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.
