Creativity and Cash Flow August 13, 2010 -- Lately, I'm getting approached to monetize the site by isolating some content off behind a pay wall. Am I the only one in the country that finds this idea disgusting? I guess I see the greater question to be: How did everyone manage to forget the original purpose of the internet? I've had a web site since about 1998. The way I understand it, the internet was designed to allow people to share information. For the most part, that's what I've used this site to do. From my e-mail and my web stats, it's seems like my audience primarily consists of musicians and college students doing research (and I have another batch of recording industry statistics on the way for them just in time for a new semester). Neither group is known for having excess cash to fritter away. My recording industry stats are the most popular area on the site, so charging for access (like the RIAA does now) would only serve to eliminate that traffic, or reduce it significantly, as even publications such as the New York Times have discovered. While I have indeed used the site as a vehicle to generate income, I've found that it is actually easier to sell records if they're someplace that people are accustomed to shopping at -- like iTunes or Amazon, for instance. So, in contrast to what people are telling me to do, I've actually recently removed the retail options from the music section. Now I've limited my options here to a couple of buttons to make a site donation through PayPal. They're kind of a waste, too. In the 5 or 6 years that I've had those scattered about the site, not one person has ever kicked in a single dollar. I'm not complaining about this, it's just a statement of fact. Feel free to send a few bucks to wizard@azoz.com through PayPal and pleasantly surprise me. I find that the quest for cash is actually counter-productive to the creative process. Just tagging that last paragraph felt kind of whore-ish to me. I write to share information. My target audience has always been indie musicians, and the college students came along for the ride, possibly because my stance against the RIAA's bone-headed idea that suing them was the way to go. Although my personal life has been somewhat in the way lately, my primary purpose since 2002 for having this site has always been to provide information that will help others. Here are the key points in regards to the internet, copyright and creative works which I have found to hold true throughout the past 8 years. As already stated, sharing information was the whole reason the internet was created in the first place. We use the internet to connect to a server somehere out there that has information or files that we want to see or use and pull a copy into our own machine. That's peer-to-peer at it's heart. What we now call p2p programs just simplify that process. In olden times, you had to know someone's IP address to log directly into their computer, but it was still relatively easy to do. And even if they kill all the commercial p2p nets out there now, we can always go back to the old way. To make it stop would involved shutting the whole damn thing down. Ain't gonna happen. So the RIAA's legal attact on the universities has been a waste of time since day one. In terms of the music business, I've noticed that the people who cry loudest about the pirates stealing their stuff are the ones that have already made a shitload of money. The other end of the spectrum (independent artists that are relatively unknown) is populated with artists begging people to just listen to their music. P2P neither hurts nor helps the unknowns. I used to run LimeWire for the sole (totally legal) purpose of sharing music that I possess copyrights for. The problem is that if people don't already know your name, they aren't going to be searching for it. So they're not going to find it other than by a total accident or maybe a typing malfunction. So while the most prominent battle has been between the rich and famous and the college students using p2p to find music, the majority of the country's musicians (and culture) are really off to the side in that discussion. It really has nothing to do with us. So we're giving our music away for free on our own web sites and places like DMusic, MySpace or Facebook. Why would we give our music away for free? For the same reason that the big boys have been paying to get their music to dominate the radio airwaves for the past 40 or 50 years. You've got to get it in people's ears before you can expect them to buy a copy. It's that simple. The other great truth is that for the famous signed artists, record sales have always been a losing venture. Bruce Springteen can make more money in 3 nights at the Meadowlands (or what used to be the Meadowlands) than he will from an entire year's worth of record sales. The record label keeps 85% of the income from sales and will find any way possible to make sure that artist is always in their debt, even if it comes down to cooking the books. That's why ever major label is under perpetual audit by the artists. In 50 years only twice, to my knowledge, has any artist ever audited their label and found out that they had been paid properly. The great promise of the original Napster was not in snagging all the new commercial releases. The real treasure there was a vast landscape of music that the record labels have removed from the market forever. All of the out-of print music that had long ago been deemed as no longer commercially viable. That changed with things like Kazaa and LimeWire. The depth just isn't there. A lot of artist catalogs seem to be limited to the radio hits. In the case of my favorite acts, these tend to be the songs that were beaten into our heads by being overplayed on the radio to the point that they become one of the last things you want to hear from that act, except maybe in a concert situation. While music has peer-to-peer, it is really no worse than the public library is for writers. If you take into consideration that Benjamin Franklin opened the first public library and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison didn't give him a beatdown for it, it's easy to see that the current squabble over copyright is definitely NOT what the founding fathers had in mind when they created the U.S. copyright laws in the first place. The worst thing that you can do to a creative person is hide their work from the world. It is our only legacy, our only chance to live forever. John Lennon isn't dead. I hear his voice every day. Shakespeare is still with us. So is Johann Bach, Wolfgang Mozart and Ludwig von Beethoven. Stephen King will probably live forever, right next to Edgar Allen Poe. It's unfortunate that many of us in the creative field will die in poverty or penniless, even the famous ones. I saw that Noel Redding (Jimi Hendrix's bassist) was selling off his guitar on eBay a few months before he died. That shouldn't have happened and it is an indication that something is wrong with our society. The people most influential in creating our culture are always the last ones to profit from it. In metaphorical terms, we are the whores of culture. The pimps (like the record labels) collect the money and give back as little as legally possible. The copyright laws were designed to protect the interests of the "authors and inventors," but when you get right down to it, they only really protect the true pirates. Obviously, we're doing something wrong. The last point I'd like to make involves intent and motivation. There are two primary things that motivate me to sit down and write something for the website. Sometimes it's because I look at the front page and say to myself, Oh no! I've haven't written anything in a week. My readers are going to get bored and go away. So i'll sit down and try to manufacture something that I think people might be interested in. Other times, I have something to say, a story to tell or maybe I'm just spreading what I consider to be useful information that I've gleaned from surfing the web, the latter having been low on my priority list lately. My readers can tell the difference. They rarely write to talk about the forced articles, unless I managed to find something that served both purposes. Music seems to be the same way. I watch some of my friends struggle over a song and the inane pointless rules that they worry about that really have nothing to do with anything other than it's what people have told them for so long are the rules you must follow to have a hit song. I've seen formulas for writing music -- keep it to 3 minutes, the intro should be 13 seconds long, keep within the accepted song structures (verse-chorus, verse-chorus, lead breaks, a double chorus and out). They worry about how catchy their hooks are, if the songs are danceable or want them compressed to death so they sound "louder on the radio," even though none of them will ever make it to radio anyway. Ironically, the music I like best seems to break all of the rules. "Stairway to Heaven" is 7 minutes long. Pink Floyd writes everything in minor keys, some of their music doesn't even have a proper verse-chorus arrangement. Only The Beatles seem to have been the masters of breaking all the rules while still managing to squeeze it into the pop music framework, but if you really dig deep enough, it's easy to see that this was a herculean effort for which George Martin deserves most of the credit. As for myself, I have other skills that I'm relying on for income (software programming, primarily). When it comes to creative works, I have no respect for the rules and conventions. If a song is 5 minutes long to convey the emotion I'm trying to spill out, then it's a 5-minute song. If the thought only lasts 2 minutes, well, that's okay, too. In writing, telling a story might take just a few paragraphs or it might require several pages. The only thing I know for sure is that my intent severely effects the quality of my work. If I worry about getting paid for something, then it's going to be crap. I might look at something after it's done and say, Hmm, maybe there's a market for this. I've shopped out articles for magazines occasionally with this in mind, and so far I'm batting 100% on those efforts, which was encouraging, even though I haven't put much effort into that for a while. If I put the idea of making money at the beginning of the process instead of the end, the final result is nowhere near as powerful, entertaining or thought-provoking. Probably because that's not what I was trying to do. I was trying to make money. I can only speak for myself, but it appears to me that a lot of creative people have this same problem. That's why we need the pimps -- the record labels, publishers, agents, publicists -- to go out and sell it for us. If we try to do it ourselves, we lose out humility, we lose touch with our passions, we lose the ability to look for beauty and drama in the world because we're looking for a bag of money instead. There's no easy answer to this. A song or a book doesn't become valuable to you until after you've heard or read it. If I buy Stephen King's latest book or Radiohead's new album it's because they've already convinced me that they have something of value to offer. I'm buying based on trust. They already have reached me. Now it's just a matter of keeping that link alive. So that's how I approach the making of creative content. I'm still in the process of building that bond with my audience and I'm not going to insult them and chase them away by demanding payment up front. That seems rather stupid to me, not to mention highly counterproductive. Unfortunately, that's how the rest of the world works. So maybe a little further down the line I'll write a book. And I do have another album that's on the verge of going to iTunes and Amazon. But I'm still going to let people hear at least some of it for free. And I'm still going to get ridiculed for it by the profit-motivated because they see what I do as detrimental to their pursuit of money. In the words of Lennon/McCartney, I don't care too much for money, cause money can't buy me love. That's what I get from my audience. It's all I really need or want. There will never be a pay wall on AzOz.