Only a Hundred Years Old
Friday, October 30th, 2009 by Patrick Ross“We’re returning to a prior age, one where the economics of music are about performances, not recordings. You know, copyright on recorded music is only about 100 years old.”
So said a professor at a dinner I attended the other night. I like this professor, he knows a fair amount about copyright (even if his area of research and teaching is broader) and he actually is pretty solid on the benefits of copyright. I wanted to follow up with him, let him make clear that after a few glasses of wine he was starting to generalize, but the conversation involved other thinkers as well and took a different direction, so I’ll follow up here (the prerogative of having a blog).
On the surface, he’s basically right. For musicians, performance has always been a part of the equation, but after a long era of multiple revenue streams from recorded music, for many musicians performance income is becoming a larger percentage of their real and potential income. And yes, if you’re referring to the mechanical music right, we’ve only had that in US law about 100 years.
Of course, copyright didn’t appear until a relatively short time ago, namely the early 1500s; it took a few long decades between the invention of the printing press in the 1400s and the first rights assignments. I’m currently doing research on a copyright infringement filing by a cartographer named Willem Blaeu in Amsterdam before the States General of the Dutch Republic in 1608; that’s only 401 years ago.
But it’s a common meme that we’re returning to a simpler time, a time of live music, that the era of recorded music is passing.
Let’s think about the implications of that for a second.
Without recorded music, we have no radio, we have no “ownership” of music. It’s highly unlikely a music fan in Boise will discover bluegrass, or another fan in Duluth will be exposed to jazz. If you think about how recorded music has reached us in the last 100 years — through our radios, on movie soundtracks, in restaurants and stores, on our turntables and cassette players and CD players and MP3 players, through Internet streaming, in video games, and now through “cloud” services like Spotify in the U.K. — it’s hard to imagine a cultural invention that has had more impact on our culture, or brought more joy to “consumers” of the end product.
There are “performance rights” attached to many of the technologies listed above; songwriters get paid not just when one of their songs is manufactured on a CD or downloaded from iTunes but when that song is played on terrestrial radio or Pandora. Performing artists earn income from digital transmissions and are seeking the same right from terrestrial radio, which most other countries already have (as I alluded before, copyright far predates even the settlement of North America, let alone the creation of U.S. law).
Yes, economics of markets change; certainly the cartography industry is different now than it was when Mr. Blaeu was running his printing shop along the Zuider Zee in Amsterdam 401 years ago. But rights models continue to provide incentives for creation and mechanisms within those changing markets, continuing to allow creators to have some say in how they are compensated and how their output is used.
I know this professor is broad-minded. I can’t imagine he was favoring a world where sound recordings are merely things whipped up on MacBooks using the latest Garage Band, then seeded across P2P networks to promote upcoming concerts. We’ll have plenty of that, and that’s fine, but again that invovles a rightsholder exercising his or her right to reproduce and distribute that work according to that whim.
There are a tremendous number of revenue streams attached to recorded music, and there are more to come — the “cloud” model won’t be the last to emerge. That is, we will see these coming on the assumption that the continued benefit of copyrights in sound recordings is recognized, and innovators are allowed to continue to innovate, both with technology and consumer-focused business models.
October 31st, 2009 at 2:32 am
Well said! Thanks for that brief history……fascinating stuff.
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Couldn’t agree more. I hope the future will present more opportunities for the creators to retain their copyright and that there are access points for the distribution of their work that amounts to a robust revenue stream (or several).
I’m not willing to jettison idea of value in recorded music (and its dual copyrights) just yet, and I’m glad you’re not either.
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Max and Casey, thanks so much, particularly since both of you are much deeper into the world of music than I am. It’s helpful to hear I might have been on to something here!
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:02 pm
I enjoyed your words about recording vs. live. That’s been talked about for about 100 years also, but more deeply investigated in the last five. The basic problem remains:
how does the performer get enough $$ to feed himself and family? Recording did enable the cheapskate in Duluth to hear great and new music, but this did not automatically get any money to the artist. And everybody wants a cheap band, even here in Sarasota, where the Symphony is being broken by the wealthy churls.
Let’s address THIS problem.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Don’t forget that print music was a huge business prior to recorded music. Brings to mind Russell Sanjek’s great series of books “American Popular Music and its Business: The First Four Hundred Years” - and only the last volume covers the 20th century.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Well said, Laurie!
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Great post. Laurie makes a good point about print - but speaking as one who makes a large part of his income from print (choral) music - that world is changing fast, too. And the world of performance income doesn’t help those of who write but don’t perform. It’s a new world - every day it seems.
November 6th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
While technology has proven to be somewhat of an anathema for Master owners (primarily record companies), it has proven to be a boon for Music Publishers. With each new technological step forward, Publishers have benefited from such usage which has, in turn, brought the power base back to the copyright owners of the COMPOSITION, as opposed to the recorded version thereof. This is a timely reminder that Music Publishers were around a long time before Record Companies, and that the music industry as such relied upon the publication (in sheet music form) of a composition to become popular (ergo the genesis of the term “Music Publisher”).
If I had’ve told you 20 years ago that songwriters and music publishers would be making a not-so-insignificant revenue stream from a mounted singing fish, a “singing” greeting card, or a key chain - you would’ve laughed at me.
Today, both songwriters’ and music publishers’ revenues are increasing due to the creativity afforded them by virtue of the seemingly limitless avenues coming from new technologies.
Indeed, it does seem that artists may have come full circle in light of their primary source of income being in the form of performance income these days. But as technology grows, so do the avenues for the “creators”of the music - and bear in mind that songwriters and artists are quite often one and the same. And that’s who matters most! Record Companies and Music Publishers have only ever been facilitators.
It all stems from the talent, and they should be the ones to benefit the most!
November 13th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Peter, I like your “full circle” enlightenment……power to the CREATORS! The “facilitators” should be as you’ve pointed out, “junior” to the Creators when the money is passed out. In today’s scenario that is so doable.