Hallo whoknows,
tausend Dank, dass Du den Link zu dieser denkwürdigen Rede nochmals gepostet hast! Es stimmt nicht, dass sich das
niemand angesehen hätte - ich kann Dir sagen, mehr Leute als man denken würde, diskutieren darüber... Nur halt eher weniger im 100-Millionen-Dorf der deutschsprachigen Europäer (ich kehre wieder zur rein männlichen Form zurück, es entspricht den Markt- und Machtverhältnissen auch im Musikbusiness)...
Ich will es mit einer Zusammenfassung versuchen. Was Courtney Love im Grunde sagt, ist:
- Dass die Major Labels schon lange von "Unterstützern der Künstler", die mehr als nur ein "Produkt" vertreiben, zu reinen Distributoren geworden sind.
- Die Majors kappen - ermöglicht durch diese
zentrale Stellung zwischen Künstler und Konsument - den direkten Kontakt vom Künstler zum Konsumenten. Und nebenbei vertreiben sie jedes künstlerische Werk ausschließlich als reines Produkt.
- Die Majors haben deshalb Angst vor Napster und Co, weil sie diese Mittlerstellung als Distributoren zu verlieren drohen oder verlieren könnten. (Kleine Randbemerkung von mir: Es geht dabei weniger um Umsatzverlust - denn wie auch Courtney Love anmerkt, die Künstler wollen und sollen auch bezahlt werden -, sondern viel eher um den Verlust dieser
macht-strategisch entscheidenden Position.)
- Die Majors haben sich unter Ausnutzung ihrer Distributions-Macht auch gleich
die Macht über die kreativen Inhalte angeeignet. Und
das ist das wahre Problem.
- Courtney Love ruft die "Creative Class" auf, Modelle zu entwickeln ("Filtering systems"), die eine künstlerische Entfaltung im Musikbusiness ebenso ermöglichen wie den authentischen Kontakt zwischen Künstlern und Publikum...
Hier die aus meiner Sicht wesentlichen Inhalte (die Hervorhebungen durch
Fettdruck hab' ich gemacht):
Quote:[...] Somewhere along the way, record companies figured out that it's a lot more profitable to control the distribution system than it is to nurture artists. And since the companies didn't have any real competition, artists had no other place to go. Record companies controlled the promotion and marketing; only they had the ability to get lots of radio play, and get records into all the big chain store. That power put them above both the artists and the audience. They own the plantation.
Being the gatekeeper was the most profitable place to be, but now we're in a world half without gates. The Internet allows artists to communicate directly with their audiences; we don't have to depend solely on an inefficient system where the record company promotes our records to radio, press or retail and then sits back and hopes fans find out about our music.
Record companies don't understand the intimacy between artists and their fans. They put records on the radio and buy some advertising and hope for the best. Digital distribution gives everyone worldwide, instant access to music.
And filters are replacing gatekeepers. In a world where we can get anything we want, whenever we want it, how does a company create value? By filtering. In a world without friction, the only friction people value is editing. A filter is valuable when it understands the needs of both artists and the public. New companies should be conduits between musicians and their fans.
[...]
Let's not call the major labels "labels." Let's call them by their real names: They are the distributors. They're the only distributors and they exist because of scarcity. Artists pay 95 percent of whatever we make to gatekeepers because we used to need gatekeepers to get our music heard. Because they have a system, and when they decide to spend enough money -- all of it recoupable, all of it owed by me -- they can occasionally shove things through this system, depending on a lot of arbitrary factors.
[...]
The corporate filtering system, which is the system that brought you (in my humble opinion) a piece of crap like "Mambo No. 5" and didn't let you hear the brilliant Cat Power record or the amazing new Sleater Kinney record, obviously doesn't have good taste anyway. But we've never paid major label/distributors for their good taste. They've never been like Yahoo and provided a filter service.
[...]
I still need the old stuff. I still need a producer in the creation of a recording, I still need to get on the radio (which costs a lot of money), I still need bin space for hardware CDs, I still need to provide an opportunity for people without computers to buy the hardware that I make. I still need a lot of this stuff, but I can get these things from a joint venture with a company that serves as a conduit and knows its place. Serving the artist and serving the public: That's its place.
A new company that gives artists true equity in their work can take over the world, kick ass and make a lot of money. We're inspired by how people get paid in the new economy. Many visual artists and software and hardware designers have real ownership of their work.
Einer der Unterschiede im urheberrechtlichen Sinne zwischen Europa und den USA ist: Das
Urheberrecht verbleibt in Europa dem Künstler. (Nicht aber die
Nutzungsrechte.) Die Stellung der Künslerin bei einem europäischen Label ist deshalb eine grundsätzlich bessere: wenn - und das ist freilich die Krux - europäisches Recht angewendet wird.
Anyway: Wovon die Künstler im Alltag leben, das sind ohnehin die Nutzungsrechte. Und es geht immer wieder um den Marktzugang. Wenn der von Majors verstopft ist, wird's schwer - siehe Dotcom-Sterben und Microsoft-Blühen. Aber auch die "Dotcom-Denke" hat so ihre Fallen:
Quote:[...]The celebrity-for-sale business is about to crash, I hope, and the idea of a sucker VC gifting some company with four floors just because they can "do" "chats" with "Christina" once or twice is ridiculous. I did a chat today, twice. Big damn deal. 200 bucks for the software and some elbow grease and a good back-end coder. Wow. That's not worth 150 million bucks.
... I mean, yeah, sure it is if you'd like to give it to me.
I know my place. I'm a waiter. I'm in the service industry.
[...]
It's exactly the same with recorded music. The real thing to fear from Napster is its simple and excellent distribution system. No one really prefers a cruddy-sounding Napster MP3 file to the real thing. But it's really easy to get an MP3 file; and in the middle of Kansas you may never see my record because major distribution is really bad if your record's not in the charts this week, and even then it takes a couple of weeks to restock the one copy they usually keep on hand.
[...]
Most people don't go into restaurants and stiff waiters, but record labels represent the restaurant that forces the waiters to live on, and sometimes pool, their tips. And they even fight for a bit of their tips.
Music is a service to its consumers, not a product. I live on tips. Giving music away for free is what artists have been doing naturally all their lives.
Record companies stand between artists and their fans. We signed terrible deals with them because they controlled our access to the public.
But in a world of total connectivity, record companies lose that control. With unlimited bin space and intelligent search engines, fans will have no trouble finding the music they know they want. They have to know they want it, and that needs to be a marketing business that takes a fee.
Das ist die Vision, die allerdings voraussetzt, dass die "Internet-Kultur" auch tatsächlich zur bestimmenden Kultur wird und TV, Radio, Magazines, CDs e.g. weitgehend ersetzt:
Quote:We'll still have to use radio and traditional CD distribution. Record stores aren't going away any time soon and radio is still the most important part of record promotion.
Major labels are freaking out because they have no control in this new world. Artists can sell CDs directly to fans. We can make direct deals with thousands of other Web sites and promote our music to millions of people that old record companies never touch.
[...]
A lot of people who haven't been around artists very much get really weird when they sit down to lunch with us. So I want to give you some advice: Learn to speak our language. Talk about songs and melody and hooks and art and beauty and soul. Not sleazy record-guy crap, where you're in a cashmere sweater murmuring that the perfect deal really is perfect, Courtney. Yuck. Honestly hire honestly committed people. We're in a "new economy," right? You can afford to do that.
But don't talk to me about "content."
I get really freaked out when I meet someone and they start telling me that I should record 34 songs in the next six months so that we have enough content for my site. Defining artistic expression as content is anathema to me.
What the hell is content? Nobody buys content. Real people pay money for music because it means something to them. A great song is not just something to take up space on a Web site next to stock market quotes and baseball scores.
[...]
Don't tell me I'm a brand. I'm famous and people recognize me, but I can't look in the mirror and see my brand identity.
Ja, und genau DAS haut die Menschen immer vom Hocker: Dass die Ansicht, dass nicht alles PRODUKT ist, sondern auch nicht messbare KUNST, KREATIVITÄT, VERSTAND (ja, auch der!), GEFÜHL etc.; dass all das AUCH aus den USA kommt.
Dass gerade in den USA das Bewusstsein für die "Creative Class"
http://www.creativeclass.org/_flight_riseoverview.shtml wächst und blüht und gedeiht... Richard Florida ist sozusagen der "Wissenschafts-Star", der den Diskurs auf ganz US-amerikanische Weise weitertreibt, in Großbritannien noch sehr bekannt ist und im Rest von Europa
http://www.creativeclass.org/acrobat/Europe_in_the_Creative_Age_2004.pdf schon weniger...
Quote:As a user, I love Napster. It carries some risk. I hear idealistic business people talk about how people that are musicians would be musicians no matter what and that we're already doing it for free, so what about copyright?
Please. It's incredibly easy not to be a musician. It's always a struggle and a dangerous career choice. We are motivated by passion and by money.
That's not a dirty little secret. It's a fact. Take away the incentive for major or minor financial reward and you dilute the pool of musicians. I am not saying that only pure artists will survive. Like a few of the more utopian people who discuss this, I don't want just pure artists to survive. Where would we all be without the trash? We need the trash to cover up our national depression.
[...]
We suffer as a society and a culture when we don't pay the true value of goods and services delivered. We create a lack of production. Less good music is recorded if we remove the incentive to create it.
Schöner kann man das marktwirtschaftlich-demokratische Prinzip einer Gesellschaft nicht ausdrücken. (Und die Rede wird als "Case Study" in Colleges auch rauf und runter gespielt - in den USA, aber NICHT bei uns in Europa.)
Quote:How dare they behave in such a horrified manner in regards to copyright law when their entire industry is based on piracy?
Und wann bitte, wacht die Europäische Politik, wann wachen die Europäischen Künstlerinnen auf und wehren sich dagegen, jetzt auch noch die rechtlichen Regeln der US-amerikanischen Unterhaltungsindustrie übergestülpt zu bekommen?
Quote:It's a radical democratization. Every artist has access to every fan and every fan has access to every artist, and the people who direct fans to those artists. People that give advice and technical value are the people we need. People crowding the distribution pipe and trying to ignore fans and artists have no value. This is a perfect system.
If you're going to start a company that deals with musicians, please do it because you like music. Offer some control and equity to the artists and try to give us some creative guidance. If music and art and passion are important to you, there are hundreds of artists who are ready to rewrite the rules.
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html Ja genau, einige spannende Projekte in diese Richtung entstehen überall auf dieser schönen Welt - es wäre doch mal eine tolle Sache, SOLCHE Projekte an dieser Stelle (in einem eigenem Thread) vorzustellen und zu promoten!
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