Lukas and I were talking about a great video today, The Money Tree, in which a tree is carefully adorned with 100 one-dollar bills, each one containing a short note exemplifying the obvious serendipity of coming upon such a sight. It’s a wonderful video, and the music is great too.
It caused me to share a similar idea I’ve had related to music on the web. One of the situations I run into a lot as I make various audio demos for the web is that I constantly have to find freely-licensed music. There is some great stuff out there–the track we used in our most recent demo is a good example–but you have to know where to look. Also, these wells are often shallow, and you have to constantly be on the lookout for more of them in order to get enough of what you need. Then there are artists (Moby is one example) who have made it possible to use their stuff for free demos. But it’s not easy to find all this stuff, despite how great search is supposed to be these days.
So what about this. What if you bought a song, and then released it to the web for free? I don’t mean “bought the right to download it from iTunes and uploaded to a p2p site.” No, I’m talking about buying the song outright. Buying exclusive rights to it, and dumping it into the public domain. Crazy, right?
Well, what does a song cost? Let’s forget about Top 40 music for a minute, since I don’t want that even if it were possible to afford it. I’m thinking more of the kind of music people want for demos and videos and soundtracks. $10K? $100K? The RIAA seems to think $750K is a reasonable amount for a song. A cool $1 million?
The economics of this don’t look good until you stop and realize that as you read this, millions of people are paying $0.99 for songs on iTunes, paying for the right to download them into their personal collection. Now, what if instead of doing it that way, a bunch of fans got together and pooled their $0.99s, add them together until it comes to some insane amount that satisfies The Industry. They exchange this huge sack of money for the right to walk away with this song they love, and then share it by putting it into the public domain. Everyone wins.
It’s possible to buy one-of-a-kind paintings, statues, and the like, and to then donate them to museums where the public can go and enjoy them. Is it possible to buy a song? ’cause if it is, there are a lot of us already basically doing this. We just need a way to do this transaction.
10 Comments
Ah! Neat idea. With the right industry contacts, that might just work.
I think the biggest challenge would be Wormtongue’s subtle poisons: vis-à-vis iTunes and the imperial pirates of the music mafia coalition. The MCPS will probably send the lads round to break your legs if you tried anything like that.
Still… I’ll bring website if you someone else brings the contacts
You could try working with Moby, Radio Head or Nine Inch Nails on something like that. They would probably love the idea.
Songs are definitely for sale; take the Beatles catalog as an example.
However, it seems to me that they are always sold 1:1 – one label to another or individual.
If a million people are willing to pay a dollar for a song, in the iTunes ecosystem, are the rights worth a million? Surely they are worth more.
I can’t envision a system that would ever satisfy both parties. If the label thinks they can sell a million copies of a song, why sell all future rights for a million? How about doubling the offer? Still the problem remains – why sell? One million people are willing to pay two dollars, surely its worth more then that.
Selling the rights to another label or individual is different, since its one entity with a million dollars and not a million people with one dollar; they are buyers not potential customers.
I think the reason why this doesn’t apply to one-of-a-kind art is because its value is derived from its singular nature. Music doesn’t suffer from this problem, my copy is as good as your copy – except you want to use your copy in a demo and not get sued.
Perhaps there needs to be exclusions in copyright law for things like demos, but that’s another bag of worms altogether.
ND
According to The Guardian, the beatles back catalog is worth about £750m ($1b). If someone had that kind of money lying around, then they would be about to buy it, and once they’ve bought it they can do what they want with it, including release it under a free licence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/mar/12/news.thebeatles
Of course this figure doesn’t take into account past sales, and not everyone is as talented as the beatles.
Of course, the importance of freely-licensed art and music is a value (and public right) that is already recognized by culture and law. The trouble is laws are increasingly extending the length of copyright.
I like your idea though.
The problem is, which 1 million people? If there’s 10 million people who *would* be willing to pay $1 for the song, which 10% should actually pay the $1?
How about this: You set up a site in which everyone can pledge to pay a self-chosen maximum price for a given song. You collect pledges for, say, a week. At the end of the week, if you’ve collected enough pledges, you buy the song and liberate it.
What if you collect more pledges than the song costs? In that case, you reduce the amount that everyone who pledged has to pay. e.g. If 10 million people pledged a maximum of $1, and you only needed $1 million, then each person only pays 10c.
Great idea! You should have a look at Sellaband.com. It’s not about liberating music but gives an idea on how fans can work together and ‘invest’ in a song!
In a similar vein, take a look at Musopen. They’re getting people to pledge money so that they can hire an orchestra to record classical works which will then be released into the public domain (although most clasical music scores are out of copyright, most good recordings aren’t):
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Musopen/record-and-release-free-music-without-copyrights
It’s an interesting idea. It’s related to crappy photos on Wikipedia – why doesn’t the celebrity or car maker buy out all the rights to a decent photo from a professional and upload it under an acceptable license?
The reason it doesn’t happen for songs is most musicians have signed a deal where they don’t own their master recordings, and they’ve signed another deal as songwriters to a music publisher. So they can’t make the deal, and The Industry isn’t interested in a one-time deal; it wants to sell more pie slices – new formats and per-download and movie placement and ringtones. Selling a song outright reduces its value to the label and music publisher to $0. The fact that for 99% of all the songs in their catalog the future revenue will never amount to more than $10000 doesn’t mean there are people both at the label and the music publisher with the power to make the deal for $15000 without a million dollars in lawyers’ fees changing hands.
Where it’s really bizarre is advertising. Audi commissioned the song “Streets of Tomorrow” for a campaign, yet you can’t go to Audi.com and download the song from the Q7 page. Instead Audi paid for expensive commercials to expose the song and now it’s forgotten.
Almer, Sellaband sounds like Artistshare. Both let you be a patron of the recording, but you don’t get rights to give the result away. Even though “I love this song so much that I’ve freed it for the world to enjoy it” is a wonderful idea.
If a song is worht a million, I must be quite rich, having written 280 songs or so… Reality is that a high percentage of all songs written in this world are dark matter and probably never even make it to being recorded in reasonable quality, much less being published at all. And only then what you say kicks in at all…
I think it’s a cool idea, but I remain skeptical. The problem is, if songwriters actually understood the importance of free culture, you wouldn’t need millions of dollars to convince them to release their stuff freely or into the public domain.
There’s a misconception at the root of the disconnect, which I don’t think this idea addresses. Songwriters tend to have a lottery mentality, and tend to view royalties as a potential source of welfare in the future, or something to help support their kids. For famous artists, how big of a one time payment would be needed to convince them to never do a licensing deal or receive any royalties again? For an up-and-coming artist, how do you put a price on their music while avoiding the lottery consideration (i.e. a song might not be worth much, monetarily, now, but if that artist thinks they might one day make it big and have a chance to do bigger licensing deals… how much would you need to pay them out of that illusion?).
I think the problem is that so many songwriters look to copyright as their main hope for ongoing income. A one time pay off, from that perspective, seems more like a severance package than an alternative source of revenue.
If artists really understood the value of freely licensing their work, both cultural and in terms of the other types of business models and sources of income it could enable, you wouldn’t need to buy them out to begin with.
Cool thought experiment though.