Quid Pro No
1.7
Hi again everyone. The last two weeks have been incredibly hectic. I got engaged đ„° and also attended a wedding. But arachne is BACK baby.
đ Feature
Iâve now finished Chokepoint Capitalism. While there are many things Iâm reflecting on, there is one that I havenât been able to unstick from my mind.
In the 20th century, the creation, marketing, and distribution of âcultural productsâ (music, film, literature, etc.) was enormously expensive. The technology to, say, record audio and video was difficult to obtain, difficult to maintain, and required skilled, experienced labor to operate. This era can be marked by the use of analog recording media, like wax cylinders for audio, film reels for video, and typewriters for text. In the middle of the century, in order to distribute music, masters would have to be made of the recording done by the artists. Those masters would then be used to print grooves onto vinyl. That vinyl would then need to be mass produced and literally mailed to radio stations and record stores around the country.
In short, the ability to create and duplicate cultural products was limited to firms and corporations.
The exorbitantly high cost of entry to play in the cultural industries lead to things like the studio system in Hollywood or the oligopoly of music publishers. It also lead to extortionist record contracts and the concession of copyright from the artists to the companies. If the artists had limited domain to strike out on their own or play a robust market for their labor, the companies had enormous leverage to control the artists and their creative output.
But something dramatic has happened. As computers and digitalization have miniaturized and become ubiquitous in the consumer market, more people have low- or no-cost access to the means to create, distribute, and market creative work. Software like Garageband and platforms like Bandcamp or Soundcloud have dramatically limited the need for traditional functions of the record companies.
Or have they? These companies are still around, arenât they? Warner, Universal, Sony, they still have enormous reign over the way we create and consume music, donât they?
Well, thatâs because, in my opinion, they are no longer music companies. They are legal and marketing companies that happen to be in the business of music.
Copyright law plays a big part in this issue. In the United States, when a musical artist contracts with one of the companies, they are essentially forced to concede all of their rights to the copyright of the material they generate while in the employ of that company. What this means in practice is that (for the vast majority of music acts) the recording and publishing companies (essentially one and the same) can control when, how, and where different music earns money. Plus, copyright terms are insanely long, allowing companies to hold onto the right to earn money on music created by artists who are long dead.
In the old system, there was a somewhat legitimate justification for this. The record companies were indeed providing an enormous investment up front in the form of recording studios, hardware, staff, and tape. But Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas were able to make their lauded debut EP in a bedroom. If the studios donât have a need to provide, uh, studios, then the justification for their existence is 1. that they provide a legal infrastructure to uphold and defend copyright and 2. they can get Billie on Times Square billboards. Harder to do that from a bedroom.
These companies arguably make negligible dollars on the creation of new music. They make money licensing their existing libraries to streaming companies, film and TV, and other tangential licensing agreements like in sampling. These licenses they are only able to leverage because of their robust legal armies and the rigorous, vengeful defense of their copyright in which those armies engage.
If you are an independent artist, there is currently no meaningful system by which you can protect your music like the major players can. If you donât have your own vengeful copyright defenders (read: if you donât have a shit ton of money), your music may be used without your permission, you may not be paid for that use, and it can just be flat out stolen by someone else.
So artists are left with a Faustian bargain, one that is entirely a construct of law and cultural norms. Either remain independent or buy into the rapacious, guzzling record companies thatâll give you less than pennies for the labor and works you provide them.
I dream of a decentralized system of music creation, akin to early proliferation of recorded music. The giant mega corps that hold the countryâs music hostage by sitting on piles of copyright they did little to earn, in my opinion, either ought to be broken up or the terms of copyright massively shortened. Allowing artists a chance to shop around the license to their music before 70 or so years after they die could create a new robust, artist first industry.
The record companies have lobbied governments, cheated musicians, and created the streaming industry to maintain the power they have over creators. I hope the next era of our digital world can start to rectify these issues.
đ Reading list
So Iâve started reading a fantasy novel called Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett. Now, you may be wondering why Iâm recommending a fantasy novel series on this very non-fiction newsletter.
Hereâs the premise of the book: Magic has been industrialized and monopolized. Various merchant houses have subdivided the nation into provinces that they control. The magic? All types of objects can be written on with special runes to get them to act a certain way. For example, there are self propelling wheels that have been marked with runes that make them think they are perpetually moving downhill, thus they go forward.
The book (and the series, Iâm told) has allegorical components to modern real-life technology. Thereâs also something going on here with artificial intelligence. Please read this book so we can talk about it.
âĄïž Lightning
It seems like everyone I know is sick right now. Mask up, wash your hands, and if youâre sick stay home.
If you donât know, Elon Musk wants to literally fight Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck takes his martial arts training very seriously and doesnât have time for casuals.
Some little bits of technology that often go uncelebrated:
literal mirrors
glass, generally
đ Glossary
Analog
So we typically refer to clocks with hands as âanalog.â Thatâs because some kind of information is encoded or represented by physical, observable symbols or signals. Analog can be a little strange to define and identify because all different types of technology can be considered analog. Sun dials use the angle of the sun to represent time of day, film cameras use a special chemical mix on a material to capture light, typewriters use real-world stamps of letters to place ink onto a piece of paper. All of these are analog, they transfer information from some physical variable into human processable data.
Digital
Digital is considered the opposite of analog. In this case, real world information is encoded into âbitsâ that are readable by computers. To use some of the examples from above, instead of light being captured on a chemical film, digital cameras capture light on an electrical sensor that converts that information to bits. The information in those bits can be used to display your image on a screen. On a desktop computer, a press of a key on your keyboard relates some kind of encoded information to your computer which then receives it and goes âHm, okay so that is a letter X.â Digitalization thus makes copying much easier; all you need to do is take the instructions for one thing and put it onto another piece of hardware.
In the case of music, for example, vinyl records are considered analog. If you as a listener wanted to make a copy of your vinyl record, you might place a microphone in front of your speaker system, record it, and transfer THAT recording to its own vinyl. Or, you might place a removable epoxy over the surface of the record and use that mold to pour your own vinyl record. In both of these processes, the original work would be degraded due to external variables. Room noise, shoddy hardware, specks of dust in your epoxy, etc. Digital works do not have this problem. When they are duplicated they experience virtually zero degradation.
This is all to say that copyright law needs to do some work to catch up with how we copy things at all. It was much easier to enforce copyright law when copies were more difficult to produce and more identifiable.
âïž Answers
When is the new iPhone coming out?
You can basically set your watch to the second week of September for this.
Thatâs all for this week. Thanks for reading.