I had an unnerving experience while reading Caitlin Moran’s Times column today about the internet and free culture – namely, I thought she was wrong. Now, obviously, Caitlin Moran isn’t allowed to be wrong about things. It upsets the natural order; it’s like the world has been thrown off its axis. Up is down, black is white, cats are marrying dogs, Toploader were a good band. And so on.
The thrust of the article is the pretty widespread belief that the internet has, in effect, deranged us: it’s led us to expect everything for free, to the point where we refuse to pay for the art and the journalism we used to pay for; and that by letting ourselves become freeloaders, we’re screwing ourselves and our future, because the only people who’ll be left doing art and journalism will be those from wealthy enough backgrounds that they don’t need to worry about being paid. Because, as she says,
…there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and there’s no such thing as a free internet. I liked the old system we used to have – where, if you wanted something, you paid for it.
Now: I am a huge, huge fan of people who create things earning a living from it. I am also a huge, huge fan of giving my money to people who create things I like, or to the corporations that enable them to create – as evidenced by the fact that I’ve spent most of today trying to do just that, even though ITUNES IS A COMPLETE DICK that keeps moaning on about “unkown errors” when ALL I WANT TO DO IS WATCH THE AVENGERS. If I’d pirated it, I’d be on the post-credits sequence by now, but I won’t do that because I believe Joss Whedon deserves nice things in his life. And, crucially, I’m not alone in this – the claim that the internet is busily laying waste the creative industries doesn’t really hold true.
In the article, Caitlin says that “the music industry has shrunk 40 per cent since 1999″, which is something of a zombie statistic. As far as I can tell, it’s traced back to a mis-labeled chart from a report by analysts Bain & Co (Mitt Romney’s old stomping ground). Actually, that’s not the global music industry turnover – it’s the US recorded music industry turnover (as the corrected report now makes clear). Yes, revenues from recorded music alone have declined by about that much, in the US and the UK alike, albeit from a historically unnatural peak – but the music industry as a whole is actually doing pretty bloody well. The industry has only collapsed if you only look at one single form of revenue stream, for the large record companies that were traditionally the gatekeepers for the whole music industry, but aren’t any more.
The idea that, because of the internet, people just want stuff for free and won’t pay for it is simply wrong; as Mike Masnick’s The Sky Is Rising study points out, US household expenditure on entertainment grew by 15% as a proportion of income between 2000 and 2008. The number of actual transactions in the recorded music industry has almost doubled since 2000. People are buying cheaper recorded music, certainly, but it’s hardly evidence that the population has developed a sudden allergy to the act of paying. Despite piracy, the film industry is growing – worldwide box office rose from $26billion in 2006 to $32billion in 2010. Despite piracy, the games industry is exploding – the amount we’ve spent on gaming around the world has more than tripled in the past decade . We haven’t turned into a society of cheapskates – we’re sluicing our money at an ever-increasing rate towards creators.
That’s not to suggest everything’s peachy. Some particular businesses and business models (often based on a historically temporary and somewhat artificial scarcity) have been screwed hard by the newly negligible costs of replicating and transmitting information, and that’s been traumatic for large numbers of people affected by it. But blaming it on people becoming “freeloaders” is not just over-simplifying the issue, it’s untrue and unfair.
The idea that the internet is a big, confusing magnet messing with our moral compass also comes up when she discusses punishing pirates – but again, I’m not sure it’s a fair charge:
When the Government proposed prosecuting illegal downloading, and punishing it with internet disconnection, a lobbying group called FAC (Featured Artists Coalition) campaigned against it – “It would reduce the civil liberties of every one of us in the country.”
But how? How is not having access to the internet, because you have committed a crime there, any different to not having access to, say, a library, because you committed a crime there? The internet isn’t a necessity. It’s wholly thrilling and brilliant and useful – most of the time, I’d rather spend an afternoon there than, say, Bath – but it’s not a right to be able to use it.
Because, for pedantic starters, it isn’t a crime. Because the internet is increasingly central not just to where we have fun, but to where we do all the tedious, necessary bits of our lives – it’s where we work, we bank, we pay our bills, we stay informed. It’s where we live. Because the level of intrusion and surveillance of everybody’s private actions in order to detect supposed pirates, and the knock-on effect for other individuals and businesses, was out of proportion to the problem. Because the standard of proof, and the quality of evidence, involved in “convicting” people for it would not have met any of the standards we demand for just punishment to be served. Because this was an actual policy, not a metaphor, and policy-by-metaphor is a terrible idea. Those who opposed it, by-and-large, weren’t objecting to the metaphor; they were objecting to the actual details of what it meant in the real world, because those are the bits that actually cause harm.
A lot of the article echoes something that Moran said during her book launch at the Bloomsbury Theatre a week or so ago, about her support for The Times’ paywall – helpfully transcribed by my friend Kat. Now, personally, I’m happy to pay The Times a fair amount every month to scramble over their wall, and I have done from the start (after all, that’s how I read the article in the first place). I’m also glad that different news organisations are experimenting with different approaches to not going massively bankrupt. Try ALL the business models!
Moreover, I’m a journalist, and I very much like getting paid for being a journalist. But the thing is, I’ve never once worked for an organisation that actually charged for its journalism – and yet they still paid me, and they still made money (well, mostly). The news industry’s problems are far more complex than “people stopped paying” and “going free online was a bad idea”, and there’s no simple connection between whether you charge for online content and whether you pay your journalists properly. Much like the discussion of the music industry, it seems to elevate a particular business model to the level of a moral absolute – not simply that it’s wrong to take things for free, but it’s also wrong to give things away for free, even if that’s part of your plan to make money.
And it’s that underlying idea – that not charging for some stuff devalues everything – that brings me back to the part of the article which most niggled away at me. Not so much because it’s factually wrong, but because it seems to express an attitude towards culture that makes me feel itchy:
We think that, as soon as something is on the internet, it turns into something else – that it’s not quite real. Things, somehow, don’t count on the internet.
Take, for instance, a song. When is a song not a song? When it’s on the internet. If a song is on a CD, or vinyl, in a shop, we would not hesitate for a moment to pay for it. Put the selfsame song on the internet, though, and millions of people would be steadfast in their conviction that you can simply take it without paying. It’s still exactly the same song you’d pay for on vinyl – written by the same people, who spent the same hours and same money recording it – but press a button, and it’s yours.
I sort of see the point, but it’s a deeply weird way of expressing it: the idea that things are only things if you have paid for them. It yokes together economic value and cultural value and objecthood and claims that they’re all one and the same thing. More importantly, as an example of how the internet makes us lose our minds and act in uniquely strange and immoral ways, it’s completely off target, because there’s nothing unusual or new about the internet in this respect. We’ve always had songs that we haven’t paid for, and we’ve never thought of them as un-songs because of it. The folk song passed down the generations from mother to daughter: not a song? The nagging chorus drifting over from a neighbour’s radio: not a song? The pissed-up pub closing time singalong of a chart hit from back in the day: not a song? The tune in my head that reminds me of that night when I first met that person: not a song? The things people danced to in fields in the early 90s, because someone had turned up with a soundsystem and someone else had turned up with loads of drugs: you know, I’m pretty sure they were songs. The world is full of songs; they’re in the air, all around us, inside us, and I bloody well am steadfast in my conviction that I can simply take them without paying. Because not everything is a transaction, and a world where everything is turned into a transaction is a smaller and greyer and more bitter world than we deserve.
Good article, the shrinking-music-business stat always makes me laugh. I wonder if people would get so riled up about it if you rephrased it as “music business has shrunk 40% since the massive increase in home gaming”?
Also, how is downloading a song from the web really any different to recording it onto a blank tape from the radio? I did a helluva a lot of that when I was a kid and, oh look, there’s a ceiling high bookshelf of cds I’ve bought. And another with DVDs. Filthy pirate that I am.
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Excellent article. My pet peeve is with the argument that “people used to buy CDs etc” which is true whilst ignoring the fact that physically making a CD and distributing it is a hell of a lot more expensive than hosting it on a server.
Excellent article, well reasoned. I was also baffled by most of Moran’s arguments in that column, most of all the idea that the Internet is exactly the same as what she characterises as a wider world of apparently perpetually unchanging social, cultural and economic dynamics. Which is about as accurate as claiming that the creation and use of currencies did not make any kind of difference to societies based on barter, or that replacing feudalism with democracy doesn’t really change anything fundamental in what we do or why we do it.
The Internet is driving a paradigm shift in the established relationships and mechanisms between all consumers and all media: the decline in print-based music journalism isn’t a sign of declining interest in music, it simply reflects an audience that prefers to get its music information and meta more immediately, more directly, and not filtered or censored by the editorial choices of a small handful of individuals. When I want to read an album review, I can now source a far wider range of critiques and opinions than ever before, and make a more truly informed choice about what I then buy or support.
New musicians are still emerging and they and established acts are still growing sufficient fanbases to support their careers through, for example, live performances. If the Internet is creating a generation of liggers who expect to get all their entertainment for free, how are the majority of performers able to sell live tickets at such eye-wateringly high prices?
The Internet is changing us as consumers. We are more aware, more widely informed, better able to engage in discussion and debate over created media, rather than passively accepting the opinions of a very limited number of individuals who earn a living by telling the rest of us what to think. It’s a genuinely democratic forum for social interaction, unlike anything else that has preceded it, and to try to argue that all it is really doing is lowering our proper inhibitions and making us all loosely more greedy and blinded by our own sense of entitlement, as Moran’s article does, is self-interested nonsense. Fortunately, rather than trying (and probably failing) to express any kind of public criticism of her arguments via the paper that printed them, the Internet allows even non-journalist individuals to respond in public and debate the issues she raises.
Very good. However you miss or underemphasis the fact that music and film have been available for free since the invention of radio and T.V. We expect it to be free because it has been forever, not because we invented the internet. The publishers made it so.
I agree with your argue on music, alas, not the one on journalism.
Whilst I congratulate you on having become a fully-fledged member of the ‘paid hack brigade’, you have somewhat failed to take into consideration the legion of recent journo graduates and ambitious writers new to the industry, who are being expected to work for between 2-6 months unpaid and/or write ad hoc features and reviews for nada. This is largely due to dwindling advertising revenue (“we don’t have the budget to pay you”), which is in part to do with falling circulation figures, which itself can thank the distribution of free information on the internet. How many 18 to 30-year-olds buy hard-copy newspapers anymore?
I can’t recount the amount of times I’ve been told by start-up news/lifestyle outlets AND established big boys that they cannot pay for my words because they’ve no money. This is ultimately down to some indirect link between the profusion of free content on the web and publications laying people off and keeping hold of as much money as possible. Hence why Moran says that only the richer kids (whose parents are paying their rent and outgoings in the first few years of their career) can actually get to a point where they have made all the contacts they need to and are finally being paid to write.
Hey Disillusioned – I’m not saying for a second that all is rosy in the world of journalism, because I’d be mad to think that. Publishers are being squeezed on all sides, nobody sees a clear path out of the woods, and the result is often crappy behaviour towards their staff – some frankly reprehensible exploitation of people starting out in the business, and precious little loyalty to, or job security for, those already in the trade.
But, as I said, the problems the news industry faces are a lot more complex than just “people stopped paying”. As you say, it’s largely due to a collapse in advertising, which is itself only partially linked to declining sales of print products. The broad problem is simply that there’s more competition – for scoops, for readers, for advertisers, for delivery channels, for reputation even – and that’s not something that’s easily solvable by just bluntly saying “well, make people pay again.”
(In a similar way, some of the problems faced by new journalism graduates and others starting out in the industry are also due to too much competition – there’s an over-supply of people who want to be journalists, which makes it hard to get that first job and massively depresses salaries, often to the point where they’re zero. Which leads to journalism becoming a privileged, London-centric, upper-middle-class enclave, which nobody wants. But again, the solution to that isn’t to tell people “stop trying to become journalists”, because you’ll probably end up with a similar outcome that way too.)
Of course, it’s not surprising. Other industries (like music) were hit by the sudden ease of transmitting information as a knock-on effect – for journalism, transmitting information was the business. It’s changed the very core of what the industry is about, and it’s not surprising that the type of institution needed to do journalism in an age where the transmission of information is hard looks radically different to the type needed when it’s cheap and easy. That’s why I say I’m glad that people are experimenting, not just with ways to make money, but also with internal structures, types of reporting, new delivery channels, and so-on. It’s like the Cambrian explosion – myriad new forms are emerging, some of them weird and alien-seeming, and only some of these will ultimately work, and it’ll be dreadful for those that fail. But some will survive. It’s why it’s simultaneously the worst and the best time to be a journalist. It’s exciting, which isn’t always a recommendation.
Anyway: the best of luck with trying to get paid for your words. It’s tough and dispiriting and there’s a lot of bastards out there, but there really are still places – old guard and new startups alike – who are paying fair money for decent work. If you ever want to pitch me anything, or ask questions, the contact form on this site’s front page should reach me.
In regards to piracy, while bit torrent remains the most convenient/easiest way to watch or listen to music, it will beat out other means (i.e. iTunes).
The Oatmeal has a great comic regarding this that’s not far off the point you made about The Avengers: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
But now Spotify makes listening to music far easier than bit torrent in my opinion, which is why it’s been so successful.
I think it’s fairly simple: make it super easy to buy stuff and I believe most people probably will.
>>> Mike Masnick’s The Sky Is Rising study points out, US household expenditure on entertainment grew by 15% as a proportion of income between 2000 and 2008.
This “study,” which hardly seems worthy of the name, was commissioned by technology lobbyists in order to undercut copyright. His statistics stem come from the same self-interest as those used by the RIAA. To cite just one example – there are plenty – he includes _iPod sales_ in his calculation of the value of the music business. Since musicians or organizations that support them don’t benefit from this, it seems like a foolish statistic that proves nothing – which seems appropriate, since Masnick is essentially a lobbyist.
Well, Rob, that stat comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual Consumer Expenditure Survey. I’m pretty sure they aren’t lobbyists for the technology industry. Yes, entertainment expenditure includes an awful lot of things, from country club memberships to pets and, yes, iPods. Of course it’s perfectly possible that people have entirely shifted their expenditure away from recorded music and films to athletics shoes and boat docking fees, as part of a massive demographic shift in terms of Americans’ favoured leisure pursuits. That wouldn’t actually change my argument, which was against the notion that people have stopped paying for things because they just want stuff for free now they have the internet.
Thinking that Mike Masnick isn’t an unbiased source is entirely correct. But are the statistics actually wrong, and how does that affect the point being discussed?