I posted on our Blackboard discussion group about Joel Tenenbaum’s fight against the ridiuculous fine the RIAA has levied against him for downloading ten songs without paying for him years ago (he was 16). One of my classmates believes this is a black and white issue of theft. He even said that as educational professionals we should be educationing people about ethical behavior, because if we promote theft of this kind people will start stealing the educational content we develop.
Where to start?
My classmate’s father is a music artist. One thing he mentioned was that his dad has to travel promoting his work, and can’t get in the studio to record new stuff because he is always on the road. Maybe his dad needs to take a cue from other artists like Radiohead and Trent Reznor. They realize that the music industry is what was keeping their fans from accessing their music. They have made their music free, and have seen increases in older catalog sales, concert attendance, and interest in general.
The music industry promotes what they think the majority of the market will purchase. And by purchase, I mean a CD for 16 bucks. A CD I am not supposed to copy to any of my other electronic devices, let alone make a backup copy of. And I’m probably not going to want to buy what is marketed to me.
I will however buy CDs from artists that I hear on Sirius Outlaw Country. I want the ability to download the source of inspiration for the artists played on that channel.
THIS is the true longtail. I listen to an interview with a band I like. They say they were inspired by the music of an older artist because their mom always played it in the car. The music reminds me of something, I want to hear it. But the catalog is out of print, so how do I get to it?
Hopefully the artist has a website, or even better a MySpace page. If I can’t download the CD, maybe they are playing nearby and I can visit the merch table. I can connect with others who like the music, becoming part of that community. The artist is popular in this small community that I was able to find on my own, making my own connections, avoiding the bs marketing machine of the music industry. Janis Ian wrote a fantastic post about her experiences with the music industry back in 2001, you can find the article here.
The Bruns reading even refers to this. He said this about the new power of artists:
The new players, then, are embedded into the networks of community and cultural exchange, and participate in such networks where traditional industry only utilized them to capture new prodct of the media industries once it had become sufficiently visible; the new operators instead connect directly into the grassroots of fandom and creative practices to cultivate new ideas and new participants, they work with, for, and as part of communities, and share in their tacit knowledge and informal practices
In other words, record companies filter access to artists. The artist must be very visible for the record company to allow massive connections to that artist. But artists who open up their networks by making their work freely available become part of the community of folks who appreciate (and buy!) their work. These artists who connect to the communities have a better chance of selling records, especially if they don’t have alot of exposure.
Maybe this is what my classmate’s father needs – embrace this new way of connecting. The old ways of distribution are dying. Right now the artists have a golden opportunity to drive their own destinies, they just have to let go of the paradigm that the music industry has created for all of us. If they don’t they are destined to become like the scribes in the Shirkey readings.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the world is changing right in front of our eyes. As far as education professionals go, we have to give up this idea that we own the content we develop. Its a losing proposition. There are other ways to monetize what we do, so that we have the resources to do more. Acting as the experts, or the expert finders, is one way. Becoming the human GPS that helps people learn to navigate the firehose of information is another.
But wasting energy, time, and money to lock information up is going to keep us firmly planted in the old way of doing things. Those old ways may be familiar, and they may be the only pattern we know to get things done. But we have to start creating the new patterns that work in the new world we live in. We have to be willing to open some ports so that network connections can be made, or we’ll find ourselves on the outside of the connected world.