Tag Archive | MP3
October 10, 2011  

Music is not Bread

Wilco’s most critically acclaimed album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was released only after they were famously cut free from their original label (Reprise Records, now owned by Warner Brothers). Foxtrot found its new home (on Nonesuch Records), says lead singer Jeff Tweedy, because of leaked tracks on the internet. “Music is not a loaf of bread,” he says. “When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that’s it. The loaf of bread is gone.”  But that’s not the case with an mp3. “People who look at music as commerce,” he continues, “don’t understand that. They are talking about pieces of plastic they want to sell, packages of intellectual property.”
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The Marina City Building in Chicago, photo by the author

The Marina City Building in Chicago was put on the cover of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Picture by the author.

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I am an economist and a musician.  Does Tweedy’s claim mean that that an economic view and the musician’s view of music are in conflict?  I don’t think so.  I think Tweedy’s claim is exactly right on the economics, that music is not a loaf of bread.  I also think that an understanding of the economic properties of music, to which Tweedy hints, can illuminate as set of strategies for musicians today.  I describe the economics of “music is not bread,” below, and then discuss the strategy that I am pursuing (in my podcast, The Lion in Tweed), which is informed by this perspective.
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THE ECONOMICS OF “MUSIC IS NOT BREAD”
Economists study how goods are produced (among other things), and loaves of bread and mp3s are produced in a very different ways. To explain this difference, economists make a distinction between private goods and public goods.  Private goods are rivalrous: as others consume the good, there is less is left for you.  Public goods are nonrivalrous: as others consume the good, the amount of good left for you is unchanged.  Bread is a private good. If I eat the bread, there is no bread for you.  Music is a public good. If I listen to the song, there is still a complete song left for you.  If bread were a public good like music – no matter how many times you took a loaf of bread from the counter, there would still be a loaf of bread on the counter. You could feed the world with that loaf of bread.
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The idea that music is a public good underlies the fundamentally economic claim that copying is not theft. An economist would say that theft is a thing that applies to private goods, to things that one is deprived of, when another takes them. Public goods cannot be stolen: they can only be shared.


Video: “Copying is not Theft” by Nina Paley.

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Economists will also say that the reproduction cost of a public good is essentially zero. An idea is a public good: consider the cost of telling someone an idea versus the cost of inventing the idea initially.

“If we are having a conversation about music, we are having a conversation about ideas.”
–Devon Powers, At “Sex, Hope, and Rock n’ Roll: The Writings of Ellen Willis” Conference,
April 2011

It is important to note here that when I use terms like “public good,” and “private good,” I am only describing the economics of that good’s production. I am not making a legal or political claim. So, what is the point?  What is the value of looking at music as a public good?
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Economics can tell us a lot about the supply of public goods; public goods are undersupplied, according to economists.  This is a problem. The natural price of a good it its reproduction cost (also called `marginal cost of production’).  Consider a private good, like a loaf of bread: the cost of `reproducing’ a loaf of bread is that of making a new loaf of bread, so the natural price of bread is the cost of the ingredients and baker’s time.  The reproduction cost of music is zero: so we would expect the price to go to zero.  As the price of music approaches zero, however; there is no money left to cover the costs of recording and songwriting.  For this reason, making music becomes a labor of love alone; very few people can afford to be musicians. Hence the conclusion: public goods are undersupplied.
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So how can we solve this problem?  The traditional corporate response is to transform the public good into a private good by controlling and charging for access.  Some examples include: hard to copy CDs, control of who is allowed to sell CDs, digital rights management in music files, and gaming the legal system to punish those who copy music.  The CD era was the heyday of the music labels. CDs were sixteen dollar objects that provided access to what is essentially a public good. Today, record labels attempt to reproduce this structure with digital rights management.
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To control public goods in this way is an economic tragedy. Once again, imagine the loaf of bread as a public good – it is a single loaf of bread that can be copied costlessly, bringing bread to the multitudes.  Such a loaf of bread is considered miraculous.  That is exactly how MP3s work.  The corporate approach is not to celebrate the miraculous nature of this good, but instead to curb it: to make it costly to reproduce.  Therein lies the tragedy.
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WHAT STRATEGY AM I PURSUING?
The business model of my podcast, The Lion in Tweed, is to give my music away and ask for memberships – like a public radio station.  And, like a public radio station, I will never charge for content or try to restrict access to my product. This ethos acknowledges the nature of music as a public good.  I try to appeal to the listener’s sense of community, of being part of something.  I believe that the public goods problem can be overcome if the podcast is intimate, if the listener feels a kinship with the producer, if the listener has the opportunity to support the producer. Donations are both a way to support producers and a way for listeners to feel more involved, and included.
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This is my strategy.  I intend to document my downloads and membership carefully. I am hoping to learn more general principles about how these public goods can be produced.
The Lion in Tweed and Peter C. DiCola

The Lion in Tweed and Peter C. DiCola, a lawyer and economist who works with the Future of Music Coalition

Andreas Duus Pape: is an economist at Binghamton University, a musician, and a regular contributor for Sounding Out!
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Post script: Are you a musician?  These issues of compensation are very real and very important.  You can help scientific and policy research about making music by taking the Future of Music Coalition‘s “Money for Music” survey.  The survey is designed to accommodate the diverse careers of musicians in any genre, full-time or part-time, young or old.  The team has worked for the better part of two years refining this set of questions. They have interviewed musicians, talked to groups of musicians, and tested several versions of the survey.  Your participation in the survey will help the Future of Music Coalition be able to talk sensibly about how musicians in different genres are faring economically.  Here is a short video:
Here is a link to the survey itself: https://www.research.net/s/moneyfrommusic
October 3, 2011  

Pushing Record: Labors of Love, and the iTunes Playlist

Borrowed from allwomentalk.com

Last month as my sister and I drove to the store, she started to joke with me. “You’re crazy,” she began, “you’re so high-tech, with your computers, and XBOX. You love music. But, you’ve got a cassette player in your car.” I shot her a look. “So what? I like it.” I said, hoping that she would back off. “So what!” she proclaimed in response, “don’t you want a CD player? Or a jack for your iPod?” I responded, “But how will I play my tapes?” She stared at me. “Who cares? They sound like crud. You’re crazy.”

Here at Sounding Out! we’ve featured a number of articles about analog tape. It persists in popular culture (Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman’s Play it Again (and Again), Sam: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), underground communities (Matt Laferty’s On Hand Made Music), and even our personal histories (Gus Stadler’s Pushing Play). Even though tape is generally understood to be obsolete, niche, and just plain noisy – I will insist that, despite my sister’s concerns, there is something special (even forgotten) about the medium itself. I had tried to articulate this in last year’s article What Mixtapes Can Teach Us About Noise. But, when I re-read it, I can’t help but think that I somehow missed the point. Let me try again with a new question: What is the difference between a mix on cassette tape and an iTunes playlist?

Care is the difference. The material limitations of the cassette recorder demand that care is taken during the act of inscription. In other words, cassette mixes cannot be automated like an iTunes playlist. The practice of recording a mix on cassette requires, at minimum, that some attention is paid to the moment a song begins (as record is pushed), and the moment a song ends (as stop is pressed). The cassette must be tended, as it were, during the encoding process. It is impossible to program a cassette mix otherwise.

Borrowed from velvetron.com

After tracks have been chosen and messages encoded, frequently cassette mixes are shared, or gifted. If the receiver chooses to listen to the cassette, they must locate, first, a cassette player. This was not a problem in 1990 when cassette players were a more or less ubiquitous technology. But, in the present day, they are notably rare. Furthermore, even if some care has been taken to locate a listening platform, the tape is far more treacherous than the CD to navigate. Awkward transitions governed by the fast-forward and rewind buttons, encouraged listeners to listen through all but the most wretched sequences of a cassette mix. And, let us not forget, how leaving a cassette in the wrong player could result in a mangle of 1/8″ tape. Or, how speakers, magnets, and poor weather all eventually erode at the contents of poorly stored tape. Care had to be taken in maintaining and storing a good cassette mix; tapes are a fragile technology and that, for me at least, serves to valorize the labor at stake in their creation.

Am I giving the playlist enough credit? Even though the platform may not limit its listeners, and producers, in the same ways that cassette recorders have, who is to say that any less care is taken when producing a playlist? To this point, I must bring up a question of labor. While, the receiver of a cassette mix knows that at least an hour (as cassettes are generally 60 minutes or more) of work has been put into its construction, the receiver of a mix CD, or playlist, cannot be as certain. iTunes playlists can be constructed in five minutes or less. Implicated within this labor divide is both an emerging and ephemeral culture of listening.

As Sterne (2006) has argued in his paper, The MP3 as Cultural Artifact, our bodies respond to MP3s in a way that is fundamentally different than listening to a tape, or record. “[The MP3] represents a liberation of just-in-time sound production, where systems give listeners less and ask their bodies to do more of the work” (p.838). If the very compression algorithms that constitute MP3s make demands on the brains and bodies of listeners, it is interesting to think of the iTunes playlist in parallel. The iTunes playlist makes comparatively few demands on the body of the producer. This, paradoxically, results in a culture that does not valorize the labor of its constituent producers. Most apparent in the nebulous legal credibility of Mashups, the mix exists predominantly within an economy of care. Unfortunately, the digital turn toward playlisting conspires to render the labor of care, in this context, invisible.

Borrowed from downloadatoz.com

Is there hope for iTunes? Can we trust our playlists to be received with the love that was put into them? Some theorists like Hardt (1999) see an upside to caring labor. As he points out in his essay, Affective Labor,  “Caring labor is certainly entirely immersed in the corporeal, the somatic, but the affects it produces are nonetheless immaterial. What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower” (p. 96). Sharing is caring, the accessibility and ease of production that playlisting provides, is, at least, a way to foster community. I am not so optimistic. For caring labor is not adequately valued, at least not in the context of building a playlist. Playlists rely on an audience to value them, they provide no guarantees. The labor at stake in their construction may only become visible to those who listen. The cassette mix, on the other hand, has care inscribed into its magnetic tape. The listener knows that some work has been put into making the mix, even before play is pressed.

Although cassette tapes may have all but disappeared as a way to share music, the caring labor involved in their production might be salvaged in other forms. Taking a page from Andreas Duus Pape’s recent, Building Intimate Performance Venue’s on the Internet, podcasts (produced on platforms like Garageband or Audacity), provide a viable alternative. Like cassettes, they subject their listeners to a linear play style. And, there is a certain degree of care taken by the producer when splicing, cross-fading, arranging, and sequencing a set of tracks. It is implicit in the construction of a Podcast that some degree of care was taken during its development. Of course, I will keep the cassette player in my car. I have a special tape adaptor, which lets it play music from my iPod.

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Aaron Trammell is co-founder and multimedia editor of Sounding Out! He is also a Media Studies PhD student at Rutgers University.

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