It’s been nearly a month, but here, finally, is a wrap-up of the last discussion, with my own recent thoughts on the subject intertwined…

How will musicians and writers, and other artists and tradesmen whose work is now primarily digital, make a living now that their product can be so easily and freely acquired?

Jeremy poses that the barriers to entry have been removed. Any musician with GaragePro can become world-famous: “The limits are only on ability, marketing savvy and drive.” He argues that the business model of the big labels is defunct, and I’ll grant that Big Music has lost its former sway, but can the model really be outdated if there are still commercial pop superstars making big money with the help of mega-amplified media attention?

But ok, bands don’t make much money from their albums anyway, it’s the record companies who take that home. The artist makes money on the tour, right?. That was true for a band like the Grateful Dead, who made all their money from touring and whose records sold poorly – but new, anonymous artists cannot conjure up legions of fans to follow them cross-country. According to EJ, who should know these things, the labels put the young artists out on tour and take most of the returns for themselves, leaving the artists with the merchandise take. “If you’re out on tour and you’re not selling merch, you’re not making money.”

It seems there’s no money to be made for anyone anymore selling CDs. Around the table, no man could remember the last time he’d bought one. Digital music purchases were also rare. All admitted to downloading free music, often illegally, though some said they had dialled back from the days when they could fill an entire hard drive in an afternoon. “I’ve got way more music than I could ever conceivably listen to.”

One participant brought up software downloads as a comparison. “I had a project for which I needed to have Adobe Dreamweaver. Well I looked it up and it’s four hundred bucks! But within minutes through a simple Google search, I was able to find the torrent, follow the crack instructions to load the software onto my machine and use it. Now, would I walk into a computer store and see this program for $400 on the shelf, put it under my coat and try to walk out? No fucking way! But I’m happy to do essentially the same thing over the internet, because it just doesn’t feel like stealing.” This sentiment was echoed around the table.

Despite the lack of legal, paid downloads happening, we were not hostile to the idea. But for most, it was the price. “Ten dollars for an album is still too much.” I asked what a good price would be, since I felt that $10 for an album is not so excessive. Five-dollar albums? Jeremy said yes, he’d buy albums at that price. But Don was obstinate, and said albums should be a dollar, because then he would just buy them on a whim. What didn’t occur to me at the time was that there could be a service that adjusted the price per album according to how much money each subscriber vowed to spend on a monthly or yearly basis. So I could sign up and guarantee that I’d spend $500 this year on music: at that level I could get albums for $2. Kind of like the BMG mail order service of my high school days, when I started my first collection (CDs) by becoming a member. (Join Now and Get 6 CDs FREE!)

Another noted the proliferation of auctioning sites like eBay and asked why there was not a platform for auctioning mp3 songs and albums, or tickets to movies. “Why is every movie the same price? Some movies are clearly worth more than others.”

What about cash donations? I related a recent story in which I had “otherwise acquired” an artist’s album and was so moved by it, and listened to it so often, that I decided it was absolutely criminal that I hadn’t paid this guy – I went online and bought the album I already owned, just on principle (and as a result, probably transferring about $0.89 to the artist in question). And it’s true that people support art they love with their dollars even when they don’t have to. But the argument that won the evening was, “altruism is not a business model.”

If not charity, what about “Artistic Freedom Vouchers” from the government? Each of us gets $100 from Uncle Sam to spend on art and art alone… I leave it to you, gentle reader, to pursue that thread or not.

***

As for the news, we discussed James Fallows’s recent piece on Google “saving the news”, and it seems that the best news for the journalism industry is that everyone inside Google assumes that “users” (“readers”) will once again pay for their newspapers and magazines – and pay willingly – it’s just a matter of how. The argument is sound, because it also depends on the news changing somewhat. No longer will newspapers and media be able to provide the same stories as everyone else. They will have to provide something unique.

“Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time,” [Krishna Bharat, the engineer who designed Google News] told me. “Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing.” He didn’t mean that the publications were linking to one another or syndicating their stories. Rather, their conventions and instincts made them all emphasize the same things. This could be reassuring, in indicating some consensus on what the “important” stories were. But Bharat said it also indicated a faddishness of coverage—when Michael Jackson dies, other things cease to matter—and a redundancy that journalism could no longer afford. “It makes you wonder, is there a better way?” he asked. “Why is it that a thousand people come up with approximately the same reading of matters? Why couldn’t there be five readings? And meanwhile use that energy to observe something else, equally important, that is currently being neglected.” He said this was not a purely theoretical question. “I believe the news industry is finding that it will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles.”

I think that maxim could be applied equally to producers of art and media everywhere.

Wrap-Ups art, copyright, journalism, media, music

Some good links to check out before Wednesday night:

CaptainCrawl is THE music blog index, type in an artist name and check out what comes up, you should be able to find links to blogs with full albums to download.

Radiobutt was the best music blog around, dude put up all the newest indie albums, had a really good site. It was hit hard by the music industry cops, relaunched and then mysteriously went down again. If you click on the link for it you’ll can read the guy’s farewell, he doesn’t say anything about the industry, but I’d bet the constant threat of legal action finally put him off. This interview between radiobutt and captaincrawl is essential reading for Wednesday night, CC says so many things that mirror what I think.  radiobuttmusic-vs-captaincrawl

I also wanted to link to Patch, which is one of our people’s current gig, a local community news sources that I think is an example of one of the ways people are trying to make a buck off news in a creative way these days.

(From Rindy):

For ideas about the future of journalism, it’s worth reading some of the work of NYU media critic Jay Rosen. He writes often about the ills of the national press today, who believe in what he calls “the Church of the Savvy“:

To the savvy, the center is a holy place: political grace resides there. The profane is the ideological extremes. The adults converse in the pragmatic middle ground where insiders cut their deals. On the wings are the playgrounds for children.  But to argue directly for these propositions is out of the question: political reporters don’t conduct arguments, they tell us what’s happening!  Instead an argument is made by positioning the players a certain way while reporting the news and doing “analysis.”

Another lament of his is He Said, She Said Journalism, in which “balance” is created by reporting what both sides say about a dispute (there are always two sides, never three or four) without bothering to fact check the obvious clashes of truth in the arguments. It’s practices like this that have readers seeking out new outlets for journalism. Where the news has traditionally given us the View From Nowhere (the myth of objectivity), we’re more interested now in reading honest analysis from writers who are upfront about their own opinions and who document their work thoroughly for others to follow.

For a great example, read what Mac McClelland has been reporting on the oil spill, and the heinous way in which BP has been treating journalists.

Articles art, journalism, music, writing

Read this essay on the state of the music industry this morning and thought I’d post about it. It speaks to a lot of the issues that are discussed on another blog a friend runs on music where I post a lot. The biggest thing in 2009 for me musically was that I get my music almost exclusively (aside from some trading with friends) from the many blogs that are out there where you can get full albums. I thought  Jon Pareles made all the right points about how musicians are going to have to get out there and play for people rather than wait for sales of albums to keep them going. It is a changing landscape out there, creative destruction at work before our eyes, and that is surely creating hardship for people associated with music. But mostly I think it is a hugely positive trend to have access to so much music, to have the bar lowered for entering in with all the easy to use technology out there, and the chance for music to be cross-pollinated so that weird and interesting new hybrids are formed. Maybe we’ll get into this at the next Junta, which we will think will be art related.

Articles art, music

Our colleague’s piece in Harper’s concerning John Zorn elicited a reader’s letter to the editor. The reader said Cohen’s articles was “appropriately polymathic” but that his history of music was “curiously garbled.”

The full text is freely available at Harpers.org, though you need to scroll to the bottom of the page – it’s the fourth letter.

Announcements art, criticism, music, writing

Last week was the most successful Junta to date. Ten or so people showed up and turned the back of the bar from a damp and sticky foosball room into an underground outpost of intellectual enlightenment.  Josh’s presentation on the development of the New York downtown avant-garde art scene was well researched and provoked a lively debate and discussion. It touched on the art, of course, but also on the factors necessary to create it – social themes, urban planning, cultural mores, etc.

The beginning of the discussion centered on musician John Zorn, his life and work. There was the mention of a specific piece he did with one of his groups which covers some numbers of musical genres all in about a minute – I’ve lost my notes from the evening but some basic research suggests that it may be Speedfreaks, performed here with Naked City. Someone please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.

Speaking of genres, we spoke of how names like jazz, rock, reggae, techno, emo, etc are basically the marketing creations of record companies, designed to move units. The rise of music journalism helped accelerate the trend, but before any of that, music existed for thousands of years without such labels. Josh cited an internal memo at Sony Records from a few years ago which directed the marketing division to concentrate less on genres, as they were becoming too divisive (and therefore not broad enough for the mass audiences needed to support their business model). The new directive was to focus on the artist as brand – to create superstars out of everyone. When genre was mentioned at all, the memo instructed marketers to define any individual artist with “at least four genres.”

Tim spoke up at one point about the longer history of music. We look at avant-garde music of the twentieth century, he said, some of which is atonal, and see it as a rejection of what we consider traditional music: melody, harmony, etc. But he said that tradition only goes back 500 years or less – the music that dominated the medieval era was more similar to today’s avant-garde music than to popular music.

Later we ventured into government support of the arts. The genesis was one of the articles Josh cited as reading, in which a musician points to European public financing of his craft. Tim, who is a touring musician, agreed that he could live an easier life in Europe, where he would have more help from the government. Josh argued that the government should play a role in making sure that art, even so-called avant-garde art, isn’t overwhelmed by market forces. Others weren’t convinced that America should give up its current philosophy, which is to support the arts to a limited extent, but certainly not to interrupt the gentrification of neighborhoods just because art is being lost. Noah, a banker, was particularly adamant about letting artists survive on their own – either by living poor, making some concessions to mass culture by, say, writing commercial jingles, or a combination of the two. As he put it, avant-garde means anti-establishment; to directly support it with public funds (at least on a mass scale) would be contradictory.

Towards the end of the evening, we did an informal survey and found that – no surprise – most were perfectly comfortable downloading copyrighted music off the internet for free. An argument was put forward that record sales were never a viable business model for artists, but only for record companies. The labels would give an artist an advance, provide the resources to cut the album, and then pay the artist a minimal cut of the profits; meanwhile, the artist could use the marketing machine to generate revenue for himself through touring. According to this argument, aside from maybe the 100 top-selling bands in the world (Metallica), no artist is being financially impaired by this activity. Well, perhaps. What’s definitely true is that the record companies will not survive without coming up with a new business model.

Look for the next Junta to convene around late January/early February. Josh’s piece should appear in Harper’s this spring – we’ll be sure to note it here when it’s published.

Wrap-Ups art, avant-garde, music, new york city

The December 10th meeting of the Junta, on New York’s Avant Garde, will convene at 7:30pm.

B-Side

Meetings art, avant-garde, music, new york city

The upcoming meeting of the Junta looks like it will be one of our best yet. The date is set for December 10, although the venue is not yet confirmed. Our featured presenter is Joshua Cohen, who has kindly penned the following introduction and included a list of references:

I’m currently writing a compressed history of New York City’s late-20th century avant-garde movements, in music, in the visual arts, theater, dance, and in their nexus in “performance art,” but approached through an idiosyncratic admixture of geography, or urban planning, and money, or economics. Altogether, I’m writing about what’s become called “Downtown,” that stretch of artistic-minded Lower Manhattan located between Union Square, or, alternatively, Washington Square Park, and Wall Street. I’m trying to trace a particular type of cultural displacement — a displacement of the residences of cultural figures, and also of cultural venues, including music clubs, and galleries, etc. — in the interests of defining Downtown, or “a downtown.”

Briefly, I begin after the Second World War. Subjects, dates, landmarks covered include, in rough chronological order: Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 50s; Marcel Duchamp; “Abstract Expressionism”; the creation of the suburbs, the concomitant exurbanation of white ethnic populations (Irish, Italian, Jewish); the declines of two generations of American Youth: the “Beat Generation,” and the counterculture of the 1960s, and early 70s; more particularly: the Fluxus happenings centered around Yoko Ono’s Soho loft in the early 1960s; Andy Warhol; the “loft-jazz scene”; the rise of “Minimalism”; the origins of “punk rock”; the history of Downtown venues from The Kitchen through, more popularly, CBGB’s; the passing of the 1974 “Loft Law,” which provided a legal framework for so-called “warehouse-to-loft-conversions”; the cleaning up of the East Village drug scene, begun in earnest in 1984, with Operation Pressure Point, led by ambitious federal attorney Rudolph Giuliani; the growth of New York University throughout the late 1980s; the 1990s’ real-estate-boom; the rise of the Chelsea art district, and its supremacy over Soho; the shuttering of musical venue Tonic; the demise of another venue, The Knitting Factory; the closing of CBGB’s, followed by its conversion into an upscale men’s fashion store, in 2006; this brief history, before it goes on toward prognostication, culminates with two Downtown events of just last month (11/08): Christie’s first auction of “punk rock” memorabilia; and the enshrining of a CBGB’s urinal in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC, newly opened in Tribeca.

Suggested reading (Internet-only):

Peter Cherches’ overview of Downtown Music, compiled for NYU

Kyle Gann, on Downtown Music

Marc Ribot, “The Care and Feeding of a Musical Margin,” from All About Jazz, 6/5/2007

Doree Ashton’s “Implications of Nationalism for Abstract Expressionism,” from Abstract Expressionism, ed. Marter

Fluxus resources

“Art and Commodity,” from Andy Warhol, Priest, by Peter Kattenberg

“Going Cold Turkey in Alphabetville,” an article from The New York Times, 2/19/1984

John Jay College of Criminal Justice Report, “We Deliver: The Gentrification of Drug Markets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Final Report”

“Law on Tenancies in Lofts Unsettled,” an article from The New York Law Journal

Also, (nonmusical) listening:

Kathy Acker

Meetings art, avant-garde, music, new york city