Archives for 2009

by Corey Dargel

In a recent article written for Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, Greg Sandow claims that the non-profit arts world doesn’t have a good enough argument for its own economic relevance.

He raises legitimate concerns about the NEA primarily supporting symphonies and opera companies, institutions that pay obscene salaries and charge obscene admission prices. Overall, though, the article is a smug, shallow critique that offers no suggestions or solutions, much like the current Republican strategy of contentious obstruction.

I read the Sandow article just before I started reading Remix, and it colored my experience of the book. I was thinking about why people are hostile or apathetic toward the arts and what, if anything, can be done to change their attitudes.

One of Lessig’s goals in reforming copyright laws is to make it easier for the average person to create remixes. This, he argues, will not only make the average person’s life richer; it will also expand her understanding of what’s involved in the process of making art. Now more people than ever have access to tools like GarageBand, iMovie, Wavelab, etc., which allows them to experiment with manipulating content in a creative way. In doing this, they become better acquainted with both the playful and logistical/technical aspects of creating something original.

Before recordings existed, amateur singers and instrumentalists would regularly get together and play through musical scores for entertainment. They knew from experience how difficult it was to play or sing well, so they truly appreciated the work and talent it took to be a professional musician or composer. Lessig believes remixing can work the same way: the more amateur remixers there are, the more appreciation there will be for professional artists, especially those who use technology.

Does this hypothesis ring true to you? If so, do you think this is a possible step toward more public support for the arts?

By Alex Shapiro

Marc Weidenbaum’s post below, “Bach to the Future,” reminds us that
floating among the myriad of issues Lawrence Lessig raises in Remix,
from copyright concerns to aesthetic ones, there is also the topic of
psychology, and the resistance many have to to embracing any new,
paradigm-altering technology.

Often when a new technology arrives, people immediately become fearful
that it will replace all that came before it, rather than simply seeing it
as one additional tool in an ever-expanding toolbox.

It’s been exactly thirty years since the invention of the LinnDrum and subsequent drum- and
sample-playback machines, and its arrival has yet to stop people from
banging joyously on hard objects just as they’ve done since cave days.
More is more. More is good. More is fun, and breeds more access to
creativity and thus, breeds more creativity.

This one small example–electronic drum sounds–raises an important
discussion of two distinct issues. First is the complete joy of having
more tools. Fun, fun, fun. Bang on a skin head, or bang on the rubber pad
of a DrumKat that triggers samples, or hit a button or key to trigger
those samples, requiring no banging at all, and all of them result in
drumming sounds. Nifty.

Next is the economic truth that yes, unquestionably, the arrival of new
tools sometimes means that the old tools are instantly obsolete. Often
cited is the buggy whip: once the automobile took over and people no
longer traveled in horse-drawn carriages, the buggy whip industry went
down the tubes. The downside of new technology. Not so nifty, if you were
an expert at making buggy whips.

But in its place were millions of new jobs in a completely new industry.
The upside of new technology. Might be nifty, if you could enjoy a career
that’s… uh… riveting.

When the LinnDrum became popular in the very early ’80s, it began an
enormous sea change in the recording industry and literally put many fine
musicians out of work. At least, out of work doing the kinds of studio
gigs that paid their bills. I can tell you: I was there, working as an
engineer in a rock studio in Hollywood when one of the first retrofitted
MIDI LinnDrums came in (they were invented pre-MIDI), and we all learned
how to program it. That synthetic sound aesthetically defined over a
decade’s worth of pop music. Interesting times for music–all these huge
sounds (to go with the huge shoulder pads and the huge hair)–and a bad
time for drummers. On a session, we’d sometimes use a drummer to trigger
the box by playing an actual drum set, thus melding the old technology
with the new, but just as often we’d simply program a track and have the
band play along with it.

Nonetheless, lots of percussionists were resourceful and found new ways to
ply their craft and their art. Some went with the “if you can’t beat ’em,
join ’em” approach, and made money recording their own sample libraries.
Others continued to work as drummers by becoming “triggerers” and
programmers themselves, since no one can create a MIDI drum track more
convincingly than a real drummer. But neither of these examples has the
drummer being able to purely work as an artist. For that, they created
their own ensembles, and also did what we all need to do in our careers:
they created need. It became clear what the enormous differences are
between synthetic sounds and real ones, and a new class distinction was
made (often due to budget) between the use of sampled musicians, and that
of living, breathing humans dripping beads of sweat onto the drum heads.

Despite all the impressive drum samples out there now, there have never
been more percussionists playing in thousands of wind bands, orchestras
and small concert, jazz, and rock music ensembles around the globe. The
advent of the drum machine technology did not stop people from being
drummers. It just added drum machines.

There persists an irrational fear that if just anybody can have access to
the tools to make art, it lessens the standards for art. Since the
beginning of time, everybody has had the same access to something as
simple as a drum. And yet miraculously, lots of great drummers have
managed to create great careers.

New digital tools are no different. The newfound ability to create
mash-ups from existing material initially recorded by others simply means
that sound and visual artists have yet another medium from which to choose
as they create their own statement (I am ignoring the obvious debate on
copyright issues for the moment). The availability of technology to allow
us to do remixes will not stop the flow of new string quartets.

Most importantly, quality does rise to the top, more than many realize.
The economy of art is largely based on the public’s desire to experience
something. So the difference between an amateur and a professional is as
simple as supply and demand: the latter will almost always be in more
demand. And demand creates the viable economic market for an artist.

We’re in a world in which sampled drums and live ones coexist, often on
the same tracks. We are also in a world in which art is made of original
material from the efforts of one artist, as well as made from original
material culled from many other sources, thus creating a new original
work. Adaptability is why our species has been so successful, yet we are
resistant to it. Many people fear change, especially when the status quo
is working for them. This is human nature, and still, it’s also human
nature to explore and invent. Ultimately, we each invent our own balance.
If we can avoid being fearful of the new and instead, ask ourselves how we
can use it to our advantage, we’ll see technology as a gift and not a
threat, and we’ll view most advances as positive opportunities. Fun, fun,
fun!

By Matthew Guerrieri

Marc’s
post yesterday made the not insignificant point that Lessig’s
argument is mostly focused on popular culture. I agree with Marc that
“popular” is a bit of a fishy term–maybe it’s better to say that
Lessig is concerned with culture that seems to be important in
relation to its popularity. That’s another can of aesthetic worms,
but it does hint at why the hardcore classical repertoire rates barely
a passing mention, and why even someone like Andy Warhol doesn’t get
mentioned at all. In turn, that may be feeding into the other
imbalance in the book, which is towards amateurs, as opposed to
professionals. My initial sense was that Lessig was far more concerned
with permissive space for amateur remixes than with economic space for
professionals. And, I realized, that includes professional remixers as
well as professional RO culture creators.

Lessig admits (p.
291) that some forms of creativity require a traditional copyright
regime to be properly incentivized. What he doesn’t consider, though,
is how his proposed regulatory shift towards amateur RW culture might
affect the ability of that copyright to economically function. If
companies are trending towards hybrid-style leveraging of
freely-created content, and we’re altering the regulatory structure to
encourage that, then I can’t help thinking that professional
creativity, both RO and RW and everything in between, becomes a less
viable option for those who might be considering it. Lessig’s
licensing solution–electronically monitored royalty micropayments to
RO creators–shifts the economic incentive for RO creation to a
long-tail back end. His spotlight economic model–leveraging amateur RW
culture–freezes out a market for professional remixers.

I don’t
think this is a zero-sum game. But Lessig drives right by where his
argument should be going right around page 230, when he briefly
discusses spillovers and externalities. A spillover, in economic
terms, is that part of the economic value of an innovation that
accrues to somebody besides the innovator. Lessig says, correctly,
that spillovers create public value, and, less correctly, that we thus
shouldn’t worry so much about them. In fact, there’s an entire branch
of economics that is very interested in spillovers from
innovation–New Growth Theory. (I’ve been delving more and more into
New Growth Theory because it seems to match up with my own experience
of how the market treats the arts: that is, with a certain amount of
bewilderment. When one of New Growth Theory’s leading lights,
economist Paul Romer, says things like–

In the physical
economy, with diminishing returns, there are perfect prices; in the
knowledge economy, with its increasing returns, there are no perfect
prices

–that rings true to me.)

New Growth Theory
traces its ancestry all the way back to noted apocalyptarian Joseph
Schumpeter, but really took off in the 1990s when some economists
started getting their hands dirty with problems of technological
innovation and human capital. The oft-cited jumping-off point was
Romer’s 1990 paper
“Endogenous Technological
Change” (JSTOR link) which contains much of the point of the new
theory in its title: classical and neo-classical economics regards
innovation as exogenous, an externality that affects the economy from
the outside, but New Growth Theory says no, innovation has to be a
variable within the equation. The implications are commonsensical but
economically novel–economic growth has more to do with the creativity
of human capital than with simple raw labor force, and spillovers are
a bigger problem than previously thought, because excessive spillover
can actually be a drag on the economy by discouraging the innovation
that it needs to keep running.

That includes artistic
innovation as well, which is why I think that Lessig’s
under-incentivizing of both RO and RW creativity is a bigger deal than
it seems. While much of New Growth Theory is concerned with
technological innovation, there’s been some attention to
non-technology IP and copyright as well: Romer himself took a look at
music and file-sharing in a 2002 paper (
JSTOR link), in which
he pointed to work done by Steven Shavell and Tanguy Van Ypersele (JSTOR link) that
proposed a different sort of licensing scheme, an “optional reward”
system: a creator/inventor could opt either for traditional copyright
protection, or an up-front tax-funded reward payment (based on
estimated future royalties), in return for which the creation would
immediately go into the public domain. In fact, according to Shavell
and Van Ypersele:

Our main conclusion is that the
intellectual property rights system does not enjoy any fundamental
advantage over the reward system. Indeed, an optional reward
system–under which an innovator can choose between a reward and
intellectual property rights–is superior to the intellectual property
rights system in the model we examine. These findings derive from the
primary virtues of reward systems: that incentives to innovate are
provided without granting innovators monopoly power over price and
that the magnitude of research incentives may be selected by the
government.

If you applied this model to music (as Romer
recommends) you can see how it would increase the upfront incentives
for professional RO culture, while eliminating some
disincentive for professional RW culture (with more innovation
in the public domain, the burden of licensing samples decreases). It’s
not perfect–professional remixers still lag in upfront financial
incentive–but it’s better than Lessig’s model, I think, and a sign
that the economic possibilities are more varied, and, for
professionals and would-be professionals, more interesting than they
might seem.

By Brian Sacawa

Everybody has their vices. Mine is listening to pop radio in the car. (And
watching Law & Order.) I like to do this
for two reasons: 1) I genuinely like some of the songs, and 2) out of
curiosity, since I am often puzzled by what pop culture deems “good” music
and think that repeated listenings will reveal the reasons for its
popularity to me. Anyhow, on a recent drive I noticed some striking
similarities between “The Way I Are” (feat. Keri Hilson and D.O.E.) by
Timbaland (released July 9, 2007) and “Circus” by Britney Spears (released
December 9, 2008). I made a mashup of the two tracks to better illustrate
these likenesses. Here’s what you’ll hear: Timbaland Bridge–Britney
Bridge–Timbaland Chorus–Britney Chours.

Listen:

Ummm… Let’s compare. Same tempo, though we can let that one slide since
successful pop songs only work at certain tempos. Similar, almost
identical, melodies and melodic contour. But what I found most exceptional
was the cadence and rhythm at which the lyrics are delivered. These songs
were not written by the same person, nor did they have the same producer,
though Britney did work with Danja, who produced “The Way I Are”, on her Circus album. And she apparently used samples from “The Way I Are” for a
mashup with her track “Gimme More” for an interlude during her 2009 The
Circus Starring: Britney Spears Tour.

(For the record, I don’t know if Timbaland has a serious musical agenda or
artistic vision or what his views are concerning ironic references, but I
think he’s a slick sampler and pop music semiotician: semi-buried in the
background of “The Way I Are” is a sample of “Push It” by Salt-N-Pepa,
while the recurring “Yeah!” and “Talk to me, girl” that precedes the
bridge sound suspiciously like the “Yeah!” and “Take it to the
bridge/chorus” in “SexyBack” (released July 7, 2006) by Justin Timberlake
(or is it Timbalake?).)

This is nothing new for pop music. And as Lessig points out, this kind of
“sampling” is the norm in jazz. In fact, “building on the creativity of
others before” (p. 103) is how an aspiring jazz artist is often measured.
Have they absorbed the language of the art form’s innovators? Can they
play Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” solo verbatim not because it’s the only way
they know how to blow on the tune but simply because they’ve paid their
dues? Can a trumpet player play like Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Lee
Morgan, Clifford Brown, Randy Brecker, and Tom Harrell and still have
their own distinctive voice? In jazz improvisation, a sly reference to the
past in a contemporary solo speaks volumes about the artist who was
creative enough to work it in.

I’ve always thought that the amount of “copying” in pop music greatly
exceeds the amount of innovation. The few innovators there are–say The
Beatles, 1980s Michael Jackson, Nirvana, or Dr. Dre, to name only a
few–do their thing and then have to watch as the rest of the industry
emulates them. Is this imitation done out of reverence to these
ground-breaking artists like a jazz musician paying homage to the greats
of his instrument in an improvised solo? Maybe for the high school kid in
a garage band, but in general I think it’s mostly driven by economics. The
innovators innovate and then everyone else files in behind their sound to
capitalize on what’s hot. I just wonder why Britney is allowed to be so
blatant while someone else might get sued? Where’s Joe Satriani when you
need him? I guess in a different way, this also speaks volumes about the artist.

As these things tend to happen, I read Kyle’s post on leaving the baggage of scores and recordings behind by going digital, and then a couple hours later while flipping through the New Yorker, I stumbled upon an observation from Sasha Frere-Jones pointing out that what was once conjecture is getting closer and closer to plain old truth: “recordings have become advertisements for shows.” Sure, sell what you can, but then don’t sweat the illegal downloads. Digital copies don’t mean anything when they are essentially infinitely reproducible. The copy costs pretty much nothing to generate, so monetizing the copy itself is probably a losing game. Raising an army to protect it is often even counterproductive. Ding, ding! It’s time to wake up and move on.

Both of these concepts relate to some of Lessig’s ideas: the real game is not the copy and we’re just spinning our wheels deeper into the mud (intellectually and practically) the longer we pretend it is.

When anyone can have pretty much anything, getting people’s attention will be the challenge. Many probably won’t even look for what little is sucessfully kept from them.  However, when media is a vast sea, most of us will be looking for some sort of beacon to cling to; a place where we feel at home and maybe even serve as a productive part of the club. What this suggest to me is that rather than trying to plug the dam and protect the precious copies, the smartest among us are experimenting with positioning their content as close to the front lines of their community’s public conciousness (and in the best cases monetized–even if the $$ won’t happen for a while–access) as they can mange. It’s dangerous out there, sure, but it’s the place to be.

As the celestial jukebox of digital content moves from concept to reality, the tastemakers will be key, and who will those powerbrokers be? I doubt it will be the usual guest list. A new guard is coming down the pike, and when it comes to the fine and performing arts, I’m dying to see who will take that crown.