory in the new order, but again and again, they turned out to not be the real thing.

Here are some examples of careers that
do
exist but do not fill me with hope for the future:

• The giant musical act from the old days of the record business, grabbing a few headlines by posting music for free downloading:
  Radiohead is an example. I want to live in a world where new musicians can potentially succeed to the degree Radiohead has succeeded, but under a new order, not the old order. Where are they?
  

• The aggregator:
  A handful of musicians run websites that aggregate the music of hundreds or thousands of others. There are a few services that offer themed streaming music, for instance. One is a specialized new age music website that serves some paying yoga studios. The aggregator in this case is not Google, so only a trickle of money is made. The aggregated musicians make essentially nothing. Very few people can be aggregators, so this career path will not “scale,” as we say in Silicon Valley.
  

• The jingle/sound track/TV composer:
  You can still make money from getting music placed in a setting that hasn’t been destroyed by file sharing yet. Some examples are movie and TV sound tracks, commercial jingles, and so on. You can use internet presence to promote this kind of career. The problem with this strategy in the long term is that these paying options are themselves under siege.
  

• The vanity career:
  This is a devilish one. Music is glamorous, so there are perhaps more people who claim to be making a living as musicians than are actually doing so. There have probably always been way more people who have tried to have a music career than have succeeded at it. This is massively true online. There are hundreds of thousands of musicians seeking exposure on sites like MySpace, Bebo, YouTube, and on and on, and it is absolutely clear that most of them are not making a living from being there.
  

  There is a seemingly limitless supply of people who want to pretend that they have professional music careers and will pay flacks to try to create the illusion. I am certainly not a private detective, but it takes only a few casual web searches to discover that a particular musician inherited a fortune and is barely referenced outside of his own website.
  

• Kids in a van:
  If you are young and childless, you can run around in a van to gigs, and you can promote those gigs online. You will make barely any money, but you can crash on couches and dine with fans you meet through the web. This is a good era for that kind of musical adventure. If I were in my twenties I would be doing it. But it is a youthiness career. Very few people can raise kids with that lifestyle. It’s treacherous in the long run, as youth fades.