[I missed a super interesting AI talk then went to meet a student]
Sean Pager & Eric Priest, The Cost of Music: Has
Digitization Made Copyright Obsolete?
Do DIY productions chart? Very few. It is a fallacy to
equate tools with capabilities—interviews w/professional producers, engineers,
and label executives. Tools don’t make high quality recordings, any more than
great equipment can create a great tennis player or carpenter. Average DIY
musicians can’t do this without years of practice; learning mixing techniques
might not be the best use of their time. Interviewees said there was some
democratization from cheap, accessible digital recording tech. Home recording
production quality is usually poor; usually you can only rescue them to make
them listenable. Artistic/tech skill remains critical to production/recording/mixing,
largely unaffected by technological advances, and tech hasn’t markedly reduced
the time/cost associated with many recording tasks.
RT: I hear Jessica Silbey’s work with photographers—10 years
ago. What we do has value. Sure, says the market, but I’ll take a little less quality
for a lot less $. Maybe the consumer base will stave this off for music since
the market is different/less focused on advertisers.
Silbey: Yes, photographers say it takes just as much time,
and sifting through the images takes time. © wasn’t necessarily an investment
recoupment mechanism for them—so consider what folks are saying about the role
of © in their lives. Photographers=demonstrated that they are artists, not the
way they made their $, which was through contracts.
A: rejects the premise—people in the industry may not be
aware of how © functions to structure the industry. Asking people about how ©
works for them doesn’t get at the fundamentals of what © is doing. But there
are significant differences b/t music and photos [said every industry ever
right before it was rolled over]—people want adulation and admiration of
listeners, and so they want a slight edge, which makes a huge difference. Even “middle
class” performers benefit from professional assistance.
Lemley: is this the wrong question? Airgigs: I can hire
someone to do complete editing/mixing/mastering for $300—$500-700 for the best
engineers in Nashville. Haven’t we moved from the world where you had to buy a
limo and hire a chauffeur to the world of Uber—where the pros are gig-based and
cheap?
A: Sure, you don’t need a label and can do a la carte. Maybe
it’s good enough in many cases. But that’s not much different from what the
costs used to be, and the time adds up. You want a producer, a mixer, probably
an engineer. Other setup costs. Bottom line: paying for these services makes a
difference.
A: depends very much on genre: much cheaper to do hip-hop
now. And they may even want a lo-fi sound. But live musicians will cost $30-40
thousand, and that’s if you’re not using a star producer but an indie.
James Stramm, Complementary Scarcity and the Other
Post-Piracy Path
Video games, larger than movie industry and North American
sports industry combined. Revenue isn’t driven by surveillance but by microtransactions/free
to play games. Widespread piracy corroded the traditional model—pirated PC
games were 4x authentic copies in UK in 2010. They tried doubling down,
including legislation, litigation, and DRM; that iddn’t work. Legacy media
adopted surveillance capitalims—Spotify, Netflix, compete with piracy by
pricing closer to marginal cost/all you can eat. Data becomes a competitive
necessity.
Microsoft and Sony have done subscription models, but mostly
video games did other things. Streaming 100 gig game on early 2010s internet
wasn’t workable for many, particularly when milliseconds of lag can affect
enjoyment.
Partly DRM: gamers wary of DRM for many failed
implementations.
Free to play; pay to win—popular in mobile, but also used in
console games. Generally disliked by gamers; cosmetic microtransactions like skins.
Certain elements questioned as predatory/dark patterns; loot boxes.
Offering complements is a way to find things that are easier
to make artificially scarce, and consumers buy them and subsidize the primary
good.
Compared to the deadweight loss in conventional IP, access
is enhanced, but the extent depends on the type of microtransactions: pay to
win are only marginally access enhancing—sell the blade, not the razor. But cosmetic
microtransactions are access-enhancing.
Market distortion: does complementary scarcity only work for
multiplayer games? To what extent are network effects/market concentration
necessary for this to work? Does it trade off with innovation?
This isn’t really negative space—it’s just reacting to
piracy. Low enforcement environments can still lead to welfare-enhancing
outcomes. Subscription models may appeal for single-player games, but you need
market power/large catalog; fragmentation makes the appeal to users go down.
Gena Feist: Sometimes these market configurations are just
different worlds, not necessarily better or worse.
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