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Monday, August 20, 2007
FREE
Pharoahe Monch
Desire
SRC/Universal : 2007
[Buy it]
DIRTY MONEY
Clipse
Hell Hath No Fury
Re-up Gang / Star Track : 2006
[Buy it]
MONEY DON'T MATTER 2 NIGHT
Prince & the New Power Generation
Diamonds and Pearls
Warner Bros. : 1991
[Buy it]
This week, Moistworks takes up the theme of "conversion." As the week's posts will show, this theme is subject to broad interpretation. But being the first up to bat, I decided to write a little about the concept of "conversion" as it most closely relates to Moistworks and mp3 blogs in general.
This post is going to upset some of you. Let me say that I'm feeling sad today, for reasons that aren't applicable. Let me say that my sadness often manifests as anger at the capitalist mindset, with its built-in venality, its hostility to the poor, its alienating properties, its point-missing minutiae, its devaluation of art. Let me say that while I sympathize with all individuals, including artists, trying to make their way in this world, I have no sympathy for the constructs through which we move, and its those constructs, not individuals, that are at the receiving end of this post, although individuals collaborating with these constructs might feel called out. Let me say that I'm feeling too raw today to hedge my bets, so I'm going to speak from the heart, with all the intractable blind spots that entails. I'm not trying to upset you. I'm just saying how I feel. I think that's still legal.
Here at Moistworks, we give away other people's songs. That's what mp3 blogs do. I feel fine about this. If people want music for free, they can find it. We aren't giving people anything that can't get themselves. We never post songs that aren't already available commercially or as Internet leaks on filesharing services. By presenting it in context, I believe we actually improve an artist's chance of making money. The more people know your band, the more potential customers you have. But that isn't why I do Moistworks, or any of my music writing. I don't work in PR or sales. I'm not a publicist. I write about art, that's what I'm interested in. Commercial ramifications are just a nasty side effect. Plus, I've been a music journalist for long enough that I literally forget that music costs money. It's just out there, floating around in the ether, readily available. It shows up in my mailbox every day. When I download it onto my machine or give it to my friends, I don't feel a pang of remorse about it.
"But it's just like stealing!" people will say. Well, no, it's not just like stealing. I'm not saying it's not "stealing" in some commercially-defined sense. But it's not "just like" stealing at all. When you steal, you deprive someone of a physical quantity. If I take someone's stereo, they no longer have that stereo to use. I would never take that stereo. It isn't right according to my personal ethics. But if I download a song off the Internet, the owner of that song - whether defined as its creator or the person who originally purchased it - is deprived of nothing, except the possibility that I will pay them for it. Which I probably won't. If you want to share your art with me, I'll be thankful, and share my art with you. If you want to charge me for it, I'll probably say "No thanks-- I can make my own." Why would I buy something that I can make myself, and that has no concrete material value?
In legal terms, the "theft" of an abstract quantity that doesn't deprive its "owner" of that quantity is called "Criminal Conversion." Here's Wikipedia:
Criminal conversion, in criminal law, is usually defined as the crime of exerting unauthorised use or control of someone else's property. It differs from theft in that it does not include the element of intending to deprive the owner of the possession of that property. As such, it is a lesser included offense of the crime of theft.
An example might be tapping someone's wireless LAN or public utility line (which could also amount to theft of services). Another example might be taking a "joy ride" in a car, never intending to keep it from the owner. Some places have defined such conduct as a specific type of theft, perhaps with a modified penalty.
Note that the "unauthorized" use may begin after a period of authorized use, where, for example, a person rents a car then keeps it for an extra week without permission from the rental company. Another common example occurs when a person fails to report finding lost goods (including animals), intending only to keep them until someone asks for their return. When the intent becomes one of keeping them, it's a theft.
This is the complication of the digital age. Songs don't exist in discrete physical quantities which have materiality and can be depleted. They're replicants. They're nothing, smoke and air. If I take your song, what have I taken? You still have the song. "But it says right there in the phrase, CRIMINAL conversion," one might argue. It's illegal! Who cares? Lots of stupid shit is illegal. I don't care about laws. For every one that makes sense - "don't kill people" - there are five more that are nothing more than agents of social control designed by evil powerbrokers. Here in Carrboro, where I live, there's a thing called the "really really free market," where people come together to create, for an afternoon, a gift and barter economy. The cops watch like hawks, because it's illegal to share food, and while it's not technically illegal to give material goods away, it definitely seems frowned upon. What the fuck?
I know what I believe to be right and wrong. Draconian copyright law is the real theft. It deprives us, as a culture, of a healthy and organic artistic climate. It reduces the wild spaces of art to the brute baseline of money. We build our little picket fences around the things we make and litigate against one another when these boundaries are crossed. I hate this. It's soul-sucking. What can I say? I'm pretty anarcho. Art is a space for freedom! What could be less artistic than subjecting one's will to the criminal justice system? We need to learn to take responsibility for our own communities.
I realize we're ramming up against an impasse here, especially because I'm writing from the most extreme position I can imagine. I'm not so much arguing for the abolishment of the sale of music - although there are days, today included, when this is exactly what I feel is necessary - as I'm feeling it out, probing the cracks in the construct. People believe they have a right to make money from their art, and have all kinds of reasons why it's "good for music" for bands to be able to economically sustain themselves from playing music. I disagree. No one has an inborn right to make money off of art. If you can, good for you, I guess. If you can't, and this seems unfair to you, you might want to think about what's driving you to create.
This is the point where people like me and the captains of industry stare at each other, stuck. The filesharing age presents a new paradigm for music. You can't turn back the clock. Evolve or die. Personally, I like the idea of a paradigm where artistic production circulates freely and unprofitably. I'm utopian like that. I dream of entire new modes of music production emerging from it-- as it becomes harder and harder to make money off of albums, and as tools for digitally manipulating music become even cheaper and more user-friendly, what will happen? Is it possible that we'll see the denaturing of the song and the band and the artist? Will a wide variety of online users begin to upload quantities of sonic information, which will ciruclate around the Internet freely? Will we all become effectively collaborative musicans, choosing the sounds we like, manipulating them as we choose, feeding them back into the stream? Could the de-commercialization of music make its production and consumption into a new, organically evolving process in which everyone is involved and no one is star?
Probably not. The idea of a binary - creators on one side, consumers/spectators on the other - is so deeply entrenched, as is the ongoing mix-up between the intrinsic and financial value of things. But it's possible. I like the idea of this paradigm. I like the idea that the people publically making art are doing it because they're driven to, not because it's a better way to make a living than working a nine to five. I like the idea that young people will stop forming bands that record one EP before forgetting about creativity and devoting the whole of their energies to promotion. I like the idea of a social space where, discovering that someone has taken something you've made and has shared it with others, one responds with gratitude, not greed.
I'm a poet. I don't make any money from my poetry. I make music, too, and paintings. I don't make any money from that. I don't try to. There are all kinds of ways that I can make money - by writing about music, by making espresso drinks in a coffee house three times per week, by working random catering gigs, by dabbling in sub-legal underground economies - without subjecting my art to pressures of saleability. You want my art? You can't buy it, it's free! Email me if you want it, I'll send you a link to my website, where you can download my sound art and read the poems I've published online for free. You can show them to your friends or put them on your website. You can remix them or otherwise appropriate them, that makes me happy. That's community. I'll even send you the book I'm trying to get published if you want. You can do whatever you want with it. I made it, but it isn't mine. And if I do publish the book, inscribing it with a dollar value, you're still welcome, as far as I'm concerned, to type up the whole damn thing and put it on your website. Artistically, I'd rather be perceived than to make money - this is the position from which my ideas stem. I realize that they aren't popular ones. But the current paradigm, where commerical gatekeepers control access to music, is on the way out whether we like or not. We need to be thinking about what comes next, and how it might be better for us as a culture than what we have now.Labels: brian, conversion
posted by Brian
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