(Comments have a length restriction, so I made this a post.) In anticipation of the Sam Ford discussion, I am referring to an article that appears this week in the New Yorker and deals with several of the issues you are raising, Melissa.
If we are living in a world of an expanding blockbusters, how will we work with this “winner take all” model juxtaposed against an aspirational and marginalized gift economy?
As I have said before, one of the major unresolved and tremendously important issues in the digital economy is how are we (the 99%, including artists, creators, inventors , journalists, etc) to be adequately compensated for, and be able to earn a living from our creativity and labor? Jaron Lanier takes on this issue in Who Owns the Future?
In his New Yorker magazine review (Dec 2, 2013) of the new book, “Blockbuster,” Kelefa Sanneh writes:
“You needn’t be a mogul to share some version of this anxiety: it is common among cultural producers of all sorts and sizes. Where fans see a glorious profusion of options, some performers see a potentially dangerous imbalance: an ever greater supply, balanced by the kind of soft, digital-era demand that can more easily be measured in eyeballs than in dollars. In “How Music Works” (McSweeney’s), a wide-ranging book of essays, David Byrne expresses a dismay shared by many of his peers. Byrne released his first album, with Talking Heads, in 1977, and he can’t help but be nostalgic for the old industry. Like Elberse, though less happily, he sees labels chasing after “blockbuster hits,” and he broods over the plight of musicians, especially the kind who, like him, once made a pretty good living in the margins of the major-label profit machine. Byrne’s 2004 album, “Grown Backwards,” was a modest success, selling nearly a hundred and fifty thousand copies, and he estimates that, after recording costs and other expenses, his net profit was about fifty-eight thousand dollars, not including royalties. Spread over a few years, that doesn’t seem like much, especially since Byrne can’t expect every album he makes to sell that well. He wonders, “How is a mid-level artist—someone who sells more than five thousand copies of a record but less than a million—supposed to live, given this scenario?”
He goes on to discuss economist Tyler Cowen’s new book, “Average Is Over:”
“Cowen is less troubled by the further enrichment of the already rich. He takes it for granted that America will be increasingly influenced by “labor-market polarization”: productivity will continue to increase, but an ever larger proportion of the gains will go to “a relatively small cognitive elite”—human blockbusters, economically speaking. Meanwhile, more and more workers will find themselves in various service industries, assuming they can find full-time work at all. According to Cowen, future citizens will agree that “America is one of the nicest places in the world.” He predicts that even those with stagnant or falling wages will have “a lot more opportunities for cheap fun and also cheap education.” The formulation “cheap fun” explains much of what makes people so excited, and so anxious, about the future of popular culture.”
How we will deal with these structural vulnerabilities that are shaping our environment now is how we will be able to transform a very volatile and uncertain present for all producers.
Helen,
David Byrne himself offers a possible solution to Melissa’s question. Not content to simply put out music or preside over his Luaka Bop label, Byrne also publishes books, such as the aforementioned How Stuff Works or Arboretum, and creates multimedia art installations like Your Action World, “Get It Away”, or the Powerpoint driven Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information. Like fellow visionary Brian Eno, Byrne emphasizes the “artist” in recording artist, a strategy other musicians could certainly emulate in one way or another by writing for magazines, creating art as a potential supplement or promoter for their own music (bands like Giant Squid and Coheed and Cambria come to mind), or even working as session musicians.
But options exist even for those musicians who wish to exist solely in their own medium. PledgeMusic is a great crowdfunding site that allows fans to support bands risk-free (their credit card is only charged when the project is fully funded). They also offer assistance on the band’s outreach campaign and, perhaps best of all, allow the band to retain one hundred percent of their rights.
Bands that like the idea but are unwilling or unable to pay the fee can follow in the footsteps of ex-Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer, who funded her new album using the site Kickstarter. Newer bands may not be able to rely on their fanbase as much as Palmer did, but they can draw from family and friends in much the same manner that I’m sure many of us did during the outreach portion of our projects.
The bottom line of this new reality is that artists need to be able to branch out, either artistically or socially, to survive. Though the demands and strains it places on them may be unpleasant, I also think it’s ultimately for the best in that it will force to them push against their own comfort zones and limits. After all, isn’t that the aim of art in the first place?