Facebook
Twitter
iLike
Last.FM
Flickr
MySpace
October 5, 2004
Fans Rule
I’ve been thinking a lot about my “position” on filesharing and how it affects musicians, especially small independent ones like myself. As I go to more and more conferences and events, I’m starting to realize that there’s still a lot of confusion out there. There are many, many artists who still don’t know how to get a domain name, let alone understand stuff like “blogging.” And many are still very concerned about piracy eating into their profits. So I think there’s some opportunity here for outreach programs by the EFF, Downhill Battle, IPac and Creative Commons to educate musicians about these issues.
This is just my opinion, but here goes: as independent artists, all of the energy we spend worrying about filesharing and pirates and P2P and all of that scary stuff should be channeled into winning more fans and keeping them on our side.
I don’t say it enough so I’ll say it here: I love my fans. I worship them. (I don’t really feel comfortable calling them “fans” — I like to call them “listeners.” But for now it’s easier to type “fans.”) It’s the fans that encourage me to continue writing and recording, to keep trying to get gigs, to continue pursuing some sort of music career. Fans encouraged me to put out a record, fans bought the record, and fans spread the word. Right now, fans are helping me find gigs and giving me great ideas on what to do next.
My mailing list is pretty small, only a few hundred names. But it means the world to me that handful of people are interested enough in my musical dabblings to trust me with their email address.
In the end, fans are really all I’ve got keeping this whole music thing afloat. It really is that simple. And if I don’t show proper appreciation for them, well, I just suck.
Winning fans is hard work, and fans will hold us accountable and keep us on the path. True fans will let us know when we’re hot and when we’re making mistakes.
Losing fans will do more damage to your music career than any P2P pirate. A fan should be far more valuable to us than a sale.
(That’s not to say I don’t want CD sales, of course. I’d like to think I could quit the day job at some point and do this for you full-time. But I’m realistic.)
The first thing on a musician’s mind should not be “how can I keep my music off the P2P networks?” No. The first thing on our minds should be “how do I keep my fans happy?” followed by “how do I find more fans to keep happy?”
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that slapping copy-protection on our CDs and making it harder for people to enjoy our music is not keeping our fans happy. Putting copy-protection on a CD is like putting a big sticker on it that reads “hey, thanks for your money. Oh, by the way, I don’t trust you, so I’ve removed your ability to play this CD in your computer, car or iPod. Enjoy!”
It seems to me that when we have enough fans, we’ll already have the best copy-protection ever: living, breathing people who want to support us, to see us do well. If you have 1000 fans and each of them buy your newest record, you’ll have done better than 90% of records released on major labels! You’ve totally won!
It’s really hard to keep that goal in focus, especially when musicians are being bombarded with doom-and-gloom messages from the record industry. I don’t know why we listen so much. So much of the system is totally irrelevant to our musical pursuits. Radio won’t play our music. Labels won’t develop our careers. A record that sells 100,000 units is considered a failure. Tell me again why I should help save this crumbling system?
I’m more afraid of losing fans than losing control over what happens to my MP3 files. Fans give our music relevance and keep it relevant long after we’re gone. How can we lose?
Great statement, and great to hear it from an artist. I like to tell our clients that P2P piracy is high on the list of “problems we wish we had.”
I have had several discussions with Scott about copy protection and we will never agree on the subject as such – “no one needs it”.
T.A. Productions’ ALB (Audio Lock-Box) (if anyone has read our PDF) has multiple settings, it doesn’t have to restrict computers or ipods…though mp3 is not secure in any such manner.
We also deal in watermarking, adding tags to your audio/video used only for tracking reasons (i.e. where did this mp3 come from?)
This isn’t for everyone we agree, but at least it’s an “Option” that independant artists have never had. No one should say everyone should/needs to use it or that no one needs to. This varies with artist to artist.
No one is using copy protection to protect the ones you “trust” it’s the ones you can’t trust who get a hold of your IP and copy it.
I am glad Scott wrote his opinion and I strongly disagree, but it is his right as an artist to not use copy protection technology…at least for once he was able to chose NOT to use it :)
Ted
http://www.audiolockbox.com
I’ve been a visiting your site for a long time. I liked your writings on webdesign. Then I was a bit confused, when you redesigned and focused on your music.
I downloaded some of your songs and they were great! You managed to combine semi-professional recording techniques, great lyrics, beautiful music and the flair of DIY. That was totally cool. I’ve never heared anything like that before.
I really appreciate your attitude towards your fans like me. It touched me deep inside.
Another came for the web design, stayed for the music fan.
Ted, I think the point all DRM schemes miss is that they are ultimately ineffectual. They may make things marginally more difficult for those hell-bent on stealing the music for a week or so, but exponentially more problematic for the actual listeners of the music. There will never be a DRM developed that will not be cracked. This is an inexorable fact. Be it a piece of tape, magic marker, a relatively few simple lines of code or a modded piece of hardware, whatever they come up with will be defeated.
Meanwhile the vast majority of music fans get the shaft. Can’t listen to CD’s in ALL of their CD players. Can’t make their party mix tapes of music they purchased. Get stuck with high priced digital audio players that play format A but not B or C.
MP3 is still around not because it is a great format, but BECAUSE it has no DRM on it, and can be played on nearly any digital player. Left to normal technological innovation, it would have been obsolesced already. (Speaking of which, anyone know of any portable OGG players? FLAC would be a big bonus too.)
Rather than worry about getting $2000 from welfare recipients maybe the RIAA, et al should crack down on the black market warehouses churning out CD’s by the tens of thousands. I would wager they still represent larger losses than P2P ever could. They are among those cracking your DRM’s anyhow.
Scott,
The politics here are seriously broken, as we’re finding out at IPac. I wonder if you’d consider letting us take this blog post and turn it into a piece for our IPac newsletter.
It’s so funny how everybody wants to be able to downoad any song they want….yet people like Dave Shea cry a river when someone steals one of his precious little style sheets.
Um, jamesA, that’s apples-and-oranges, don’t you think? If you take one of Dave’s stylesheets without permission, it’s fairly certain that you’re gonna use it to build a website. That’d be like taking one of my songs and putting your name on it as if you wrote it.
Great post Scott.
I agree we’re fighting a hard battle when dealing with the corporate all-your-rights-reserved-by-me deluge.
I have found the biggest barriers to acceptance being (in no order):
- The one-in-a-billion-chance to be the next Garth Brooks (financially) blinds a lot of young musicians to any critical thinking.
- It’s not just record companies but *agents* are freaked at the idea of “giving away product” because they see it as losing their percentage.
- The tools we use (especially Creative Commons) are so damn abstract, I still don’t have a 10 word explanation of the value of CC licensing.
What we are asking for a *cultural* change (revolution?) in thinking about art and how it’s distributed and artists and what their rights would be a fair, safe world.
Specially on file-sharing it seems to me rather than framing the issue “do you trust your fans not to steal your music?” shouldn’t it be: “do trust a record company or agent that wants to LIMIT the exposure to potential new fans?” I would think emerging artists would do everything they can to ENCOURAGE their fans to make as many copies as possible to play for their friends and family.
Reminds me of Jason Mraz’s’s’s’ official stance on recording his shows. Essentially, he doesn’t think you should make money off taping his shows. Otherwise, record! share! enjoy!
I believe every single Walkingbirds tune is available free. Got ‘Where I’ve Been’ as a gift. But guess what? I *bought* ‘American Thing’ and ‘The Sandlewood Sessions’ with real money, because I wanted them. And I’m a tightwad with very little disposable income. But I love music. I live for music. I breathe it in my sleep and bathe in it on occasion. Especially wonders like Walkingbirds. So, I buy it, even if I can get lo-fi copies free.
So will every other music lover.
Criminals, on the other hand, will do what they do no matter what efforts you take to stop them.
I feel like there’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Anyone here read Janis Ian’s articles on the subject? http://janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html
Good stuff. One quick excerpt:
“The NARAS people were a bit more pushy. They told me downloads were “destroying sales”, “ruining the music industry”, and “costing you money”.
Costing me money? I don’t pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing. If a music industry executive claims I should agree with their agenda because it will make me more money, I put my hand on my walletâ?|and check it after they leave, just to make sure nothing’s missing.
Am I suspicious of all this hysteria? You bet. Do I think the issue has been badly handled? Absolutely. Am I concerned about losing friends, opportunities, my 10th Grammy nomination by publishing this article? Yeah. I am. But sometimes things are just wrong, and when they’re that wrong, they have to be addressed.”
Does anyone here remeber when 8-track recorders came out? The record industry said it would kill the music biz. Same thing when cassette recorders came out. Same thing when CDR drives came out. And now MP3s. It keeps not coming true (oh, if only it were true :)
I download a lot of music, and I buy a lot of music, and I pay to see live music. But none of the stuff I download, or buy, or see live means a damn thing to the “record industry.” It means a hell of a lot to the musicians though.