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FW: [NEC] 2.2: The Music Industry and the Big Flip
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kids,=20
below is an interesting piece i picked via another list. some of you will h=
ave probably seen it already, but i'd be interested to hear your thoughts, =
given the ever-present interest expressed here in copyright, distribution a=
nd major-label badness. in any event, clay's stuff is always good value - s=
ee what you think.
best -=20
max
SLOW SOUND SYSTEM
a walk on the mild side
max@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.slowsound.net
-----
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: nec-admin@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:nec-admin@xxxxxxxxxx]
>Sent: 21 January 2003 18:34
>To: nec@xxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: [NEC] 2.2: The Music Industry and the Big Flip
>
>
>NEC @ Shirky.com, a mailing list about Networks, Economics, and Culture=20
>
> Published periodically / # 2.2 / January 21, 2003=20
> 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=20
>
>* Introduction =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>
>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 =93limited duration=93 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.=20
>
>-clay
>
>* Essay =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>
>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 =93filter, then publish=93 is giving way to =93publish, th=
en
>filter.=93 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 =93publish, then filter=93 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 =931. 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.=93 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 =93jury selection=93 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.
>=20
>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 =93weblog industry=93
>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.
>
>-=3D-
>
>* WiFi and VoIP =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>
>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.=20
> 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=3D1452
> (via the incomparable boingboing.net)
>
>* Worth Reading =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>
>- 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 =3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>
>Elliott Maxwell asks:
>
> =93I'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.=93
>
>In light of Eldred, this is _the_ question. Edward Rothstein, in an
>attack on Lessig in Saturday's New York Times, asked =93What harm have
>we come to from copyright extension?=93 and the answer, of course, is
>=93We don't know.=93 (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 =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>
>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
>The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform
>the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit.
>
>To view a copy of this license, visit
>http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0=20
>
>or send a letter to
>Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
>
>2003, Clay Shirky
>
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>NEC - Clay Shirky's distribution list on Networks, Economics & Culture=20
>NEC@xxxxxxxxxx
>http://shirky.com/nec.html
>
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