Ex Libris

An internet interview of my brother, Brad, on behalf of his band the Black Eyes & Neckties.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/577673

It is really funny, because my brother is not the geek in the family, by any stretch. He’s no geek at all. So he is talking to a video blogger who is trying to quiz him on how “geeky” he is by testing his knowledge of internet resources for bands, a quiz Brad manages to undermine pretty immediately. Also, when the guy asks him what he would do to save the dying music scene, Brad, without any hesitation, blames internet downloading and the fact that people who claim to love bands will now just go out and download without taking the effort to come and support. He isn’t only condemning free downloading here, but any downloading at all. He has told me stories of selling only a handful of albums at a show (which the band actually makes a decent amount of money from) but then seeing on their iTunes records that dozens of people went home and downloaded the album (which they see all but nothing from). So, basically his solution is that he wishes he could be making music 30 years ago. It was amusing. I can’t claim I wasn’t a pretty terrible music downloader as a teenager, but I can at least hope to say I never downloaded anything from a band that needed to have a day job because they weren’t making enough from their music to live (if not live in excess).

The question is, how do you save the music scene without going back 30 years? Grants? Sponsorships? Soundtracks? How can the internet be used to both spread information but support the burgeoning performer? All good questions. I’ll admit, the implications to the music scene are not something I think about, as I tend to think more about my own trades, writing and video games, but they are all being affected by it. I think most people still find it difficult to read on a computer, but the proliferation of kindles and other such eBooks are going to make that problem hit writers more as well. And increased abilities to pirate has made it hit game companies for as well. Outraged fans ruined the game Spore over the DRM, and while it was definitely a limit taken to the extreme and not something I would say I supported, the game companies have to do something to stay in business. I think it’s fair to say, though, that musicians have been hit the hardest thus far by our increasingly downloaded culture.

I have and do continue to believe that the information age is a good thing, and that mass access to media is a good thing, but how can people continue to make art when it becomes increasingly difficult to make any kind of living doing it? I’m sure a purer artiste than I would say that shouldn’t matter, but anyone who has worked a full time job and tried to come home and have the energy to do their art and doesn’t have a chemical imbalance that makes them revel in being a martyr will tell you, it’s hard, and not preferred. And while not everyone wants to “sell out” (though plenty are more than happy), I think most people will agree that anything that enables you to spend more time doing what you love, and less time doing something you don’t love so you can still eat, sleep under a roof, and buy materials (whether that be pen & ink, a guitar & amp,  paint brushes and canvases, or a laptop computer) is a good thing. Maybe it doesn’t mean you make millions, maybe it means you only have to work half-time instead of full time, and maybe you’ve made that much reviled step to commercial art, but at least that’s that much more of your life doing what you know you were born into this world to do and less time wasted.

It’s a difficult question. I know there are a lot of websites out there meant specifically to promote indie musicians, but I’m not a musician, so I’m not sure what the strings attached there are. You can’t truly blame anyone for not wanting to buy physical copies of CDs when they are only going to then going to just rip it anyway to add to their iPod, and it’s much more ecologically sound if we do move toward less plastic waste, but there needs to be some way for that to be profitable for bands. They can sell music by way of their website, sure, but most people are too lazy not to use a central location for their music buying needs (and who can blame them, or actually “us”, as I certainly am not less lazy than that). An idea I have toyed with in response to this problem would be, in essence, a non-profit iTunes. That is, the prices would be roughly the same, and so the bands would see money from it, but the service itself would not be for profit, and so the cut would only be as much as they need to keep staff and servers going. Hopefully if this service were able to receive an endowment, it would need to pull even less from the artists, but it could probably be pulled off with or without the generosity of some wealthy benefactor who loves music (I’m looking at you, Paul Allen). I would imagine that in order to keep this service from getting too overwhelmed, you would probably have to put a distribution limit on the bands who are able to be involved. Once you reach a certain level of success, you can make money despite the cuts of the labels and the major distributors. So, no one wants to see Nickelback taking up the server space and staff time so Chad Korger could add an additional wing to his mansion. I’m not sure what implications that would have in a long term sense, because it is more than conceivable that a band could start small on this service and make it big in the course of their time there. Are they kicked out? “You’re too cool to hang out with us anymore.” I’m not sure. It would be something to consider further than this rambling blog entry has considered it. But I think that something like this needs to be considered.