Great article, interesting consideration of the issues. It is difficult to convince anyone that it is immoral to download music released by major record labels and your argument about supporting the smaller labels makes a lot of sense. But once you get used to downloading music for free, how easy is it to start paying in specific instances? For me, it’s always – well, I’ll download it, and if I like it, and it’s released by a small independent label, I’ll buy it. And of course, never do.

I completely agree with this article. And this is also what I’d do, i.e. I do buy albums/DVDs/books etc from small producers and self-publishers when I can afford it, even though I also believe in free access. But perhaps I’m unusual (residues of Catholic guilt?).

I think, though, that the counter-argument you’re rebutting is quite a recent invention. You’re right that it’s the strongest argument the other side can offer. But the idea behind intellectual property in legal history was never ‘desert’. It was the idea that providing an economic profit (technically a monopoly) would stimulate production by rewarding talent.

A few other relevant bits and bobs:

Very little of what is made from music sales comes back to artists. (Something like 3p per full-price CD if I remember rightly). I got a payment for book sales recently, my share is something like a twenty-fifth of the cover price. Which was nice actually, because I wasn’t expecting to be paid at all. I’d guess the artist’s share would be greater for small labels and self-publishing, so someone who buys one small-label CD and downloads twenty mass-market CDs for free, might actually be paying more to artists than someone who buys twenty mass-market CDs (I’m not sure if this is actually true, but it seems plausible). If I’m right about the 3p then buying single a self-published CD (all proceeds to the artist) would give more money to artists than buying 300 commercial CD’s.

Very little of what musicians make, comes from music sales to the public. Most of what musicians make comes from concert tickets. Some of it comes from sources such as sponsorship, and payments from TV and radio stations. Some, as you mention, comes from commercial add-ons to ‘free’ provision, such as ad-supported websites. But, live music is the big earner.

Very few musicians manage to make enough money to live on from the current arrangement of music. Of the money that goes to musicians, most of it goes to already successful musicians (including manufactured bands). In other words, the distribution of income among musicians is both drastically inegalitarian and fails to encourage the emergence of talent.

Actually, the current arrangement doesn’t either encourage talent or finance musicians. Record companies don’t give five-year grants to youths with a bit of musical talent on the off-chance that they’ll be international stars at the end of it. They sign up people who have already undergone the most important period of musical development and are already talented, and often successful at a grassroots level.

So copyright is not at all helping develop talent, it’s capturing the value of talent once it’s been produced. The problem being that the conditions in which it’s produced, almost by definition since capitalism isn’t funding the emergence of talent directly, are decommodified or autonomous spaces to one degree or another. There is actually a straight line from the attack on music-sharing to the corrosion of the real conditions in which musicians emerge.

Actually, a lot of previous artists never had ‘normal’ jobs – people with ‘normal’ jobs don’t have the time or energy for the sustained development of talent. In the recent past, most individual musicians, including very successful ones (e.g. the Rolling Stones), actually funded their musical development on some kind of benefit or grant (usually student grants or the dole). A lot of musicians also emerge from settings of collective cultural production (the urban music house party scene, pirate radio, Jamaican dancehall culture, the Hacienda and its scene, raves, free parties, etc). In particular, these kinds of collective spaces are common in precisely those social strata which don’t have ‘normal’ jobs (marginalised ethnic minorities and urban poor, ‘drop-out’ subcultures, etc).

Now these spaces are under attack. Manchester loves its creative city image, but has destroyed most of the ‘Madchester’ scene and demolished the Hacienda, undermining the basis for this image. Student grants and benefits are being or have already been cut, and people are under pressure not to spend time on grants or benefits on things like musical development. It’s no coincidence that the extreme pro-copyright agenda is being pushed at precisely the time that grassroots music production is being squeezed (attacks on free festivals, restrictions on live music in pubs, the moral panic against groups such as So Solid Crew, etc). It’s part of a single process of commodification of social life. Of course, it’s counterproductive, because it destroys the decommodified basis (one might say with Deleuze or Vaneigem, the basis in immanent flows, in desiring-production, or in ‘life’ and ‘play’) which is actually necessary for the process of extraction. The logical effect would be the loss of musical talent and a corresponding decline in CD sales, since all that would exist are manufactured bands. This isn’t actually going to happen, because there’s a lot of decommodified spaces still around, and the precariat is actually growing. Hence we still keep getting new artists and new genres of music, especially from the ghettos. But capitalism is actually destroying the conditions for this.

Something else I’d introduce here is the distinction between ‘capitalism’ strictly speaking (concentrated production, mass markets, gap between producer and owner, wage-labour) and petty commodity production (a market with buying/selling between small producers who are also owners). Petty commodity production exists in tributary and indigenous societies and is not identical to capitalism, though obviously it’s not gift-economy either (though there are even cases where it’s used as an expression of gift-economy, if the exchange values are symbolic). I’d argue that, if someone buys a CD from a band who publish their own work, and arguably from small labels as well depending how they’re organised, then they’re actually engaged in petty commodity economics and not in capitalism strictly speaking. Normally this wouldn’t seem to be putting oneself outside capitalism, because in a capitalist-dominated society, petty commodity production is plugged into and heavily inflected by capitalism. But if someone is making an ethical choice to prefer petty commodity products over capitalist products (e.g. to buy from small labels but download free if it’s owned by a big company, to buy from a farmers’ market instead of a supermarket), this introduces a kind of ‘moral economy’ which tends to make petty commodity production into something non-capitalist again.

Hi David

I was seeing if a search on ‘The Free University of Liverpool’ would throw up any surprises – I found this. I think your work (both what I’ve just read and your PhD) is really, really interesting and I’m inviting you to join The Free University of Liverpool as an visiting scholar/artist.

I can send you all the info about what it would mean to be a visiting scholar/artist. Get back to us and we’ll send it out.

Thanks for the mention David, let’s hope it leads somewhere – in fact let’s go on the journey together! There’s immanence for you!

Very Best Wishes

Dr Gary Anderson
Co-founder of The Free University of Liverpool
http://www.thefreeuniversityofliverpool.wordpress.com

James’ point is supremely relevant, and it’s something I’m immensely guilty of. I certainly don’t buy enough from small labels (irrespective of how much I download from them), and it’s something I’ve resolved to change.

Andy’s points are all, I think, spot on. From my experiences of DIY labels I can say that most plough as much as they possibly can back into artists themselves (though some are, of course run by charlatans- and some artists themselves are, of course, charlatans!). It varies enormously from label to label, but for small scale releases it can be up to 50%. His point about petty commodity production being outside capitalism is interesting. I think it’s perhaps useful to speak not in terms of an inside/outside binary, but of degrees. Even free production is, to an extent, supporting capitalism (you need the internet, for example); and petty commodity production of CD-Rs requires, well, CD-Rs! But they’re both further from the ‘centre’ of capital (if one can speak of such a thing) than buying a CD from a major label.

One thing I didn’t consider in this article is Spotify. Which is most certainly not an answer, because it benefits artists not an iota (you get next to nothing for plays) and (far more directly than the internet) uses music as a platform for advertising. Sigue Sigue Sputnik might have got away with selling adverts on their debut album (which is about the most interesting thing about it), but I don’t want to hear George Lamb advertising Starbucks in the middle of some free improv (I don’t want to hear George Lamb advertising Starbucks full stop, of course).
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Gary- wow! Thanks so much for the offer. I would absolutely *love* to be involved. Indeed, I’d resolved to send an email before this comment. I’ll certainly do so soon.

Best,

dave