We're Only In It For The Money

They say necessity is the mother of invention.

When I was little, all the grown up musicians I knew, whether it was Gary Dorsey, Lowell Thomas, Ozzy Middleton, whomever, they all said that the rule no. 1 of music was "get paid." The pressure is always on to get paid, because people ALWAYS seem to want music for free, or as little as possible. This is true throughout the art world generally and has been forever.

Somewhere in the history of this nation, we acquired a Stalinist hatred/suspicion of anything intellectual, coupled with an intense appetite for entertainment. This is a bad mix.

As if this weren't bad enough, corporations learned to take advantage of things by making people pay, but not paying anything to the artists, and for some reason the public is OK with that arrangement, too.

The great Billy Bragg wrote a inspiring piece in the NY Times Op-Ed, Saturday, portions of which I'm dying to share with you. Regarding last week's sale of Bebo.com for $850 million, of which $650 million went to co-founder Michael Birch:

"In our discussions, we largely ignored the elephant in the room: the issue of whether or not he (Birch) ought to consider paying some kind of royalties to the artists. After all, wasn't he using their music to draw members - and advertising - to his business? Social networking sites like Bebo argue that they have no money to distribute - their value is their membership. Well, last week, Michael Birch realized the value of his membership. I'm sure he'll be rewarding those technicians and accountants who helped achieve this success. Perhaps he should consider the contribution of his artists?

The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.

What's at stake here is more than the morality of the market. The huge social networking sites that seek to use music as free content are as much to blame for the malaise currently affecting the industry as the music lover who downloads songs for free. Both the corporations and the kids, it seems, want the use of our music without having to pay for it."

Like I said last week, band width is content-driven. No single person can embrace this truth and make a difference. There has to be a unifying movement to protect all intellectual property rights from the Rolling Stones to the street person banging on pickle buckets.