?? I have no idea what you guys are talking about and why> what does this have to do with Keenan who talking about the internet! He gave us an illustration of the Grateful Dead effect working for Prince - but NOT on the internet.
Indeed, Prince IS giving his music away for free! Holy Christ. he is giving it to readers of the Mirror newspaper. !! He's doing that in order to say fuck you to internet distribution models that celebrate "free" and saying fuck that. I'll give it away for free to the crufty old, supposedly dying newspapers! Keenan's pointing out that it's marketing genius. It IS!
Certainly, he's well aware, given the fact that his biggest selling record became a big seller because it was bootlegged, that many of th people who get his CD through the Mirror are going to bootleg it and give it to their friends, on top of getting it for free in the first place!
He says the internet is dead because it's like MTV. It was once cool and hip and awesome. Now it's just stupid.
Keenan goes on to explain why *he* thinks the Internet is stupid. But let me first illustrate with this convo that happened here in 2006. Chuck0 convinced Doug to put Wall St online, for free, with the argument that, by doing so, he would experience the Grateful Dead effect. He might become popular like Chomsky, Chuck0 said, because his material would circulate widely and freely. http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2005/2005-March/004852.html
Recently Doug pointed out that this hadn't exactly happened: " Excuse my personal pique, but I find it endlessly exasperating that I wrote a book about this shit, published 13 years ago by the leading left house in the English-speaking world and now available everywhere for free download, yet my analysis has had almost no visible effect on left discourse."
I don't know how Doug thinks about the Keenan piece, or if his pique was inspired by anything related to the basic ideas in Keenan's piece, but I know that *MY* response at the time, that he should use the little bit of fame he has gotten this way: "fuck trying to change hearts and minds and convince anyone; cash in man."
Keenan was explaining exactly why Doug didn't become as famous as Chomskey. he explained why, on the Internet, the Grateful Dead effect ain't happening.
You put your music online, for free. Everyone does the same, told that they will experience the Grateful Dead effect. Except EVERYONE is doing it. So, it's no longer enough to just put it out there, being one of the few who do. (Chomsky didn't put his stuff out there. Other people did because he already had a huge, dedicated base of fanbuoyz.) It worked for the Grateful Dead because putting stuff out there, for free, was rare.
On the internet, there is so much out there, it's hard to stand out from the crowd.
So then what? Well, then you are told that you have to use social media (it's FREE!) to raise your signal against all the noise. So you get a myspace page, a twitter account, a facebook fan page, a facebook personal page for everyone in the band, a ning page, and whatever else is hot hot hot in social media. Then you spend a lot of time trying to get heard. You cut tracks and upload them to your server or use social media.
Again, everyone is doing the same, so you're still trying to figure out how to raise your signal above the noise so you can get the gigs, get the agent, get the fan base, get the downloads. Meanwhile, as Chuck0 argued, some people are going to buy your stuff. They like a CD better or they just want to help you out.
Keenan says that to get people to do that, it's this huge numbers game. You have to get a ton of people to show up and listen, so that 20% will buy. The rest will download it from PirateBay.
Prince, he said, said fuck the internet and giving it away for free there. I'm giving it away for free to Mirror . Instead, he chose to use an old fashioned print medium, the one everyone is saying is going to die, and said, "Here, YOU guys can earn money off me. I'm not going to give shit to outfits lke iTunes.
The internet used to be really cool. The internet may have, at one time, been a place where you could give it away for free and make a living, because you were the rare band that was doing it. That is why Prince compared the Internet to MTV. (I made a similar argument in my review of Clay Shirkey's book, Here Comes Everybody. The successes that Shirkey points to only happened because it was rare that anyone got on the internet and bitched about their lost cell phone. Now that it is no longer rare, and everyone's getting on the internet, telling their story and hoping that they will get vigilante justice, a record deal, a writing contract, etc. there is so much noise that mechanisms of inequality emerge. What once appeared to give people democratic voice, does no longer. This is because there are so many people screaming into the void, that it would be impossible, today, to get heard when you complain that you lost your cell phone and some rude person has it in Queens somewhere and doesn't that suck. No one from the NY Times is going to pick up such a story. There are so many of them, it's not news.
So, in order for people to sift through all the noise, new ways of sorting through it will emerge, and those mechanisms wil enforce inequality. With the internet, the inequality comes in the form of the fact that the people with the most social media skills, the most resources in the form of free time, the ability to buy assistance with their social media needs, etc. None of this has anything to do with talent and everything to do with who has more resources a tthe get go. There will be the rare occasion when someone will "make it" and it keeps every other chump plugging away hoping that, if they just do a lot of busking in a public square somewhere, they'll make $200/hr at it, will make videos of themselves, put them on youtube, and get discovered as the next Justin Bieber.
At 07:53 PM 7/10/2010, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>At 04:42 PM 7/10/2010, Gar Lipow wrote:
>
>
>>(Though Prince is probably not in the same position in this
>>regard as a small band trying to make a living playing bars, doing any
>>gigs they can get, and selling a CDS and DVDS where they can.. Maybe
>>he has positive ROI from suing Youtube. I guarantee your average
>>non-star band does not. )
>
>
>
>I can second that. I know people who have been making a living from music
>in Nashville and Austin for a long time and the money in their pockets
>comes far and away more from playing live than anything else. And some of
>these people used to play with Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard so their
>talent is not the issue.
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