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Deleting Music revisited

Jun 14, 2013 | 0 comments

P1060917

Peter Jesperson inspects the tape vaults at New West Records

A few years ago, I was obsessed with an idea. This is nothing unusual. It happens a lot. It had to do with music, copyright and technology – so no surprises there.

It was going to be a book, but I wasn’t ready to write it. It was going to be a campaign, but I wasn’t ready to lead it. It was going to be a major project, but I wasn’t ready to undertake it.

Starting to think that I might be now. Or at least – I’m increasingly surrounded by people whose set of parameters about what is and isn’t possible in the world is much grander than I’ve been used to, and it’s starting to rub off.

The obsession was something I called Deleting Music. The basic premise is this:

There are millions of songs on iTunes, Spotify, Deezer, Pandora, and so on. Tens of millions. But as impressive as that seems, this is just the tip of the iceberg of our musical heritage.

Most recorded music is not available for sale, is completely unavailable to listen to and does not generate income for anyone. It sits in vaults, unreleased. We’re talking decades of back catalogue master tapes. The history of both popular music culture and unpopular music culture.

95% or more of everything ever released by record labels is utterly inaccessible to the public, and makes no money whatsoever for the music industries or, for that matter, musicians. That number again: 95%. And that’s a conservative estimate.

But what’s worse is that most of this stuff exists in a form that decays over time. Magnetic tape does not last forever, and no matter how well looked after this stuff is, it is becoming irretrievably damaged. All of it. And we’re letting that happen.

We have the capacity and the technology to stop that from happening. Tapes can be digitised. It’s not a trivial problem and there are hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of person hours involved in the task of retrieving, indexing, cataloguing and digitising those tapes. But we can do it.

We can do it with the whole history of books. We can do it with cinema. I’m interested in doing it with music.

But here’s the big problem: even though this music is not commercially valuable to the record labels – or rather, because of that – there is no reason for them to actively preserve this music.

Some companies are more proactive than others – major labels are more of a serious problem than independents simply because of catalogue depth and the primacy of corporate profit motive over all other considerations.

They own the recordings as assets of the business, which means that nobody else can have access. But they do not see a commercial upside to investing in preserving or making available recordings that nobody has been interested in for 30, 40 or 50 years, so they simply do not bother. Why would they?

Other than the fact that the tapes fall apart…

For want of a dividend to investors, the vast majority of our recorded music heritage is being systematically deleted through neglect.

Like I say – I don’t think this is a trivial problem to solve. It’s a complex one. There’s a tangle of legal rights to deal with. There’s a technological and workflow solution to devise. There is a case to be made at a policy level as well as an entire industry to get on board.

But I think that there’s a way to begin to address this problem. To save much of what hasn’t already been lost. I believe a case can be made at a policy level. I think that a solution can be devised that intervenes and arrests that deterioration process. Most importantly – and this is the thing that has changed for me – I’m beginning to think that a profit incentive can be developed through innovation, which will start to remove the blocks that currently prevent this from happening.

It is not up to us what is of interest to the cultural archaeologists of the future. We can’t select to preserve only music recordings on the grounds of their popularity or commercial viability, because we don’t know that this will continue to be the criteria by which our culture’s musical history will be measured.

Museums will tell you they are as interested in the artefacts that ancient cultures discarded as they are in those that were treasured.

Our responsibility is to make sure that as much of our culture is preserved as is possible. We can learn from it. We can build on it. It can inspire new works. It can be studied and used to illuminate understandings of who we are and what we value.

Because even though we don’t necessarily have an obvious commercial incentive to save everything, and nor do we currently have the technological and legal means by which we might achieve this aim, we sure as hell have the storage capacity and the moral imperative.

Music is not just entertainment commodity. It speaks to who we are as a society and a culture. It’s time to stop sitting on our hands while we watch the vast majority of our musical history simply crumble to dust.

Let’s solve this problem.

Thanks to Craig Hamilton of Harkive, Jez Collins of the Birmingham Music Archive and Simon Grigg of Audio Culture for reminding me just how strongly I felt about this. Time to get to work. I’ll let you know as soon as I know just exactly what that work might entail…

The right not to be sampled

Apr 18, 2013 | 1 comment

I had an interesting conversation on Twitter today. One of those ones where I came away glad I use the service. It made me really consider and forced me to come to a conclusion about something that I think is actually very messy and complicated – and not black and white at all.

For the record, I believe:

– That musicians and composers should have the right to prevent their work being used by organisations (whether commercial, political or religious) whose views are in conflict with that of the artist;

– That artists whose recordings are sampled in songs that become commercially successful should see some appropriate financial reward from that inclusion.

– That artists should NOT have the right to prevent their recordings from being sampled by other artists.

It’s on that third point that Jeff Price, the founder and former CEO of Tunecore and I differ. I’m grateful to my friend Fer Isella for retweeting his original statement, to which I responded.

My position, in a nutshell, is that writing, recording and releasing a song gives you certain rights over that song because of a series of agreements that took place at some point in history. The agreements (codified in copyright law) were settled upon in order to assert certain types of monopoly privileges over certain types of commercial works, in order to ensure benefit to society as a whole. There was not (and never has been) a natural, moral dimension to who owns a song.

I don’t happen to think all of those agreements are still useful, and I think that we over-privilege them when it comes to thinking about how the world should be. They’re merely settlements that are temporally and geographically situated, not divine law.

So – while there might seem to be inconsistency in my position (artists get to decide about some uses of their music but not others), the metaphor of ownership which might make it appear simple is not actually a useful one here. Otherwise, artists might also get to choose who can listen to their music, or who can broadcast it.

The distinction, then, is between ownership and moral right. I think the moral right should extend to how your work is represented and the meanings associated with that piece of work. I think it gets very problematic when you start telling people what art they can and cannot make with culture that exists in the world. Especially since all songs are derivative and build on prior culture in one way or another.

It’s an important distinction – because what Jeff Price says is not that artists have a right to choose whether someone samples their music, but that they should be afforded that right. That as a society, we should decide to allow that choice to be in the hands of the musician whose work is sampled.

I don’t happen to agree – for reasons that I hope will become clear when you read the conversation. For the sake of clarity, Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) is a recording artist who makes music out of HUNDREDS of samples taken from the whole history of popular music recordings.

Of course, the problem with leaving the solution there is that so much of the commercially released recorded music in the world is ALL rights reserved, and that generally has very little to do with the wishes of the artist. I imagine that not one of the artists sampled by Girl Talk has the right to choose to have their works Creative Commons licenced, even though it would go some way toward solving this.

My point about collage remains. If you have to ask permission to sample a work, then not only does that generate an extra step of bureaucracy before you even get to create something, it also introduces an opportunity for someone to say “not unless you give us money”. For Jeff Price to both “love Girl Talk” and wish to make what Gillis creates both administratively and economically inviable seems a contradiction.

Of course, what constitutes a sample and what constitutes a wholesale ripoff is another question entirely, and not one I plan to address here. But there is clearly a difference between using a 3-second loop or a guitar chord, and simply re-presenting someone else’s work as your own. These are the reasons that we make these settlements, and yet another reason we need to completely rewrite (not amend) copyright law from scratch (and from first principles) in the light of the new technological environment.

These are exactly the sorts of conversations we should be having.

Incidentally, I don’t happen to believe that Jeff Price should have to be asked in order for our conversation to be posted here on my site. In effect, I am sampling his Twitter account in order to make my blog, but I am drawing from material that is already out in the world, and fashioning something else out of it.

That said, if he was uncomfortable about it, I’d take this post down. Seems entirely consistent, after my post about asking The Brummie to stop aggregating my content, even though they had every right to do so.

UPDATE: This just in: Everything is a Remix (Build 2012)

Preview of the next part of the book

Jul 3, 2012 | 0 comments

I’ve started writing the next section of Music in the Digital Age. I’ve found that recording the audiobook version helps me proofread the e-book version — and so I’m doing that as I go. I thought that since it’s been a month or so since I last updated the book, I’d give you a sneak preview of what’s in the pipeline.

This section’s about copyright. Hope you find it of interest.

Here’s where you can get the e-book
Here’s where you can get the audiobook

As usual, you choose what (and whether) to pay.

How to solve Royalty Collection Societies

Jun 13, 2010 | 13 comments


Photo by ajburgess

In Britain, there’s an organisation called PRS for Music. They’re a membership organisation of composers and songwriters, and they collect royalties on behalf of those members, whenever music is performed publicly or broadcast.

And the PRS has reciprocal arrangements with other collection societies world wide – APRA in Australasia, IMRO in Ireland, ASCAP & BMI in the States, etc. So whenever a British composer’s music is played in France, money can return to that composer.

It’s a great system, and it means that people get paid when their creations are used – particularly in a profit-making context (eg: getting played on the radio; used as mood music in a restaurant or bar; performed live in concert; played by a DJ in a nightclub).

But it’s a far from perfect system.

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