NASHVILLE — Back here in Music City for my second Americana Music Conference, and my initial observations all have one simple, and obvious, theme: artists seeking greater success. Success is being defined in various ways – larger audiences, better recording deals, ways to support themselves without having to play gigs every night – but there is little question the artists who have gathered here in Nashville are serious about what they believe to be their primary profession, no matter what other jobs they may hold.

In other words, these recording artists are controlling their own destiny. Those who would play in loco parentis and infanticize performing artists by developing a “voluntary” licensing regime that makes their work free and ensures such that they must play every night are not respecting the desire of these artists to control that destiny.

One band member I met (banjo and harp, or harmonica for those not into blues or roots music) talked about trying to make a living in his former home town, Austin. It’s a great music town, he said, and his band got a lot of gigs. But it was hard to break out there from the other bands and there weren’t a lot of labels there. They don’t want to have to play every night, he said. They like playing live – they had just come off the stage when I was talking to him – but they also like recording music and reaching a larger audience. And they like getting paid. They’ve moved to LA now for better access to the recording industry, and having lived there once myself, they’re definitely going to need to earn money on their recordings to handle the cost of living there. (A cost-saving note; one band member plays a classical bass, and rather than bring it from LA he put an ad on Nashville’s Craig’s List for a one-day bass loaner, and paid the guy with a ticket to the show, free lunch, and $50.)

My panel tomorrow morning is a policy one. Naturally, those are the types of panels I speak on at artists’ conferences. But my perspective is that I don’t come to these conferences to educate, I come to be educated. Nothing is more valuable for me than to talk to artists and creators, to hear about their goals, their struggles, their achievements, their setbacks, their dreams. They are the yeast in the baking of our culture, and they are the people we at the Copyright Alliance – as represented by our exhibit space here for one voi©e — are working to serve.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 4:59 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright opponents, creators. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.