Big Music - An optional extra

I was talking to some friends the other day and heard what I thought was a most extraordinary concept. The topic of discussion was the role of trade organizations and I remarked that traditional media trade organizations are loosing their relevance and importance as the world becomes more digitized. I referred to the MPAA, RIAA and its Australian counterpart, the ARIA, and put forth the idea that these organizations would eventually die out to be replaced with different organizations.

Then the bomb exploded.

"But the ARIA is important,” said one of the people I was talking to. “It helps keep the Australian people listening to new music and the Australian music industry would start to crumble if ARIA wasn't around".

I was, ladies and gentlemen, shocked and stunned. Shocked and stunned that I’d hear a musician come out with this kind of garbage.

It's time to look at some harsh realities:

The RIAA not exist for the benefit of music lovers.
Trade organizations exist for the benefit of their members. Given that 'members' of trade organizations such as the ARIA or RIAA are record labels, the ARIA and RIAA are basically clubs for companies in the music business.

The fundamental nature of anybusiness is that it has to make a profit for the people who own it. Certain things can make businesses successful or unsuccessful. A tried and trusted method of making these things happen (or not happen) is to form a group of like-minded people to ensure situations exist which are favourable to the members of the group. Some guy called Nash won a Nobel prize for working out how all this works, so it's not like I'm just making it up.

The problems of the entertainment industry are the entertainment industry's problem.
Not yours and not mine. The fact that people in the music or film industry say something is wrong doesn't mean it applies to everyone. All it means is that those people are thinking out loud.

Most people don't particularly care what format their entertainment comes in, but are more inclined to favour something that’s convenient and easy to use one. P2P networks fit this critria nicely, hence they are popular. The "problem" is that the entertainment industry does not work on a P2P based model. The entertainment industry generally works on a physical product model, therfore any entertainment format which is not based on physical product is generally considered a "problem".

The entertainment industry cannot fix the problems of the entertainment industry.
An ultra-simple way of looking at this is to ask, "What created the problems in the first place?" An ultra-simple answer would be "We have digital entertainment in the 21st century and we don't need the physical product anymore."

As we are unable to fully comprehend the power of simple 1s and 0s, we tend to think of "digital" as "idea" or sometimes "concept" and it's quite hard to put a price tag on a "concept". I remember hearing a story of Bill Gates walking through Customs and Immigration and declaring that he was taking millions of dollars out of the country. He offered up a bunch of floppy disks containing the original DOS operating system and the airport officials laughingly waved him through as all clear.

For the entertainment industry to solve its "piracy problem," it would have to completely reverse its business model. To even being to understand the intangible it would have to let go of the physical.

This type of philosophy isn't called "New Age" without reason.

RIAA press releases are not written for the press.
Going back to the purpous of trade organizations, the RIAA has to prove to it's memebrs that it (RIAA) is doing what it's supposed to do: act for their benefit. Internal memos and industry newsletters exist for this but anything demonstrating something favourable for the RIAA has to be publicized. Anything unfavourable also has to be publicized along with an explaination of the "problem", a scapecoat to take the blame for the "problem" and a plan on how to solve the "problem". This shows how good they are when something goes right and how important they are in stoping things going wrong. This has to be done in the mainstream media because the internal memos and newsletters don't work - if it's on TV and in the newspapers it's really real.

Trade organizations are not creative in nature.
An "organization for creativity" would be an oxymoron, and trying to make one work would be just plain moronic. Luckily for them, trade orgainizations worked this out and instead became political. Being political is a difficult task because typical trade organizations represent such a narrow band of the political spectrum that they are, in theoretical terms, insignificant to the general population. In practice however, we accept that money is power. As a business's sole reason for exsistance is to make money for the people who own it, we must realize that business are pretty good at dealing with money including using it attaining the power needed to make more money.

Looking at groups of businesses like the RIAA, MPAA, BPI, IFPI, ARIA, and so on, we see they get their money from creations which are entertaining. They could be making their money from any number of other things, but they’d still act in exactly the same way because a trade organization functions as a lobby group. Every industry has lobby groups: tobaccco, retail, hospitality, pharmaceutical, automotive, etc. and they all operate on the same basic principals. The film and music industries are nothing special.

There are no creative industries.
"Creative industry" is more legitimate sounding way of describing people and companies involved in "show business". Show business is where a small group of people make money by entertaining a larger group of people. You can tell that show business is a business because one half of the term is the word "business".

Creativity can survive without show business. The world can survive without show business. We happen to keep show business around because it's entertaining and we don't mind paying money to be entertained. Something your will never hear from an artist is: "I'm only in it for the shitloads of money, free gifts, luxury hotels, drugs and women". Since nobody starts making music for those reasons, it's quite safe to assume that people would continue making music if all those things were removed from the job description, kind of like people have done for thousands of years.

Big Media does not like technology.
Even though sophisticated computer programs make it easier for film makers and musicians to create their work, the same technology is also available to anyone with a half decent PC and an internet connection. This person is now in direct competition with the large corperations who have traditionally created films and music and is therfore a threat (albeit a small one). Big Media would ideally like technology to be very expensive, as it used to be, so that only people with a lot of money can afford to be creative. In the past the only people who could make a movie or record an album were, not surprisingly, the big film and record companies.

Big Media is trying to make the best of a bad situation by "embracing new media", but given a preference it would like to be in the same place as it was 30 years ago when it controlled all the production.

An artist creates things for everybody.
Artists do not create things for their record companies or film studios. Record companies and film studios exsist to make it easier for artists to display their work to the public. A person who is a "professional musician" may recieve money from a record company, but the artist actually works for everyone. A person can be both a professional musician and an artist. The money received from the record company is actually a payment from the public to the musician. The record company is there to help the transaction happen smoothly. The record company is an "optional extra" because transaction can be performed without it.

At the end of the night my friend was actually pretty pissed with the Australian recording industry. From some of the incidents she talked about, it appears that it's exsistance has actually stopped her from getting her art out out there for people to enjoy.

There are two groups of people who count when talking about art - the artists and the people who experience the art.

Everyone else in the chain is an optional extra.