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 "So the guys who started this business all cheated somebody to get
there, and now they're being cheated, perhaps, by all these crazy,
geeky people all over the internet. I must say, my anguish level is not
great."
Richard Dreyfuss
"although
iTunes has 70% of the pay to download music market - only 1 in 40 of
all tracks downloaded on the web are ever paid for. That's 2.5%"
For many years now people have been telling us how much the media world is changing. And it is. Faster than we ever imagined.
I downloaded
my first Torrent this week. It took me about 20 minutes to download and
install the software and get an album called Wu Orleans - a
mash-up of Old New Orleans Blues and the Wu Tang Clan which will never
appear in a shop. There’s the rub - if I wanted to pay to buy the album
I wouldn’t be able. Like DJ ‘Gnarls Barkleys’ Dangermouse’s Grey Album,
and DJ BC’s Let it Beastles it’s in a strange category of illegal
downloads where there’s no legitimate alternative. The
choice is between never hearing these songs or breaking copyright law.
DJ BC and Dangermouse are so good at what they do that the idea of
simply
never listening to the tracks wasn’t really an option.
But now, as a
result, I have a piece of software which could, if I so chose, allow me
to download pretty much any album, TV, piece of software or film. For
free. I won’t. But I could.
I read last
week on the FT that although iTunes has 70% of the pay to download music market -
only 1 in 40 of all tracks downloaded on the web are paid for. That’s
2.5%.
I’ll say that again. 2.5% of music downloaded on the internet is paid for. The other 97.5% is ‘illegal’.
Shift this across to the world of film and you may get a glimpse of
quite how things are changing, and why some people in the industry are
- to put it mildly - concerned.
It would
be a great time to be a snake oil salesman. To offer the industry some
miracle Digital Rights Management cure, some piece of technology, some
dongle that would turn back time to the days when you couldn’t
duplicate a bunch of 0s and 1s to create seamless perfect copies. Or to
provide the powers that be with the details of a single organisation or
server farm which, if they shut it down, could put an end to
these threats and guarantee the multi billion dollar media
conglomerates an unimpeded flow of their multi billion dollar revenues.
 And
there’s the rub. While the studios shout that piracy hurts the artists
and the filmmakers and musicians, most savvies know that - AT MOST -
10% of the cover price of any DVD or album will go to the original
artists or production company. In many cases it’s much less. When you
bring creative accounting in, sometimes the people who made the project
such a success will never see anything. Forrest Gump earned over $677
million at the box office worldwide, yet famously never made a
‘profit’. The Blair Witch Project, the low budget $35,000 guerilla
filmmaking legend (the most profitable film ever made according to
Guiness), grossed well over $248 million at the box office alone yet
the filmmakers are apparently still yet to see more than their original
$1m advance. As Richard Dreyfuss recently said "So the guys who started
this business all cheated somebody to get there, and now they're being
cheated, perhaps, by all these crazy, geeky people all over the
internet. I must say, my anguish level is not great."
"we may be witnessing a massive shift in the way the media industry
operates from a relationship between creative people and consumers that
is mediated by large multinational businesses, to one which is mediated
as transparently as possible by technology"
Hollywood’s
history is splattered with the blood and tears of corruption, dirty
deals and backstabbing. Its vast wealth has been accumulated from the
work of an array of incredibly talented directors, writers,
visionaries, artists, musicians and actors. By standing between these
master storytellers and the public, Hollywood has managed to both make
vast sums of money, and - more controversially - saturate the world’s
cinemas and TVs with what could be seen as variations on the American
Dream.
Perhaps it is this factor more than anything else which piracy-celebrating sites such as Sweden's Pirate Bay are
trying to draw attention to. As the web helps the world shift closer to
a form of balanced global consensus across the billions of citizens who
have web access and freedom of expression, then there is inevitably a
greater sensitivity to dominance from any one culture. Especially
against the backdrop of war, poverty and the looming potential for
environmental devastation - all of which seem low on the current US
administration's policy agenda. It’s not an anti-American thing - I’m
sure there are plenty of people in America who would like to see the
media they consume be free from corporate bias, while reflecting a
broad and diverse human race, in ways that honestly depict the problems
of the world - perhaps even exploring ways they can be resolved.
Hollywood
makes some amazing films, but there is still an overwhelming favoritism
towards white, English speaking male heroes, even in a great ‘subversive’
film like A Scanner Darkly. I can’t actually think of a famous Muslim
leading actor - that’s terrible. (OK, Wikipedia
tells me of Ellen Burstyn, Dave Chapelle and Omar Sharif, but that’s it
really. Even tho there are as many Muslims as Christians in the
world, just about, Osama bin Laden is no doubt still the most
recognisable Muslim face to most Americans).
But
I digress. The point is that piracy is an unavoidable reality. The
political and ethical issues only increase the resolve of the pirates,
as do the bullying and gung-ho attitudes of organisations such as the
RIAA and the MPAA.
The
nature of torrents as a technology would effectively require the
shutting down of the Internet to prevent people from sharing films or
music. The imprisonment or fining of individual file sharers may scare
some people off doing it, but it is just as likely to alienate and
anger potential consumers. Scaled up to the millions of people who ARE
doing it, enforcement is arguably impossible to administer. It's really
hard to see how ‘the stick’ will work in a realm as open, vast and
unregulated as the net.
 Last
week Universal Music, the world’s biggest music company, announced it
was going to try a version of ‘the carrot’ by offering free music
downloads to consumers who first watch an advert. The SpiralFrog
service will arrive later in 2006 in the US and next year in the UK.
It’ll be interesting to see if it works, but if PVRs are anything to go
by, people just don’t like be told to do something, least of all watch
‘a word from our sponsors’ and will sooner or later find ways to
circumnavigate. But at least the industry is trying.
So what is
to be done? Without revenues the music and film industries cannot
survive. Films are the most expensive of art forms. Most artists are
busting to give up the day job, and surely the more talented and
committed should be able to? Is it done for? Can there be no more
professional film and music production in a digital future?
Well I
don’t know and I don’t want to Snake Oil it by saying I know how to
prevent that. But it seems pretty unlikely. In fact, so long as people
are prepared to use money for buying and doing stuff, it’s maybe impossible.
Think of
buskers. No-one needs to pay them for their music. There is no contract
or rights management software which requires you to throw some money in
their hat - nor, for that matter, are you guaranteed a nod and a smile
when you do. But people do. And good buskers make good money.
What we
may be witnessing is a massive shift in the way the media industry
operates from a relationship between creative people and consumers that
is mediated by large multinational business, to one which is mediated
as transparently as possible by technology, by the web. In other words,
producers communicating with and selling directly to audiences.
I think of
Kevin Smith, cult director, who showed just quite how creative one can
be on a microbudget with Clerks and who now blogs and chats with his
fans through silentbobspeaks.com (thanks Chris from Dundee for alerting me to this). Another site - jayandsilentbob.com
sells all manner of merchandise - t-shirts, action figures, fake props,
real props, posters and of course copies of his films. Almost all of
which come signed by Kevin Smith himself. Given the adoring fandom
which surrounds Smith (his Edinburgh Film Festival appearance sold out
in minutes), you wonder if he could finance a film directly from these
sites - pre-selling signed copies of the DVD and auctioning off roles
as extras. Even without this, the shift is clear - as a film lover the
impression is that there is no studio managed interface between you and
Kevin Smith. When he interrupts a blog post to have sex with his
girlfriend, you know that he is talking to you directly, without the
bullshit - and you, in turn, buy from him his films (and Shot Glasses,
Banky Hats and Silent Bob Coats).
 We now live in an era where a blogger like Josh Ellis could ask his readers to pay him $500 so he could travel to Nevada and write an essay about his trip to the origins of the Manhattan project or where Daniel at PouringDown.tv could raise over $2000 from dozens of readers via Fundable.org to go and make a film a day on a week long road trip for the Seven Maps project.
The
landscape is changing, and the thing that struck me at Edinburgh last
week was quite how unaware and unexcited the UK industry seems to be. Of course the fact that
most of these shifts are coming from the US is perhaps part of the
problem. A suspicion towards technology in the UK has been going on
since the levelers (and probably right back to the days when people
started cooking meat on fires before eating it). And it’s
understandable - I must confess given how addictive things like the web
are I do share concerns of a youtubed future where everyone watches -
and contributes to - their own personalized channel without enganging
with the outside world - or their families - much at all. But these
changes are happening, they are unavoidable, and sticking one’s head in
the sand may only increase the shock once the shifts in the landscape
have settled down, and reduce the potential influence.
"Think of buskers. No-one needs to pay them for their music. There is no
contract or rights management software which requires you to throw some
money in their hat - nor, for that matter, are you guaranteed a nod and
a smile when you do. But people do."
For there
are big questions to consider. Should you, for example, as a filmmaker,
put your energies into befriending public and private financiers who
may (or may not) one day fund your work, and make best efforts to
present yourself to them as a safe bet, nothing too unpredictable,
irrational or headstrong. Or would it make more sense to build up a web
audience. A collection of blog readers, vlog watchers, buddies,
subscribers and people you chat with online, who probably are most
interested in the qualities as a filmmaker which make your work less
like everything else they see; that which is your uniqueness, your humanness, your individuality.
It’s a bit of Cluetrain
conclusion, and one that’s in the front of my mind right now as I try
and weigh up a similar choice with Netribution. Should the site - and
indeed myself as its cofounder - focus on wooing screen agencies,
quangos and production companies for a bit of cash so that it can stay
sustainable and launch some pretty interesting projects. Or should we
focus on making - when inspired - great original content that will
build up our audience
to such a level where this isn’t a factor. I know which of those paths
would allow me to keep the most of my personality intact - and as a
filmmaker - that’s more appealing. But at the same time there are some
amazing things that, with a bit of cash, could be really quite useful
to
independent filmmakers. And if we are
shifting from studio dominated content distribution to a creative
dominated system, then it would be a missed opportunity if none of the
mechanisms for achieving this global collaboration and distribution
were UK - or even European - based.
One can
imagine the whole infrastructure, how it would need to work, how one
could build a kind of Wikipedia for independent creatives, an open
source media multinational, a technology as an alternative to the power
of the media
conglomerates to connect individuals throughout the entire process as
transparently and efficiently and impartially as possible. It seems,
the more I look at it, inevitable and unavoidable. Some could even
argue that the web as it stands now is an early framework for such a
structure.
I just hope
that when the final pieces come together they don’t come attached - as the vast majority of the media,
including the big sites like MySpace, Blogger and Flickr - as simply a
continuation of the US-centric, shareholder-accountable media world
built around a drive to increase profit margins.
Maybe I’m a dreamer, but just imagine it - a human-centric, socially-accountable media ecosystem, built around great art, music, storytelling and ideas.
(Images by OneSmallVoice and Jeff Belmonte from Flickr CreativeCommons pool)
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For a legal system to work, greed has to be stripped out. I would encourage any artist who sells their unprotected MP3s off their web site for $0.25. They would probably make more money than from the current system.
Until then...greed will be the greatest obstacle to the industry, not copy protection.