[NEC] 2.2: The Music Industry and the Big Flip
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NEC @ Shirky.com, a mailing list about Networks, Economics, and Culture
Published periodically / # 2.2 / January 21, 2003
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License
Subscribe at http://shirky.com/nec.html
In this issue:
- Introduction
- Essay: The Music Business and the Big Flip
(Also at http://www.shirky.com/writings/music_flip.html)
- WiFi and VoIP
- Worth Reading
- Open Spectrum
- Query: Research on Economic Loss from Protected Information
* Introduction =======================================================
This issue's essay is on distributed systems and collaborative
filtering. In particular, it concerns what sort of system would have
to exist to alter the ecosystem of music in the way earlier forms of
internet publishing have altered the ecosystem of the written word.
Between the last essay and now, the Supreme Court also decided the
Eldred case, saying that Congress has unlimited power to extend
copyright, thus making the limit of the "limited duration" unlimited.
This is Mancur Olson territory, where the effort required by the many
to police the predations of the few is so high that special interests
carry the day. For the average Congressperson, the argument is simple:
copyright is a palatable tax that transfers wealth from the many to
the few, and the few are better donors than the many. When the primary
advantage of repealing that tax is something as unpredictable as
cultural innovation, its not hard to see where to vote.
The Eldred decision costs us a shortcut. This will now be a protracted
fight.
-clay
* Essay ==============================================================
The Music Business and the Big Flip
(http://www.shirky.com/writings/music_flip.html)
The first and last thirds of the music industry have been reconfigured
by digital tools. The functions in the middle have not.
Thanks to software like ProTools and CakeWalk, the production of music
is heavily digital. Thanks to Napster and its heirs like Gnutella and
Kazaa, the reproduction and distribution of music is also digital. As
usual, this digitization has taken an enormous amount of power
formerly reserved for professionals and delivered it to amateurs. But
the middle part -- deciding what new music should be available -- is
still analog and still professionally controlled.
The most important departments at a record label are Artists &
Repertoire, and Marketing. A&R's job is to find new talent, and
Marketing's job is to publicize it. These are both genuinely hard
tasks, and unlike production or distribution, there is no serious
competition for those functions outside the labels themselves. Prior
to its demise, Napster began publicizing itself as a way to find new
music, but this was a fig leaf, since users had to know the name of a
song or artist in advance. Napster did little to place new music in
an existing context, and the current file-sharing networks don't do
much better. In strong contrast to writing and photos, almost all the
music available on the internet is there because it was chosen by
professionals.
- Aggregate Judgments
The curious thing about this state of affairs is that in other
domains, we now use amateur input for finding and publicizing. The
last 5 years have seen the launch of Google, Blogdex, Kuro5in,
Slashdot, and many other collaborative filtering sites that transform
the simple judgments of a few participants into aggregate
recommendations of remarkably high quality.
This is all part of the Big Flip in publishing generally, where the
old notion of "filter, then publish" is giving way to "publish, then
filter." There is no need for Slashdot's or Kuro5hin's owners to sort
the good posts from the bad in advance, no need for Blogdex or Daypop
to pressure people not to post drivel, because lightweight filters
applied after the fact work better at large scale than paying editors
to enforce minimum quality in advance. A side-effect of the Big Flip
is that the division between amateur and professional turns into a
spectrum, giving us a world where unpaid writers are discussed
side-by-side with New York Times columnists.
The music industry is largely untouched by the Big Flip. The industry
harvests the aggregate taste of music lovers and sells it back to us
as popularity, without offering anyone the chance to be heard without
their approval. The industry's judgment, not ours, still determines
the entire domain in which any collaborative filtering will
subsequently operate. A working "publish, then filter" system that
used our collective judgment to sort new music before it gets played
on the radio or sold at the record store would be a revolution.
- Core Assumptions
Several attempts at such a thing have been launched, but most are
languishing, because they are constructed as extensions of the current
way of producing music, not alternatives to it. A working
collaborative filter would have to make three assumptions.
First, it would have to support the users' interests. Most new music
is bad, and the users know it. Sites that sell themselves as places
for bands to find audiences are analogous to paid placement on search
engines -- more marketing vehicle than real filter. FarmFreshMusic,
for example lists its goals as "1. To help artists get signed with a
record label. 2. To help record labels find great artists
efficiently. 3. To help music lovers find the best music on the
Internet." Note who comes third.
Second, life is too short to listen to stuff you hate. A working
system would have to err more on the side of false negatives (not
offering you music you might like) rather than false positives
(offering you music you might not like). With false negatives as the
default, adventurous users could expand their preferences at will,
while the mass of listeners would get the Google version -- not a long
list of every possible match, but rather a short list of high
relevance, no matter what has been left out.
Finally, the system would have to use lightweight rating methods. The
surprise in collaborative filtering is how few people need to be
consulted, and how simple their judgments need to be. Each Slashdot
comment is moderated up or down only a handful of times, by only a
tiny fraction of its readers. The Blogdex Top 50 links are sometimes
pointed to by as few as half a dozen weblogs, and the measure of
interest is entirely implicit in the choice to link. Despite the
almost trivial nature of the input, these systems are remarkably
effective, given the mass of mediocrity they are sorting through.
A working filter for music would similarly involve a small number of
people (SMS voting at clubs, periodic "jury selection" of editors a la
Slashdot, HotOrNot-style user uploads), and would pass the highest
ranked recommendations on to progressively larger pools of judgment,
which would add increasing degrees of refinement about both quality
and classification.
Such a system won't undo inequalities in popularity, of course,
because inequality appears whenever a large group expresses their
preferences among many options. Few weblogs have many readers while
many have few readers, but there is no professional "weblog industry"
manipulating popularity. However, putting the filter for music
directly in the hands of listeners could reflect our own aggregate
judgments back to us more quickly, iteratively, and with less
distortion than the system we have today.
- Business Models and Love
Why would musicians voluntarily put new music into such a system?
Money is one answer, of course. Several sorts of businesses profit
from music without needing the artificial scarcity of physical media
or DRM-protected files. Clubs and concert halls sell music as
experience rather than as ownable object, and might welcome a system
that identified and marketed artists for free. Webcasting radio
stations are currently forced to pay the music industry per listener
without extracting fees from the listeners themselves. They might be
willing to pay artists for music unencumbered by per-listener fees.
Both of these solutions (and other ones, like listener-supported
radio) would offer at least some artists some revenues, even if their
music were freely available elsewhere.
The more general answer, however, is replacement of greed with love,
in Kevin Kelly's felicitous construction. The internet has lowered
the threshold of publishing to the point where you no longer need help
or permission to distribute your work. What has happened with writing
may be possible with music. Like writers, most musicians who work for
fame and fortune get neither, but unlike writers, the internet has not
offered wide distribution to people making music for the love of the
thing. A system that offered musicians a chance at finding an
audience outside the professional system would appeal to at least some
of them.
- Music Is Different
There are obvious differences here, of course, as music is unlike
writing in several important ways. Writing tools are free or cheap,
while analog and digital instruments can be expensive, and writing can
be done solo, while music-making is usually done by a group, making
coordination much more complex. Furthermore, bad music is far more
painful to listen to than bad writing is to read, so the difference
between amateur and professional music may be far more extreme.
But for all those limits, change may yet come. Unlike an article or
essay, people will listen to a song they like over and over again,
meaning that even a small amount of high-quality music that found its
way from artist to public without passing through an A&R department
could create a significant change. This would not upend the
professional music industry so much as alter its ecosystem, in the
same way newspapers now publish in an environment filled with amateur
writing.
Indeed, the world's A&R departments would be among the most avid users
of any collaborative filter that really worked. The change would not
herald the death of A&R, but rather a reconfiguration of the dynamic.
A world where the musicians already had an audience when they were
approached by professional publishers would be considerably different
from the system we have today, where musicians must get the attention
of the world's A&R departments to get an audience in the first place.
Digital changes in music have given us amateur production and
distribution, but left intact professional control of fame. It used
to be hard to record music, but no longer. It used to be hard to
reproduce and distribute music, but no longer. It is still hard to
find and publicize good new music. We have created a number of tools
that make filtering and publicizing both easy and effective in other
domains. The application of those tools to new music could change the
musical landscape.
-=-
* WiFi and VoIP =========================================================
There's been lots of interesting conversations and feedback around the
Zapmail essay (http://www.shirky.com/writings/zapmail.html), which was
pointed to by over 350 different weblogs and sites. In that essay, I
pointed to the symbiosis between WiFi and Voice over IP in home and
office setups. Several readers pointed out the possible symbiosis
between WiFi and VoIP for mobile telephony as well, by using WiFi
access points to carry voice traffic from mobile phones in congested
urban areas, possibly putting those access points into payphones,
whose use is declining precipitously.
Pocketpresence.com is working on putting VoIP in a PDA, as is
Telesym.com. Meanwhile, from the it-might-be-vapor department,
Motorola, Proxim, and Avaya are announcing wireless roaming that can
jump between cellular networks and WiFi.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/14/business/14MOTO.html
And in the Wifi-is-a-product-not-a-service department, Technology
Reports suggests that Starbucks in the Bay Area may be so bathed in
freely available WiFi signal that patrons do not need to use their
for-fee TMobile service.
http://technologyreports.net/wirelessreport/index.html?articleID=1452
(via the incomparable boingboing.net)
* Worth Reading =========================================================
- Open Spectrum
David Weinberger has put together an absolutely terrific pair of
papers, and essay and a FAQ, on Open Spectrum, drawing on the work of
Jock Gill, Dewayne Hendricks, and David Reed.
The essay is at:
http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/framing_openspectrum.html
The FAQ is at:
http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/OpenSpectrumFAQ.html
Along with Kevin Werbach's earlier white paper on Open Spectrum for
New America (http://werbach.com/docs/new_wireless_paradigm.htm), there
is now enough non-technical literature to move the conversation from
the technical realm to the policy realm.
* Query: Research on Economic Loss from Protected Information ============
Elliott Maxwell asks:
"I'm trying to find anything good that's written from an economic
perspective on the effects of loss of access to protected
information on innovation and economic growth. There is lots of
anecdotal evidence, but if you know of anything systematic and/or
empirical it would be great."
In light of Eldred, this is _the_ question. Edward Rothstein, in an
attack on Lessig in Saturday's New York Times, asked "What harm have
we come to from copyright extension?" and the answer, of course, is
"We don't know." (Rothstein's piece is at
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/18/arts/18CONN.html)
Because we can't directly demonstrate the loss of things that didn't
happen, we need examples of loss from other systems where information
became too atomized or controlled. Route 128 versus Silicon Valley,
Japanese versus American manufacturing, anything that helps illustrate
the point concretely.
If you have any pointers, send them to me and I will forward them to
Elliott (and point to the paper when it appears.)
* End ====================================================================
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2003, Clay Shirky