I remember having a lunchtime conversation with my Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Murray many years ago. My uncle, who is a mathematician, posed a (serious) question about why companies keep needing to make more and more money. I thought about this question for a long time, and it finally dawned on me that if you own a business and make just enough money to make your product and make a living from selling it, your business will fail because the amount you need to pay in materials, utilities, taxes, repairs, advertizing, insurance, and salaries will continue to rise. And the costs of being in business need to be worked into the cost of whatever it is you are selling, and that requires growing your business. That, I guess, is the foundation of capitalism.
Value seems to be determined by what something can be sold for. In the case of physical art (or instruments) or antiques (or first edition books), the resale value seems to be determined on the state of a particularl market (or so the Antiques Roadshow tells me). Something made by someone who is no longer alive often ends up having more monetary value than it would have had while that person was living. Go figure.
And then there is "intellectual property," which is rarely intellectual, and never property in the physical sense of the word. And that "intellectual property" is often controlled by a person or company that holds the copyright, until it expires and goes into the public domain. When that happens it no longer has monetary value. The practical value (I'm talking about music and literature here) that it has after going into the public domain remains the same, but in our current climate it seems to have little value when it is made immediately available via the IMSLP, the Internet Archive, or the Gutenberg library, because (maybe) it is in the great "bin" of things that aren't worth selling. Images are different. Getty and Lebrecht (a member of Norman's family, maybe) obtained copyrights for all sorts of images, and they make a great deal of money selling their use.
Back in the earlier days of the Internet (not so long ago) YouTube videos used to offer music and other stuff that was instantly available. Now the things that people put on their YouTube channels are preceded by advertisements. The person who provided the "content" doesn't have a say about which advertisements come before their videos, and, unless they have a commercial account with YouTube, never see any kind of compensation from the entities that post the advertisements. Ads interrupt movies at random moments, and they interrupt pieces of music. The only way not to see the ads is to pay YouTube not to see them.
Back in the "before time" it used to be fun to see what might come up on the YouTube sidebar. Now it seems that the AI bots that keep track of my YouTube viewing and listening are getting more aggressive about what they want me to see. Perhaps they want me to see videos that have particuar ads, or videos that a YouTube user has paid to have made more visible.
Visibility on the Google-based internet used to be driven by popularity. Now it seems to be driven by a whole host of factors that I feel are way beyond my control.
I used to chuckle when I noticed that after buying something online my email, Facebook feed, and Instagram feed would be full of similar products. I used to think that my feeds were personalized to my interests, but I now feel like my feeds are slowly driving my interests to a place I may not want to go. I admit that I have spent far too much time scrolling through entertaining videos on Intagram, but they have nothing to do with who I actually am (thank goodness) and what I actually need.
Facebook has been an effective way for me to share my work (which I offer mostly for free) with musicians who can use it. But now I have no idea who among my thousand or so Facebook friends sees what I post, or when. I might share this post on Facebook and see if anyone comments. Or not.
So I have been trying to spend more time away from the commercial parts of the internets, and spend more time with the things that really matter to me. It feels so great, for example, to have obtained enough piano technique to understand how great it feels to play Schumann on the piano.
As the world becomes more driven by the intelligence that is artificial, I feel less and less "connected." I also know that because of the "devaluation" of the blogosphere this post will only be read by people who know me or know my work. And that's fine. Actually, that is great.
Unlike "content creators" who need to generate enough "content" to remain visible and relevant, I am content (not a bad pun) to write what I want when I want (both music and prose), and have it be enjoyed for what it is by dozens--on or off line.
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3 comments:
A couple of comments.
First, you mention that "Something made by someone who is no longer alive often ends up having more monetary value than it would have had while that person was living. Go figure." This is a matter of scarcity: there can no longer be more things made by that person, so the number of things is now fixed permanently in place.
Second, you wrote "And that "intellectual property" is often controlled by a person or company that holds the copyright, until it expires and goes into the public domain. When that happens it no longer has monetary value." To the contrary, when a song or a book or an image goes into the public domain, it has value to anyone who might want to use it, not just to the person or company that previously had sole ownership of it. So Riccordi or the Puccini estate had control of "Turandot" until it went into the public domain, and you could, say, write a new ending for it only with their permission. Now anyway can write a new ending of the opera or rewrite the libretto.
I guess I was thinking about the scads and scads of material in the public domain that a great many people don’t value as much as they value the stuff that you can buy. The things I find in the public domain are of unmeasurable value to me. The treasures I find in the IMSLP mean everything to me.
How I wish that people who make art could benefit from the price it can be sold for after their death. The finite nature of life has been on my mind lately.
Oh how I value your reading and commenting, Lisa!
The issue you're raising with respect to prices after some dies applies to the living as well. If an artist sells a work at age 25, and by the time she's 40 she's famous and the work is resold for ten times what she initially sold it for, she doesn't receive any payment from the resale.
I'm not sure what legal changes would be required for a person to profit from a rise in value after the initial sale or after death, but it would probably mean extending copyright even further into the future or creating laws giving artists a cut of sales after the work passes out of their ownership. I would have qualms about doing this.
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