A big ol’ shout of thanks goes out to Tara for this interview with Austin Hill of Akoha — simply described as “meaningful play” — which touches upon so many cultural aspects of social economics in day-to-day living outside of the realm of social networking.
Like at minute 2:30 in the video; I knew there had to be a reason why I enjoyed investing so much time and resources in building community!
But seriously, what Austin ends up speaking about — average people organizing and affecting change online — is something that Molly discussed with me over lunch this afternoon.
I logically argued that the WS situation was simply pointing people to a spot to petition and pressure folks to really do their job, while with the ICRM, money has already been donated, accountability for historical failures have been scarce and the future looks somewhat bleak. Molly instinctively dropped into the world of eros, determined to figure out how to affect the lethargy through online social organization, especially as Greensboro celebrates its 200th birthday over the next few months.
While we both want the museum to become a reality, I found it interesting how the eros and logos in our positions quickly came to the foreground. I usually don’t shrink away from a problem; I try to provide a solution, often creatively tapping into the mechanics of the web. But with this issue, I’ve no idea where to start:
Funding has been both a blessing and a curse to this project
Everyone and their mother in town wants to see this project come to fruition
Yet residents have twice refused to support the project as a bond referendum
What type of a solution can the social economy of a Facebook offer to this type of political conundrum?
If you live in the Triad and you don’t want your local bar, restaurant or club venue to morph into a Donutland and shut down overnight, do yourself a favor and read this announcement I received from the venerable Kathy Clark:
Some of you may have heard that the City of Winston-Salem is trying to pass a “Night Club Ordinance” that would severely impact a lot of venues financially, ultimately forcing them to close down. The story is long and involved, but basically in response to the shooting of a police officer at a night club, the City proposes to make all night club owners hire off duty police officers as security guards at a rate of $25 an hour. The number of officers would be based on the capacity of the club. For a club the size of The Garage, four officers would need to be hired.
There is more to the ordinance than just this. City officials would ultimately have the final say on who can perform in Winston and where they are allowed to perform. All this is designed to reduce violence in Winston-Salem.
The ordinance does not address such issues as the fact that Winston-Salem has a higher percentage of rape than the national average. Shootings occur in apartment complexes, at shopping centers, not just night clubs. And domestic violence is a much larger problem than night club violence.
Very soon, we could have a totally different nightlife - one devoid of new and interesting music.
Your support matters. Please help. And please forward this to anyone that may care: a music lover looking for great live music, a musician looking for venues in which to play, people interested in downtown revitalization. This will impact us all.
I’ve been to The Garage. It’s not very big. I can’t imagine how they’d be able to pay acts to perform with $100 flying out the window each hour. Do the cops also perform doorman duties at that rate? How about bar back?
It’s a ridiculous broad stroke proposal to thwart the potential repeat of a terrible, yet isolated incident.
You don’t even need to live in Winston-Salem to help. Here’s what you can do:
I’d rather pull out my eardrums with tweezers that listen to most 50 Cent tracks, but you gotta give him credit for staring technology in the face and not blinking. I guess he has an advantage over Doug Morris and the rest of his ilk in that he’s previously dealt with raining bullets.
Dodging the damage of MP3 downloads must be cake by comparison.
[…] “How are G-Unit Records doing in these times of file-sharing?
“Not so good.” he responded. “The advances in technology impacts everyone, and we all must adapt. Most of all hip-hop, a style of music dependent upon a youthful audience. This market consists of individuals embracing innovations faster than the fans of classical and jazz music.”
“What is important for the music industry to understand is that this really doesn’t hurt the artists.”
Thats quite a statement. Organizations like the RIAA are always talking about how the artists get hurt by file-sharing but 50 Cent clearly doesn’t agree. In fact, he appears to appreciate the value of a good fan, whether he buys or file-shares his music, as he explains:
“A young fan may be just as devout and dedicated no matter if he bought it or stole it.”
Indeed. It’s been said time and time again - get the music out there by any which way, fill the gigs and capitalize on the merchandising and ends will meet. 50 Cent agrees:
“The concerts are crowded and the industry must understand that they have to manage all the 360 degrees around an artist. They, (the industry), have to maximize their income from concerts and merchandise. It is the only way they can get their marketing money back.”
He finishes up: “The main problem is that the artists are not getting as much help developing as before file-sharing. They are now learning to peddle ringtones, not records” he said.
“They don’t understand the value of a perfect piece of art.” […]
50 Cent is using marketing terminology like “360 degrees” to describe the value proposition surrounding an artist and the major labels can’t come up with anything better than suing their customers and boycotting iTunes.
Apparently not realizing that piracy-catalyzed 360 deals are actually recouped directly out of the artist’s pocket, he went on to offer the following when addressing the issue of lost recorded-music sales revenue, “The concerts are crowded and the industry must understand that they have to manage all the 360 degrees around an artist. They, (the industry), have to maximize their income from concerts and merchandise. It is the only way they can get their marketing money back.”
Further expounding on the negative effects of piracy, he offered, “The main problem is that the artists are not getting as much help developing as before file-sharing. They are now learning to peddle ringtones, not records. They don’t understand the value of a perfect piece of art.”
I could be off here, but 50 Cent’s perspective sounds steeped in the shoes of an artist / label executive, not in naivety.
With most major deals, all money put up by the label must be recouped prior to an artist getting a dime of profit from any revenue stream managed by the label. With fans that download music for free, it seems to me that 50 Cent is looking at the silver lining of the situation and chalking it up to a marketing expenditure — similar to producing music videos in the golden age of MTV.
Maybe instead of suing people for spreading the goodness of an act, labels should focus on the remaining opportunities to maximize their profits and stop trying to force their will on both a market and open technology? 360 deals don’t represent an ultimate answer, but neither does suing their fan base.
The record industry doesn’t have a f*cking clue how to make money. It’s only their fault for letting foxes get into the henhouse and then wondering why there’s no eggs or chickens. Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid’s face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning. Those kids are putting 100,000 to a million people out of work. How can you pick on them? They’ve got freckles. That’s a crook. He may as well be wearing a bandit’s mask.
Doesn’t affect me. But imagine being a new band with dreams of getting on stage and putting out your own record. Forget it.
[…]
There’s so much crap in that blurt, I almost don’t know where to begin. I agree 100% with Simmons that the music industry has had no clue in evolving their business model to work with the open mechanisms of the internet since its inception… but that’s where we go our separate ways.
The music industry should’ve dropped the moniker “record” as soon as digital tracks became available. No one buys records to listen to records anymore. It’s apropos, though, that someone as musically irrelevant and ancient as Gene Simmons still uses that language.
There is no henhouse. Never has been. The internet as a protocol is close to being P2P native, but software designed to transfer files across the internet in a collaborative fashion simply took advantage of music as a file format, like any other document of bits. Who do you sue for that?
Suing fans into perpetuity does nothing to improve “record” sales or halt the evolution of technology and culture. A better approach would’ve been to figure out how to make money off P2P instead of trying to eliminate it while ostracizing the market with fear tactics.
Who is this class of 100,000 to a million people out of work? Throughout time and across industries, the middleman has never enjoyed a guaranteed existance with technology in play. And if Simmons is referring to artists, he’s on crack. Artists — of any kind — are not guaranteed a career by anyone, in any medium. If they were, I wouldn’t be a commercial artist to pay the mortgage and an artist on the side to fulfill my soul. Simmons is still experiencing a coke high from the seventies with that perspective.
People who copy files that were designed to be copied are now crooks? Either lock the goods in the safe (DRM) and change the very DNA that defines a digital document or monetize the actual process of being “looted.” There’s no in-between and the market is clearly not buying into the future of DRM.
Hey Gene, hate to break it to you, but bands are still hitting the stage and they’re more empowered than ever to make a “record.” The difference? They don’t live in an age where long tongues, fake blood and platform boots can sell millions of copies of a two-hit record for $10, all the while being fronted big cash by a label who could sell an igloo to an Eskimo and get him to pay an extra $100 to see a grade B act fill a Colosseum show. This is the information age; those days have been dead for years now.
A bipartisan bill introduced in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday would give the Justice Department the power to pursue civil copyright enforcement actions against individuals who use file-sharing networks. The Intellectual Property Enforcement Act was introduced by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and committee member Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
The bill would authorize additional funding to investigate and prosecute intellectual property crimes involving computers and the Internet, and allocate additional funds to the FBI to assign more agents to work on intellectual property crimes; it would also classify both the importation and exportation of pirated works as infringement.
“Copyright infringement silently drains America’s economy and undermines the talent, creativity and initiative that are a great source of strength to our nation,” Sen. Leahy said in a statement.
Similar legislation (also called the “Pirate Act”) has previously cleared the Senate three times, CNET News.com reported, despite contentions from civil liberties advocates and others that the legislation would essentially have the government filing the lawsuits currently being pursued by corporate copyright interests like the Recording Industry Association of America.
“I applaud Senators Leahy and Cornyn’s leadership in working to ensure that adequate resources are available to enforce our nation’s intellectual property laws,” said Motion Picture Association of America chairman and CEO Dan Glickman.
I think I’ve officially seen it all, now.
The head of the MPAA — an outfit whose primary role is to censure artistic vision in order to “protect” the average American — applauds two Senators for pushing legislation through Congress to allocate money straight out of our pockets to police and prosecute his industry’s headaches?
Mr. Glickman, let me be the first to applaud you. Seriously. Way to teach the kids about how capitalism works. At least they’ll have that life lesson in tow as they forgo college to pay into perpetuity for downloading a copy of Rocky IV.
UPDATE: Apparently, on the very same day the above legislation was introduced, the Democrats pushed through another bill to extend the Higher Education Act of 1965.
The U.S. House of Representatives bill (PDF), which was introduced late Friday by top Democratic politicians, could give the movie and music industries a new revenue stream by pressuring schools into signing up for monthly subscription services such as Ruckus and Napster. Ruckus is advertising-supported, and Napster charges a monthly fee per student.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) applauded the proposal, which is embedded in a 747-page spending and financial aid bill. “We very much support the language in the bill, which requires universities to provide evidence that they have a plan for implementing a technology to address illegal file sharing,” said Angela Martinez, a spokeswoman for the MPAA.
According to the bill, if universities did not agree to test “technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity,” all of their students — even ones who don’t own a computer — would lose federal financial aid.
Pulling financial aid from students without computers? Man, that’s low.
“Such an extraordinarily inappropriate and punitive outcome would result in all students on that campus losing their federal financial aid–including Pell grants and student loans that are essential to their ability to attend college, advance their education, and acquire the skills necessary to compete in the 21st-century economy,” a letter from university officials to Congress written on Wednesday said. “Lower-income students, those most in need of federal financial aid, would be harmed most under the entertainment industry’s proposal.”
Check out this move by the lobbyists for the MPAA and RIAA:
The old language over the summer required schools to develop “a plan for implementing a technology-based deterrent to prevent the illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property.” The new language requires “a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.”
In other words, if universities pay large, lump sums for providing campus-wide subscription services for their students to download music and film legally, then the federal government won’t be forced to turn off financial aid.
Of course the cost of these subscriptions will be pushed onto the incoming class of 2010 and beyond in the form of an extra bump to the traditional yearly tuition increase that occurs each year across our land in these fine institutions.
What a racket. Organized crime isn’t this fucking organized.
The RIAA can bitch. Songwriters in Nashville can ask how they’re going to get paid. No one’s paying attention anymore. They had EIGHT YEARS to make a move, to fix things, and they didn’t accomplish a damn thing. Mainstream media is now with the public. The record companies fucked up. Music is free. Accept it and deal with it.
To that particular end, here’s Saul Williams message to the people:
My Dearest Friends and Fans,
It is my greatest honor to present to you The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, my new album produced by Trent Reznor and mixed by Alan Moulder.
The wall of sound that we’ve created is tagged with such graffiti that a passerby would seek out doors and ways to ENTER. Once inside a world defined by dreams come true they’d find aligned with the simplest act of sharing what we treasure. Most people aren’t aware of the world of art and commerce where exploitation strips each artist down to nigger. Each label, like apartheid, multiplies us by our divide and whips us ’til we conform to lesser figures. What falls between the cracks is a pile of records stacked to the heights of talents hidden from the sun. Yet the energy they put into popularizing smut makes a star of a shiny polished gun. The ballot or the bullet for Mohawk or the mullet is a choice between new times and dying days. And the only way to choose is to jump ship from old truths and trust dolphins as we swim through changing ways.
The ways of middlemen proves to be just a passing trend. We need no priests to talk to God. No phone to call her. And when you click the link below, i think it fair that you should know that your purchase will make middlemen much poorer…
NiggyTardust!
love,
Saul
No doubt a creative and eloquent way to pitch the download of an album while riding the wave of the anti-label froth that has developed in the mouths of music lovers everywhere. The last line is a bit overstated at this point in time — middlemen will continue to find their nut to squirrel away — but the optimism is fresh and well taken.
Here’s the jist of the release approach:
Download the album for free and receive it in 192Kbps MP3 format
Download the album for a $5 donation and receive it in one of multiple formats — 192Kbps MP3, 320Kbps MP3, FLAC lossless audio
All versions include a PDF with artwork and lyrics
All files are 100% DRM free, and can be played on any device. MP3s are encoded with LAME v3.97
I heard Saul Williams first drop his style in a track called Ohm on Lyricist Lounge, Vol. 1 in 1998 and his Buddhist / kung-fu inspired cut stuck with me for years. I rediscovered him in my iTunes catalog this past week, so I was already planning on supporting this release before Reznor “leaked” three tracks from the NiggyTardust album.
Check them out for yourself:
Ohm (Lyricist Lounge Vol 1)
Tr(n)igger (NiggyTardust)
Break (NiggyTardust)
Banged And Blown Through (NiggyTardust)
While I’m psyched to see artists use the guts of the internet to promote and distribute their craft, this model isn’t necessarily the savior for indie artists everywhere. I mean, it wouldn’t hurt for any artist to develop a site like the NiggyTardust site — chock full of free and donation driven download options, embedded widgets for viral promotion, etc. — but Trent Reznor is already Trent Reznor.
Would this work for him (and Saul Williams) if Reznor hadn’t gone the label route first?
As I see it, the future of independent music isn’t relying on massive shifts in the online distribution model. If Amazon.com and iTunes were as lax as Amie Street regarding entry into their catalog, distribution success would then be simply a question of the right price point — and that’ll work itself out through competition over time as the average kid’s perception of a music track moves farther and farther away from something one pays money to own.
So the question that’s popping off in my noggin’ is: What exactly is the draw for an artist or band to sign their lives away with a traditional label?
Their hold on distribution has slipped away
Online promotion is open to all with a clue
Radio is no longer a huge draw to potential fans
Music videos are probably watched more on YouTube than the reality show driven MTV
What’s the “sell your soul” pitch from a big label in 2007? Seriously, what angles of distribution and promotion do they still have a death grasp on? Big media connections?
How are successful smaller labels working with artists and differentiating themselves from the machine?
What are successful independent bands doing (aside from making great music) that can be replicated by other independents?
Will services like Facebook Music be the answer? Or can a walled garden truly provide that degree of change?
UPDATE: Doc Searls touches uponinformation, meaning and knowledge in next gen search via a conversation with Jeremie Miller. For some reason, data is left out of the conversation.
I know data and information appear to be identical twins in the eyes of computer science, but I swear data has a distinguishable birthmark behind its left ear.
