The Pirate's Dilemma: notes

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Lol, it may be fun playing in a dive, but I always hated having to tie in to some antiquated POS sound system or lighting "grid" (aka couple of lights on a stick).

Of course, at the time I was spoiled by having regular access to a big venue as their house tech. These days, I'd probably cut off a finger or something to be doing sound/lights/sfx rather than data security. Of course the worst part was, I always turned down the crazy sex and drugs... on second thought, maybe I shouldn't get back into that scene.

[Lupernikes_shadowbark]

and of course, companies like Apple et al are aiming their PMP products at people who can afford to buy the songs/etc needed to fill the increasingly capacious things!  Of course people are all going to obtain all the material involved legally.......

[East Coast Hustle]

I always turned down the crazy sex and drugs.

YAF,R?

[Tempest Virago]

Okay, I read the whole thread, and I have a couple of disorganized thoughts to throw out there.

First, from my understanding, copyright originally come around as a way for artists to be able to survive while making art. Making your art is great, but it doesn't help feed you, so somebody needs to feed the artists if they want the art.

Originally, this was done by patrons. Some rich duke or whatever would pay people to paint portraits of him, and then the artist could paint his own paintings on his own time, and thus he'd get to do his art. Eventually, we outgrew that system, and came up with a new one - copyright protection. It seems to me we've outgrown this one, and need to come up with a new one as fundamentally different and as updated for our time as copyright was to patrons. Artists still need to get fed, and it's ridiculous to expect them to give us stuff for free while they starve, but there's gotta be a better way to do this.

Second thought is this: somebody mentioned people buying things out of guilt, but I don't think that's the right way to look at it. People should (and do) support artists because they genuinely like the artists and want to help them make a living.

What people should be selling isn't physical products, but human appeal. And artists have an in with the people who want their stuff - if people like what you do, they're already inclined to like you. We want to like the artists whose stuff we like, we want them to be cool. And if they are cool and treat their fans right, their fans WILL do what they can to support them. (Fans who don't are assholes, and there are always going to be assholes, but the hope is that they will be the minority.)

Obviously, this doesn't apply to record companies. Nobody likes record companies, nobody wants to support them. And, IMO, part of the reason pirating music is seen as such a casual thing these days is because of that. Nobody feels bad ripping off record companies, but I think they DO feel bad ripping off artists. So that's a big motivation there for record companies to try to hold onto the system we have.

I don't know that much about the music industry, so I may be totally off base with this, but that's what I've observed. Thoughts?

[AFK]

Second thought is this: somebody mentioned people buying things out of guilt, but I don't think that's the right way to look at it. People should (and do) support artists because they genuinely like the artists and want to help them make a living.

Bin and Go!

I personally greatly enjoy going to the CD store to buy albums.  (Or ordering them online from Amazon)  A lot of the artists I follow put a lot of time in effort into the music they create, but then, also the package they use to deliver it.  They carefully consider who is going to do the cover art, what theme it will convey, etc.  When I was young, buying music was something of a ritual.  You go to the store, pore through the CD racks (at the time it was cassettes actually).  Seeing what was new, checking out past releases from bands you follow, checking out the T-shirt racks, etc.  This followed by the ritual of checking our your new purchases.  Putting in the CD or cassette, following along with the lyrics, if provided, reading liner notes, etc.  I still enjoy this ritual. 

Music for me is a quasi-spiritual endeavour, both when I create it and when I listen to it.  The recording industry may not be the perfect setup for supporting artists.  But, as it is what exists, I'm not going to use that imperfection as an excuse to deny what the artists have rightly earned.  I am going to continue to buy their albums as they release them and I am going to continue to enjoy this ritual. 

[East Coast Hustle]

there's a pretty simple solution for people who want to support an artist and don't want to shell out $18 for a CD when $17.25 of it is going to the record company.

GO TO A SHOW. BUY A T-SHIRT.

your average band makes a little less than a dollar per $18 CD sale (maybe more like $1.75 if they're on an indy label but then they don't sell as many albums).

now, if you go see them live and shell out $18 for a ticket to the show, they'll probably see $4 or $5 of that.

and if you buy a t-shirt from their merch booth for $18, they'll probably see $9 or $10 of that.

and that more than makes up for downloading a few CDs without paying.

[That One Guy]

there's a pretty simple solution for people who want to support an artist and don't want to shell out $18 for a CD when $17.25 of it is going to the record company.

GO TO A SHOW. BUY A T-SHIRT.

your average band makes a little less than a dollar per $18 CD sale (maybe more like $1.75 if they're on an indy label but then they don't sell as many albums).

now, if you go see them live and shell out $18 for a ticket to the show, they'll probably see $4 or $5 of that.

and if you buy a t-shirt from their merch booth for $18, they'll probably see $9 or $10 of that.

and that more than makes up for downloading a few CDs without paying.

TITCM

Merch is how a touring band makes its money, so buy some at the show if you really want to support the artists!

[AFK]

*cough* http://www.cafepress.com/SONOFCONVENTION *cough*

[Jesrad]

Replacing copyright: basically there needs to be some way to make money from creating new intellectual works. But if a legally-enforced monopoly on the copying and distributing of those works won't fit, then what ?

Well, I experimented with one alternative. I have an active account in Second Life that I use to sell my own creations. Just so you know, SL enforces copyright by allowing creators to set "permissions" on their stuff, so that the next owner cannot duplicate or modify or transfer the object to someone else (and any combination of those, with one exception: you can always transfer a non-copiable object, or copy a non-transferable object, can't forbid both at the same time, so SL follows the "first sale doctrine" of legal theory applicable in much of the Western world). That's DRM, and I loathe it, so I went and found some way to do without.

What I did was selling my stuff with full permissions and an explicit authorisation of selling for profit and competing with my own distribution of it. I initially set the price very high, the principle is that with more sales, more people can distribute my stuff and compete with me (and recoup their initial purchase), so my price (and theirs) come down, until we all reach the marginal rate for distribution (that is, at this point we hardly make any money from distributing the stuff). At that point, my original work for the initial creation is paid for multiple times over and I, as an author, was rewarded for creating new things - and yet with this system no one can monopolize the distribution and leverage outrageous margins out of legal enforcement of bogus rights, like the RIAA members do nowadays.

End result: It works. It lets an incredible number of people access the works at lower prices although with a little longer delay (corresponding to the period during which the prices go from very high to "practically zero"). My stuff is now pretty much in the public domain, which is exactly what I wanted because it stops bastards from taking it, slapping restrictions on it through the inbuilt DRM system, and selling it as their own. Of course some people tried to do just that, but the fast-widening distribution model ensured no one would buy it from them when they could get it almost for free elsewhere.

That's the First-disclosure model I was talking about on page 1, put into practice. I could profit from my natural monopoly of disclosure on the original work (being the author, I was the only one to have access to it), as I sold access to it at a price that suited me and corresponded to how valuable I estimated my work to be. The first buyers were confident their own distributing leverage was sufficient to make a profit for themselves too (rewarding their own distribution work in the process), and in turns smaller distributors or end-purchasers bought access to it from those first disclosees, then they too turned around and sell it at a lower price, extending distribution of it some more and making it more accessible, etc... Basically, it works like some MLM scheme except the product sold has actual value instead of being an empty promise, and everyone is informed of the way it works and where it's gonna end, from the start.

(I did get some nasty flak from people who arrived after the whole thing was over, did not understand the model, and thought my prices were "way too low", missing the whole point of such a dynamic method of distribution.)

[Cain]

Its strage, but I keep saying games like Second Life and WoW would be brilliant places to try out new economic models.  Some games have actually quite advanced economies, and it has the benefit of not destroying peoples lives by experimenting with the system.

Obviously no replication can be perfect, but with micro-economic models and trends, it could be very, very useful.  Real people generally act more like real people than computer projections done by economists, so I think there is merit to the idea.

[singer]

End result: It works. It lets an incredible number of people access the works at lower prices although with a little longer delay (corresponding to the period during which the prices go from very high to "practically zero").

How do you determine when to lower your initial price?

[Jesrad]

Also, this model of distribution appears spontaneously in the right conditions: as lots of authors of intellectual works abandoned SL over time, they just started selling their stuff with full permissions just like I did, as a way to grab the last shreds of value they could before leaving for good. It sparked an entire, fast-growing movement of "BIAB" (stands for Business In A Box) commerce, where you pay a lot for full permission stuff you can start to sell for profit as restricted, DRMed content on your own. The whole thing immediately followed the same trends: as people started reselling the BIABs as such instead of as DRMed content, the prices went down fast, the content became more and more accessible and cheaper, and in no time people started buying the BIABs not for the purpose of reselling, but for enjoying the content itself. That movement is strong and keeps going, new original content gets released this way continuously, in turn fueling more original work creation. Hopefully, at one point the whole DRM thing can be abandoned once and for all (that's one of the last things stopping SL's editor from licensing their server software or interoperating with compatible, reverse-engineered servers).

How do you determine when to lower your initial price?

At one point, after being away for a few weeks, one customer came to me and said: "Hey, you should check that, this guy X is selling your stuff at 1000 while you're selling it 12000. I think he has pirated your stuff !" So I explained to him that this was actually the model working as expected, and thus I dropped my prices to 500. I kept an eye on the prices that other people were selling at, adjusting from time to time, which is easy to do since there are "online-shopping" websites where you can lookup the stuff and check its price in realtime.

See, the strength of this is that if I set my price too high initially, then I only get one or two purchases and the reward I end up getting for creating is lowered to a more reasonable amount. The continuous lowering in price and eventual "open sourcing" happens at the rate the whole audience decides, as they make actual purchases, instead of at some fixed legal rate. If they don't buy, or buy little, then the lowering takes more time, but it happens eventually. If I price it lower than I could, then more people rush to it and try to make a profit from distributing it, and that augments my reward. It balances out.

It's more complicated in my example because I do both creation and distribution, but I could restrict myself to making new stuff and selling it at high price to all the distributors I could, and not bother on distribution at all (leaving this entirely to them to cope with the downward trend and accessibility explosion).

[singer]

It's more complicated in my example because I do both creation and distribution, but I could restrict myself to making new stuff and selling it at high price to all the distributors I could, and not bother on distribution at all (leaving this entirely to them to cope with the downward trend and accessibility explosion).

Would the initial price in this option be the same as if you were distributing initially yourself... (I'm not understanding the difference between being your own distributor as opposed to distributing your stuff to as many distributors as possible?  Is it just that as your own distributor you would be both wholesale and retail but wholesale only if you simply sold to other distributors?)

[Jesrad]

(I'm not understanding the difference between being your own distributor as opposed to distributing your stuff to as many distributors as possible?  Is it just that as your own distributor you would be both wholesale and retail but wholesale only if you simply sold to other distributors?)

There's no difference, you're right. Every customer is a potential distributor in this model. The marketting is a bit different though

[Adios]

Interesting thread.

I feel if an artist can touch me in a way that I want their music I will go buy it. I will go see them in concert. I will listen to them on the radio. I will buy their merchandise.

What I won't do is scan through a thousand internet loser wannabees trying to find a single artist worth listening to. Grass root garage type bands who have the will, talent and dedication rise to the top for a reason. People who just want to make music and post it on a website and expect millions to flock to it and pay them big bucks tend to bore me.

If artists have beefs with record labels then they have the right to co-op their own label and save millions.

I really enjoy listening to local and touring bands live. Some are far better than others. But they are almost always interesting. I think supporting live music is critical. When I owned a bar I always had live music. Some bands would come in all cocky and say 'This is what we charge for a night." If I liked them AND THOUGHT THEY WOULD BRING THE BUSINESS I WOULD HIRE THEM. I hired a band once and it was their second live gig. After talking about it they decided they would play for the door with a not less then clause. 30 minutes before they were to start I was at over 3 times occupancy load and you couldn't breathe without hitting someone. They sold me almost completely out of alcohol. I gave them the door ( 3 times the not less than clause) paid their (extensive) tab plus a bonus. And invited them back. Every time they played they repeated the scene. This to this simple man is what music is. Something to touch people, get them off their asses and go see them. To make people want to hear them bad enough to actually drop a few bucks on a CD or merchandise.