Okay this is pretty cool, and a really interesting example of what can happen when old media meets new media to produce something extraordinary. Filmmaker Casey Neistat was offered $25,000 by 20th Century Fox to make a video to promote the release of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. In considering the themes the studio proposed for the project, Neistat responded that he would like to take the money and do something for the people of the Philippines whose lives were overturned by a typhoon on November 7th. The studio said yes, and the video below is the result. Assuming we can take the whole story at face value — and I certainly hope we can — it’s a wonderful example of digital age meets legacy industry to produce something that wouldn’t exist without combining the best of both worlds. Less than a decade ago, even if a filmmaker like Neistat had the same instincts, the technology simply wasn’t there to support this kind of project. Kudos to Neistat for his approach, and kudos to whoever it was at Fox who recognized that this video actually fulfills their creative brief. Take a moment to view.
Category: Art
NMPA Targets Top 50 Illegal Lyrics Sites
Last week, the National Music Publishers Association put the top 50 unlicensed lyrics websites on notice. President of the NMPA David Isrealite had a simple message to these top infringers: “Get licensed, get offline, or get sued.” And with two recent judgments in its favor, Isrealite has little doubt his organization would prevail in its pursuit of these cases. Identifying who the top 50 illegal lyrics sites are is the result of work led by David Lowery at the University of Georgia, where he is a professor. (Note: Link to study contains the list of these top 50 sites.) Known principally as the leader of bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, Lowery’s background is actually in mathematics, and he collaborated in developing an algorithm to identify these top 50 sites. At the head of the list is RapGenius.com.
Lyrics sites make an interesting subject in that, if licensed, they adequately fulfill many of the purported virtues of the internet. When the licenses are paid, all three parties in the arrangement benefit; the publishers (artists) are compensated, the user gets a free information resource, and the site owner can sell ads against the traffic he generates. Contrarily, the unlicensed lyric site represents the end of civilization as we know it. These sites serve nobody other than a handful of poachers using SEO to generate free money for themselves. There’s no innovation, no job creation, no benefit for the original content creators; and there is no end of legal, easily-found alternatives for the user who wants to look up lyrics. In fact, depending on what lyrics you type into a Google search, all of the first twenty or so results could well be licensed sites. I happen to think a songwriter’s or a band’s website ought to be in the top search results, but that’s another conversation. To allow unlicensed lyric sites to continue to operate is tantamount to saying, “Yes, the Internet we want is a place where muggers, thieves, and bottom-feeders are allowed to thrive.”
Unfortunately, where there’s money to be made, there’s always someone eager to normalize what is essentially a sleazy, back-alley hustle and call it business. In this case think Mark Andreeson’s VC fund putting $15 million into the aforementioned RapGenius quite recently. Anyone who claims that piracy is merely a reaction to the producing industries’ failure to adapt, and who wants to maintain a semblance of integrity, should champion the NMPA’s declaration in this case and call the Andreeson VC funding out for the kind of grotesque mockery of capitalism that it is. There is no difference between knowingly profiting off the mortgage-backed securities scam and knowingly profiting off the exploitation of songwriters or textile workers or farmers or anyone else who’s getting hosed. And in this case, it’s in the service of a website that offers the public nothing they can’t get elsewhere and for free! What we do by choosing to allow this is to say that the world belongs to the biggest bullies, in this case using code and basic marketing as weapons. And the reason I think it’s a big deal is that it goes right to the heart of how we hope to shape the future of society in concert with these technologies.
When it comes to post-apocalyptic fiction, we typically see one of two future worlds. In the brutal dystopia, we find a barren and wild landscape where all social order has broken down, and most of what was once humanity has regressed into some primitive form depicted as any of the following: cannibals, mutants, neo-religious psychos, cyborgs, homicidal gangs with colorful mohawks. In the ontological dystopia, social order still exists with the masses comfortably ensconced in some gleaming edifice, blissfully ignorant that they are prisoners of a state where government has merged with some ultra-pervasive corporation monitoring and controlling their every move. In either scenario, the heroes typically represent the last remaining seeds of real humanity, and the plot recreates the Moses saga concluding with the hero leading some portion of human refugees in Exodus toward a new dawn. Music swells. Roll credits.
In considering the matter at hand through the lens of this metaphor, the unlicensed lyric site owners and their VCs are the barbarians who have abandoned social order and who feed off the defenseless in the wild landscape of cyberspace. But there is also an element of the ontological dystopia inherent in this thought exercise, and that’s where the major corporate leaders of the internet industry tell the citizenry living in blissful ignorance, “Take the candy (lyrics). It’s free. We’ve provided it for you.” And the public is mollified by this until discovering all too late that it isn’t just songwriters whose labor can be exploited in this manner.
In his recent article about metadata in The Atlantic, technologist Jaron Lanier writes the following: “Metadata is a slow, relentless concentrator of wealth and power for those who run the computers best able to calculate with it.” This is a profound statement in a world that includes a very real, very powerful, monopolistic, and even secretive company called Google. But as a general principle, if I take Lanier’s meaning correctly, he’s describing a world in which those who wield computing power, and only computing power, will own, will lead, and will decide. Either we say no to normalizing exploitation of all labor or we start getting fitted for colorful jumpsuits.
It’s Not All About What We Want
“People tend to want artists to do the same thing, and it is incumbent upon artists to do something that the audience doesn’t want — yet.”
This quote comes from composer, artist, and producer T Bone Burnett in a recent Q&A with The Hollywood Reporter that has been circulating over the past week. The whole article is worth a read for several of Burnett’s observations about music, the music and film businesses, and the Internet industry, which he unapologetically calls a “con game.” The above quote, however, is particularly resonant in that it says something true about both the artist and the technologist, who are too often poised as antagonists in the great debates of the digital age. When it comes to innovation, real innovation, in either creative works or technological advancement, the endeavor is rarely about delivering what the market thinks it wants, but about providing something new we consumers didn’t know we wanted until we had it. And although the creative artist and technological innovator are cousins related through this maternal principle, it seems they are frequently dragged into a blood feud over a contemporary misconception that we can only support the artist at the expense of technology or vice versa. Perhaps the reason this feud persists is that it is perpetuated on virtual battlefields by people who misunderstand both artistic and technological innovation.
Specifically, Burnett is addressing the subjects of self-promotion and crowd-funding — two advantages offered by Web 2.0 to the independent artist that are presumed to obviate the need for legacy business models like studios, labels, or publishers. But inherent in what Burnett is saying — and it is interesting that he uses the word incumbent to imply a kind of responsibility for the artist — is the reality that innovation in creative works, in technology, in science, in anything requires old-school, long-term investment (i.e. faith) in a process that yields mostly failures but also the unpredictable successes that spawn both cultural and economic rewards for subsidiary beneficiaries. This is equally true for a miracle drug or a generation-changing novel.
If we want a rich, culturally diverse society with a solid middle class, I believe we have to resurrect the value of long-term investment and reject the fast-burn, short-money culture that has become the cultural norm over the past half century. But the persistent, blind faith in the digital revolution runs at full gait in the opposite direction. Web 2.0 success stories are largely wealth-consolidating, non-job-creating enterprises. Nevertheless, while a sense of hopelessness persists among the generation now coming of age, this demographic maintains an unhealthy crush on the Internet, clinging to the futile hope that one day its reductive economics will magically yield collective prosperity if we just wait long enough.
To Burnett’s point, it may seem populist and terribly democratic for the artist to exclusively crowd-fund. It may seem like this is the ultimate answer to the so-called gatekeeper corporations, portrayed by netizens with no experience to be sinister hoarders of culture and abusers of artists. But even the smallest, independent imprint or record label or production company will tell you that the fundamental work surrounding the products — from investment to distribution to marketing — hasn’t changed at all. Crowd-funding and self-promotion have their uses and are wonderful opportunities for any number or artists or other entrepreneurs, but the mandate to sell ahead of production, ahead of discovery, is not always going to be the best path to innovation. At the same time, the middle class has historically been sustained by business models that enable investment in a process — it doesn’t matter if it’s pharmaceutical research, auto manufacturing, or music production — and that process might employ dozens or hundreds or thousands of people whose continued livelihoods are maintained by occasional hits amid a lot of trial and error.
A drama professor in college once told us a story about the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey taking one of his comedies out to the country to perform for the local residents. Early into the first act, the audience sat mute and confused until it occurred to someone in the company that these people didn’t know what a play was. The performers stopped the show, explained the fundamentals of theater, and then restarted the play from the top. Given context, the audience supposedly laughed its heads off at the show.