How Years Of Copyright Maximalism Is Now Killing Pop Music

from the originality-is-a-con dept

Almost five years ago, we warned that years of copyright maximalists brainwashing the public about ever expansive copyright and the need for everything to be "owned" had resulted in the crazy Blurred Lines decision that said that merely being inspired by another artist to make a song that has a similar feel, even if it doesn't copy any actual part of the music, was infringing. We warned that this would lead to bad things -- and it has.

Over the last few years, we've been detailing story after story of similar cases being filed. It's become so common that we don't even bother to write about most of the cases. As we've said, though, this really is the industry reaping what they've sowed. It's gotten so crazy that even the RIAA (yes, that RIAA) has felt the need to tell courts that maybe their interpretation of copyright has gone too far in the direction of over-protecting copyright holders.

It's now become such a fact of life that the NY Times has a giant article on how copyright is basically eating pop music these days. It describes a bunch of these cases, and notes that merely "being influenced" makes you liable for copyright infringement, and how that's causing problems for the very concept of pop music:

That is, to put it plainly, bad news for pop stars, and the producers and songwriters who help them craft hits. They are now marks for frivolous litigation premised upon nebulous assertions as well as a complete and willful ignorance of how pop music is actually made.

Occasionally, pop innovates in a hard stylistic jolt, or an outlier comes to rapid prominence (see: Lil Nas X), but more often, it moves as a kind of unconscious collective. An evolutionary step is rarely the product of one person working in isolation; it is one brick added atop hundreds of others.

Originality is a con: Pop music history is the history of near overlap. Ideas rarely emerge in complete isolation. In studios around the world, performers, producers and songwriters are all trying to innovate just one step beyond where music currently is, working from the same component parts. It shouldn’t be a surprise when some of what they come up with sounds similar — and also like what came before.

The whole article is great, including this fantastic line:

It fails to make a distinction between theft and echo, or worse, presumes that all echo is theft. It ignores that the long continuum of pop revisits sonic approaches, melodies, beats and chord progressions time and again. It demands that each song be wholly distinct from everything that preceded it, an absurd and ultimately unenforceable dictate.

All echo is theft. That's definitely the argument that many copyright system supporters have made for years. And now it's coming back to bite them.

But here's the most frustrating part of all of this: even with that one RIAA filing admitting that sometimes copyright could go too far in over-protecting rightsholders, it's not stopping them or other copyright maximalist organizations from still pushing for more expansive, more draconian, more protective copyright reform. Get ready for it, because it's coming. There are efforts to import the EU's dreadful copyright directive, as well as a very strongly backed effort to get rid of the DMCA's safe harbors. And this is coming at a time when actual revenues for artists have continued to shoot skyward.

However, as with so much about copyright, this is all about third parties -- not the artists and creators themselves -- looking for their own monopoly rents. They're looking to figure out how to get a piece of the pie for literally doing absolutely nothing. But if something becomes successful, suddenly they all want a cut, and copyright maximalism has handed them the tools to get exactly that. And, as a result, pop music is under ongoing litigation assault. The labels are making money. The lawyers are making money... and, according to a new Rolling Stone article, the insurance companies are making money:

While some record labels may have the budget to hire on-call musicologists who vet new releases for potential copyright claims, smaller players who can’t afford that luxury are turning toward a tried-and-true form of protection: insurance. Lucas Keller — the founder of music management company Milk and Honey, which represents writers and producers who’ve worked with everyone from Alessia Cara and Carrie Underwood to 5 Seconds of Summer and Muse — recently began encouraging all his songwriter clients to purchase errors-and-omissions insurance, which protects creative professionals from legal challenges to their intellectual property. “We all feel like the system has failed us,” Keller says. “There are a lot of aggressive lawyers filing lawsuits and going ham on people.” (He’s particularly critical of publishers whose rosters are heavier on older catalogs than new acts: “Heritage publishers who aren’t making a lot of money are coming out of the woodwork and saying, ‘We’re going to take a piece of your contemporary hit.’ ”)

Under E&O policies, insurance companies can cover several million dollars of an artist’s costs if they lose a copyright lawsuit. Joe Charles, senior vice president at insurance provider Alliant Insurance Services, says that as many as half of his personal A-list music clients — a roster of stars who already pay for tour insurance and other standard entertainment-industry policies — have recently shown interest in E&O coverage. “When a major claim is all over the press, we’ll get 10 to 20 calls from musicians asking how they can protect themselves and what it will cost,” Charles says.

Notice that all this is money that is not going to the actual artists. The entire premise of the Rolling Stone article is basically that having a hit song is simply too expensive these days, because of bullshit copyright lawsuits that actually have a chance because copyright law has gone insane. Something is clearly broken here, and supporters of the copyright system need to admit that maybe they've gone too far.

Filed Under: blurred lines, copying, copyright, inspiration, insurance, lawsuits, liability, pop music

DailyDirt: Creative Robots Replacing Artists And Writers...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Robots are taking away valuable jobs from more and more humans everyday. People used to connect phone calls. People used to categorize links on the internet (and some still do). But those jobs have been largely replaced by more efficient algorithms. Jobs that require some human creativity are supposed to be immune from an attack of automation, but it really depends on what kind of creativity.

• Algorithms that mimic Vincent Van Gogh's style -- or other artist's styles -- will be able to create enormous libraries of digital artwork. If non-human artists' work is in the public domain, maybe we'll see an insane amount of clip art in the near future. [url]
• Japanese fembot HRP-4C can sing like human pop stars. This isn't new, but when nobody really recognizes the composers behind pop music, will anyone care when the voices are artificially generated, too? [url]
• Turning data into written text isn't exactly a creative task, so humans might not be required to do it for much longer. We've seen computers writing news stories, so it shouldn't be too surprising that a bot is writing millions of words every day now. These bots aren't writing the great American novel, but maybe if we introduce them to a lot of virtual monkeys banging away on typewriters.... [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: artificial intelligence, automation, clip art, composers, fembot, pop music, robots, shakespeare, vincent van gogh

The Internet Didn't 'Kill' Carly Rae Jepsen's Career

from the LEAVE-THE-INTERNET-ALONE!-*sob* dept

The Internet gets blamed for so much. This loose collective of millions of users and websites is blamed for everything from killing off major industries to turning the world's children into short attention span txt fiends. The Internet will kill art via piracy, we are assured repeatedly. A new generation of children will be raised by the wan glow of LCD monitors and nurtured by thousands of ethereal Facebook friends.

Now the Internet is being charged with filicide. In a post titled "How the Internet Killed Carly Rae Jepsen," Katherine St. Asaph applies her detective skills in order to solve the mystery of why Jepsen's new album has been met with large quantities of indifference. First, she chronicles the swift rise of "Call Me Maybe," the inescapable phenomenon that entertained us briefly between Rebecca Black's "Friday" and Psy's "Gangnam Style."

Tastemakers heard it, then moguls who were de facto tastemakers, and it spread to listeners who knew nothing about the singer except this beautiful thing she'd written. They fell in love at first listen. They gushed. They sang along. They recorded karaoke videos and public swoon mobs and re-enactments of its summer-love video. They sent it to No. 1 for seemingly the entire summer and sent its singer to what looked an awful lot like dazed stardom.

Doesn't all of that sound absolutely horrible? Apparently St. Asaph would prefer Jepsen wallowed in obscurity so that she never had to be disappointed by the fact that she had and lost fame. Instead, it's better if she never had it, if I'm following the logic here correctly.

Jepsen and her two bandmates recognized it was best to strike when the iron was still tepid and ventured into the studio with enough co-producers and songwriters to choke a "Tribute to Lou Perlman" compilation. Jepsen's debut album was released and promptly fell off the public radar, failing to surpass 100,000 sales. This sort of situation is hardly unique. Plenty of big hits have been followed by a loud sucking noise as fans rush off to examine the Next Big Thing, creating a temporary vacuum in their wake.

St. Asaph discusses the internet's well-chronicled role in Jepsen's rapid rise to fame, though, it's not so much the rise to stardom that concerns St. Asaph (and leads toward murder charges being brought against the Internet). It's what happened during the rise. In her estimation, the homicidal Internet took the spotlight off of the talented Jepsen and shone it on itself, taking something vital away from the actual artist with the endless stream of remixes, lip dubs, image macros, covers and other forms of audience participation.

This sounds counterintuitive; shouldn't it help Jepsen for thousands of people to remix, recreate and otherwise rejoice over her song? But the meme's not about Jepsen; it's about her song, and she is secondary... This is the problem Carly Rae Jepsen's facing: loving "Call Me Maybe" as a meme hasn't made people invested in her as a musician.

That may seem unfortunate, but it's hardly unique and it's hardly new. It certainly isn't an "Internet" problem. In fact, throw quotes around "problem" as well. Super-popular pop stars are rarely embraced as artists. They're embraced as temporary phenomena, a momentary distraction to be enjoyed until the next groundswell displaces them.

Long before the Internet was meming artists to death on a regular basis (and in broad daylight!), people were picking up and discarding pop phenomena nearly as quickly. (If you don't want a bunch of horrible songs stuck in your head, you might want to skip ahead to the next paragraph.) Remember the "Macarena?" Did anyone ever care about the musicians behind the devilishly circuitous hook or the "choreographer" that crafted a dance so easily emulated your grandmother has probably attempted it? How was the album, I ask rhetorically, as if anyone outside of the artists involved have ever listened to the entire thing? How about Right Said Fred, whose "I'm Too Sexy" took clubs by storm for an entirely unreasonable amount of time before vanishing into the pop ether? Lou Bega, temporary mambo king who finally hit it big with his 5th attempt? How about Jesus Jones, who had two singles hit the US Hot 100 but managed to leave the charts untroubled for the next four albums? Chumbawumba were a frickin' anarchist collective, and yet, all anyone in the US knows is they cranked out the perfect drinking song about drinking. The list could go on and on and that's only covering a small part of a single decade.

The Internet doesn't split the artist from their creations. It certainly provides more avenues for interpretation but it doesn't change anything about humanity's relationship with charting artists. Very few artists enjoy continued mainstream success, no matter how artistically valid their non-hit offerings are. To lay this at the feet of an inherently participatory culture that was previously limited to drunkenly bellowing their 75% correct karaoke interpretation or drunkenly performing a 75% correct interpretive dance is to take a few steps into elitist territory and chastise people for only liking the "hits." The tool set the Internet provides may bring a much wider variety of participation (and bring it much faster), but it's not anyone's "fault" that Carly Rae Jepsen's album isn't racking up hundreds of thousands of sales. That's simply the nature of pop culture. The phrase "15 minutes of fame" has been around since before you had an internet connection.

And while you're fitting the Internet for a Murder One charge, you might want to step back and consider that Jepsen's rise to superstardom, however brief, was largely due to this very same Internet. While it's true that the Internet wears many hats -- some white, some black -- you can't just hold it responsible for destroying artists and ignore its star-making power.

Filed Under: carly rae jepsen, hype, internet, one hit wonders, pop music

The New Elitism: File Sharing 'Created' Pop Music And Removing Gatekeepers Is 'Killing Culture'

from the revisionist-history-and-revisionist-futurism dept

Helene Lindvall is back, bringing with her one of the worst anti-piracy arguments ever crafted. You might remember her from such Techdirt posts as "You Can't Trust Anyone Who Gives Stuff Away But Still Makes Money" and "Not Wanting To Spend All Your Time Playing Pirate Whack-A-Mole Is Defeatist." She's topped herself this time, though, making the claim that piracy has started a "self-perpetuating conveyer belt of cookie-cutter pop stars."

Her post at the Guardian carries this provoking title: "Why piracy is perpetuating plastic pop," and it theorizes that piracy's ravaging of the music industry has resulted in a non-stop stream of ready-made pop stars, the likes of which has never been seen, except for pretty much the last 50 years of the recording industry. In her hurry to blame piracy for American Idol, Miley Cyrus and other artists who carry a hint of "assembly line" about their person, Lindvall blows right past the obvious fact that pre-made pop far precedes file sharing, and arrives at this bizarre conclusion:

Could it be that instead of creating a more level playing field and opportunities for, say, a new Nirvana or Smashing Pumpkins to break through, piracy and the unwillingness to pay for music is creating a self-perpetuating conveyer belt of cookie-cutter pop stars?

Could it be? Could piracy have gutted the market so much that labels are forced to play it safe and only invest in pop stars? Really? Is it only NOW that the recording industry is shifting its gears towards "safer" music and "plastic pop" and that it has spent the last half-century-plus cultivating only the finest, deepest talent and rewarding listeners with act after virtuoso act?

Never mind the fact that pop music has existed (to some extent) since the 1940's (60 years BN*). Never mind the fact that Top 40 radio has been around since the early 1950s, a format based on teenage girls' interaction with jukeboxes (play the same handful of songs, over and over). Never mind the fact that bubblegum pop and the rise of pre-fab bands began in the mid-1960s. All of this predates the repeated killing of music by anything stronger than a cassette tape. Never mind the fact that one of the most hated of all pop entities, the Eurovision Song Contest, has been tormenting the ears of listeners since 1952.

*Before Napster.

Never mind the fact that for every Nevermind, there are a million other weightless albums released into the Top 40 ether by major labels. Never mind the fact that Nirvana's success swept in a long string of much less talented grunge purveyors. Why? Because Nirvana sold albums. The Smashing Pumpkins were also beneficiaries of Nirvana's financial success. The major labels pick up acts if they think they'll sell, not because they have a burning desire to only offer the best music to the world. Hell, even Bob Dylan got dropped from his original label for failing to push enough vinyl, and people consider him to be one of the finest songwriters of all time.

Basically, her whole argument boils down to good, old-fashioned elitism. Lindvall automatically assumes pop is a universally "bad" thing, presumably because it's popular, and points the finger at piracy. It's only slightly less insulting than saying that if the barriers to entry are removed then everything will suck. Instead, it lays the blame on the broad shoulders of John Q. Pirate, whose illegal efforts have "cheapened" quality, non-pop music .

Compare Lindvall's theory to Gavin Castleton, whose post for The Trichordist gets expounded on by David Newhoff. Here's Newhoff's opening line:

Imagine your diet will henceforth be determined by the tastes of a majority of American ten-year-olds.

Sounds like "plastic pop," doesn't it? Newhoff's post deals mainly with the film industry, but he first takes a moment to bash all these new artists operating outside the established systems:

One assumption behind DIY culture seems to be that the best work is being systematically squashed by big media conglomerates, and that the level playing field of the Web will allow great art to emerge through the ultimate, democratic means - popularity supported by algorithms. This theory has proven generally untrue for journalism, music, and publishing; and we're now on the leading edge of its proving untrue for filmed entertainment.

Newhoff off-handedly insults DIYers here, tying them in with spam bots and other SEO gamers, while simultaneously making the implication that the industries value art over commerce. He quotes Castleton, who goes even further, hilariously suggesting that the labels and studios are actually well-designed filters, rather than commercial ventures:

"When you release the valve without well-tuned filters in place, you get what we have now: muddy waters (not the artist, the metaphor). You have tracks from seasoned artists like Radiohead distributed side by side with garbage (not the band, the metaphor), and you have transferred the burden and blessing of filtering from more official gatekeepers to the consumer..."

God forbid the consumer (you know, the one expected to reward every artist monetarily) have any control over the incoming stream of content. We simply can't have people deciding who or what they want to throw money at. After all, they're only the public, an unwashed group of freeloaders who don't know what they want or how to show their appreciation when a label or studio hands it to them. Over in Lindvall's post, Noel Gallagher (the slightly less loutish half of Oasis) spells out exactly how the public should be treated by artists and their preferred gatekeepers:

[A]s I understand it the consumer didn't want Jimi Hendrix, but they got him - and it changed the world ... Fuck the customer. He doesn't know what he wants. You fucking give it to him and he likes it.

The consumer [says] 'Where's my free music on the internet? Is this a free download?' Fuck off! It cost me a quarter of a million pounds to make it, you're not getting it for nothing. I want my quarter of a million back, thank you very much. That's why we're rock stars.

Quarter of a million pounds to make a record. $250 million to make a movie. You'd think at some point someone would start dialing back the costs if they thought they had a very slim chance of recouping. But, no. These dollar figures are tossed around as some sort of anecdotal evidence that everything must return to the heyday of previous formats (CDs, DVDs, etc.). Here's the story, morning glory: Mr./Mrs. Consumer give not one single fook how much you sunk into your last album or how long you had to tour to pay it off.

Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins) also weighs in on Lindvall's post, decrying the fact that, as a musician, he's required to earn and cultivate his own audience:

"People like me used to be auteurs, saying 'I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want to do, you like it or you don't like it' and if you're really good they'll come," said Corgan. "Now I'm supposed to beg for attention. It's completely counterintuitive to why I became a musician in the first place and the personality of someone like me.

"I'm supposed to have enough of an ego to make my own world, my own music, my own artwork - everything - but then say, 'Please, please will you just fork out that $10, I know that's a really big decision'. What? When did that become such a big decision? Even if we could find the right price point the general person doesn't believe in making that purchase."

Billy, I hate to point this out, but musicians have always had to ask customers to fork out money for their albums. The aspect you don't seem to like is the fact that there's not a gatekeeper between you and the audience, doing the dirty work like asking for money or shoving your CD into the New Releases rack. You had to beg for attention when you first started. Now, you're stuck with everyone else, Connecting With Fans. Attention is scarce. More scarce than money these days.

The processes have been democratized and that does nothing but ire those who used be safe inside the clubhouse, occasionally flinging art in the direction of the general public with one hand out and the other flipping them the bird. Now that anyone can get in the game and make their own fortune without yoking themselves to gatekeepers, the club members have begun resorting to insulting everyone without a membership card. Back on Newhoff's blog:

No one can argue that the consumer isn't "getting what he wants, and for free," but the democratization of journalism has broadened the concept to include literally anyone with a computer. As with Caselton's Radiohead example, the best journalists in the world now swim in murky waters amid every crackpot, amateur netizen who considers himself a reporter.

That's the internet for you. Freeloaders. Crackpots. And saddest of all, the Club Members are now forced to share space with the General Population.

The digital-age conceit (because the Web is an egomaniac's paradise) is that the consumer always knows best; but this apparently fair and reasonable-sounding attitude may well be a greater culture killer than all the suits in Hollywood have ever been. Why? Because, just like solid news reporting, great art is not created by popular consent; to the contrary, it is often created in spite of it. When we shift the "burden and blessing" of gatekeeping from a finite number of professionals involved in the process to an infinite number of amateurs detached from the process, we are simultaneously creating work by committee in real-time while undermining the principle of investment in that work in the first place.

Between Newhoff and Lindvall (and Castleton), the general public is nothing more than a freeloading collective hellbent on destroying culture and rebuilding it via pre-fab pop stars and personal blogs. They decry the level playing field as harmful to the efforts of truly creative and talented artists, the likes of which will be buried by either (Lindvall) "assembly line artists" or (Newhoff) "crackpot bloggers."

All this faux concern for the outer limits of artistic expression completely ignores the fact that the fringe artists, the avant garde, the groundbreakers have as little use for these very same gatekeepers (that Lindvall and Newhoff hold in such high regard) as these gatekeepers had for them. It's been the independent artists, like Amanda Palmer and Ok Go that have ditched the label system and struck out on their own, and with great success. Many, many artists over the years have divorced themselves from major labels and studios simply because of the limitations. Others have been cast off by these same labels and studios for a lack of commercial success.

Artists like Amanda Palmer and Ok Go aren't held back by the public, they're enabled by the public. Lindvall and Newhoff act as if these artists have to only produce content that will appeal to the widest possible audience -- those ugly "masses." But what the successful artists have shown is exactly the opposite. Under the old system they were expected to do what Lindvall and Newhoff decry about the new system: dumb stuff down and produce something with a broad appeal. But under the new system, these artists have been able to find their niche and create the art they want to create. It's an upside-down world from the one that Lindvall and Newhoff see.

Yet somehow, Lindvall and Newhoff believe that scaling back the role of gatekeepers will somehow prevent artists like Billy Corgan or Noel Gallagher from ever succeeding again. And rather than distance themselves from the so-called "pop manufacturers," they attack the public, their own potential fanbase. There's always been a market for lowest-common-denominator pop culture, but lowered entry barriers are making it easier for even the most niche of artists to find an audience. This should be celebrated rather than mourned, but Lindvall and Newhoff seem to feel anything produced outside the "old" system is nothing but mediocrity.

Filed Under: billy corgan, david newhoff, elitism, filesharing, helene lindvall, noel gallagher, pop music