Gary and May,
Here is a musical question for you. I was chatting with an old friend last week and he is a musician who has begun to "venture" out onto the web. I was explaining to him how people (and I used you as an email) utilize blogs and the downloadable song approach.

His question to me (and I am passing it to you for comment) was: "How do they protect themselves from someone stealing the music they write?"

Easy enough, and I can give at least two answers:

1) How does he intend to protect himself from people stealing his songs _anywhere_? -- I suppose you could roll it up in a little ball and put it where the sun don't shine, but is that _really_ why we create songs? We create because we have no choice, we create to communicate, and in this modern age, _every_ relayed communication can be duplicated and rebroadcast. So it's not a matter of being online or not, it's just a fact of life.

bq. When we were in the design phase for the Information Highway exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre, Exhibits Director Heinz Riese said he was concerned about the sorts of content our 1995 audience might bring into the exhibit space. _It is like putting a vending machine for handguns into a highschool_ was how he put it. I said, _Heinz, we have to accept that the vending machine is already there ... it's time we instead started teaching our kids when is the appropriate time to go get a gun._

or alternatively ..

2) We write really good songs and write more all the time.

IMHO, this is all about running from ghosts.

Shareability is not the issue -- people have been taping off the radio since the invention of the home recording wire -- the only _real_ danger is others taking your song as their own, slapping a restrictive copyright or DRM technology on it, and cutting us out from singing our own song by threatening legal action if we do. That is a pretty obscure danger, but the solution is also easy:

Copyright doesn't restrict rights, it allows them -- by default, Copyright law says maximum restrictions apply, so by using the Creative Commons license, we specify exactly which rights we are willing to waive, and thereby we make our music _shareable_ without exposing ourselves to the _real_ theft, the pirates to take the property and claim it as exclusively their own (like the contract May had with EMI, I might add ;)

Oh, here's a third answer, best of the bunch, but it is not mine, it comes from Woody Guthrie ...

bq. "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

One further bit on that notion of writing really good songs -- I believe what people seek is not the song, but the contact with the mind of the artist; the artists speak for them in ways they find clumsy to do themselves, so they take our songs, poems, novels and movies to heart, make them their own.

But the thing is, time marches on, they need new songs, new words, new expressions. On one hand, they want to know how we the artists are doing, how we are developing, what we are thinking _now_ and they themselves mature and seek more sophistocated expressions. So they come back to the reliable sources who spoke to/for them before, and they ask for more.

if you are known as an artist, which today rests on being _share-friendly_ -- if only because the stats say the RIAA are going to pump out ever smaller catalogs in ever larger init numbers for every higher shareholder returns -- then yours are more likely to be the words and images your fans seek then if you just hid in your basement.

So what if one tune hits a Chevy commercial? I guarantee, those who like your stuff go to Chevy for more, they will find out who you are and come back to you. Ditto if they heard you on a high-school film studies project soundtrack, or on an MP3 player overheard on a subway ...

If you have to put it in the terminology of _The Biz_ it means your market _value_ goes up the more you are known as a valuable resource, which means your ticket price goes up, which means you start to make a decent living. Recordings are, in these sensibilities, a _loss leader_, a "cost of doing business" and the essential lesson is there being few things more useless than last year's album (which, sales tell us, is the vast majority case, golden oldies are the exceptions)

By contrast, if you "stick to digital restrictions management(Read this presentation given to MS last week)":http://www.teledyn.com/mt/archives/002001.html you end up owning 100%, but of something so obscure that it is effectively worthless. You might make money now while you happen to be the darling of Billboard and Rolling Stone, but come back in two weeks ...

So it really boils down to a question of _Why are you doing this anyway?_ and if the answer is "To create an essential product to be licensed for all uses and thereby become as rich as Proctor and Gamble" then the answer is _stay away from digital media_ (or marry Microsoft); if, on the other hand, the answer is, "To communicate our vision to people and help them in this struggle we call human life" then you want to be heard, you want to be understood, you want to _make contact_ ...

and the internet is your very best comm-channel.

A closely related question is that of DRM (Digital Restrictions Mangement) aka the political wars going on where the technology companies are going _outside the law_ as self-appointed IP vigilantes set on restricting who and what you can listen to and where.

The very best reference I can offer you on this issue is EFF spokesperson Cory Doctorow and his excellent presentation given to Microsoft's Research Group last week, especially the section on "Why DRM systems are bad for artists":http://www.commonhouse.net/wiki/drm/DRM_20systems_20are_20bad_20for_20artists

This article I read in the New York Time was interesting and very much in line with what you've been saying, so I thought I'd share a bit with you in addition to the link.

"The key thing was when I realized that anyone could download music for free," Mr. Camelio said. "I got to thinking: what's the one thing you can't download, the one thing that the artist can hold on to? The answer: the creative process. That's the product I'm offering: the creative process."

You can get the full details http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/04/arts/music/04KAPL.html?ei=5090&en=3341caf43b73c95f&ex=1246593600&partner=techdirt&pagewanted=all&position="

(Sorry for the messy URL but you form for posting a comment wouldn't accept HTML tags)

Proving once again how truly great minds are frequently unoriginal with respect to each other ;) ... I had blogged "that same New York Times article(indirectly and coincidentally also from TechDirt)":http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/04/arts/music/04KAPL.html?ei=5090&en=3341caf43b73c95f&ex=1246593600&partner=techdirt&pagewanted=all&position= earlier this afternoon on "TeledyN":http://www.teledyn.com/mt/archives/002026.html :)

yes, it seems there are artists out there who _are_ waking up to the smell of the digital redistribution coffee; the NYT article perhaps unveils another basic truth, that the old guard won't be the ones to change, they will simply fade away out of irrelevence, replaced by the newer and more nimble share-friendly upstarts.

bq. [ _As for the link/href rules in my blog-comments, it's a sad reality of blogging that allowing html links or auto-linking on URLs become a magnet for abuse attacks._ ]

Trackback from TeledyN:

Not bad, really, considering we've only posted two tracks and especially considering the fine offerings by the competition; it's worth a little self-backpats to know May and I can hit the Top......