Give It Away And Pray: Maybe Not A Business Model, But Still Important For Artists
from the If-you-don't-know-what-you're-doing,-you're-doing-it-right dept
Mike has written that "Give it away and pray is not a business model," however, that doesn't mean it's not a good way for Artists to live.
Business models can emerge from "give it away and pray." When I gave Sita Sings the Blues away, the audience created modes of sharing and revenue streams I hadn't thought of. Many fans, on their own initiative, set up screenings and house parties, and sent me donations. Now that I know this is possible, I could call it a "business model" that could be replicated by offering screening kits and guidelines. But the audience may be coming up with new ideas and wanting to engage in new ways I can't predict or imagine. Last year's business model can't describe next year's zeitgeist; "give it away and pray" is eternal.
Because I surrendered any commercial monopoly on the film (truly gave it away with copyLeft rather than "sort of gave it away" with no-commercial-use and no-derivatives restrictions), it has been incorporated into some amazing creative projects I could never have imagined. Bill Cheswick's every-frame-of-a-movie poster and Star Simpson's MonkeyLectric bike wheel display are just two examples. If I hadn't given the film away, I wouldn't have even known about these amazing projects, let alone been part of them.
"Give it away" means expecting nothing in return, so whatever does return is also a gift. "Pray" means letting go of the results and trusting that giving is the right thing to do even if nothing comes back. This isn't a business model, because it's not about business; it is about Art, and Love. Economists may not be concerned with Art and Love, but Artists have to be, or else they stop being Artists. Of course Artists can be concerned with business as well. Art and commerce can be fully complementary. I pay a lot of attention to business models (that's why I read Techdirt). But I can forget that I am an Artist, especially when "give it away and pray" is so often dismissed.
It's easy for me to exalt "give it away and pray", because so much came back to me so quickly in the case of Sita. We can analyze this material success and derive useful business models from it. That's quite valuable, but it's only part of the picture. If we forget the "give it away and pray" part, we regard audience gifts as commodities, which degrades the artist, the community, and the artist-audience relationship.
We never know what the world will bring us. Adhering to a business model may make us feel secure, but the most exciting possibilities and opportunities are in the space of not knowing. In Art, unlike Business, if you don't know what you're doing, you're doing it right.
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Filed Under: business models, free, music industry
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Re:
http://blog.ninapaley.com/2009/12/07/correction-again/
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Where would art be without so much lawyering? I shudder to think of it.
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Paley licensed the sync rights to the songs. With these payments, she was free to release Sita any way she wanted to.
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So cool
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Question for Nina
Have you thought about using a contest to ask people and fans to submit ideas on how to monetize your music?
Have you thought about setting up a wiki and crowdsourcing a business plan?
My outside the box idea for you is to combine all the above ideas and let several business plans evolve over time via inout from your fans.
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Re: Question for Nina
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Re: Re: Question for Nina
http://questioncopyright.org/creator_endorsed
And you can get the .fla source files here:
http://www.archive.org/details/Sita_Sings_the_Blues_Files
Basically you can do whatever you want with "Sita", without my permission, but Endorsed projects have a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
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"And you can get the .fla source files here:"
:|
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FLA format problem
I wrote about it in detail here:
http://fsmsh.com/3271
My conclusion since then is that the only way Sita is going to get converted to an open format is if somebody with Adobe Flash's animator installed renders the files to SWF format and publishes those.
If/when that happens, I think I (as well as many other people) can probably get it converted to SVG (and after that, conversion to many different open formats becomes possible).
But I am NOT willing to install a proprietary operating system or to buy Adobe's animation software just so I can make this initial conversion from FLA to SWF.
Nor am I willing to reverse-engineer FLA format and write a conversion library. There doesn't seem to be much interest in doing that. In fact, AFAICT, the only reason SWF is supported is because you needed that to _play_ Flash animations (SWF was intended as an opaque distribution format -- like a binary, and because Flash is a product of proprietary culture for proprietary animators, FLA, which was intended to be a source format, is generally not distributed, so there was little demand for reading it).
To clarify -- we are talking about access to the original vector graphics, for the purposes of making more sophisticated derivatives. The _video_ is of course already available in several free/open standard formats on Internet Archive, if you are satisfied with video snippets or frame-captures from the film.
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Re: Re: Question for Nina
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Wow
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Give it away for free
???
profit
Make music
Sell out to record label
???
Be abused by record label
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Accident, Adversity and the Value of Ideas
So, yes, Nina made the film without copyleft in mind. It can be said that she arrived at the decision to copyleft it by accident, after a great deal of adversity. How does that in any way count as an argument about what she says above? She has learned a lot through her experience and now believes she can help artists avoid the problems she encountered. What's wrong with that?
Penicillin's discovery was an accident. Is it therefore any less valuable a discovery?
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Re: Accident, Adversity and the Value of Ideas
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Nor was it in this case. But feel free to keep continuing to make stuff up, TAM.
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In this case people "ripping" her work knows where they will have to go to get more material or newer things so those with a little bit of sense know they have to treat her well by giving back in some way. I think it creates a symbiotic relation with users that can have very positive results. The key word is eco-system.
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Not Just One Plan
So in some ways "give it away and pray" has been around and successful for a long time.
The real difference these days is you can get much more and broader exposure more quickly because of the internet. You also don't need a big company to help you get that mass exposure any more. And that is what has the big publishers, record companies, etc. scared.
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