Looking for loot in all the wrong places
Mashable is dead right about Billy Bragg’s Bebo beg (say that five times fast): royalties to musicians from social networks just weren’t part of the deal. Nick Carr calls it exploitation, sharecropping even, which just ain’t so, and would be offensive to me if I were a sharecropper or a descendant of one.
Bragg characterizes the musicians who post content on the site as “investors”, but that only holds if every one of us is an investor in every service we use. As hard as it may be to face, musicians are not magical fairies who bless everything they touch; sometimes they are just users like the rest of us, who poop and join new websites every day.
The radio analogy that Bragg makes is facially a wee bit less useless, but it is no more correct. There is no choice made by the artist there; radio gets to play your stuff whether you like it or not. That’s why there’s a statutory license, to approximate for the deals everyone would make individually. With the opt-in nature of social networks, there’s no need for such a thing. That’s not to say that they wouldn’t like to have one; I bet the sites would be willing to pay a reasonable statutory share of their ad revenue from each artist page if it let them force every artist to have a page…
Don’t get me wrong; I think artists make enormous contributions to the value of the web. I just don’t really know how to decide who’s an artist anymore, so if they’re going to get paid, I think they’re going to have to stand up and ask for it up front. Turning around and asking for a tithe after the content has spread throughout the tubes is a sure way to clog them up.
evan :: Mar.25.2008 :: Notions :: No Comments »