Ignorance or Indifference to Exploitation?

It is with great shame that I must confess that I have never taken the time to really give Billy Bragg's music a listen. But I've long been familiar with his politics, and I always admire an artist who isn't afraid to infuse their socio-political ideology into their craft. It is in this sense that I admire Billy Bragg a great deal, despite having listened to fewer than ten of his songs.

He notably chose to remove his songs from his myspace page in the past because he felt the terms and conditions of MySpace were suggesting that any content a user (or in his case, the music owned by a musician) uploads to the site then becomes, in effect, the property of MySpace and they are then free to use it as they will. His protest contributed to a widespread response against MySpace's terms and conditions and they were subsequently changed.
More recently, I have read (around the internet) that he had spoken at SXSW about the difficulty artists face in making a living as musicians in the internet age. I was glancing through last Saturday's New York Times when I came across an editorially written by Billy Bragg about this very subject, entitled The Royalty Scam.

To paraphrase what I gleaned from the article, Bragg asserts (and I agree with him, though I still see other benefits to having a MySpace page for my music) that these websites, such as MySpace, which allow users to upload their music are benefiting from this content (vis-a-vis advertising revenue) which encourages more viewers and users to come to MySpace (e.g.) to listen to bands' music, and are doing so without paying the artists any royalties.

I'll let Bragg complete this point:

The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet, too?

This is an idea that I had never really given much consideration to in the past, but I must say that after reading this, I agree. Again, I see other benefits to having my music on MySpace, namely the immediate accessibility for and to fans, old and new. MySpace has allowed by of my bands to expand its fan base and form new connections and gain valuable resources which has led to much growth. There is an amazing grassroots aesthetic for lower-tier independent bands, or bands signed to small indie labels, and it's just convenient to have access to such a wide range of resources within just a few clicks.

However, this does not negate Bragg's point: these websites are benefiting from having other artists' work as free and feature content accessible to anyone, with or without an account. This brings me to a couple of points I want to raise:

1) While the benefit to this may be miniscule in scope for one or two small-time music acts (I'll use my bands an an example), when you look at smaller acts as a collective whole, that's still an exorbitant amount of viewers and visitors that are confronted with advertising (which is where these websites really make their money). In fact, on MySpace, advertisements are the very first thing on the page. Just look at Paper Brain's MySpace page if you don't believe me. We don't have TOO many daily visitors, but each of them are exposed to the ads, and at some point, someone will click on one of those ads. Multiply this by god knows how many bands are on MySpace who have one of these someone's.

2) Take this point and expand it to more widely known bands who get thousands of hits each day on their MySpace page. Let's just use Radiohead as an example: at the time of this writing, they have had nearly 20,000 unique song plays today. I'm no statistics junkie, but I'd venture a guess that they had about, at a minimum, 10,000 visitors today. Imagine how much money MySpace makes daily in advertising revenue from Radiohead's MySpace page alone. And does Radiohead see a dime of that from MySpace and the folks at NewsCorp.? Nope. Not even close. And why not? As Bragg points out in his editorial, radio stations pay artists royalties for using their music because the radio stations are making money by using artists' music to draw listeners who then are exposed to advertisements in very much the same way that MySpace and it's ilk are doing. Something seems amiss...

The question then is what do we do about it? Unfortunately, I don't have much of an answer. For me, I feel very conflicted. Perhaps the benefits that I speak of are merely an illusion -- or as Bragg says, disingenuous. Afterall bands existed and succeeded on just as small of a scale as they are now well before MySpace came along. Perhaps the MySpace dillema has made it even worse for artists by flooding the market, so to speak, with a particular commodity (in this case, music) which has made it more difficult for the most "well-deserving" artists to obtain the attention of the people they mean and need to to help them succeed. Indeed, it would seem that I am in a one-sided relationship with MySpace afterall, and not the symbiotic one that I have been led to believe (though much fault and naiveity of my own.) But again -- what do I do about it? While I'm now more aware of this exploitation and denial of rights by MySpace, I don't quite feel exploited just yet. Perhaps its a mild indifference, but I just don't see myself bowing out just yet. But I'm an idealist more than a pragmatist (not to an extreme, though...), so I wouldn't be surprised to see myself removing myself from this machine, because, really, it isn't right. Whenever anyone benefits financially from the inclusion and use of an artist's work, that artist should be compensated in tangible and real terms, not in vague and empty promises of the benefits that comes from exposure to new fans and influencial people -- a promise which, given the current climate, is a very unlikely outcome for the vast majority of artists who choose to participate in this system.

To read the rest of Billy Bragg's editorial, The Royalty Scam, simply jump on over to it at NYTimes.com

And speaking of Radiohead, listen to this song, because it's been suck in my head for four days now: