>On Jul 11, 2010, at 9:43 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
> > Keenan's the shithead for daring to be possessive about his precious music.
>
>He made several points when I interviewed him. One (and I'm paraphrasing
>this somewhat tendentiously), the record companies, scummy as they were,
>at least gave advances to bands that allowed them to tour and live. That's
>dying. And two, musicians these days have to be good with marketing plans
>and spreadsheets - he liked it better when they were good with music and
>didn't have to spend so much time selling themselves.
>
>Doug
my own experience suggests they had to be good at other things besides just playing. you had to know how to deal with people. you had to know how to work the phones. you had to know how to create a press pack. you either had to have design skills or know someone who did who'd do it for free or cheap. But I take his point and I think it's quite accurate that, on top of all that you had to have then, you have to have even more skills because of the technologies. It's part of a larger process of capitalist rationalization: making people perform more and more of the labor via technology. An old mentor always wrote his books long hand, handing them to the dept sec'y to type up. doesn't happen these days. Same thing. My bosses have to create their own slideshows and presentations, something they'd have handed off to the design team years ago - an issue that came up when I gave a talk to IT management last year.
what keenan gets at in his blog post, though he doesn't develop this as explicitly as I am, is the issue of how people argue for a certain approach to making based on an assumption of scarcity. You could make it big like Chomsky, because unlike other authors who try to preserve their IP, you buck the system and give it away. IOW, the system against which you are working has to exist for you to be successful.
Obviously, people who've supported the approach believe that it won't matter if everyone's doing it eventually. They're not aware of this assumption. But what Keenan was saying is that it does matter; the Grateful Dead effect rests on an assumption that it's rare. It also rested on a fan base that wasn't operating only according to the market logic of self-interest maximization.
When it's no longer rare to give music away or ignore/encourage bootlegging, it turns out to have all these side effects that no one had thought about - side effects ramped up by the glut of creative products via the internet. And when it takes place among a fan base who are not pre-disposed to be really into "sharing" and mutual aid, it doesn't work either. There are a lot of bands/artist/musicians out there who don't want to be some hotshot, they just want to make a living. They don't and they can't without having a day job and I suspect, once again, that this other dude that Alan and Michael are promoting is just advancing a model that won't scale - as they say in my business.
As much as I'm critical of Clay Shirkey, at least he does recognize this problem in Here Comes Everybody. He concludes that it's an acceptable side effect, that the filtering mechanisms that sift through the glut are superior to earlier filtering mechanisms. Keenan's saying that it isn't superior at all. Clay Shirkey thinks it's more democratic because people can hop on the internet and directly control who gets signed by visiting their sites, downloading their music, talking them up on blog posts.
Keenan thinks this isn't happening because, well, people aren't interested in even exchanging their labor for the free download. In other words, they take the download and then don't "give back" in the form of social media buzz. It's not because they are bad people that they don't do this. It's just the nature of the very "free" market in which they participate. In a market, the whole point is to act in your self interest. Well, what's more self-interested than downloading music, listening to it and doing nothing else?
so, these days, they have to have all the skills the earlier musicians had *and* they have to do their own marketing, arrange their own tours, schedule their shows, analyze social media marketing data, understand new technologies, etc. Fortunately, if you get the right kind of day job, you can do all your social media activity while at work! ;)
shag
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