On the back of an interesting post my good friend Jeff Lee made about Good Old Neon’s music, which is free to download in a variety of bit-rates, I thought I’d post something about this bassist’s position on the intellectual property of The Monotremes’ music.
We recorded the tracks that are on our Myspace in the Vatican studios in Stepney Green, using a couple of vocal mics into a firewire audio interface into my ageing laptop. Unlike recording onto magnetic tape, wax discs or most other mediums, this means that the moment after recording the music exists in digital form – as a complicated string of ones and zeros.
The important thing about this way of capturing the music, and I’m sure you’re aware of this, is that the audio is infinitely reproducible without any loss of quality. If I copy the raw audio from the bass line onto a usb disk, then onto another hard disk, then burn it onto a CD, all of these copies are identical. There is no ‘original’ copy – each of those files that exists is in the same state as all of the others. We might for convenience label a particular set the Masters (say, a copy of every separate instrument and the data about how they fit together all burned onto one nice-looking CD, put in a case safely somewhere with the word ‘Master’ written on it in Sharpie) but this copy has no actual primacy over any other – it’s just something we can stash away for a little piece of mind in case of massive computer failure.
This is one of the key facets of intellectual property. Were The Monotremes making oil paintings in the Vatican rather than songs, we’d emerge from the sessions with 6 physical objects. If you wanted one of these objects, you’d have the only copy. We’d give/sell it to you, and after that we would no longer own the piece.
But if we record, mix and make available a piece of digital music (and to side-step the bit-rate arguments, lets say that we made all our songs available in FLAC format (something I’m anxious to do for marginal benefit to anyone but audiophiles who would baulk at our amateurish mixing anyway) – audio quality is a subject for a whole different post) then anyone with an internet connection and an interest can have a copy – the exact same copy as the one that’s on my computer. The exact same copy as the copy that a radio station would play, or a guy at an indie disco. More importantly, once, uh, ‘Dave’ has downloaded a copy, he can give it to ‘Steve’ who can give it to Beth who can stick it up on her website and from there a thousand other people can get the exact same piece of music that we released on our site.
As most of you reading this are aware, this happens a lot. Through Bittorrent, Limewire, Bearshare, muxtape, etc etc etc, people are sharing copyrighted and non-copyrighted music out there, in massive volumes.
Now I’m not clear-thinking enough to be able to usefully parse the ethical ins-and-outs of this situation. There are a large number of writers online who have written a lot of incisive (and not-so-incisive) articles about the rights, wrongs, ups and downs of what is currently happening out there in the digital realm. There’s a fair amount out there that uses corporate greed as a bit of a straw man in a way that smacks of dishonest self-justification, and opposing arguments that talk about self-entitlement and the me!me!me! generation that wants everything, now, for free in a way that amounts to little more than lamenting the loss of a non-returnable situation. I’m fascinated by these pieces (and might start linking to the more interesting pieces as I stumble across them) but it’s not the job of The Monotremes to justify the state of music distribution in the world today. I only want to say how we fit into it.
The raw pragmatics of it, Part I: you can download all of our song both from our Myspace and our regular website. This means that, whatever our intent, we’ve pretty much thrown our seeds into the wind. Now that it’s out there (on literally two or three hard drives, hopefully eventually more) we’ve surrendered control of it. Personally that’s been done more than willingly, but we wouldn’t have had a choice not to, really. You can elect to not allow people to download your Myspace tracks, but there are numerous ways around that.
The raw pragmatics of it, Part II: We’re a small band that’s just starting out, in London, a city that’s a sea of other small bands both new and established. We ought to be doing everything we can to get our name out there, to be heard. The last thing we want to do is to slap DRM on our music or chide potential fans for sharing our music. We want to make it as easy as possible to listen to our music. And if we can avoid the out-of-the-blocks douchebaggery of bands that demand money for music when there are a thousand better band giving theirs away for free, so much the better.
A third aspect to the not-copyrighting our material is this: I have a genuine interest in seeing what others might do to with our tracks. I’ve not touched on the malleability of digital music in this post, but suffice it to say that if or when we release individual parts of our songs to the public (so you can download just the drumtrack or just the vocals, for example) anyone with a laptop and a copy of Audacity can play around with our stuff and stick it back online. More on that below.
Releasing it without copyright is therefore completely an option. But I keep sticking this little fella and his related text all over our music and webpages:
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This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
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The Creative Commons website does a far better job of describing itself than I can – you should head over to the site and check it out. For those of you who can’t be bothered, here are a couple of sentences:
Creative Commons have used real legal skills to write a variety of licences that are just as legally-binding as copyright, but allow the end-user to do things that copyright doesn’t. We’ve gone for the “Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales” licence, which does this stuff:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
Of course, if people are so happy infringing copyright, why should they stand by a creative commons licence? Why would they worry about attribution and sharing alike? Why do I want to use it rather than just saying “There’s no copyright on any of our stuff”?
1) It restricts commercial use – If someone out their does intend to make money out of our songs, we don’t think it’s crazy that we should get some of that money. Commercial use tends to be enforceable in the way that bittorrent is not, since whomever is using our thing will have a product out there and a means for distribution.
2) It completely legitimises up all downloading and uploading of our work – we’re not just tacitly accepting that our music will be copied, we’re actively saying that’s what we’re like to see happen.
3) I like to support creative commons – it’s relatively unimportant for a tiny band like us to have a legal mechanism in place in case of sharing, but the more little people use this, the higher chance there’ll be some ‘trickle up’ as bigger ventures see how widespread CC is. By the same token, other bands/artists/writers might learn about it from our site.
4) It’s pretty cool (nerd snort) – it feels good to have that handsome little stamp on the page – I feel kinda progressive, on the cutting edge of intellectual property.
Nearly there. Phew.
Last point: let’s play a game of improbable hypotheticals. Let’s say that at our tenth show an A&R man comes up to us and says “Here’s a contract. For you: a bunch of money to record & tour. For us: an album released in the traditional way, copyrighted, with the money going to us with you guys taking a cut if it makes the initial outlay back. Kay?”
What would I do in that devastatingly unlikely scenario?
I’ll be honest with you, without delving into the self justifications too much: I will be working on the assumption that our fans will pirate (to use the parlance of the record companies) any records that we make under the contract, and some people will buy it, possibly mostly for the packaging. The consumers aren’t losing out. The industry will be paying us knowing about the state of online music dissemination so if they lose out, hey, they’ve come into this with their eyes open. And we’ll spend six months unawaredly building up a mountain of crippling future-debt whilst having the time of our lives living in a van and working at a studio.
In short, not sure. Depends how good the contract is.
So yeah, Creative Commons. If you’re a band member reading this, suggest it to your band. If you’re a listener, download our songs, share them however you like, stick them to video and put them on YouTube, tease them apart and use them as building blocks in your clowncore symphony. Let us know how you get on.
-Mike
If anyone’s coming to the gig, I love to chat about this stuff. Don’t hesitate!
