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ONE of the least convincing arguments I hear in favour of getting rid of the recording industry is that they're just useless parasites skimming off the artists. Get rid of the recording industry, the logic goes, and all that money will go to the people who actually make the music.
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But more generally, the problem that artists have is not the recording industry. The main problem musicians face is other musicians. There are too many of them.
Pardon me while I make a simplistic, Economics 101 argument here, but it seems to me that the reason almost no musician ever makes much money is that there is a huge excess supply of people who want other people to listen to them sing or play an instrument. When all the primates are vying to get up on stage to impress the other primates, there's little reason to pay the primates much.
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Economist Blog], via
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One great thing about living in or near a major city is that there's a chance to see people who are still trying to find out which category they belong in basically every day.
As a musician, I mostly care about the actual music. There are plenty of us out there who will play for free, just to have an audience to play to, because we love it that much, and there's no other choice. That's why I advocate Creative Commons as a means of forgoing the music industry and getting straight to the music. Due to the supply/demand equation, its price should be negligable or free.
Now that I think back... I know a lot of parents with teenage daughters. Over the last 8-ish years, I can recall plenty of loooong discussions about Britney Spears' wardrobe and lyrics and "attributes" and "attitude", but not a single mention of her music.
OK, maybe Britney Spears is a bad example, having little music to speak about in the first place. But you get my drift.
How do you explain the fact that people nevertheless do?
The market is strangely skewed towards a very small number of artists, who produce lots of revenue. That revenue would go a long way if spread out at say 30,000 / year / artist. Which I expect 99% percent of musicians would be quite happy with (assuming they still get an audience). There will, of course, always be more wannabe musicians than actual, but having heard some of them, I am just as happy to have them flipping burgers. The money that goes to the recording industry, is music money that isn't creating music. Getting rid of it would allow far more musicians to make a living at making music, and fewer of them would get rich at it.
Yes, when a band has made it big, they can sell a lot of albums, and if those albums are protected by copyright and can have a lot of money charged for them, this generates lots of revenue, which the band can capture some of. And this does contradict the argument (which I don't think was actually made) that all musicians are substitutes for each other, since if they were, people wouldn't pay the high monopoly rents for the famous bands' music, and would instead buy these cheap substitutes, and the revenue wouldn't be so skewed.
But it does not contradict the argument that music supply will remain high without that revenue, which does not depend on saying that all musicians are substitutes. It merely depends on saying that good, in-demand musicians will still make music without massive recording revenue, and that potentially good musicians will still try to become famous without the appeal of that revenue.
In other words, the skewness of the current system demonstrates the inelasticity of demand for good music - people are willing to pay a lot to hear the top few bands. But I don't see how it says anything about the supply. And if the supply is also inelastic, lower compensation will not decrease it.
Example: I defy you to find a higher-fidelity or more artistically sensitive recording of Chopin's Prelude no. 9 than this one; it was made by a good friend of mine who spends roughly half of each year working as a programmer and the other half taking time off to make music like this.
But in this case, I agree: it seems driven by simple supply-vs-demand.
It's strange that -- while YouTube is the biggest next thing -- I can't seem to recall a similar mob-created market in audio. Obviously there used to be huge online markets in audio, but 99.999% of their content was just MP3s ripped off studio-produced CDs. Maybe it's just something about Homo sapiens' head-wiring: it's harder to home-brew an audio clip with the same visceral visual impact as, um... two guys with a lot of Mentos and Coke.