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cc-eyebeam - [cc-eyebeam] Manufacturing demand and restricting supply makes art expensive

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Subject: Creative Commons-Eyebeam Forum 2003 November 12-19

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  • From: Neeru Paharia <neeru AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: Creative Commons-Eyebeam Forum 2003 November 12-19 <cc-eyebeam AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [cc-eyebeam] Manufacturing demand and restricting supply makes art expensive
  • Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 19:15:48 -0800

Reflecting on many comments about the marketing and economic value of art.

Without the marketing, branding, and distribution, Madonna would not have as
much value as she does now, because most of the demand for Madonna has been
manufactured by the marketing/distribution infrastructure. Imagine a world
where Madonna wasn't signed by any big label, but still was able to produce
music -- what would her sales be like then? Probably only a small fraction
of what she sells now. Her stuff is sometimes good, but so is a lot of other
music. So in an economic system where goods are bought and sold, are you
really buying Madonna/art, or are you buying the marketing and distribution
of Madonna? That's where all the expenses are going anyway. And could much
of the marketing simply be associating ideas with Madonna, (ideas like
power, sex, and transformation) which in that case, you're actually buying
the idea of Madonna, like a branded product, like an Gucci bag?

I think at least partially, the value of Madonna goes beyond Madonna --
you're actually buying the value-add that the industry provides, including
the ideas they associate with her, packaging, and access to her music. So
if the marketing firms/labels are creating all the value, or demand for the
good (Madonna), then of-course they will be the most interested in asserting
IP rights in the value they created. It's really not about the music, it's
about manufacturing demand by selling ideas, and the access to the product.

Firms also used to be able to restrict supply of these products (while they
were simultaneously manufacturing demand), a key component in creating
value. But now with digital distribution, they can no longer restrict
supply easily. This really has nothing to do with the artist or art, it's
all about the Firm creating demand and restricting supply, it's about
creating value and extracting value, it's business. If an artist was
compensated fairly (somewhere between nothing, and millions of dollars) how
many artists would choose to restrict supply of their artwork? I don't know
what most artists think, but I would never personally want to restrict
supply of my own work and think lots of people would feel the same. In
physical space, the creation of a painting was in itself a legitimate
restriction to supply (because it's one-of-a-kind) but in digital space,
what is it? DRM? That's artificial. So the outstanding question is how to
compensate artists fairly if supply is unrestricted -- Joline, Sal, Jon, and
others had great thoughts on this.

I know we talk about how important IP rights are for artist because we don't
want them (myself included) to be taken advantage of, but does a system
where most artist make nothing, and the few who make money, make tons of
money because they are being packaged and marketed in the right way -- even
though their art is probably not much different from any one else's -- a
system that makes sense? The few artists who do make money are often just a
component of a huge marketed product, their music just a piece of the larger
picture where most of the value is created by manufacturing demand through
clever marketing, branding,, and distribution. And this is really where the
IP rights are being asserted. It seems like artists worry most about
corporate exploitation -- who else really has the power to take advantage of
them? This point rang true as we recently hashed out the Sampling license
on our website -- the artists who developed the sampling license wanted to
allow the world to sample their work commercially, EXCEPT for advertising
firms. Funny how the biggest supporters of strong IP are the corporations.

On a slightly different note, I value art because it's something that moves
the human spirit -- it's a world where I can experience ideas, feelings, and
thought. It's interesting how marketing capitalizes off this by associating
ideas (like Nike's "Just Do it"=triumph and self-determination,
Madonna=power, sex, money, Diamond=eternal love) with products, so our
desire to experience feeling/ideas, something that art has been a vehicle to
convey, is now placed on our desire to purchase product, rather than seek
out the experience of art. Or some would say marketing is art.

All this to say, I agree with Joline, art should be publicly funded and
access to art should be universal. I really like the solutions she
presented.

Creative Commons is thinking about trying to do something like this, at
least in a minor way, by collection donations from the public and then grant
all the money back to artists to create CC licensed works. We're still
working out the details but we also thought it would be great to focus our
funds on music and encourage legal sharing of content, to prove substantial
non-infringing use of the file-sharing networks.

I've also been talking to a MP34U, a group that's trying to "manufacture
demand" for MP3s that are legal to share led by the founder of Bezerkely
Records. There are thousands of legal MP3s put up by self publishing
artists -- look at mp3.com. But there's no one to curate, no one to find
the good stuff for you. Their solution is to have ~50 people constantly
scouring the web for good legal mp3s, which they'll put on their personal
play-lists so you can find people with similar tastes to yours. Maybe they
can help encourage people to file-share legal MP3s, since right now, demand
is clearly on the side of the illegal MP3s.

And maybe some of these ideas about people-centered vs. thing-centered, as
MLK discussed, comes back to defining art as an inherent right. Which would
mean supporting people to create art, as most cultures have enabled and
valued for thousands of years.

I hope some of this makes sense.




  • [cc-eyebeam] Manufacturing demand and restricting supply makes art expensive, Neeru Paharia, 11/18/2003

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