Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [60]
Jigsaw Falling into Place
Rightly or wrongly, there’s a strong public perception that labels pass on stunningly little of music profits to musicians. But what’s the alternative model? Should bands treat their recorded music as little other than advertisements for performances, and should we start to think of music as a service rather than a product? Should we go back to a patronage model, where shares of an album are sponsored by fans? Are online ad-based revenues enough to keep bands going? Could they use an up-sale model, where additional content or access can be purchased? Perhaps a shareware model will work, where a great many fans might choose to donate just a few dollars, or where long-tailing can support a project just on a relatively few dedicated hard-core fans.
These models have been tried by different artists, such as Jonathan Coulton, Trent Reznor, and Maria Schneider. These models have succeeded, but this success has been limited to relatively small and loyal fan bases, and these models remain unfamiliar and strange to the majority of listeners. To succeed on a large scale—large enough of a scale to offer an alternative business model attractive to a wide variety of musicians—they would need a familiar public face and a prominent success story. With In Rainbows, the shattered and fragmented system of music distribution and acquisition began to look, to some, like a jigsaw puzzle falling into place. Radiohead, a highly regarded band with a very strong international following, was adopting a DRM-free, pay-what-you-feel downloadable distribution model! They would show that it can be done; that this is, at least in one prominent case, a viable business model.
The fit, for the fan, was a very natural one. Instead of paying for the object on the basis of the costs incurred—or perhaps just the industry-standard pricing model—you would pay for your own perceived use-value that the product delivered. What could be more fair from a consumer perspective? Of course, the problems were numerous. Most notably, you were asked to pay upon download, before listening to the album and determining its value to you. But still, this was a hopeful sign that real change might be on its way.
To the industry, of course, this looked like a dangerous betrayal. If it succeeded, this would only feed the perception that labels are unnecessary intermediaries, and would cover over the supposed necessity of paying all the producers, executives, marketing people, lawyers, and so on. Legitimating a user-consumer-centered sales model further undermined the basic business model of the industry. At the same time, the fact that Radiohead reverted back to a traditional sales model rather than seeing the experiment through made this respect for and legitimation of listener-centered pricing into a mere gimmick to increase hype. So, in the end, it didn’t really make anybody happy. Trent Reznor, for example, called it “insincere” and a “marketing gimmick,” while—on the other side of the issue—James Blunt suggested that the pay-what-you-feel approach would “devalue” music, saying “I’ve got to pay a band and a producer and a mixer.”
The labels have grounds for complaint—after all, they are playing in accordance with the rules. (Of course, they helped make up those rules through lobbying Congress, but they are the rules.) Furthermore, they did spend a good deal of money producing and marketing music that they have a legal basis to expect to be able to sell. Just because it’s free to download doesn’t mean it was free to make, and they have a legitimate expectation to be able to recoup their costs. The bigger issue, of course, is whether the business model is sustainable in the digital age, and whether it is exploitative and undeserving of protection or preservation.