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LATELY the country-steeped singer-songwriter has become vocal and eloquent on issues of artists’s rights, including an appearance before lawmakers in Washington, DC; she’s also on the executive board of the Content Creators Coalition. The freshest thing about the arguments made by this daughter of St. Johnny is that she looks not only at technological and economic but the cultural causes of our current culture crash. In other words, what is it about our thinking, our assumptions about the arts, that have kept us from fixing this mess?
Here is what Cash posted on her Facebook account; I have blocked it into paragraphs for clarity.
For those of you who keep telling me that artists should work for free for the sheer joy of creation: You’ve been watching too many operas about starving artists who die before their time and are glorified for it. Do you pay your plumber? Your kid’s teacher? Your mechanic? Your grocer?
If art and music are not important to you, by all means, don’t buy them. If they are, then PAY for them, as you do everything else in your life that you require for physical or spiritual sustenance.
Yes, people will always create. I have spent 35 years of hard work, with a bone-crunching schedule, to achieve some level of mastery over what I do. It took me almost two years to make my last record, and I had to pay bills during that time. It is my profession, not my hobby.
I do not participate in the notion that music should be free, until tech companies who use our work as a loss leader also work for free, and until the CEOs of those companies stop taking home millions of dollars in ad revenues which they make by using the work of songwriters and musicians as bait.
Cash’s arguments have impressed me for a while now, and I hope to speak to her soon and get her to expand on some of this.
so glad to hear someone speading this truth! Thank you. This is what I shared on Facebook. I have a lot of ‘friends’ and the majority call themselves songwriters or some version of being either in the music biz or a music lover. Hopefully this will be re shared many times over. We are in big trouble out here in music land…. I appreciate your willingness to put eyes on the problem….
“It’s about time we as songwriters, publishers, and all creators of content stand up for our livelihoods. I agree that we chose music because we love it and we want to make the world a better place but when the greed of the masses won’t allow us to make even a modest living, we are essentially enslaved to our craft. If more of us said ‘NO, HELL no!’ or charged for our time (not withstanding the creative initiative it takes to create something awesome) & if we only made miniumun wage, many would still make more income than presently through the various royalties. Even the big guys are pulling out their hair wondering how they’re going to help their kids pay for college (basic higher education, nothing fancy!) I love what I do, but how can I look a writer in the eye and tell him or her that she’ll be able to make a good living? Right now, we’re tempted to buy a lottery ticket every week… because getting a song cut is hard, getting it to do well on the charts is challenging, and performance and mechanical royalties have diminished at alarming rates. This used to be a sustainable industry. Writers & publishers could leverage income made from their 1st cuts to finance the next batch of songs, eventually creating a sustainable stream of income that would suffice for at least a modest retirement. Not so much anymore. I’m tired of it and I’m ready to take a stand, have been for a long time. Call me selfish if you want, but in my heart I know we are getting a very unfair and raw deal. I just can’t agree that getting shit on isn’t stinky!!!!
I agree 100%. But unfortunately, the smart business savvy CEO will take advantage of the moron freshman musician every single time just to “get their music out there”. How many times have musicians heard that?? I’ll be perfectly honest, I fell for it too when I was young and stupid. The worst ones are the organizations like Music Gorilla. You pay them $35 a month, which seems like a good deal. And for that they claim to “connect you with record label execs, management, etc.” We got a five minute meet with a label rep from Sony at a SXSW about ten years ago. We were promised that Sony wanted to meet with us and they sent a twenty-two year old kid, probably some intern, to tell us, “y’all sounded good, but our roster is full right now, but we’ll keep in touch.” So it’s that promise of something better just right over the horizon that keeps luring the starry eyed artists into falling for that trick every time. And musicians get old enough and wise enough not to fall for that anymore, well, there’s another hundred up and coming bands on the scene that will fall for it. Now, after years of labels taking advantage of artists, there has been a rise in home-grown music. Especially with the aid of technological advances in recording techniques. I could write and record a hit song from my living room without a single artist. And it’s not just for rap anymore. Plus, the sound quality of recording has suffered greatly. I’ve seen one-million dollar SSL control boards on sale now for $70,000. The average listener doesn’t care anymore that their music is produced by a top name producer in a top name studio. They just want to download it for free.
What I’m seeing is a huge rift opening up in the music industry. You will always have the Madonna’s and the Metallica’s and the Michael Jackson’s but more and more music that the average person is listening to is something their buddy recorded in his bedroom, and they are getting it for FREE. The big labels don’t want to spend the money recording an album if it’s going to be ripped and downloaded a million times for free. So yeah, the culture is to want to get something for nothing. People want to be able to download music for free, CEO’s of companies want to take advantage of starving artists by saying “We’ll take you where you want to go.” and that’s where we are right now.
I will disagree though that trying to lobby or pass a law to block this is the best approach. Let the record labels go out of business, let the music industry crash, just like the stock market, and let’s rebuild it again in a manner we see fit.
Sorry if I’m taking in circles, but as a twenty-year musician who has kept a day job the entire time because music has never paid the bills, I’ve been there, done that, got a closet full of t-shirts to prove it, and it sucks. I guess I can say I’m one of the more fortunate or ambitious ones who actually has eleven albums, a national tour a drum endorsement deal and several first-round grammy nominations under my belt, but it still doesn’t pay the bills! But I still keep doing it because I refuse to give up (or give in).
Sean
I agree with Sean. Top down approaches (passing laws that control every small thing in our lives) never works as well in the long run as bottom up approaches such as organizing, social pressure, and learning how to effect changes through the media. We need someone to write a screenplay for a movie that highlights this problem and causes people to want to change on their own free will.
I’m coming at this from the point of view as a hobby composer/arranger — the exact opposite of a professional. I could very easily afford to give my music away for free — and from where I stand, I still agree with the professionals that a consumer doesn’t just get music because they want it.
My attitude is that music — like certain other connection-oriented activities — is shared for either love or money. And if I’m not doing it for money, I’ll do it for love, sure.
But that just means if I don’t love you, you don’t get any.
Either way, an artist has the perfect right to expect compensation on their terms, and that is the way it should remain. I, an amateur, will let a person in the room to hear my music if I like them, and a professional will let them in the room if they get paid. Either way, you don’t just get to barge into the room and get access because you want it.
Corollary to this: if you aren’t willing to make friends with the performer through love or money, then you will only get access to sh*t music. And you shouldn’t be surprised by this. It stands to reason that the only thing you can get at sh*t volumes for sh*t prices is sh*t. You want the good stuff, then cough up. No one owes anyone anything just because they want it for nothing.