Source: wesbound – Dang! Via Maurice Chevalier and Apple Logic Pro X Users… | Facebook
I expressed my thoughts on the revenue model for independent digital content creators of today in above linked Facebook posting following news by Apple Logic X User Group Admin, awesome artist himself, record producer Maurice Chevalier’s sharing of news that Soundcloud had been acquired by another big corporation the other day and is going to cease operating under its own brand name.
For convenience, I’ll add my ramblings and thoughts on the matter here:
Someone in the comments suggested building a better platform for independent artists | content creators.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking for quite some time now and loosely following Adam Neely’s excellent video on intellectual property rights:
Personally, I don’t think platforms or distribution at large, i.e. streamed, download, whatever, cut to the root of the problem. I think it’s the entire ownership | property rights model that could use an overhaul. Specifically: Who really “owns” a piece of music, art, literature? Wasn’t it always created from having learned the “trade” by leaning on someone else’s work before? In other words: Isn’t any kind of creative expression always an amalgam of art someone else before published and other creators using a substantial part of that material in their own creations?
I think, Adam Neely’s YouTube Channel has a great video somewhere on his channel on the conundrum with intellectual property, which really is modelled after the owning land paradigm and going back as far as the 17th century, if memory serves. In other words: I don’t think – and him apparently, neither, Adam, that is – that music or any creative work was like a piece of land that you “owned” because you either grabbed it from someone else or inherited and for which you charge as soon as someone uses that land for say, cropping or farming.
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Frankly, the entire idea of “ownership” needs to be “rethought”, as far as I can see…. It should be “reinvented” in such a way that e.g. there is always a portion that is going to get taxed for the reason I give above – i.e. we learn from what’s in the “public domain” – and another, hopefully larger portion actually being licensed out. Creative Commons had the right idea about that, I think. Just haven’t gained enough traction among content creators and for that reason, I think independent artists today should have long boycotted _any_ “commercial” outfit and fallen back to what I’m trying to outline here. No?
Problem will be monitoring, tracking etc. you say? But I think, even that … could be solved in clever ways making use of today’s technology: Say, there was a unique identifier key that is retrieved from a large publicly accessible database or catalogue via web “hooks”/connections and that database generates new keys via some algorithm as needed. Once you publish your work _anywhere_ , the next available ID gets automatically created and assigned to it. Boom! It’s forever “linked” with your track, image, voiceover, other audio, whatever. If someone else tries to use it, for whatever application or reason, they can’t do so unless they pay the license fee, which would also get associated with the ID holder of that particular work. And registrants or participants in that system are free to decide what data they share. Could be as little as only a receiving bank account number and otherwise anonymous. Heck, each and everyone is constantly getting tracked by triangulation via our mobile phones, so data privacy can’t seriously be the “show stopper” here, can it? If we’ve taken _anything_ away from the Snowden situation, it’s that: YOU ARE BEING WATCHED AND LISTENED TO 24/7, whether you like it or not!
Maurice Chevalier – since I’m aware that you’ve been monitoring the markets thoroughly, a thought on my ramblings, maybe? If so inclined.
And really anyone. Feel free to have your say here on that matter. The revenue model simply doesn’t work in the artists’ | content creators’ favor any longer, it likely never really has except for those major acts who were artificially kept small in number so the labels would have leverage to control the markets – as they do today, just using different tools and media and technologies. Same, same, just different. No?
wesboundmusic 