The Brooding Savage

What follows is a comment sent to me regarding my earlier post about the Music Industry, as well as certain other questions I posed about the eventual "democratization" of music.  The author is a friend and colleague. 

Dear Bill:

I welcome discussing this notion by some technologists claiming "democratization" when applied to the music industry. My own experience is that Musicians want their creations, inventions and writings to produce "capitalization."

As I told the magazine Red Herring when I was interviewed back in 2000, it's not the Labels that will be destroyed by Internet Technology P2P, it will be the music retail stores like good old Tower Records, beginning with the illegal and unfair competition from Napster and Kazaa technology giving away Tower's products for free. Technology provided new consumer outlets, but never provided Label services like some would inappropriately claim. I knew the technology sites would one day have to pay to become "retail stores," just as Napster was advocating at the time. But they were never trying to become "Record Labels." Labels are banks who give artists money to record, tour, buy equipment, advertise, publicize, sell, distribute, hire attorneys, accountants, assistants and more, all of which are still needed, even with Internet "retail stores" like iTunes. And the artists usually do not have to declare bankruptcy if they don't pay the Label back, which happens over 90% of the time.

I was one of the 2-million that downloaded the free Coldplay single by entering my email address last week. Coldplay now has 2-million addresses to which they are sending follow-up emails encouraging purchase of the full album, T-shirts, etc. It is more like drug dealing than "democratization," in that the first one is free and we hope to hook you, otherwise known as big-C "Capitalism."

Radiohead has signed with a new Label. Trent Reznor of NIN still wants Label support. Even Jerry Garcia stated that when anyone says "that music belongs to the people and musicians rip them off. That kind of thing really irks me. It's like, in order to get so you can play music you have to sacrifice a lot of what would have been your normal life. You know what I mean? For lack of a better phrase, you have to pay the dues to get so you can play music. It's not a thing you just do. If that were so, everybody'd be making their own music and there wouldn't be professional musicians. There'd be no need for them. For someone to deny the fact that you spent a certain amount of your life working on some sort of discipline and learning how to play... that's the rip-off."

The notion of "democratization" as used by technologists toward music seems as absurd as when used by the Bush regime, and I find them similar. We live in a world, for better or worse, driven by "capitalization" which technologists seem hellbent to overthrow when practiced by the music industry. Yet, if the technologists do not 'capitalize" their own companies and VC funding dries up, there is no "democratizing" technologists employed there any longer. Technology and Music are equally dependent on the same "capitalization" with little regard for "democratization." The Constitution of the United States and constitutions in most other nations guarantee the right of authors to control their work within a Democracy driven by Capitalism. Sharing material otherwise under Copyright through P2P might be better defined as "anarchy" or "sociopathic behavior," rather than "democratization."

I personally find P2P users bombing the legal music industry to be no different than Bush bombing with technology in illegal wars and using illegal wiretaps that overthrow even more rights guaranteed by the American Constitution. Those same "democratizing" technologists provide the wiretaps, provide the smart bombs, and agree with right-wing politics most of the time, as suggested in an article about Facebook published by The Guardian in which the author refers to those technologists as "neo-conservative libertarians." Maybe you are one too? The last 8-years of all this bombing by Bush and his technology friends may have done more to overthrow Democratic Rights than to provide the "democratization" of anything.

Musicians want their creations, inventions and writings to produce "capitalization."  Technologists vision of "democratization" should be applied to force Cheney to reveal his meetings with oil barons, but that never happened, while their attacks on Cheney's natural enemy, the entertainment industry, are just destructive with little purpose. I look forward to constructive discussions regarding technology outside the limitations of the approved technologist ghetto rhetoric. Please join me in advocating for the Peace issue of WIRED magazine and that all technologists refuse to go to work on an agreed upon day in protest of the war.

Best regards,
David Bean
Professional in the Internet and Music Industries