Woo, mischief, I didn't notice your location. You probably HAVE met more neurotic poseurs than I have.
I'm 100% with you that the whole "starving artist" thing is a pretension. The best
artists I've ever known have not been the flaky Byron wannabes. Those are the ones who just don't want regular jobs. The really great artists I've met are organized, practical and focused. They put in long hours studying the technical aspects of their medium, because they know that meaningful expression doesn't happen just because you bought your outfit at an antique clothing store.
Now as far as theft of music, I don't think
anybody has said that artists should not be compensated for their work. They invest labor in making something you find valuable, and basic ethics dictates that some compensation should be made when one person enjoys benefits of another's labor.
However, we've been kind of screwed over by publishers, where "we" means both consumers AND artists. They have insinuated this concept into our culture that an intellectual property asset should be treated exactly like a tangible asset. They were able to pull this off for a long, long time, because the publishers controlled production and distribution. People thus saw the medium and the content as synonymous. The thing that makes intellectual property different from tangible property is that intellectual property can be reproduced infinitely. In a tangible goods transaction, you have ten chickens and I have a dollar. I give you the dollar and you give me a chicken. You now have my dollar and nine chickens. In an intellectual property transaction, metaphorically speaking, I give you a dollar and you still have ten chickens. You can sell as many chickens as people want, for whatever price they'll pay, and at the end of the day you'll still have ten chickens. This is not an economically sound principle. Unlimited IP rights is literally like a license to print money. That's one reason the framers of the Constitution stipulated LIMITED intellectual property rights. The ability to make profit off your work encourages creation. The ability to charge infinitely for something at no incremental cost to oneself
discourages creation, concentrates wealth artificially in the hands of intellectual property holders, creates monopolies, devalues currency and so forth.
Here's how I envision the life of a musician under a more reasonable system: You have your garage band, just like four or five other guys on your block. You play in the park on the weekend in your free time, while continuing to plan for getting a real job if necessary. People like your music, maybe toss some money in your hat. You use that money to print up some flyers to attract more people to your little weekend performances. Eventually, you become well-known enough locally that you can approach (or are approached by) local club owners. This brings you your first paying gigs, and gets you more attention, which gets you higher paying gigs and recognition in a wider area. As soon as your income from the music is high enough to cover the cost, you go online. Put MP3s of ALL your stuff on the web. Make them available through P2P yourself. Start putting your URL on the flyer, and mention it at your performances. Use your web stats to keep track of what people like from you, so you can be sure to play those at your performances. If you're
actually good enough, you have the potential to become a star right now, through P2P and word of mouth. You can play to bigger crowds with people who will come in and pay money just to see you. Imagining that the labels didn't control the radio stations, you'd also get radio play, which is just more advertisement for your performances. At this point, you approach (or are approached by) my vision of "the labels," which are companies successful musicians hire to do advertising, arrange tours, handle merchandising, etc. "The labels" perform this service for a modest upfront fee and a contractually agreed upon percentage of the income for performances and merchandise.
You're now a successful music star. You've never mastered an album. You've never had to try to convince a stuffy record exec in a thousand dollar suit that you're the coolest punk thrash metal act in history. You've never signed your soul away to a publishing company. You've managed your own finances, and kept a very respectable percentage of them for yourself. And you've never sold anything intangible to anyone. You still have intellectual property rights and control. That's what you use to keep those loser guys down the street from copying your style once your music starts to catch on. But you never find yourself having to prosecute your fans for illegally downloading a riff from your biggest hit as a ringer for their cell phones.
See, what the labels are afraid everyone will figure out is that they're not really particularly necessary anymore. The Internet revolution has made many record industry jobs obsolete the same way that the industrial revolution made many manual labor jobs obsolete; the same way that the digital computer made many clerical jobs obsolete (bet you didn't realize "computer" used to mean a guy with a pencil and a roll of paper). Times change. The only difference is that the folks who feel endangered this time have far more money and power than those in the past.
