The week’s background chatter has been filled with debates over what constitutes fair pay for musicians — an issue brought to the fore by the second season of Minnesota Orchestra musicians being locked out. Stir in a fascinating article in Digital Music News by the founder of TuneCore, and it’s clear that there is no way of separating music from politics.
It’s not a direct link. It’s more like Music + Economics = Politics.
It’s when we add the economic dimension — of how much we are willing to pay for art or, to frame it another way, how much we believe an artist should be able to eat every month — that the issue heats up. And there is nothing, truly nothing, different between how I shop for a CD on Amazon, peanut butter at Walmart, and, um, borrow, free MP3s from my friends.
I’m afraid I’m about to preach a sermon, something any critic seems naturally disposed to doing. For this, gentle reader, I beg your indulgence, but I feel duty bound as a person engaged with the world around me to get this off my chest. This needs to be a well-researched 800-page book. I’m aiming for a carefully-distilled 1,200 words.
Jeff Price, the founder of spinArt and TuneCore and an ardent advocate of musicians getting paid for online content, laid out a harrowing account of how music is not really what iTunes and Amazon are selling when they are selling music. I don’t know enough about the business to be able to tell if all he writes is true, but, given Price’s background, I’ll take his word for it.
He writes:
Technology has provided a way for there to be little-to-no cost or risk to have music stored on hard drives always available to buy or stream. The incentive for a store to sell music and make money from that sale is gone. Instead, music is used to sell smartphones, tablets, computers, recurring monthly subscription fees, operating systems and to generate market share. Or it’s being used as a loss-leader in order to attract a buyer; making all the investors and shareholders rich while the songwriters, publishers, artists and music creators get little to nothing. The artist is a commodity being aggregated to provide the impression of breadth in a music catalog.
(You can read the full article here.)
Walmart has been fingered many times as a catalyst for an economic race to the bottom, where the large company bullies prices down to the point where even its suppliers can go out of business in trying to find new ways of cutting costs for everything from pickles to socks.
But Walmart is, in many ways, old, bricks-and-mortar news. There is an online race to the economic bottom as well. Peruse this site and you’ll notice that I’ve never (or hardly ever) provided a link to Amazon. It’s because I can’t bring myself to.
In my short stint as a business reporter at the Toronto Star, after the music critic’s job was eliminated, I discovered how Amazon has created a worldwide labour force, most of it in low-wage countries with English speakers (now there’s a nice legacy of the British Empire) ready to design websites or gather up false Facebook friends and Twitter followers for peanuts.
Add to that Amazon’s discounted goods, most of them made in low-wage countries where language issues are irrelevant, and one quickly gets a picture of a business focused on world domination (doesn’t that sound quaintly Gothic!) rather than making a legitimate contribution to the quality of life. (And there are many other businesses like Amazon operating in the same manner.)
If a graphic designer can create my website for $125 in Pakistan, why should I hire the nice lady with the George Brown diploma who is going to charge me $7,500?
I already can’t buy a Canadian-made laptop, TV, stock pot, or toaster oven. Soon, it could be no different for basic computer programming, customer service support, or web design. You can hire freelancers on an open virtual marketplace to create any and all sorts of content — down to writing a book to order. It’s done via a bidding system to make sure the bargain-basement wins (check out an example here).
It boils down to this, as I see it:
From the moment I wake up to when I set my artfully gelled hair down on the pillow at night, I am faced with choices that allow me to have a lot — of doughnuts, fries, underpants, and music — for a little, meaning I can have plenty more. Or I could choose instead to have just a small tub of handmade ice cream, or one piece of handmade furniture, or one really fine pair of dress shoes.
I choose more, every time. It’s normal and natural. Why should I — someone whose income today is half of what it was two years ago — deprive myself? Thank goodness the men and women and children I am depriving in the process are usually invisible and inaudible.
For someone — like The Telegraph’s Ivan Hewitt last week — to have the temerity to suggest that musicians are overpaid is the clarion fanfare that this race to the bottom is now firmly ensconced in the arts as well.
If we pause to consider the implications for just five seconds, we will quickly realise that there will always be someone willing to work for less, because less is still better than nothing.
It’s this awful little death spiral that ties music to politics.
One last point: As we all know, the polity is roughly split between those who believe that the invisible hand of commerce is the most reliable force of economic strength and, by extension, individual wellbeing and those who hold that people should have a hand, through their governments, to shape their economic destiny.
The former camp is absolutely right; the pure market really is the most efficient means to an economic end. But the extended process of growth and decay of economic cycles has a human cost. I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago as I read Donald Cameron’s The Impossible Dream, a self-published 1977 book of how he came to found the Banff Centre in the 1940s.
Cameron grew up on a Prairie homestead and was an activist in the United Farm movement during the Great Depression. His accounts of what people went through during that time are heartbreaking.
So it’s alright to sacrifice human lives for the sake of letting the economy take its course? Businesses can, when run well, continue in perpetuity (even the Hudson’s Bay Company has survived nearly 500 years). But if I’m really lucky, I’ll be on this earth for 85 years, with no possibility of restructuring, an IPO or a leveraged buyout to extend for another 85.
Having the opportunity to work for a living wage during the 45 years of vigorous adulthood doesn’t seem too much to ask.
So, bringing this all back to music: Do we endorse cheap and free and say bollocks to a living wage for those who make the art, or do we sustain something that is part of what lifts us out of the crowded henhouse that provides us our $2.49-a-dozen eggs?
Still think your iPhone’s earbuds aren’t political?
A Happy Canadian Thanksgiving to one and all.
John Terauds