Ramblin' Pete and the iTunes Vampire

Pete Townshend, rock legend and guitarist extraordinaire for The Who, loves a little controversy. His latest jab came at the inaugural John Peel Lecture, put on by BBC 6 Music, where he called Apple a "digital vampire" bleeding artists. He made a number of points in a rambling, somewhat confusing diatribe, and I've been sorting through his thoughts in a few discussions since reading about it yesterday.

First up, he called file-sharing theft and a dilution of copyright. I love his line that "that people who downloaded his music without paying for it 'may as well come and steal my son's bike while they're at it'". I couldn't agree more.

As to Apple being a vampire skimming 30% off the lifeblood of artists, I think that's a stretch. iTunes is a store, and they have their own costs to cover. The deal is pretty comparable to most of the digital storefronts out there, and arguably lightyears better than the huge cuts and byzantine (yea nefarious even) accounting of the record labels over the years. The money from subscription services like Spotify and Rdio is absolutely terrible, in addition.

Townshend does lob one interesting notion out there though. In the spirit of John Peel's channel of open discovery for new artists on his renowned radio show, he suggests that Apple should hire label scouts and marketers to dig out and assist the best underground emerging artists they can find. Doing so would turn the massive iTunes spotlight away from major label artists that dominate the store's features and spread a little limelight to struggling lesser known acts. It's an interesting idea, and one that attempts to address the ongoing problem of finding good filters for music discovery. There is more music being made and distributed than ever before, which is tremendously exciting. Except that it's almost impossible to sift through it all. And the traditional outlets for discovering new music have become too homogenous (radio) or too outmoded and niche (magazines and print). We won't even talk about what's happened to music television.

Apple and other stores could take on this curatorial role more. As Now's Benjamin Boles suggested in a brief Twitter exchange we had, it'd be akin to what customers expect from an indie record store more than any other typical music store. But Apple and Amazon are probably not interested. Someone could really run with this idea but the thing about Apple doing it is their fantastic reach. iTunes pretty much is the world of digital music sales. Other stores like Amazon have a stake, but iTunes is much larger. And then there are the subscription services, which may yet allow for some kind of curation to unfold. I'm loving my Rdio subscription for checking out new releases. If the social dimension of Rdio and Spotify were to grow, something that Facebook is very keen to see happen, perhaps a bleeding edge of crowd discovery could occur there. Apple's Ping social network was a feeble attempt at just that. So very feeble.

The difference between a Facebook/Spotify model and a potential Apple/neo-Peel discovery channel is social (what are my friends listening to?) versus curated (though Townshend is at pains to note that John Peel gave pretty much any record at least one shot on the air). And that's where we're stuck today. How do you find something that's new *and* good?

Music and theft: the con of convenience

So this morning I'm reading a post from Mika Schiller on Made Publishing. It's called "Music File Sharing and Digital Disruption Aren't Unfair". The post is a bad attempt at justifying illegal downloading by putting it on a relative moral plane, clearly worse than murder or the right to decent health care or national defense. He goes on to say that file-sharing "isn't a moral issue, it's an economic one." Business models are changing, and why should we protect the old-guard industry standing in the way of progress?

The last part is partly right - business models are changing, and the record industry is struggling desperately to overcome it's near total irrelevance. But there are still key fallacies here. First and most important, a song belongs to an artist. It's their creation. If they choose to give it away, so be it. And indeed there's little choice given the realities of contemporary digital distribution. Secondly, songs from signed artists are the joint property of the artist and the company they work for. Sure, record companies have a long history of corruption. If you look around, so do many companies in many different industries. Kinda the nature of the beast. Regardless, artist and company have made a deal, and selling the songs is what makes the deal viable.

Enter the downloader. Illegal file-sharing is exactly that, the theft of property. Utopian net anarchists will tell you intellectual property should all be free, but they're wrong. It's a lawless, frontier mentality, devaluing the rights of the creator. Anything you create, you are entitled to treat however you the creator see fit, whether giving it away or selling it for profit. Profit is how you earn a living from your creation. It's not an inherently evil word. Perhaps in the future a better model will be adopted. The subscription model is bandied about all the time, but has yet to gain major traction. Legitimate digital downloading is growing, and convenience is certainly part of it. Buying tracks from iTunes or eMusic is a straightforward proposition, and it'll continue to grow as the CD disappears from view.

But back to file-sharing. Sure I'm crying over spilled milk, the cat's out of the bag and Pandora's box is waaaaay open. The fact remains all those albums and tracks you so conveniently swap back and forth don't belong to you. If you could download cars, or pies, the fact that it's theft would be pretty obvious. Sure you didn't kill somebody, but you can't just drive a car off the lot and keep swapping it for a new one every ten blocks. Making something digital makes it ephemeral, so the act of theft appears to be insignificant. Stealing an extra newspaper from the box is another example. You already paid a buck, the box is open, why not grab a few extra papers? But as you waltz away with five broadsheets in your hand, it's pretty obvious you took more than you were entitled to.

Music is especially ephemeral. With the precedent of radio, it's the least tangible art-form. Radio is of course subsidized by advertising. But there's a mental association for the majority of people, that they've listened to plenty of music for free, so now there's a better, easier way to get that music for free. And they're absolutely right. But who's paying for it? Not advertising. Not the industry. And certainly not the downloading music aficionado.

Then there's the live red herring. People argue they may download music from an artist that they don't pay for, but that makes them more likely to pay to see the artist live. It's highly unlikely given the amount of file-sharing going on, that people are seeing every artist they download. So what is it? A 5% justification? 10%? You see a quarter of the acts you download? Which would mean you only stole from 3/4 of them? Which you didn't. You stole from all of them. It just doesn't hold water.

Schiller argues that the rise of the auto industry put the horse and buggy industry out of business, and you can't say that the auto's innovation was unfair to buggies. It's an apples and orange comparison, though. Doubtless new companies will come along with different business models, ones that are more effective and yes profitable than the current record industry. And if those are equitable and share profit more fairly with their artists, more power to them. In the meantime, rampant downloading is no better than the storied corrupt record labels themselves. You're ripping off artists, just like they've done for years. You've just eliminated the middleman.

Ultimately what's under debate is the value of music. Maybe $1 per song is too high. I don't think so. A pack of gum or a chocolate bar costs a buck, you consume it and it's gone. A great song can brighten your day, haunt your memories, become entwined with the soundtrack of your life. A great song you'll play over and over, finding new things to love about it. That isn't worth a dollar? And even a song that isn't magnificent, isn't artful or moving or innovative or whatever floats your boat - if you take momentary enjoyment from that track, from the bop of the rhythm or a lyric or its melody - is that really any different from enjoying a $1 candy-bar?

Artists should be entitled to earn the fair value of their creations. Until a better method comes along that pays stakeholders fairly, can you really argue that taking their work for nothing is okay for now? As an artist myself, I support artists. I buy downloads through iTunes and I have an eMusic subscription (I don't even take advantage of all my downloads every month, but I figure what the hell, it's a small price to pay for the music I do enjoy). If an artist offers freebies and sample tracks, great, I'll grab 'em. But that's where I stop, 'cause there's no excuse for a con of convenience.