[ EEPI-Discuss ] Mr. Krimm's bifurcation into T-shirts and Muse-ical noise

[David Wade <djw@marystruck.com>]

At 07:25 PM 5/26/2005 -0700, you wrote:

>Perhaps you'd like to see all non-star musicians get into the T-shirt
>business.  But then they are in the T-shirt business and not the music
>business.  That's the celebrity model right there: tangential value, not
>direct value.  It skews the market incentives very badly.  An artist with a
>great T-shirt and lousy music will sell more T-shirts than an artist with
>great music and a lousy T-shirt.
>
>As a musician, I want to get value because of the great music I make, and
>not have to depend on getting into a completely different business selling
>T-shirts (or whatever other tangential value you propose).
>
>Without some sort of direct compensation for the *recorded* music, I'm
>screwed, plain and simple.  Getting a fair return for recorded music is my
>only hope for self-sufficiency as an independent musical artist making
>high-quality music that appeals to a moderately sized audience.

It is so interesting that the image that jumps out at me is that you could 
substitute "vinyl records, or even CDs" for T-shirt in the above argument 
and the entire statement would mean exactly the opposite of what it means aqui.

That tells us that the argument, itself, is without meaning until you fill 
in "what" you are talking about.  General Semantics teaches us to eschew 
such statements.

So what is the truth here.  Musicians make music.  When I hear "Hey, Jude", 
it will always be The Beatles singing, but when I hear Beethoven's Ninth 
Symphony it will always be the nameless players of the band on the Mall in 
front of the Capitol on each 4th of July...  So, what we have is that there 
is such a thing as an Intellectual Property Right, (The Beatles) but it 
eventually expires... (Beethoven)  So what we need to decide is, Who owns 
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  Clearly we know who owns "Hey, Jude", and they 
sold it to someone who will collect the royalties as long as he 
can...  But, Beethoven's Ninth?  Is there an Intellectual Property Right 
associated with the individual performance?  Or is it with the person who 
chooses the particular musicians and pays for the performance?  Be careful 
here...  You could easily end up with Bill Graham owning all the Grateful 
Dead and Jefferson Airplane performances.  (Or, perhaps the performance is 
a T-shirt and belongs to the better T-shirt manufacturer who captures the 
best version of the performance.  If this is the case, there is no IP, 
merely product.)

If it is, as I would prefer, The Musician...  Why is it so easy to take 
those rights from the musician?  Substitute Author or Painter for musician 
in that last sentence.  When a painter sells a copy of her painting (I'm 
thinking of Julie Bell) does she sell her rights to that image?  Of course 
not.  So why do we pretend that a musician can be deprived of his ownership 
of a performance?

If these rights are non-transferrable, would that make a significant 
difference in this discussion?  I think it would.  I think it would solve 
the problem.  I believe what we are arguing about otherwise is which piece 
of the carcass which corporation is entitled to, surely the musician 
doesn't even enter the discussion.

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