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| For starters, I don't believe anyone was predicting an actual apocalypse... |
STILL MORE UPDATES: This thing is a hit. Will Buckley at Fareplay comments, in a piece called The Creative Meltdown That Is, author Steven Johnson writes a follow-up to his original article, gets comments from Marc Ribot and T. Bone Burnett! Excerpts at the end of the post.
UPDATE AGIN: Robert Levine at Billboard responds!
Also see the comments of my Internet media piece for an ongoing discussion of the issues involved here, between me and an anonymous, pro-piracy/libertarian[?] reader.
A little follow-up to do with one aspect of my Internet media piece of a few days ago: a New York Times Magazine article, The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn't, by Steven Johnson, has been making the rounds lately. In it Johnson makes a case, based on very broad categories of statistics, that all the bad effects of Internet 2.0 media on artists' livelihoods, which artists say are happening, are not happening. Or are offset by good things.
I said this about it in the comments of my Internet media piece, where someone left a link for it:
Interesting article. We'll put him in the camp of writers boosting the idea that recorded music is now worth nothing (ignoring that a lot of people are making money off of it), and there's nothing anyone can do about it. The article is not a scientific study, it's one writer's opinion, based on very broad categories of statistics— which it seems to me would be prone to distortion because of the vast amount of money concentrated at the top, say, 1% of the business. His conclusion “Consumers spend less for recorded music, but more for live.” is indicative of that— if revenues for middle class musicians fall off a cliff, well, hey, U2 is getting $500 a ticket, so that makes up for it. I don't see his conclusions borne out in the lives of the musicians I know, and clearly a lot of artists have been alarmed about the way things are going.
Similar questions and criticisms are now being raised by more able reporters than I. Jonathan Taplan, an artists' rights firebrand, calls it “one of the most brain dead pieces that the New York Times Magazine has ever published”, and says “Whenever the technology industry comes under criticism, they can always rely on the epic logroller Steven Johnson to roll out a book or article that 'proves' that everything you are observing is actually wrong.” He makes the same complaint as I do about the distortion of the statistics caused by the concentration of wealth at the top:
As we have pointed out before, the recorded music business is a winner take all business in which 80% of the revenue flows to 1% of the artists. So the fact that Beyonce and Jay Z are making more money today that in 2002 does not have anything to do with the lives of the average musician. If you average in the incomes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page, it looks like the median income is rising. Bullshit.
Taplan is fun to read, but other writers go more in depth refuting Johnson's claims. Like Kevin Erickson at the Future of Music Coalition, in The Data Journalism That Wasn't. It begins:
Steven Johnson’s article “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t” frames itself as a data-driven response to concerns about the plight of creative workers in the digital age. But Johnson’s grasp of the limitations of the data he cites seems tenuous, and he ends up relying on some very dubious and all-too-familiar assumptions. In its sweeping dismissal of artists’ various concerns, the article reads as an exercise in gaslighting.
The piece is so detailed that it's difficult to summarize— do go read that whole thing. I promise you will encounter Johnson's arguments again. Erickson concludes:
The debate today [is]... not just about whether art will make money, but whose art, what kind of art, and how much of the money generated by art ends up with artists, and what they’ll have to endure to get it. It’s about how much agency artists get in defining the terms of the digital landscape. It’s coming from artists who hated Napster passionately and artists who really had no problem with unauthorized file sharing. It’s coming from artists who’ve recorded for major labels, indie labels, or no label at all.
Let us be clear: our problem with Johnson’s article isn’t that he fails to conform to some doom-and-gloom scenario for artists working today. Indeed, there are a lot of new opportunities for artists, and those opportunities are worth celebrating. Most frustrating to us is that Johnson reinforces a false binary between pro-technology optimistic futurism and anti-technology digital pessimism. And that simply doesn’t describe the state of the contemporary debate about art and the digital age.
If you want to know how musicians are faring, you have to ask musicians, preferably a whole lot of them. You’ll get different answers from different musicians, and they’ll all be correct in terms of their own experiences. But your overall understanding will better reflect the complexity of the landscape.
More after the break:
