[WS:] Randian rubbish! People have been creating art since the beginning of history. Mass produced celebrity art has been around for less than a hundred years and it will not be much missed. If anything, its disappearance will create more room for spontaneous creativity of ordinary people - that has been suffocated by televised rubbish.
Wojtek
On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 5:55 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>wrote:
> At 03:22 PM 7/8/2010, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Jul 8, 2010, at 3:05 PM, Matt wrote:
>>
>> > I guess I am missing the point...entirely. Unless the context is only
>> > U2/Prince/Ke$ha/Lady Gaga/Justin Bieber/Whatever gazillion dollar
>> > tours, and not every band who paid for tours and living expenses by
>> > selling tickets, t-shirts, and CDs in the back of the bar they were
>> > playing in.
>>
>> I just interviewed the guy, Sean Keenan, for this evening's radio show.
>> One difference between then and now: in the old days, record companies
>> (whose general suckiness I won't for a second deny) gave advances to
>> promising acts. Now, bupkes. And as Keenan points out, the artists that
>> succeed today have to be good with spreadsheets and marketing, which take
>> precedence over music.
>>
>> Look, this is part of my ongoing interest in how the hell we're going to
>> pay for journalism and popular art in a world where everyone wants stuff on
>> the Internet for free. His isn't the last word, but it's all worth thinking
>> about.
>>
>> Doug
>>
>
> My first reaction was: strike! If they just stop creating music, art,
> journalism, literature, and so forth, people will realize how much they want
> it and are willing to pay for it.
>
> But there is the rub. As Shane said, the dealio is, with anyone who is a
> creator, the drive to create (and I suspect, not necessarily to have an
> audience at all) is so strong that they can't fathom doing this. Which is
> not to say that this drive is natural or anything like that. The situation
> is one where creators get taken advantage of because of this idea that
> people do it for the sheer joy of creating and, therefore, they don't need
> to get paid. Anyone who has ever freelanced or tried to run a small business
> knows just how many friends and family - and perfect strangers -- will ask
> you to work on spec, for free particularly if, in their mind, all you are
> giving up is your time. after all, you must love designing web sites so
> much, you'd do anything to create and, therefore, since there's no "cost"
> involved, why wouldn't you make this one little web site for a friend?
>
> (same thing goes on, as you know, WRT authors and speaking engagements. Of
> course, you will do it for the good cause, right? It's just a weekend, 2
> hours of your time. And of course you'll do it on the cheap - the cause! -
> since, as we all know, peole aren't goign to pay for tickets to see a lefty
> speak! yadda. A few months ago, I was in a conversation about that and had
> to defend the lefty speakers who were asking the big bucks to speak. Dudes,
> they have to eat. And everyone nodded. And I thought we were all on the same
> page; no inviting speakers unless we are paying them a reasonable buck.
> Well, no one wanted to slow down for two minutes to raise the money, so they
> plowed ahead and I've since backed off, embarrassed that they have the nerve
> to ask people to speak for practically nothing.)
>
> Meanwhile, as my reading of Ken Auletta's Googled revealed, advertising
> revenue on the Web is a tenth (or less) of what advertising revenue was for
> print. That was the "free" model before - the 50cent cost of a newspaper
> didn't cover production and distribution costs of that newspaper so it was,
> nearly, free. The rest was made up in advertising revenue.
>
> The deal with the Web is that the advertising costs don't sustain the
> operation. Everyone thought it was going to be cheaper to produce web-based
> versions of print. Well, surprise, it's not a tenth or less of the cost of
> producing print. And in spite of the wealth of information today's
> advertising can learn about what works and doesn't work on the Web, the
> problem is that tracking, collating, deciphering, analyzing that data costs
> money and requires skills -- the latter is actually, I'd guess, in short
> supply. Why? Because in the old advertising world, as Adland's James Othmer
> points out, no one knew why advertising worked or didn't work. They had lots
> of research and inchoate theories, but nothing solid. So it was all magic -
> which is what Adland is, largely, about: they way an entire advertising
> industry was built on smoke and mirrors, convincing people to pay big bucks
> for advertising that no one could explain how and why it worked (or didn't).
> WEll, now they have detailed data on who's watching and who's not, what goes
> viral and what doesn't, they have bloggers who willing write about what they
> liked and didn't like about it - hell with the focus groups! But all that
> information - who can figure it all out? It's still a big black box.
> (Auletta says that Google is in the process of creating the artificial
> intelligence to decipher all those signals and then sell that information to
> marketers, business owners, etc.)
>
> The point? It's a different business model - well, the same really. It's
> the old advertising based one, but with less money coming down the pike from
> advertisers. Google is placing it's money on the emergence of a mediating
> advertising analysis infrastructure. They are creating the tools so that a
> business can place it's ads on line, get immediate feedback about how the ad
> is working or not, allow them to tweak it themselves OR google sells them
> the consulting staff to do it for them. (again, see Auletta's _Googled_.
> I've boiled that part of his work down into a concentrated form since his
> book is about a lot more than just this stuff. And, as Auletta's quick to
> point out, Google's often so fucked up that makes beaucoup bux off very
> little they've actually created themselves, but they end up making it off of
> the startups they've purchased. So, this may be their plan, but it will be
> one of the very few times Google makes money of something they *intended* to
> do. :)
>
> So what I'm saying is, the big money, if Google's correct, is going to be
> where Google is, where the analysis is, and they are going to be the deep
> pockets that eventually makes sure the content is produced. As I wrote in my
> review of chris Anderson's _Free_: the word of the day is circuitous. The
> path to $ is going to be far more circuitous than it ever was with the old
> advertising model. And it will require bizarre iron constitutions for anyone
> to ever run a business on this model and for them to even understand what
> the fuck is going on. (On the other hand, I can tell you from first hand
> experience that plenty of medium-sized businesses have no idea what the fuck
> is going on. One company I worked for called their print business, "The
> Daily Miracle," because they had no idea what worked and what didn't work.
> And now, with the Web, they are screwed.
>
> so, it's a different business model with music, too. Circuitous is the word
> of the day. and the big money isn't going to be where it's conventionally
> been. The music will, eventually, be paid for; it just won't be paid for by
> the consumer purchasing a music product directly. They will view ads. They
> will give their information to facebook in order to listen to pandora and
> show their friends what kind of music they like. And pandora will collect
> all the information about what people listen to and don't, what they like
> and don't, and they will sell that information to - whomever. And then
> facebook will sell related information. And third party companies like
> Rapleaf will sell information about the email addresses associated with
> myspace, facebook, linkedin, yadda. You are giving them all these marvelous
> information, and they will feed that information into their information
> factory and spit it back out in the form of music produced based on all that
> collation of data from social media, from iTunes store, from Amazon's store.
>
> Bake your own fucking bread and circuses man. Give it to them for FREE and
> then they will sell that to whomever and they will take it, with their
> half-baked, clueless theories about what works and doesnt'w ork in order to
> figure out what music you want made next.
>
> today's artificially-intelligentized cool-hunters do it with "intelligence
> agents" instead of hustling the streets of NY looking for the latest new
> fad, the authentically hip so they can turn it into a mass merchandized
> experience, and the authentic can sneer and get pissed because their cool,
> authentic whatever has been taken over by the faker poseurs. and the beat
> goes on and on and on...
>
> So Keenan thinks it's "whoring" to place products in a music video. That's
> really funny. It's like the classic bourgeois distinction about selling your
> skills at baking apple pies and selling your skills at giving hummers. The
> distinction rests on mystification of one as mundane, the other as sacred.
> Apparently, selling the music directly through tickets to concerts and CD
> purchases, or even getting paid royalties for each video played on MTV
> (supported by commercials!) is not selling your Art in a bad way, but making
> a music video with a pepsi can in it is.
>
>
>
>
> http://cleandraws.com
> Wear Clean Draws
> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
>
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