More Music Lessons

In Music Lessons, we made some parallels between the piracy-induced decline of the music industry with Pinterest, and predicted a similar decline in the availability and quality of image content on the internet. The article in refence, David Lowery's Letter to Emily White has gone "viral" and the phenomenon has given rise to numerous rebuttals along with the praise.

The comments to the rather toothless rebuttal article A WSJ Intern Replies To An NPR Intern’s Viral Post on Music Piracy are more revealing than the article itself. While one commenter bemoans, statistics in hand that

"[...] recorded music has gone from a $12B business in 2001 to a $6B business in 2011. About 35% of that 19% is 7900 Petabytes which was 11 billion movies consumed that people didn’t pay for. That is why Home Video has gone from a $26B business to an $18B business. Pirate Bay is the 81st most popular web site, more popular than Netflix and way more popular than Spotify. ISPs made $50B in 2011 selling a service that comes with free music, free movies, free software, free games and free books. the solution is for ISPs to obey the law and terminate repeat infringers."

another commenter adds, taking a completely different angle:

It’s not because we’re poor, we’re just living in a high speed world where we want access to EVERYTHING… EVERYWHERE and it’s services like iTunes, Spotify and Pirate Bay (listed in descending order of benefit to musicians) that are providing us with that.[...]This will cause a total lull in musical creativity, inspiration, originality and general interest in music until the industry devolves into being a totally non profitable market for anyone because no one will care to consume it anymore. It’s bleak, man.

Interestingly, a more robust rebuttal of David Lowery's piece on Boing Boing has elicited some angry backlash... against the rebuttal itself:

"The issue, for me, isn't whether millions of hobbyists can squeeze out $100 a year while technology companies skim millions from the transactions, but whether a professional class of musicians, artists, writers, filmmakers, etc. can still exist in this country."

"Morrison posted an opinion that "we shared music when it was casettes". And then didn't bother to inquire whether the amount of sharing in any way equated to digital sharing."

From the camp of "Love The Art, Hate The Artist":

"Do you know any musicians who make music only for money? I don't. They make music because they can't stop themselves from making music. And they have day jobs."

"Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock."

"If you want to sing, sing. But, for God's sake, stop complaining about how you're being oppressed because the rest of us don't want to support you while you do it."

"It's been coming for awhile. Musicians have officially become boring."

"The free content crowd doesn't value artists. And they're nasty about it too. Nicely done."

Until Pinterest came along, graphical content was largely untouched by piracy. Ben Silbermann has found a way to tap into this poor cousin of "sharable content" with a platform geared towards the hoarding of third-party digital images by its users, adding a further leaching of creator's copyright with an embed feature that is little more than a gateway to a hotlinking free-for-all of this infringed content.

What is the adaptive path for visual artist with respect to their partnership with the internet?

REDUCE CONTENT. Reduce definition. Reduce size. Reduce availability. Institute a pay-per-view. Charge for website access. Educate the masses.

We may be fighting Pinterest now; tomorrow, we'll be fighting hundreds of Pinterest clones.

Dear Artists,

Dear Artists,

We've grown up to your music, we've wept to your poetry, we visited places from which we saw your photographs, we crafted projects from your instructions, we've been inspired by your painting styles.

It's the digital age, and you're going to need to adapt. We're downloading your music and sharing it with friends and strangers on the internet. We're posting your writings on our blogs, because ideas are free. We're sharing your arts, crafts and photography on Pinterest and other platforms. We will give it all to Pinterest and Grokster to distribute and profit from because they conveniently put everything in one place, and for free.

How you're going to make a living from your creations is your problem, not ours. You're just going to find a way to adapt and make money without copyright protection. Art is meant to be shared, get on with the program. If you can't figure out how to make a living with everyone distributing your content where they bloody well please, suck it up and go wait on tables.

Once again, thank you for the inspiration and making the world a more beautiful place. We're looking forward to complimenting you by handing off your work to Ben Silbermann, making him rich rather than you, but especially getting kudos for our refined style from our "followers." Remember, it's publicity! You should be grateful.

Genuinely appreciating artists as always,

The Pinners

This, above, is the message that pinners are sending artists/creators. They really do hate the artists as much as they love their art.

Quoting a comment from Julie Meyers Pron's blog Pinterest: Educate Your Users About Content Theft, "I haven't contacted any of the users because I know from past experience the hateful reaction you get when you ask people not to break copyright & reprint your recipe."

Love the Art, Hate the Artist

Love the Art, Hate the Artist

Available here through Creative Commons.