Music and Risk by George Ziemann -- March 7, 2008 There's a recurring theme (I think they're called "memes" now) that there is some sort of risk involved in creating music. Today alone, I encountered "Why should a musician bear the cost and the risk of creating music with no expectation of a return on their investment?" and the equally nonsensical, "Songwriters are shielded from that risk by the fixed nature of the mechanical rate." What risk? There is no monetary cost to writing a song, especially if you use hotel stationery. Not a lot of risk there, either, unless the hotel happens to be in Baghdad or something and, if you're in that kind of situation, the fixed nature of the mechanical rate isn't going to be much damn help. Once you learn how to play, you've already forked over the cash for an instrument. Once it's in your hand, you can recreate the music of others or create your own. Creating your own bears no additional cost, no risk, no investment to expect a return on, unless you count emotional investment. You can introduce risk, but it is not inherent. The risk begins when someone decides that your unique version of the A-D-E chord progression can be packaged and sold. Even then, the risk usually does not fall on the musicians or songwriters. The songwriters get paid broadcast royalties for airplay, be it television or radio. They also get paid the fixed mechanical rate for every copy of their song that is manufactured -- whether they are sold or not. As for the musician, there should be no risk whatsoever. Someone want you to record an album? Do a live show? Whether it's a concert stage or a studio, the musician can alleviate all risk by demanding to be paid first. You don't open your guitar case until they hand you cash or the check clears. I suppose you could create risk by counting on royalty income that you may never be paid, but that's a business negotiation issue and has nothing whatsoever to do with the process of creating music. This basic state of affairs has been constant for the last 100 years. In this respect, the Internet has changed nothing. Get paid up front or don't open your guitar case. The other meme I have a problem with is music as some sort of property. Music is not property. Neither is writing, be it fiction, computer coding, or making video games. You can declare that it is your property by filing a copyright but what you are actually claiming is the right to make property based on your idea. This could be sheet music, recordings, t-shirts, books, video games, software or any other tangible product. I'm going to focus on music, just to avoid running out the tangential scenarios, but the same idea works for everything that people are calling "intellectual property." Music, once released into the wild, is owned by everyone who wants to own it. I specifically am NOT talking about physical copies right now. We'll get to them later. Non-musicians take ownership of songs usually because it will remind them of an event. Your first kiss, a dance or high school prom, the first song they played at your wedding, the theme of a movie you loved. While there are a lot of songs you like, there are a select few, maybe even just one, that are "your" songs. To hear them pops open a door in the hallway of your mind and you have to go down there, if only to close the door. It's different for musicians. You've got to own a lot of tunes. You have to steal them from their original owner, analyze them, interpret them, maybe even steal the style of the original, copy every single note. Then you somehow change it, even though you're playing it the same. You make it your own. Stevie Ray Vaughan's version of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" comes to mind. Beck, Bogart and Appice stole that one before Stevie Ray got to it, too, but Stevie Wonder wrote it for Jeff Beck in the first place, so it actually was a gift. Mysteriously, Wonder's version still had commercial value. "Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." -- John Lennon Consider the song, "Imagine," by John Lennon. I did a cover of this one with The Hurricane. Market value of a copy of our recording is zero, nada, zilch. Copies of Lennon's version are only a buck at iTunes. That's so damn close to worthless that I can see it from there. So the value of an individual song is based on scale and volume, from an economic point of view and from a manufacturing point of view. Interestingly, there is a flip side to this that also depends on the widespread availability and recognition of a song, yet is not dependent on how much profit was made. Even though I've never bought a copy of the song or the album that contains it, I am very familiar with "Imagine." I heard it on the radio. It was free. Someone told me what the chords were and my brain filled in the actual notes from memory. Now it's mine, too. Despite how much John Lennon may or may have not been paid for each individual copy of his tune or each time it was played, the most valuable copy is the one that cost nothing to produce and the one that has never been for sale -- the handwritten lyrics on a piece of hotel stationery. Now you have to pay just to look at it. Other than staying in a hotel in New York, there was no risk involved in writing that song, no cost, no investment. The creative process is free. Always has been, always will be. Don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise.