Modernaire Strike Back!
Ruth (Chestie La Rue – what’s not to love about a name like that) from Modernaire has replied to my rambling nonsense about copyright and freebies, although she did so in a comment, so I thought I’d move it up here for your perusal:
Hello all. It’s Ruth here from Modernaire and The Moulettes. Sorry for the delay in responding but we’ve been touring and driving a lot and today is the first proper bit of time I’ve had to get something written down. I apologise for my clumsy way with words but I’m extremely tired and verging on mid-tour tonsilitis.
As Matthew explained earlier, the problem was in fact just with one song and one particular site (the Kruger website). In fact all of us love blogs and bloggers. To be honest Hannah and I aren’t particularly technically minded but we still browse blogs from time to time to find out about new and exciting things. I know that you were expecting us to come back with an adversarial response but really we completely support the use of our songs by people on the blogs. After all, it’s about the music and it virtually pointless to write about music if it can’t be simply heard. I honestly do not believe that blogs are taking money from our pockets, if anything they are helping a huge amount. So many people have discovered us through blogs and then gone on to come to gigs and buy cds. This may be a vast generalisation but I would say that the people who are interested enough in music to spend their time discussing music in fora such as these are the kind of people who go out and buy/see the music too. For small bands like us gigs are the biggest potential sources of income and without internet hype nobody would be booking bands outside their local area.
There’s one small thing that would possibly cause a little resentment but I don’t think blogs generally do this. If you were to put up a band’s songs for download without their permission I think that would be a bit cheeky. Essentially a band’s material is theirs to do what they like with but if other people want to talk about it, play it to their friends and even give it to their friends then that is fine as long as we don’t forget to support the music scene in a physical as well as a virtual manner by going to gigs and buying the music too
I just think it’s such a shame to see talented musicians, such as Hannah, wasting their potential creative time working in crap jobs to pay the bills. I could slip into a little rant now about the evils of greedy promoters (they’re the guilty ones not the music fans) but I won’t because i don’t have time, got to get ready to play the sold out Astoria this evening!
Hmm. A few things to think about there, if you ask me, as well as thanking Ruth for taking the time to write back. I really do appreciate it.
Firstly, I don’t always ask permission to post things. In fact, I rarely do. I know blogs that do but I, erm, am just too lazy I suppose. It would be a nightmare and would rub out the spontaneity of the things I write here. That’s not a justification exactly, nor an excuse, more of an admission of culpability I suppose.
Secondly, I have some doubts about the following statement: “Essentially a band’s material is theirs to do what they like with”. I know it makes sense on the face of it, but I am not sure if it’s true. Culture is a shared enterprise and, as Campfires & Battlefields has eloquently pointed out on this site before, once you release things into the world you kind of relinquish ownership and spill it into the sea of things that we share between us. I know it sounds crazy to say that someone’s artistic output is not entirely their own, but art of all kinds is an interaction, not something that is merely delivered to you and I think that once you put it out into the world you do have to surrender a degree of ownership. I am not sure how much ownership you have to surrender – I am still thinking about that one – but I don’t know if you can claim anything to be entirely ‘yours’ once you ask other people to listen to it. That doesn’t change the fact that failing to get permission to post people’s songs is not entirely okay, of course.
The most crucial point, actually, is the last one. You can make a justifiable argument for giving anything and everything away for free. Take this site for example: I give it all away. The writing, the sessions, the podcasts, all of it. Given the effort, what do I get to charge for? I really don’t know. For musicians it’s similar. They do not make money touring – don’t let anyone tell you this because it’s bollocks. Touring is an arduous and expensive business for virtually all bands, so don’t let anyone tell you it will make up for lost album sales because it won’t (touring, I mean, not just playing live, which is a different story).
So at some point, after you’ve raised all the publicity you can and received all the critical acclaim you can muster, you have to decide that some things need to be paid for, but what are they? As Ruth says, it makes sense to allow blogs to talk about things because I would agree that the word of mouth is important, and it can even be argued that it makes sense to allow some file-sharing as well, because it too spreads the word far and wide. But where does the money come from? Ultimately, if you are to avoid having great musicians sweating away at shitty jobs, they need to be paid. Money needs to be coming into the system from somewhere, and at the moment I really don’t see where that is coming from.
I think that trying to drive traffic, as Kruger have done, by trying to insist on exclusivity or trying to restrict or own dialogue as many are trying to do in the internet age, is just not the way to do it. I can see their point of view, in the same way I think I would be justified in trying to make the Toad Sessions exclusive, but I still pretty much think it’s the wrong approach. Then again, I am not paying my bills with this.
At the moment though I think the best plan is not to worry about that sort of thing: build an audience, build a fan base, get out there and get some loyal listeners and trust that somewhere, somehow, this will end up being something that will create its own opportunities. How the fuck you manage this as a band without losing all faith in the dream is beyond me though. How and when do you put your foot down and say ‘No, not this time. Now you need to put your hands in your pockets, people.’ I just don’t think anyone has a good answer to this question at the moment.
These two songs come from the brilliant Velvet Never Dries, which can be purchased from the Modernaire MySpace page here.
Modernaire – Bloodshed in the Woodshed One of my favourite songs of the year, this one.
Modernaire – Rain
And here is Hannah and Ruth’s other band, the wonderful Moulettes. Do me a favour and buy something from both bands because it’s not expensive, and I really appreciate them making their contribution to this page and being so patient with my nonsense. And, of course, they’re both fucking brilliant.
The Moulettes – Pirate Song
There’s a broken link for
Bloodshed In The Woodshed
Matthew,
I agree with your comments to a degree, but one thing I can’t follow in your arguement is that “culture is a shared enterprise”. Only to an extent, but there still has to be author ownership.
How would feel if you saw a poster for the Scarlet Johansson album that read:
“Scarlett Johansson…. is a genius” – Song, By Toad
Or how would you feel if a reviewer for the Sun lifted one of your posts wholesale and reprinted it as his own?
I know these examples don’t correlate exactly to a band’s music being used without their permission, but I’m just trying to show that by putting your work “out there”, you’re making it publically available – but you still have to retain ownership.
I am not saying that you have to surrender all rights or that anyone has to just offer something up to the world and then give up on it. What I said was that there is a degree to which, as soon as you are asking other people to interact with your creative enterprises, that you have already surrendered a degree of ownership.
If you want to keep your art, whatever it is, shut in your house and just do it for your own sake then that’s fine, but as soon as you put it out into the world people are going to create their own meanings for it and have their own interactions with it – you can’t and shouldn’t have any right to demand to influence this interaction.
So I am not saying that you surrender authorship or give up all right to determine how the work is used, but there is still a degree to which this is true and necessary.
The examples you cite are a bit different to what I’m talking about, too. One is simply a direct misquote, a lie, as I never said that. Flatly misrepresenting someone’s position is just dishonest, but it’s not a question of copyright or ownership.
Lifting the review wholesale is also simply plagiarism. A more appropriate analogy would be simply reprinting my reviews as Song, by Toad reviews in their paper and then selling that paper. This is almost exactly analagous to what we do on music blogs: we use other people’s stuff and give them full credit. For the most part the arguments are the same too: up to a point it would be hugely beneficial to me to have my reviews printed verbatim and credited in The Sun, but there would come a point where I would have to start to ask myself why they were making money from my writing and I, irrespective of credit or audience received, was not. Where that point lies though is anyone’s guess.
Here’s another example: one of my readers recently changed his Facebook profile picture to the Toad sketch I have in the blog header. My initial reaction was ‘Hey, that’s mine!’ but if I’d used an EH Shepard sketch myself would I think I was doing something bad? Probably not. There’s no credit or benefit to me and no attribution, but do I have the right to ask him to stop? I don’t know, but it would feel a bit weird doing it and I don’t think it would be right, somehow.
I am not saying there is a dogmatically right view on this, but an artist’s work is not exclusively their own from the second they invite other people to appreciate it: it becomes, to a limited and undefined degree, a shared thing at that point. To what extent? I don’t know, I’m still trying to get my head around that.
I agree with the idea that the album is yours til you put it out in the public domain where it then becomes everybody elses to share and enjoy. There is a big difference though between letting go of the music ona personal level and letting go of the rights to the music.
That’s true. You know it’s yours when it reality it isn’t really. But the relationship between artist and audience is clearly symbiotic. I just particularly struggle to understand the extent to which you should have to relinquish control once you publish.
All music emanates from the precious wounds of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and all those who seek to profit therefrom shall buuuuuurnnnn!
Erm, C&B, pull yourself together and say something sensible you arse.
Fecalith?
Erm, yes, no way anyone could accuse that of being anything but entirely sensible.
Hurn.
um, didn’t you say a loooong way back (when you were displaying your ‘in work but not doing any so am buggering about drawdin instead’ wares) that people could do whatever they wanted with your sketches? I haven’t bothered to lok back through the posts to check if that statement is indeed correct, but I do remember something along those lines being floated.
Yes, exactly. I am not saying that I want to stop the fella using the sketch, I am just saying that when I saw that he had it felt weird: I had a brief proprietary instinct that I had to remind myself to quell.