It used to be that aspiring musicians had to get signed by a label to get the money and facilities to get major play on the radio, and the only way to obtain the music for oneself was to go to a record store. Things have changed. Today, someone with the right stuff could become a star using only a computer, an internet connection, and a bright spark of creativity. Millions of songs are available to be downloaded for free (legally or otherwise) from the net. Now that digital recording and sound production software packages are available to the masses, demand is increasing for music formats that allow collaboration. Established bands such as the Beastie Boys and Nine Inch Nails are seeing the benefits of loosening control over the music. Fans are no longer passive; they're becoming listener-artists who co-create music online, using tracks that artists have posted on the Internet in a form that their fans can easily remix.
Culture, by its nature is a product of mass collaboration. Each member of a culture is able to influence and be influenced by others.
In this regard, mass collaboration, powered by the internet, has two effects:
1) it changes the boundaries of community - the perimeter of people who can observe and be influenced can now be anyone in the world
2) it provides everyone with the ability to amplify ideas and behaviors.
With technology, the skill of creating music became separate, for the first time, from the physical skills required to play an instrument. In the past, a specialist who excelled at a given instrument was a leader in the industry, which revolved around superstars. Technology however gave a leg up to generalists. A thousand fair saxophonists could not to add up to one Branford Marsalis, but one Branford Marsalis could add brilliance to a thousand hip-hop or acid-jazz compositions.
The skills of Branford Marsalis are not achievable by everyone. But the skills of the generalists can to a large extent be facilitated by software. Those who can sample content accessed from the internet now have facilities that were once only available to commercial studios. Further, policy changes such as the BBC opening up their audio and video files for anyone in the UK to remix put a huge amount of source material into the hands of the masses.
The primary barriers to musical collaboration now are
a) legal issues of copyright and how to make fair use of samples and remixes
b) a mass music industry that can't seem to do anything but cling to an old profit model where stars are made and sold, and all rights are reserved.
Neil Layton, who founded a music label called Fading Ways Music to embrace shared music and collaborative culture, has an insiders perspective on the prospect for collaboration in the music business. According to Neil, a CC-based music industry implies a complete re-working of how most music biz people (both on the artistic as well as business side) think of music. Most mainstream and aspiring artists seek the kind of fame and fortune that mass media hype and marketing can bring. The nature of superstar economics however is that "the very few hyper-successful artists (in the commercial sense at least), tend to leave little on the table for their less fortunate peers. Non-commercialized artists are may have more freedoms and even produce more rich artistic offering, but economically speaking it is un-sustainable."
The first step to a CC-based music business, artists and labels - a new system of rights and royalties administration is needed. While independent artists are technically able to collect royalties under the current Performance Rights Organization system, the metrics that are used to divide the revenues are biased to favor the cartels and biggest artists (being based on commercial radio play and record sales). Under these rules the mega-stars tend to scoop up royalties that under a more accurate system would belong to the "long-tail" of indie artists. The technology exists for a more sophisticated payments system that remunerates not only the original artist but those who contribute and remix the original works.
A CC-based system could allow an equitable distribution of revenues in a transparent pathway of micro-payments from one work to another, facilitated by user playlists such as lastfm.com, YouTube, MySpace, or other web 2.0 applications. Users or fans could even participate in the revenue stream in an environment where the line between artist and audience becomes increasingly blurred; for the new version of neilleyton.com I am working on a system where user content could be monetized through a system of paid downloads (whether subscription based or pay-per-download) that remunerate both the artist and the fan who contributed the content. Even the most forward-thinking artist likes to retain some comfortable level of control over their creation. In this aspect the CC revolution in music will not exactly mirror the Open Source software GNU-type evolution. Artists are not programmers, nor do programmers fully understand art. There is an artistic ego that is a valid necessity to the creation of good art.
| Art doesnt neccesarily benefit from the free and open exchange of ideas and edits. Science does, and most specifically software development does, but when you take something like music and apply this same paradigm its no longer personal. Mabye the masses of generalists could construct an interesting collage of samples, but could they collectively write a good love song? - Brendan Long |
The ending of the Sopranos Series surprised many viewers in that it foiled viewers attempts to achieve a denouement (closure) to the story. Everyone was debating who was going to get whacked, and as it turned out, the only person to "get whacked" was the audience - the tension builds though the episode, and then the camera turns off. That is pretty much it.
One commentator felt that the author was deliberately leaving his options open for a sequel of a future movie plot. What would the audience have done - probably, as in most gangster features, seen to it that Tony Soprano died by the sword he lived by.
There is one well known example of harnessing the power of a wiki to write fiction - the experiment called A million Penguins in which the publisher of that name set up an installation of mediawiki and invited the internet to write a novel. One of the problems in that experiment was that the participants enjoyed too many degrees of freedom. The prose all turned into zany chaos.
In a TV serial however, the freedom is much better constrained - a legion of fans would have to be true to the established characters (and would probably police each other for that). If character was fixed, plot was the variable. Since dialogue is mostly a derivative of plot, that could have been left out of the collaborative effort. What remains is the stage directions.
1. Create a page called Episode 86 - a name free of connotations.
2. On Episode 86 all that exists is a list of episode summaries, and a short paragraph with a meta description / plot summary. You allow parallel versions of the story to develop, and pick the best one. Each version should have its own homepage, example Episode 86 - The Fat Lady Sings.
3. Each alternate version page contains a list of scenes (and alternate scenes), each with their own meta descriptions.
4. At the scene level you finally have a written description of what actually happens, with links to the preferred previous scene and the one which which most ought to follow.
5. Lead author roles should be freely taken and the lead authors for each scene should include lots of meta notes to other authors which indicates what scope of participation would be helpful.
The key to all of this is to design an properly iterative process, where meta information comes first, becomes fixed, and then serves as a boundary/framework to all child pages / objects.
Would music created by a group, in a self-organized fashion using modern networking tools, fill those needs? Or different needs? What lessons can we learn from existing self-organization examples engaged in globalized activities like software development?
The Beastie Boys came the closest to mass colaboration with their concert video "Cool, I F***ing Shot That!", Which passed out cameras
to audience members who shot footage that was then later edited together to form a cohesive film by the band.
These are the types of innovations that are necessary to keep the music industry alive in this new era of technology. However, neither is a full revolution in the sense that they dont aim to replace the Superstar Economics under which the old industry is run. Rather, they aim to use technology to give fans a greater sense of involvement with the music that they purchase. This creates a sense of community and a vested interest in the product that can help to increase sales as a whole.
contributed by Brendan Long on Jul 13 12:29am
Page Last Updated: Sep 21 10:03am by mlpilling