When you need to rely on artistic output to pay the rent, it doesn’t take you long to realise that unless you’re going to get picked up by a large publisher or music label, you’re going to need another job.

Recently I’ve been thinking about this problem and the related crisis in the music and film industries in some detail. At its simplest, the problem is this:

People want to consume entertainment, but they do not wish to pay for it.

Artists do not have the right to be paid whatever they feel they are worth, they must compete in a market and persuade people to hand over cash just like any other industry. Punitive measures such as taxing consumer products in order to force payment of artists is in my opinion pure idiocy. We need to think instead about encouraging people to pay for the entertainment they love. I think that requires a few things:

1. Consumers should not have to fork out more money than they feel comfortable spending
2. More of that money needs to land in the artist’s pockets rather than distributor’s, so that artists on the ‘long tail’ can make a living off a smaller fan base
3. Artists need to find new ways to grow and engage with their fan base

Thankfully, the Internet makes all of these much more practicable than ever before.

One solution to the first problem has recently been played out with mixed results by Radiohead, but wouldn’t it be interesting if we had some sort of “tip jar” system in place for all artists? You download something via P2P, like it, and you can make a donation – of whatever size you want – to the creator. Well somebody is working on that but the question is whether it will ever work.

One artist working with a non-digital medium (paintings) has given this a whirl and it seems to be working. Ali Spagnola will – when it’s your turn – paint a picture just for you based on a theme you suggest and then send it you free of charge anywhere in the World. It’s not a con. I know this, because I’m currently staring at this picture painted for me sometime last year. Payment is completely voluntary. I’m ashamed to admit I still haven’t got around to throwing some money into the tip jar, but I’ll rectify that mistake this week. The painting has grown on me. I would miss it if I lost it. Ali deserves to be able to eat for giving it to me.

Does Ali make money? Perhaps. Do Radiohead? Definitely. So, it’s a model with potential.

As for the distribution problem, well I think it’s clear now that the current relationship with artists and the distribution chain is going to die within a matter of years. A band or a writer can now distribute directly via their website, and even authors can publish books cost-effectively without the need to get men in suits and lawyers involved. There is an issue of how to manage all this and as Kevin Kelly discovered when researching this, being your own tour manager, promoter, lawyer and roadie can be a gruelling and unprofitable exercise.

And then we get to audience engagement. The Internet has blown that apart as well – artists can now have a direct conversation with their fan base via blogs, social networking websites and video sites. It doesn’t scale (how do you stay personal with fifty million fans in 150 countries?), but that would be as they say “a nice problem to have”. Most artists don’t know how to do this well – they’re musicians, writers and film directors, not PR specialists – which suggests there will exist a niche industry helping bands do this very cost effectively within a few years. The current promotion and PR industries are not a good fit for where the industry is heading, they need to change.

As for growing your fan base, I agree with Robert Rich’s words in his message to Kevin Kelly:

Companies can use demographic models and track people’s search patterns to pander to their initial tastes and to strengthen those tastes, rather than broaden their horizons. This problem doesn’t lie within the technology of the internet, but within the realities of capitalism and human psychology.

There is a problem here with collaborative filtering – it’s locking us into tastes, not broadening them. However, it can also be the most powerful tool an artist can have working for them.

Four months ago I had never heard of The Courteeners and yet last Saturday was in the crowd at their sell-out gig at Manchester Academy having paid several times face value for the tickets off eBay. That only happened because last.fm algorithmically said “you should listen to these guys, because you like James”. So far The Courteeners and their label, promoters and distributors have directly received at least £30 off me they would never have got without that technology helping them. I expect they will get hundreds off me over the next decade providing they keep doing something I like.

However, I’d like to share that music. I’d like to say to my friends “look, listen to this, you’ll like it” and give them a copy. DRM and the law prevents me. It is working against them, because I know for a fact I could recruit at least another half dozen fans for their next tour and album release. They are working against me by insisting I do not put their album up on a website for anybody to download and listen to. I will happily work as their unpaid promoter and recruit whoever I can into giving them money, but that little circled “C” prevents me. They could have licensed it under a creative commons license, but they chose not to.

This one act alone has probably cost them a couple of thousand pounds in future lost revenue just through me. Scale it up to the 2,000 people who were at that gig the other night, they’re probably losing millions. Not millions in five years when they try and break America: millions of pounds right now, this week.

So, we need to find more new ways to openly and cheaply distribute art and leverage a fan base so as to be able to make a decent living – perhaps even an indecent living – for artists and fans alike. I have more ideas on how to make that happen, but I will share those with you tomorrow.

Think again.

From Wikipedia:

Miserere by Gregorio Allegri is a piece of a cappella religious music (a setting of Psalm 50/51) composed during the reign of Pope Urban VIII, probably during the 1630s, for use in the Sistine Chapel during matins on Wednesday and Friday of Holy Week. […] at some point, it became forbidden to transcribe the music and it was only allowed to be performed at those particular services, adding to the mystery surrounding it. Writing it down or performing it elsewhere was punisheable [sic] by excommunication.

[…]

Although there were a handful of supposed transcriptions in various royal courts in Europe, none of them succeeded in capturing the beauty of the Miserere as performed annually in the Sistine Chapel. According to the popular story (backed up by family letters), the fourteen-year-old Mozart was visiting Rome, when he first heard the piece during the Wednesday service. Later that day, he wrote it down entirely from memory, returning to the Chapel that Friday to make minor corrections. Some time during his travels, he met the British historian Dr. Charles Burney, who obtained the piece from him and took it to London, where it was published in 1771. Once it was published, the ban was lifted, and Allegri’s Miserere has since been one of the most popular a cappella choral works now performed.

[…]

Mozart was summoned to Rome by the Pope, only instead of excommunicating the boy the Pope showered praises on him for his feat of musical genius.

Thanks to the advent of technology, we’re all Mozart now…

The problem is, somebody somewhere has to stay rich.

Since Napster, it would seem that people have wanted to download music without paying it, and the industry has tried to convince the World this is theft. It’s not theft – they still have their copy of the music – and it’s not a criminal offence in the UK at least. What was really strange is that all the official sales figures showed that when Napster was in operation, sales of albums actually increased.

It seems counter-intuitive, but the simple truth was that only a selection of the most popular tracks were ever really available online at any one time. What would happen is a user would come along, download something they’d never heard before – something they would not have bought in a shop – and discover something new. Finding it difficult to quench the thirst for this new taste in an artist, they would then pretty much buy the artist’s entire back catalogue. I know this myself, because I was glad when Napster shut down – I would save about £200/month in buying CDs of obscure artists. I’ve not bought anything since that I haven’t downloaded some of first.

In other words, the music industry was so embroiled with anti-piracy that they weren’t prepared to adjust their model of the World to fit with what consumers were actually doing. If they had some vision, they would have made the most popular download tracks legal to download and share for free, and make an absolute bundle off the phenomenon that we now call The Long Tail instead of going around suing teenagers.

So, when Universal steps up to the plate, it’s time to get excited, right?

Techcrunch carries a story that gives more background on what is actually going on, and it’s grim reading. DRM-crippled downloads from the start, with a requirement to go and watch ads you’re not interested in to keep your music. It’s Windows-only and you can’t transfer the music onto a portable device. The thing about the ads of course is that you could log in, let them pop up and go and make a coffee and there is nothing Universal, SpiralFrog or anybody else can do about it. If they force you to commit some action to show you are paying attention, a new industry will emerge in India or China whereby you can pay somebody in a sweatshop to log in and do it all for you. It’ll still be cheaper than buying the music, and as a result SpiralFrog will see their ad rates plummet.

TechCrunch are right to call them on this – it’s a lame business model that will backfire on them badly. The oppurtunity to do something genuinely innovative seems to have passed them by. I predict SpiralFrog will hit the deadpool within 18 months of launching their new service, and I also expect that in the process, will convince a much wider audience of the disadvantages of Digital Rights Management – when DRM as bad as this is slapping you in the face, it is hard to not conclude that you don’t want or need it in your life.

A new business model will, however, emerge when Universal realise that users reward “free”.