Mr. Brown thinks that selling off Britain's gold reserves at the bottom of the market was the act of a prudent man
I’ve made the case before that Gordon Brown is arrogant and incompetent; an awful mixture and catastrophic in a political leader. It seems that a guy named Vernon Coleman agrees and has written a whole book on Brown’s mismanagement of the British economy.
Recently I retuned my digital radio and discovered a station named Amazing Radio. Amazing is a test station with music consisting of unsigned artists chosen and uploaded by the audience. This got me thinking.
Golden Age?
Recently four Danish men were accused of helping Internet users download music illegally. They ran a file sharing web site named Pirate Bay and have now been found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail.
This is not the first time the music industry has prosecuted file sharing sites and the case for the music industry seems to be that the music files are copyright and should be paid for. Pirate Bay claim that they are only allowing people to search for files and the legality of the downloads are not it’s problem. Let’s take a step back and consider what’s happening here.
The music industries case rests on the copyright laws which originated in Britain in 1710 as an act “for the encouragement of learning” and “for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books”. In 1787 a copyright clause was incorporated into the United States Constitution.
Copyright allowed the authors to receive payment for their work which was deemed useful by the population at large. The printing press had been introduced into England in the 15th century but for over two hundred years it was not possible for authors to receive payment based on the popularity of their work. With the introduction of copyright it became possible for an author to receive payment for each copy of the original work he produced.
The copyright principle was later extended to sound recordings and specifically music but before this could happen various technology had to be invented to allow the recording and copying of sound.
The history of sound recording might be said to have begun in 1877 with the invention of the mechanical phonograph cylinder by Thomas Edison. Around 1889 gramophone discs replaced cylinders. Originally made from a resin derivative these discs were dramatically improved in the 1940s with the introduction of vinyl. It was these vinyl records which became the standard for the following decades and the music industry as we know it was born.
Prior to copyright a musician made money by performing. The same person may also have written the song but that made no difference. The song had to be performed for anyone to receive payment.
The invention of the vinyl record meant that a performance could be recorded and this recording then transformed into something saleable. Copies of the record could be sold a million times over with minimal production costs. The music industry liked the maths and many people became extremely wealthy.
As with any new industry the original owners and managers were music enthusiasts but as the profits grew the middlemen were drawn in. Managers, agents, public relations executives and a plethora of other hangers on.
The middlemen were businessmen. They didn’t care about the music they cared about profit and as any businessman knows the way to make profit is to buy cheap and sell dear. Keep your overheads low and your prices high. The businessmen fine tuned the industry by maintaining a small stable of musicians and maximising sales using large scale marketing.
Midlemen
So there were two enablers for the music business as it grew, copyright laws and technology both of which are artificial. The original purpose of copyright may have been “for the encouragement of learning” but it is fair that the definition now encompasses entertainment. But copyright laws is not the same type of law as Thou shalt not kill or thou shalt not steal.
Copyright law was introduced long before digital media and globalisation and it’s intention was to provide a living for writers and artists not to bestow super star status on a selected few.
The maintenance of copyright laws is valid not because it benefits the music industry but because it benefits the population as a whole. If it does not do that then it’s existence, or at least it’s implementation, should be questioned.
It is fair to say that the music industry during the period of vinyl and CDs did not fulfil the purpose originally intended for the copyright laws. The middlemen had so manipulated the industry that it was they who selected the musicians to be famous through massive promotional campaigns. Pink Floyd even made their careers by criticising the industry.
The music was not cheap. At the age of 16 in 1975 I started my first job and earned £15 per week. At that time the average price of an album was £3 or £4. This means that Robert Plant considered that a teenage kid should spend a fifth to a quarter of his wages keeping Led Zeppelin in luxury hotels and private jets!
The Rolling Stones did not earn massively more than similar artists because of their undoubted talent but because of the massive promotional budget. We, the punters, fell for this marketing and revered musicians as spiritual leaders rather than craftsmen capable of banging out a good tune. We worshiped Elvis like a God and listened to tax exiles such as Bono on subjects such as world poverty.
Just last week the front page of British newspaper The Sun proclaimed that Lilly Alan had condemned the BNP! Sorry Lilly, you sing a nice song, but I do not need your advice when appraising the fascistic tendencies of political parties.
A pertinent question to ask is: has the music industry benefited music?
As advertising executives always argue when defending alcohol or tobacco advertising: marketing does not make you consume more it just makes you consume a specific brand. Do we need someone else to spend our money telling us which music to listen to?
The enablers to the music industry are not hard work and talent but technology, copyright laws and marketing. Without these man made artefacts the music industry would not exist as it is today.
So let us return to the situation today. If copying went into overdrive in the 1960s then the digital revolution and The Internet has put copying into hyperdrive. Digital technology has allowed not copying but cloning of music recordings. This means that there is no deterioration in quality if the copy is from an original or from another copy. In addition the production costs of making extra copies are so close to zero as to be unimportant and the technology required can be found in any teenager’s bedroom. Further, The Internet means that these clones can be distributed globally at minimal cost effectively bypassing the music industry and making policing of the old copyright laws almost impossible.
The record companies now squeal that organisations like Pirate Bay are not only illegal but immoral but are Pirate Bay any more immoral than EMI? It could be argued that Pirate Bay have merely leveraged the new technology in the same way that the record company did in the 1960s.
The music industry is not fighting to protect artists and their music, it is fighting to protect the armies of middlemen plus the stable of supposed talent which they have spent millions of dollars hyping. Remember The Bay City Rollers? Was this really the best music Britain could produce in the 1970s?
Of course musicians should receive payment for their work but the bloated music business no longer provides any useful contribution to music. We do not need music companies to pay DJs to play their music. We do not need promoters to ensure that their artist is plugged simultaneously on every TV channel and that promotional plastic toys are included in cereal packets. Remember that these costs are always passed on to the punter.
The world has changed and the music industry cannot insist that the paradigm be frozen as it was when the technology gave them their best advantage. Technology gave and technology has taken away. The industry has exploited teenagers for decades but technology has now swung in favour of the teenagers. About time to!
Amazing Radio works by allowing artists to upload their music via a web site named Amazing Tunes. The music may be tagged as free but if not then anyone downloading the music gets charged 79p per download. The public are free to make play lists and this feeds the content on Amazing Radio.
In 1980, Michael Jackson secured the highest royalty rate in the music industry but even this was only 37% of wholesale album profit. Artists who upload their music to Amazing receive 70% of profits from downloads.
Good or Bad?
It might be argued that Amazing is similar to service such as iTunes but there is a crucial difference. Services like iTunes still adhere to the old paradigm because they restrict choice. They sell only music by artists who have signed contracts with the music industry.
In the 60s an artist gained tangible benefits from singing with a big label as this gave them access to the complex expertise required for music recording, distribution and marketing.
Since recording and distribution can now be done by the artists themselves the music companies provide little more than marketing and even this is being challenged with artists such as Groove Armada signing directly with Bacardi.
The music industry is a cartel system which restricts choice and has created price distortion for decades. It is a legacy system long overdue for decommissioning.
The Amazing paradigm is a revitalisation of the original intent of the copyright laws, based firmly on current technology and a more realistic valuation of music. It allows greater variety while dispersing more of the profits amongst a greater number of artists. Less musicians will be millionaires but more will make a fair living.
This morning I listened the Today program on Radio 4 and heard Tony Woodley, the joint secretary of the Unite union, discussing the recent take over of Vauxhall/Opal by a Canadian parts manufacturer named Magna. Obviously Mr. Woodley argued for retaining the jobs at Ellesmere Port and Luton.
Save Vauxhall campaign logo
The role of a Union is to represent the worker so it is right that Mr. Woodley argues for protecting the jobs of workers. In a Capitalist system, it is also right that the managers of the company protect the value of the company for shareholders. Ideally the two sides would meet to discuss the issues involved and reach some kind of compromise.
These days, corporations have become global and many are classed as multinationals and have shareholders from multiple nations. The managers of these corporations will naturally look to base their business in a location which provides the maximum Return On Investment (ROI) and in the case of Vauxhall/Opal this might mean that they may decide to close down Ellesmere Port or Luton in favour of continuing or expanding production in Germany.
You may not agree with Capitalism but this is how it works.
The response of trade unions has been pitiful. Mr. Woodley has merely argued that the British government should intervene to protect British jobs. This is an inadequate response.
Politically unions tend to be lean to the left and some are outright socialists emphasising the fraternity of workers world wide. Indeed the very purpose of a union is to unite workers so that they cannot be picked off individually by the employers.
“United we stand, divided we fall” is a common phrase within trade unionism yet when job cuts loom union leaders scurry to save their workers jobs at the cost of foreign jobs.
The corporate managers must love it. Governments of each country are badgered by their unions into supplying incentives to the multinationals. More often than not these incentives boil down to tax payers money and the tax payers are the same workers who’s jobs the government is trying to protect.
Dr. Johnson has been much in the news recently and it was he who said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. I am not suggesting that union leaders are scoundrels but they show a woeful lack of imagination and principle when allowing corporations to play one nation off against another.
We have comparatively free markets within The European Union for goods and services. The unions within Europe should unite to protect the jobs and rights of workers throughout Europe.
Of course the argument is then that the jobs will go outside the European Union but as we do not have a global free trade area yet perhaps global union action can also wait.
A couple of weeks ago James Murdoch made a speech condemning the BBC as a state owned organisation which discourages pluralism in journalism by “dumping” free news on the market.
The argument is appealing as conventional market theory would imply that if you are giving something away free then nobody is going to pay for it.
Bush House
Mr. Murdoch’s attack has come in the wake of two factors: The Internet boom and the global recession. Prior to these factors, commercial media organisations were awash with advertising revenues and did not see the BBC as serious competition. But with the rise of The Internet, advertising revenues are now spread more thinly over many more media suppliers. The current recession has put further pressure on commercial organisations.
First seen as a lame duck, the BBC modernised and expanded its services. The modern BBC provides many services online but, as it does not rely on advertising revenue, it is not directly affected by the recession. So it is only now that commercial media companies are struggling that they attack the BBC.
Are they right? Should the BBC be cut back or abolished?
Mr. Murdoch’s argument is predicated on the idea the all things should be left to the market which, through the mechanism of competition, will supply variety. In this case this means a plurality of programming and opinion.
Market theory is real and underpins much of the success of the western world. However, Mr. Murdoch’s claims for market forces are flawed. Market forces can produce a plurality of suppliers but this does not mean a plurality of services or opinion. On the contrary, market forces use competition to evolve a monoculture of services and opinion.
This has happened again and again in history from telephone systems to television. VHS won out over the superior Betamax format and Blue Ray has recently won out over HD DVD for high definition television recording. This is classic free market operation. Multiple ideas emerge and one wins out, sometimes through an innate superiority, but often due to superior management, marketing or any number of other factors. For TV formats this does not matter, but for news, which is essentially the battle of ideas, a monoculture is positively dangerous.
If it were true that a pluralistic news media would emerge from a purely commercial medium then this would have occurred in The United States. It has not. The news media in The United States have many positive qualities but diversity is not their strength. Further, commercial media companies will all have an natural bias in favour of free market capitalism to the detriment of the reporting of other systems.
Mr. Murdoch’s is not attacking the BBC because he favours pluralism. He has no real interest in diversity of opinion and makes the arguments for selfish purposes. News Corporation has always been a rapacious free market company striving to defeat its competition. A monoculture is acceptable for a mature industry that makes widgets but not for an industry that reports events.
BBC TV news reported Mr. Murdoch’s speech and asked the question: If the BBC did not exist, would we consider creating a news service which was owned and run by the state. At first blush this does not sound a good idea and has the resonance of totalitarianism but in the same TV program, Greg Dyke, ex director General of the BBC, made the point that the BBC is not a state run organisation. It is an organisation funded by a license fee and controlled by a trust. This is not the same as state control.
Shareholder capitalism and state ownership are not the only models possible for organisations. The United States savings and loans and the British mutual building societies are other examples of a middle way.
Of course the BBC can be leaned on by the British government and this has happened. But is this very different from the shameful behaviour of the United States media in the wake of 9/11 when they overlooked illegal and ignominious activities of the United States government and armed forces?
The United States is a country with a strong basis in free market capitalism and an understandable mistrust of the state. Great Britain has a long history of laissez-faire capitalism but also a solid foundation in pragmatism. We should use markets when they are useful, not out of an ideological obsession.
The BBC provides a useful counterbalance to commercial organisations and is respected throughout the world. Its lack of reliance on advertising allows greater freedom from lobby groups than its commercial competitors. One only has to watch a few minutes of CNN to realise that commercial organisations rely on BBC reporters throughout the world. Even the leader of the Soviet Union found the BBCs reporting independent enough to rely on during the military coup in 1991.
Mr. Murdoc’s speech has been given great attention because his father, Rupert Murdoch, made a similar speech some years ago but whereas Rupert Murdoh recognised an technological shift that would inevitably force change on a media industry which had stagnated, James Murdoch is appealing for change to protect a vested interest.
Mr. Muroch claims that the BBC is an obstacle to pluralistic media – It isn’t. The BBC has proved itself over the years as a defender of objective journalism and should not be sacrificed to support the profits of the Murdoch empire.
I think the fairest definition of my opinions on economics is liberalism. I see the benefits of Capitalism but I have the gut feeling that it drives us to work too hard and to treat the world as nothing more than raw materials. I can see that Socialism lacks a mechanism for accountability and can lead industry to become so incompetent that it cannot perform it’s function.
I saw part of the documentary on the collapse of Lehman Brothers recently and it seems that all the rich and powerful bankers were hoping for a bailout by the American tax payer. There was a clip of some high falutin banker complaining that Lehmans only needed 30 or so billion to keep it afloat and billions of dollars worth of value was wiped out across the world because the money was not forthcoming.
Government Bailout
I think the guy misunderstood the nature of capitalism. That value wasn’t wiped out by the collapse of Lehmans. That value didn’t exist in the first place. The list price of various financial instrument was driven up and up by irresponsible lending and the collapse of Lehmans was a market indicator that the value was illusory.
If the U.S. Government had bailed out Lehmans that illusion may have continued for longer but it could not prevail indefinitely.
To paraphrase Withnail and I, the market is like a balloon that you are hanging onto which is going higher and higher and the only question is: how long can you hold on?
The U.S. Government were right to allow Lehmans to go to the wall. Though I do not know which is better Capitalism or Socialism I do know that what is worse than both is to pretend to have capitalism while insisting that the tax payer picks up the bill for failed companies.
Nationalised companies have no dividends to pay and so should be able to operate at a lower cost than private companies but they become inefficient. Private companies, by contrast, have market pressure to drive them to be efficient but they must pay dividends to share holders and that extra cost could wipe out any efficiency gains. You pay your money and you take your pick.
Worse than either are private companies that are bailed out by the government because they have no market pressure to make them efficient and yet they must pay dividends.
The worst of all possible worlds to misquote Doctor Pangloss.
I saw this graph purporting to be the life cycle of a bubble. Specifically a housing bubble. If you believe this guy then house prices have a way to drop yet!
I have been mulling over the expenses scandal currently bubbling away in the British press and it seems to me that this is the straw that broke the camels back. The expenses scandle is the last in a long stream of betrayals by our leaders and specifically by New Labour. It is time for a general election. (See petition information below).
New Labour came to power promising an end to the sleaze that defined the fag end of the last Tory government. Tony Blair portrayed himself as embracing an innovative vision of The United Kingdom and promulgated a bold modern vision of the future of the UK.
MPs who tried to stop you seeing their expenses
However, it quickly became apparent that the cardinal attribute of New Labour was not vision but spin. One after another New Labour ministers proved themselves corrupt and were dismissed from office only to be brought back in once the fuss had died down.
New Labour policies turned out to be the wholesale adoption of Thatcherism but, as with all converts, the policies were embraced as a doctrine and without understanding or judgement. Privatisations continued and New Labour became the bitch of big business.
Tony Blair began hobnobbing with the super rich and power went to his head. At the frenzied height of New Labour devotion to hyper-capitalism he tried to introduce super casinos. That a Labour government should consider the massive expansion of gambling in this country when the only people calling for it were greedy American business men beggars belief but by this time he was so far gone he could not see further than the Gordon Brown’s balance sheet.
When George Bush decided to go to war with Iraq Blair’s dragged us in too. The Islamist terrorism unleashed the Big Brother tendency that is never far from the minds of any Labour government. New laws were introduced to detain people without trial, CCTV became almost ubiquitous
The credit crunch brought claims from our leaders that this was a global phenomena that had little to do with their policies ignoring the frequent articles in newspapers such as The Economist describing the dangerous asset price bubble which was being fueled by cheap money and would eventually burst.
When ordinary people protested against the bankers in London the police responded with highly questionable tactics such as kettling and casual violence which may have left one man dead. Yet our leaders supported the outrageous tactics and trotted out the usual platitudes about violent demonstrators.
Luckily the widespread use of video technology by the general public revealed that the violence was mainly perpetrated by the police.
Now we learn that those we trust with the leadership of our country are fiddling their expenses like so many seedy second hand car salesmen.
On The BBC, Radio 4 program Any Questions this week it was suggested that the British people use the upcoming European elections to withhold votes from the major parties. Our leadership on the panel showed the depth of their depravity once again by attempting to scare the public with the spectre of racism and erroneously implying that this meant a vote for the BNP.
Lord Falkner went on to complain that it was a tragedy that New Labour would be judged on the expenses story and that this was a distraction when more important issues were at stake.
Lord Falkner is Talking Bollocks!
There can be no more important issue than whether our leaders are trustworthy. Their policies and promises mean nothing if the are prepared to waive aside their probity and obligations for a few thousand pounds.
While preaching prudence our leaders have led us into the worst economic crisis for decades. They led us into an illegal war that caused the deaths of thousands and severely damaged Britain’s reputation abroad. They continue to introduce ever more draconian laws which erode our civil liberties and they encourage the police to suppress protest using methods not dissimilar to those found in Zimbabwe.
Now we hear that they have been fiddling their expenses.
During the Any Questions program Susan Kramer, MP, suggested that we need a general election. She is right. The British people must be given the chance to decide whether their representatives deserve the confidence and the responsibility with which they are entrusted.
A tedious week at work. I reflected on the way the English language has been debased by commercialism when I read the words “Loyalty payment” and “Highly competitive exclusive offer”.
The ducks are still on the pond. The two males can be seen most days and mid week the female waddled out of her hut
2 ducks
and the two males sped after her. A tremendous fight ensued and at first we were unsure what was occurring. It became obvious that one male was earnestly pursuing the female while the other male tried strenuously to fend him off. After a while the female achieved some distance and the two males finished their fight with one chasing the other away. The hierarchy restored the female was left alone and the two males returned to being good buddies. A Pakistani colleague commented: “Just like the America, once their authority is established they want to be your friend”.
I watched an interesting documentary on Network Theory on Tuesday evening. Six degrees of separation and all that.
This year I ensured that I would see some of The Brighton Festival by drawing up a plan and booking in advance. Mostly this has been theatre but I was asked by some friends if I wanted to see some dance and I thought: what the hell, I’ll give it a go.
So on Wednesday evening I saw Aphasiadisiac at The Dome. This was not what I had expected and was inspiring. There was not much that most people would call dancing about it. The performance was created by a guy named Ted Stoffer and performed by a Belgian dance company named Les ballets C de la B.
I know very little about dance so I don’t really have the vocabulary to describe it. I was impressed by the ability of the performers to use their bodies to communicate. I was amazed at their ability to create a mood or a feeling by the choreography. They played the music themselves using a trumpet, a saxophone, drums and an accordion. The music itself was very good and at one particular point the performers all came together and sat and stood in a very tight group of five directly in front of us while they played. I found the proximity disarming and became self conscious. It felt strange to go from being a passive observer to somehow being observed and almost part of the performance.
Other parts were good in different ways. The awkwardness of a couple sitting together was portrayed perfectly through body language and facial expressions. A girl played an instrument and looked around while two of the men ran around as though desperate to remain in the spotlight of her gaze. Extraordinary stuff which opened my eyes to the world of dance. The Youtube vid below is of a different performance.
On Friday British Gas turned up to survey my loft prior to getting it insulated. B&Q are currently doing some very good deals to insulate your loft with parts and labour included for £198.
I began cogitating on how it is not really in the economic interests of the gas company to insulate my loft. It is in their interest to encourage me to consume as much gas as possible while it is in my interest to consume as little as possible while ensuring I am conformably warm.
I read somewhere that companies are much better at cutting their costs than individuals are. This makes sense. Companies makes plans and prepare budgets to control costs whereas most individuals are not so rational.
But panning back a bit and considering climate change and The UK’s dire economic condition it is in the Global Interest and National Interest that I consume as little gas as possible.
So surely we have the pricing model wrong. The model is currently configured so that the agent which is most efficient at controlling consumption (The gas company) actually benefits from excess consumption.
I recall a similar conversation on the subject of taxation. Our politicians tell us we should be saving energy and cutting CO2 emissions yet the greatest part of our taxation is placed on work. Taxation has two effects, firstly and obviously, it raises money to be spent by the government but secondly it deters the activity which is taxed. This has been known for centuries from windows to tobacco.
So the effect of our taxation system is to deter work. Surely we want people to work so why not lift all income tax and place it on petrol? If it were done intelligently I could still afford to drive my 2 litre car 90 miles a day to work. It would just make it painfully clear how much money, and therefore petrol, I am wasting.
It seems to me that there are three entities who can control costs: The seller, the buyer and the government. With conventional pricing models the economic motivation are for the seller to increase sales and the buyer to reduce sales. The government is the third entity and currently pays for services which are deemed communal such as waste disposal.
And waste disposal too has a dodgy pricing model. It is currently in the interest of retailers to bulk our their products with wasteful packaging as this helps to sell more product and the waste disposal costs are bourn by the tax payer. There have been attempts to makes consumers pay for the amount of waste that they produce but the problem with this is that consumers can cheat by fly tipping. Far better to charge the costs of waste disposal as a tax to be paid by retailers.
I have thought for a while that the main deficiency with socialism is the lack of a feedback mechanism. Command economies continue to manufacturer products which consumers do not want and fail to manufacture products which they do want because the production is not influenced by the consumer. Capitalism gets around this problem but the current capitalist model encourages and rewards over production.
I read an article in The Economist a while back about the British aviation engine manufacturer Rolls Royce. This was deemed a successful company because of the innovative pricing structure it had adopted. Rolls Royce does not make it’s profits from the sale of engines and can make a loss on engine sales. Instead it charges it’s customer (the airlines) for engine air time. Each engine is fitted with various computer systems which relay telemetry back to a control centre in Rugby. Engineers can then detected potential problems early and perform preventative maintenance when an aircraft next lands.
This is an excellent idea. Rolls Royce can become a successful engine maker, gain market share and earn greater profits. But at the same time the manufacture of engines is not the driving force. In fact it would be in Rolls Royce’s interest to keep engines airworthy for as long as possible and therefore restrict engine manufacture.
I suggest that we could do with this sort of thinking when designing pricing models for all sorts of goods and services. We still use capitalism but design the system in such as way that production is not the driving force for profits.
On Saturday afternoon I visited The Old Municipal Market to see an artwork by Anish Kapoor entitled The Dismemberment of Jeanne D’Arc
The Dismemberment of Jeanne D’Arc
Yeh Anish, nice name!
The big blobby bits are the bits I’d seen clips of but I found the big red elipsical hole in the ground most effective. It appeared that Mr. Kapoor had opened up the ground to reveal that beneath the first few inches of dirt the living flesh of the planet Earth had been exposed. The Earth is alive!
On Saturday night I saw another small theatre production named Bane at The Three and Ten in Brighton. This was described as a “One-man comedic film noir parody.” Part thriller, art comedy the single actor played a plethora of characters and pulled it off brilliantly.
No round up of last week can be complete without mentioning the MP expenses scandal currently bubbling away in British politics. Last week The Daily Telegraph revealed that John Prescott had claimed for repair of a broken toilet seat twice. – You couldn’t make it up.
jonesxxx
hildacarmi
Teenagers Turn Tables On The Men In Suits
Tags: Amazing radio, digital radio, dab, file sharing, peer to peer, Pirate Bay, music industry, copyright "for the encouragement of learning", printing press, history of sound recording, phonograph cylinder, Thomas Edison, gramophone discs, vinyl, popular music, Michael Jackson, music royalties, music downloads, iTunes, Music, amazing tunes, middle men, music website
Recently I retuned my digital radio and discovered a station named Amazing Radio. Amazing is a test station with music consisting of unsigned artists chosen and uploaded by the audience. This got me thinking.
Golden Age?
Recently four Danish men were accused of helping Internet users download music illegally. They ran a file sharing web site named Pirate Bay and have now been found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail.
This is not the first time the music industry has prosecuted file sharing sites and the case for the music industry seems to be that the music files are copyright and should be paid for. Pirate Bay claim that they are only allowing people to search for files and the legality of the downloads are not it’s problem. Let’s take a step back and consider what’s happening here.
The music industries case rests on the copyright laws which originated in Britain in 1710 as an act “for the encouragement of learning” and “for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books”. In 1787 a copyright clause was incorporated into the United States Constitution.
Copyright allowed the authors to receive payment for their work which was deemed useful by the population at large. The printing press had been introduced into England in the 15th century but for over two hundred years it was not possible for authors to receive payment based on the popularity of their work. With the introduction of copyright it became possible for an author to receive payment for each copy of the original work he produced.
The copyright principle was later extended to sound recordings and specifically music but before this could happen various technology had to be invented to allow the recording and copying of sound.
The history of sound recording might be said to have begun in 1877 with the invention of the mechanical phonograph cylinder by Thomas Edison. Around 1889 gramophone discs replaced cylinders. Originally made from a resin derivative these discs were dramatically improved in the 1940s with the introduction of vinyl. It was these vinyl records which became the standard for the following decades and the music industry as we know it was born.
Prior to copyright a musician made money by performing. The same person may also have written the song but that made no difference. The song had to be performed for anyone to receive payment.
The invention of the vinyl record meant that a performance could be recorded and this recording then transformed into something saleable. Copies of the record could be sold a million times over with minimal production costs. The music industry liked the maths and many people became extremely wealthy.
As with any new industry the original owners and managers were music enthusiasts but as the profits grew the middlemen were drawn in. Managers, agents, public relations executives and a plethora of other hangers on.
The middlemen were businessmen. They didn’t care about the music they cared about profit and as any businessman knows the way to make profit is to buy cheap and sell dear. Keep your overheads low and your prices high. The businessmen fine tuned the industry by maintaining a small stable of musicians and maximising sales using large scale marketing.
Midlemen
So there were two enablers for the music business as it grew, copyright laws and technology both of which are artificial. The original purpose of copyright may have been “for the encouragement of learning” but it is fair that the definition now encompasses entertainment. But copyright laws is not the same type of law as Thou shalt not kill or thou shalt not steal.
Copyright law was introduced long before digital media and globalisation and it’s intention was to provide a living for writers and artists not to bestow super star status on a selected few.
The maintenance of copyright laws is valid not because it benefits the music industry but because it benefits the population as a whole. If it does not do that then it’s existence, or at least it’s implementation, should be questioned.
It is fair to say that the music industry during the period of vinyl and CDs did not fulfil the purpose originally intended for the copyright laws. The middlemen had so manipulated the industry that it was they who selected the musicians to be famous through massive promotional campaigns. Pink Floyd even made their careers by criticising the industry.
The music was not cheap. At the age of 16 in 1975 I started my first job and earned £15 per week. At that time the average price of an album was £3 or £4. This means that Robert Plant considered that a teenage kid should spend a fifth to a quarter of his wages keeping Led Zeppelin in luxury hotels and private jets!
The Rolling Stones did not earn massively more than similar artists because of their undoubted talent but because of the massive promotional budget. We, the punters, fell for this marketing and revered musicians as spiritual leaders rather than craftsmen capable of banging out a good tune. We worshiped Elvis like a God and listened to tax exiles such as Bono on subjects such as world poverty.
Just last week the front page of British newspaper The Sun proclaimed that Lilly Alan had condemned the BNP! Sorry Lilly, you sing a nice song, but I do not need your advice when appraising the fascistic tendencies of political parties.
A pertinent question to ask is: has the music industry benefited music?
As advertising executives always argue when defending alcohol or tobacco advertising: marketing does not make you consume more it just makes you consume a specific brand. Do we need someone else to spend our money telling us which music to listen to?
The enablers to the music industry are not hard work and talent but technology, copyright laws and marketing. Without these man made artefacts the music industry would not exist as it is today.
So let us return to the situation today. If copying went into overdrive in the 1960s then the digital revolution and The Internet has put copying into hyperdrive. Digital technology has allowed not copying but cloning of music recordings. This means that there is no deterioration in quality if the copy is from an original or from another copy. In addition the production costs of making extra copies are so close to zero as to be unimportant and the technology required can be found in any teenager’s bedroom. Further, The Internet means that these clones can be distributed globally at minimal cost effectively bypassing the music industry and making policing of the old copyright laws almost impossible.
The record companies now squeal that organisations like Pirate Bay are not only illegal but immoral but are Pirate Bay any more immoral than EMI? It could be argued that Pirate Bay have merely leveraged the new technology in the same way that the record company did in the 1960s.
The music industry is not fighting to protect artists and their music, it is fighting to protect the armies of middlemen plus the stable of supposed talent which they have spent millions of dollars hyping. Remember The Bay City Rollers? Was this really the best music Britain could produce in the 1970s?
Of course musicians should receive payment for their work but the bloated music business no longer provides any useful contribution to music. We do not need music companies to pay DJs to play their music. We do not need promoters to ensure that their artist is plugged simultaneously on every TV channel and that promotional plastic toys are included in cereal packets. Remember that these costs are always passed on to the punter.
The world has changed and the music industry cannot insist that the paradigm be frozen as it was when the technology gave them their best advantage. Technology gave and technology has taken away. The industry has exploited teenagers for decades but technology has now swung in favour of the teenagers. About time to!
Amazing Radio works by allowing artists to upload their music via a web site named Amazing Tunes. The music may be tagged as free but if not then anyone downloading the music gets charged 79p per download. The public are free to make play lists and this feeds the content on Amazing Radio.
In 1980, Michael Jackson secured the highest royalty rate in the music industry but even this was only 37% of wholesale album profit. Artists who upload their music to Amazing receive 70% of profits from downloads.
Good or Bad?
It might be argued that Amazing is similar to service such as iTunes but there is a crucial difference. Services like iTunes still adhere to the old paradigm because they restrict choice. They sell only music by artists who have signed contracts with the music industry.
In the 60s an artist gained tangible benefits from singing with a big label as this gave them access to the complex expertise required for music recording, distribution and marketing.
Since recording and distribution can now be done by the artists themselves the music companies provide little more than marketing and even this is being challenged with artists such as Groove Armada signing directly with Bacardi.
The music industry is a cartel system which restricts choice and has created price distortion for decades. It is a legacy system long overdue for decommissioning.
The Amazing paradigm is a revitalisation of the original intent of the copyright laws, based firmly on current technology and a more realistic valuation of music. It allows greater variety while dispersing more of the profits amongst a greater number of artists. Less musicians will be millionaires but more will make a fair living.
Most importantly it will be good for music.
See article on Slashdot: Should a new technology change the patent system?
See article on Ars Technica: 100 years of Big Content fearing technology