Why We Can't Have Nice Things

by 99 Seats

Via the always handy You've Cott Mail comes a point/counterpoint that really highlights why conversations about art, commerce and the generation gap really don't go too far. Emily White, a 21-year old intern, writes an essay on why her generation, which loves music, will never buy albums, most because they've never bought albums. They've shared music, traded music, bought songs on the internet and, yes, illegally downloaded them. But her entire music experience has been digital. She offers her vision of what her generation would want:

What I want is one massive Spotify-like catalog of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices. With this new universal database, everyone would have convenient access to everything that has ever been recorded, and performance royalties would be distributed based on play counts (hopefully with more money going back to the artist than the present model). All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?

In response, David Lowery, of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, at the Trichordist launched this...well, you can really only call it a screed. He starts off saying he's not trying to "shame" or "embarrass" White. Then proceeds to wag his finger at her for about a million paragraphs. He throws out nearly every possible reason a young person wouldn't want to pay for music and just demolishes them. By the end, he's invoking the Occupy movement and telling her to donate to the American Heart Association in Alex Chilton's name, because she name-dropped Big Star. One of his major rhetorical flourishes is to say that White owes two grand to the artists in her collection and compares that to the cost of a laptop, or a monthly Metrocard or a college education. He hits your heart strings by talking about two impoverished artists he knew who took their own lives, which he apparently blames solely on 21-year olds downloading their music. It is quite the barbaric yawp of a blog post. It's also pretty wrongheaded.

Emily's piece is discussing one thing that Lowery turns into another, seeming to have only read the headline. She doesn't say she's never bought music; quite the opposite, she makes a point of saying that. Yes, sharing music with your friends is still illegal, but mostly David is railing against the piracy industry. Which isn't her point at all.

Emily is talking about creating a different model for a generation whose experiences are radically different. When she's talking albums, she's talking a physical CD bought in a brick-and-mortar store. She doesn't seem to have any objection to paying for music, or to making sure that artists are fairly compensation. The compensation structure of the music industry isn't her subject. The way young audiences enjoy and experience and, yes, purchase music is. David completely ignores that and kicks around a whole bunch of strawmen.

He wants to talk about compensation structure and rail at Emily (and her generation) for a kind of moral turpitude. It's immoral, he says, not to care about the plight of artists. Most of me agrees with him. But I think he's going after the wrong end of the stick here. Emily doesn't say anything about not caring about the fate of artists. Again, she notes that she'd like a system that compensates artists more than the current one. David mentions nothing at all about creating a new system. For all of his passion, details and breakdowns, he's trying to tell Emily, someone who sees the immorality inherent in the system and wants something different, that no, she should be supporting this system.

If I were Emily White, I would feel shamed, embarrassed, scolded and kind of angry about Lowery's piece. I certainly wouldn't want to engage him any further because, plainly, he's not actually listening to me. He's so invested in the way things used to work that he can't even imagine a different way of working. So we can't talk about that, we can't discover that. This conversation will go nowhere. Which is a shame. Because, like many industries, the music industry needs to re-think its model. You can't do that when even the iconoclasts, the rebels are standing atop the barricades shouting "STOP!"

Comments

[Alison Croggon]

"Emily, I know you are not exactly saying what I’ve illustrated above. You’ve unfortunately stumbled into the middle of a giant philosophical fight between artists and powerful commercial interests. To your benefit, it is clear you are trying to answer those existential questions posed to your generation. And in your heart, you grasp the contradiction." Doesn't sound like he's being unforgiving to me.

Yes, he's using the letter as an occasion to ask why it's so acceptable for artists not to be paid for their work, while nobody blinks at spending hundreds of dollars on the hardware. Good question. And he does have a suggestion: he suggests iTunes as a system that works perfectly well as a convenience and as a model of compensation. He doesn't blame piracy solely for the deaths of his friends: he says clearly they have other problems. But he says that if they were not so poor, if the popularity of their music had been reflected in an income, it might have made a difference.

I totally agree with David Lowery. It's not a rant: he is outlining vividly what happens to artists when they make work that people believe they have a right to enjoy for free. He's asking how the culture that takes that as a given can be changed. Every artist whose work is reproducible faces these issues. I try not to get depressed about the hundreds of thousands of copies of my novels that are pirated, but sometimes it's hard not to: I don't believe each of them represent lost sales, but it's impossible to deny, in the age of the iPad and other nice ereaders, that many of them do. For many artists, it's the difference between being able to pay the rent and being broke. Since there are young musicians and emerging writers who face exactly the same problem, I'd say it's not a "generation gap" at all. It's the gap between those who spend years making work, and those who think it's perfectly all right to thoughtlessly consume it without any respect for those who made it.

[99]

But...see...Emily has no problem with iTunes and no compunction against paying artists. I suppose some people do, but I don't know those people, haven't heard from them. It's an enduring strawman argument. It's not one that Emily is making. Again, in fact, she wants a system that works for her convenience and supports artists BETTER than the system we have in place.

If you want to complain about piracy, fine. But don't make every argument about the changing way that people enjoy music into an argument about piracy. And don't make the consumer the enemy. They're not. The pirate sites, sure. The corporations that are relying on an increasingly out-of-date and destructive model and still refusing to pay artists appropriately, yes. But accusing an entire generation of being moral degenerates isn't getting it done.

[Petter Joe]

this is a admirable article. i just adore if i apprehend the article.