

David Byrne: 'The Internet will suck all creative content out of the world' - wiredfool
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/11/david-byrne-internet-content-world

======
mturmon
True story: David Byrne rode in my Honda Civic. He was doing a studio visit at
the UCLA school of art, and he got hungry for lunch and some alone time. My
wife, a student there at the time, drove him to a sandwich shop nearby.

He was at UCLA showing some photos he had been taking, and doing studio visits
with the MFA (not BFA) students at UCLA's (very prestigious) art school. He's
quite unassuming.

He's also not an old fogey. If he says something is wrong, he's worth
listening to, even though he's largely repeating other sources and familiar
stories.

His message is not what we want to hear. We want to hear that the Internet is
a win all around, except for dinosaurs that deserve to be disrupted anyway.
It's hard to make the case that indie musicians needed to be disrupted.

~~~
anigbrowl
Indeed. Byrne has always been in the vanguard of exploring new media and
musical avenues, as opposed to playing shows in arenas or Las Vegas for easy
$$.

------
pedalpete
It strikes me that the thing that doesn't get discussed in many of these
discussions is that it isn't about creativity. He's attaching the view of
'creativity will disappear because the creatives can't get paid'. But
creativity isn't a market. They are two distinct things, and the problem with
trying to sell your creativity now is that it is easy for anybody to do it.
The supply side has changed significantly while demand hasn't. A record store
only had so much space to put so many artists, and therefore a label could
pick-up an artist, promote that artist and that artist would get bought buy
lots of people because that was the album that was available.

The new reality is that the scarcity of prime real estate on the shelf, where
all the money was made, is now gone.

In fact, the internet isn't sucking the creativity out of the world, quite the
opposite. It is allowing anybody to share their creativity, and as a result,
those who used to make a very large income from the scarcity of distribution
are no longer able to command the market as they did before.

I'm not going to argue if current music is better or worse than the music
during the old ecosystem, that is all personal taste.

If we look back at the age of the big record labels making huge dollars, the
artists complained then as well. They complained that the labels took all
their money, that the labels weren't letting them express their creativity and
forced them to make the same music again and again. It's why many top artists
formed their own record labels as soon as they were big enough to get away
from the big 4.

Now, maybe artists have been taken advantage of by Spotify, just like they had
been by labels previously, but this is the business agreement they've entered.
If David Byrne doesn't want to share his creative efforts in this manner,
nobody is forcing him to, but I'm sure there are 100 lesser known artists who
will take his place. It's simple supply and demand, he's on the wrong side of
the equation these days.

------
mjolk
He's complaining that the sky is falling when it really isn't. His argument
gets circular, but this is a decent microcosm:

>I also don't understand the claim of discovery that Spotify makes; the actual
moment of discovery in most cases happens at the moment when someone else
tells you about an artist or you read about them – not when you're on the
streaming service listening to what you have read about...Why would you click
and go elsewhere and pay when the free version is sitting right in front of
you?

I've found out about new artists through Spotify's radio service. I 'Discover'
new music by clicking around on Youtube or Spotify; I don't read music
magazines (amusingly also becoming archaic).

Now, where this is actually kind of cool, is that the artist gets paid when I
listen.(1) I didn't go out and pirate it.*(2) I didn't give revenue to a
Youtube user that uploaded against copyright. I didn't go with the 'free
version.' As a paid subscriber, I pay to keeping Spotify running. As a user of
the 'free' Spotify version, I pay by consuming marketing, which in turn
generates money to keep Spotify running. Spotify in turn gives money to the
label, who are responsible for paying the artists.

If you buy a nice dinner and the restaurant doesn't pay the busboy, you don't
kick the waiter. That doesn't make any sense.

Talkies (or records or CDs or eBooks or DVDs or internet or drive-ins) will
suck all creative content out of the world.

(1) The artist _does_ get paid. If the contract between an artist or group and
his/her/their record label isn't lucrative for the musician(s), it's hardly
fair to blame the streaming service, isn't it?

(2)I wouldn't have even known the song/artist existed

disclaimer: I really like Spotify.

~~~
ScottWhigham
I'm sorry - this reads like a fan's take on what the music industry/bands is
like. Have you uploaded anything to Spotify and gotten paid? Do you have proof
that a single band you've "discovered" on Spotify has ever received a check as
a result of your being able to listen to their music without directly paying
for specific access to that album/song? I highly doubt it. Are you familiar
with the breakdown between publishing and mechanical copyrights? If not, then
you're just spouting the marketing that companies like Spotify/Pandora want
you to spout.

Spotify sucks for "making money" as an indie band. It's a nice tool in other
areas but to act like "the bands that my friends and I listen to get paid when
we listen" is, well, either willfully ignorant or naive. That doesn't make it
lose/lose for everyone - like you said, you wouldn't have know the song/artist
existed and there's value _to some bands_ in that.

It's simple: If you didn't get paid to write software, but instead got paid $6
per hour with no insurance to travel the country while staying in cheap hotels
and eating crap food and to go onstage for an hour and half per night to code
only to throw the hard drive/files away at the end of the show, would you
write really great software during your "downtime"? Or would you be
exhausted/bored and find that, hey, guess what - I don't think I'm as creative
when I'm on day 87 on the road as I was on day 3.

Services like Spotify relegate "songwriting" to "something you do in your
downtime because they don't pay the bills". Today is a far different
musical/creative world relative to 30-40 years when the record company would
front you 6+ months of expenses and say, "Go write a great record." If you
think that has no effect on the quality of the music written, you're fooling
yourself.

And the restaurant analogy makes no sense here. Who is the restaurant - the
music industry or Spotify? Who is the bus boy? I'm assuming that's the band
but then which side is the waiter?

~~~
larrys
Scott - I liked what you said so I forked to your music site. Very nice but
wanted to point out that the links at the bottom left ("video/music/calender")
don't work for me in Firefox 24 under osx 10.8.5.

------
soylentcola
I think it's a complex issue but finding ways to extract value from products
and services always is.

I think that if you want to mirror the "old" status quo, services like Pandora
or Shoutcast stations should be treated similarly to radio: the company doing
the streaming pays a license for the music (ASCAP, BMI, etc) but not per-song-
per-listener royalties. That's how radio always worked and it was kind of like
publicity for recording artists.

There are two big differences now. Streaming services offer much more variety
in terms of artists and songs so it's harder for content creators (and their
funding companies, the music labels) to focus on the most profitable acts to
push. Also, streaming has become very convenient so it is replacing the
purchase of "hard copy" encoded material (CDs, etc) for many listeners.

When it comes to on-demand services like Spotify, it's harder to claim that
it's the same as radio. With radio, no matter how many independent and college
stations you have, you can't just pick any song you want to hear and have it
play immediately.

At the same time, it's not the same as a CD. With a CD you pay $10 or $15 and
that covers hundreds and hundreds of "listens". I have some albums that I've
probably listened to a thousand times or more over the course of my life. If
Spotify is equivalent to a CD, then how do you determine the cost of one
listen? $15 for a 15-song CD I play 100 times works out to $1 per song or a
penny per song per listen.

Even with CDs, artists might only get pennies on the dollar for every CD sold
with the label taking the rest to (supposedly) recoup the cost of production
and marketing. If I'm essentially paying a penny per song per listen then the
artist is getting a fraction of a cent per listen in this increasingly
hypothetical situation, it seems to line up roughly with what they are making
from Spotify.

I'm not even suggesting that the radio/CD model is the best solution out
there. It just seems like more of the same. The selling of recorded music has
never really been all that profitable for label-backed artists and the ones
who have made a good living that way are an anomaly in the history of the
musical profession.

Musicians historically made their money by either charging for live
performances or being hired by some sort of benefactor to improve their
status. Sounds a lot like selling concert tickets or licensing music for
movies, TV shows, and commercials these days.

I don't think it's ever been very profitable to be a professional musician and
for better or worse, it seems that is not going to change anytime soon.

------
phaser
I think the point with mr.byrne is that everywhere the old big company labels
have equity on the system it will be corrupt. If you 'discover' music through
Spotify and every song played will give royalty to an artist you might think
there is more possibility that a RIAA song gets 'recommended'.

It might not be the case, though. Music produced my the RIAA labels have
always been more popular, thats why they are commercialy successful, thus
advertised, and with more possibility to be 'recommended'

But why independent musicians feeding the old monster? There are lots of
really good music services without RIAA people involved. (i might be wrong on
this) rdio, tunein, grooveshark, tunecore, last.fm, beatport

Today music services are the equivalent record stores. some of them have lots
of RIAA produced pop music, some others will get only independent labels.

------
dirkk0
There might be a future when you earn money playing real instruments before
real people. I remember Zappa's "You can't do this on stage anymore' area.

Real instruments of course include computers these days, as long as people are
interacting with it (i.e. 'playing')

~~~
anigbrowl
Not all composers are performers. Read the credits on music, a lot of hit
songs are penned by people who only work in studios and are not particularly
glamorous or charismatic.

------
krrishd
I really wish he didn't have access to Internet; let's see how that would go

