That blog will be more about issues of media regulation, media philosophy, creative, media-related ideas, empirical research and theory than this one. On this site, I’ll nevertheless keep blogging more personal – and, hopefully, sometimes wildly tangential – stuff.

Short abstract:

If it is possible to speak of a coherent file-sharing movement in Sweden, what are the principal societal factors shaping it? This paper contextualises the recent history of Swedish peer-to-peer-based file-sharing as forming part of a wider shift in politics towards a late-modern collective ethic. Everyday file-sharers operate as ‘occasional activists’, as pirate institutions not only speak for, but also run and build the networks. Such institutions – The Pirate Bay, Piratbyrån, and The Pirate Party – cannot be explained by invoking market logics, online communitarianism, or political motivation alone. The cyberliberties activism animating these hubs is connected to the larger framework of balancing utilitarianism, nationalism, individual autonomy and collectivism in Sweden. Further, the emergent Swedish file-sharing justificatory regime hinges on a general view of what the internet is, what it is good for, and how it should look in the future, as the file-sharer argumentation rests on the inevitability of unrestricted file exchange on the internet, while the industrialist concerns of the cultural industries emphasize instead how exchange should be regulated and sanctioned by accountable providers.

The activism which has supported file-sharing should not be seen as in any way “purist,” but rather “sticky”: it is not only to do with sloganeering, but with entrepreneurship, the construction of infrastructures, and marketing. Hence the confusion within some circles, and hence the additional layers of controversy surrounding especially The Pirate Bay, as it has been accused for being a callous business venture as well as an almost anarco-collectivist activist hub – something which distorts the established order within traditional rightwing as well as leftwing circles. This observation ties into what Karl Palmås says in his new book (Swedish only, I’m afraid) Prometheus eller Narcissus: Entreprenören som samhällsomvälvare, published by Swedish publishers Korpen.

The first one to be published in 2011 is found in the bilingual online Greek journal Re-Public, which has a current theme issue on the topic of “piracy as activism”. The aim of this issue is to explore “pirate practices and subjectivities in terms of their resistance to the dominant organisations of everyday life” (quoting the editors’ own introduction), and it’s out now, available in both Greek and English.

“It takes (at least) two to tango” is a short article about the activist subject and the pirate subject – and how it seems impossible to maintain agential “purity” in an era that is characterised by an even more complex tangle of agency, in which we as subjects are embedded. My argument, in short, is that the forms of activism found online, connected to what is commonly called the “pirate” movement, are hard to separate from consumerism and entrepreneurialism, given that what is traded remains to be products from the cultural industry, and that all forms of establishment of hubs, sites and the likes are akin to (real or potential) commercial ventures, albeit of an “outlaw” or “rogue” kind.

Given the rather activist profile of the journal and its implicit audience, I aimed to make this article a bit more argumentative – and perhaps even provocative – compared to more scientific peer-reviewed articles. (Another article of mine is currently under review with Critical Studies in Peer Production, and is of the more scientific kind.) Given the other contributions in the same issue, I think my own Re-Public article fits very nicely as a thought-opener, alongside Roberto Verzola’s, Thanasis Priftis’s, and David R. Witzling’s expositions on what the term “piracy” really means; and the case studies of various countries like Brazil (Aline de Almeida Coutinho), the Philippines (Rolando B. Tolentino) and Somalia (Olivia Swift); as well as the interesting interviews with both Ernesto (founder of Torrentfreak.com) and one of my favourite contemporary theorists, Alexander Galloway. With respect to the different local case studies above, it should perhaps be mentioned that my own article is based on a case study of Sweden (home of sites like The Pirate Bay).

Altogether, a really interesting package from the editors and contributors, and a sign that things have been moving forward in the last years. More and more cultural researchers are showing interest for these kinds of issues, and there seems to be a rather established consensus in the academic community that “piracy” needn’t be as one-dimensional as the “captains of the industry” or legislators would have it. Likewise, the tension between piracy and activism is far from unsettled, and a rather complex thing. I hope that my article can inspire one or two more thoughts on the subject matter.

Note: My coming article for CSPP (mentioned above) is also a reflection on the particular case of Sweden and file-sharing, aiming to further problematize the “pirate movement”.

According to the current ruling in the Pirate Bay trial, the Court of Appeal makes a very interesting comparison between The Pirate Bay and services like Google and YouTube, which also distribute copyrighted material:

“If the nature of a search service is such that it primarily is a valuable tool in lawful activities, and of general benefit to society, if this legitimate use predominates, but the distribution or transmission of illegal material in spite of precautions cannot be ruled out, the operation of such a service should be considered as legitimate.” [emphasis added]

In fact, the ruling depends on whether one sees file-sharing as a fundamentally good thing for society, or as a public hazard. Once again, the saga of The Pirate Bay shows that the law is eminently political.

By “benefit to society,” I assume that what is meant is primarily the economic impact of BitTorrent-based file-sharing. This mode of reasoning is based on the idea that file-sharing of copyrighted material infringes on the sales of such material, as it would eradicate possible sales opportunities.

The strange thing about this argument is that it ignores all the additional diffusion that takes place thanks to file-sharing. In many cases, the cultural products shared would never even be bought or rented otherwise. File-sharing undeniably contributes to the regeneration of general cultural knowledgeability. Often, it serves as a sort of browse- and test mechanism, leading to a broadened taste and a more knowledgeable and dedicated cultural audience, who ultimately buy significant quantities of DVDs, Blu-ray movies, cinema tickets and video games. File-sharing is a magnificent distribution apparatus, which allows citizens to sample material. Sure, sales of audio CDs have slumped, but it is also the only industry that has clearly been “suffering” due to file-sharing. The movie industry and the video game market are still highly profitable markets.

The entertainment industry finds itself in a schizophrenic situation. On the one hand, there is a tacit admission that the value of a digital file should be compared with radio, as services like Spotify allow for users to pay a relatively modest fee in order to gain access to the material, while the authors behind the songs also get very modest compensation for each transferred file. (Yes, Spotify is also based on file-sharing technology.) On the other hand, we still see the legal battles where the industry puts a notional value to the files that are transferred through BitTorrent services like The Pirate Bay. In the reader I have been co-editing, Efter The Pirate Bay (2010), Stefan Larsson makes a thought experiment, in which the “value” of the files referred to in the District Court’s ruling in the initial Pirate Bay trial is extended to an average BitTorrent website, and the entire range of files such a site would cover. According to the legally sanctioned calculation model, the value of the material circulated (by means of only one single file-sharing site) would thus reach approximately €50 billion. That is more than the combined turnaround of Volvo and Ericsson – Sweden’s two largest companies – in 2009.

Thus, the claims cited in these rulings are absurdly high, if you look at what sums the entertainment industry’s calculations would result in. It is obvious that these are imaginary figures in order to mainly intimidate or discourage. The damages claims that Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström are required to pay according to the court, €5 million, is a sum that for example corresponds to what around 500 rape cases would generate (in terms of damages) in the current Swedish legal system. It is clear that lawsuits such as these, regarding important regulatory issues of the Internet, are to a large extent dictated by private interests.

At the same time, the ad- and subscription-based service Spotify has been warmly received in the mass media, underpinned partially by Swedish national pride as an industrial nation, and partially as a form of panacea to “that bloody file-sharing”. But one should remember that Spotify has a relatively limited catalogue, and can hardly be said to favor the more peripheral, unknown artists, while the service itself still only provides very modest income for the participating songwriters and artists.

The unregulated digital infrastructure provides a uniquely new possibility to provide everything from the most obscure to the most popular. In fact, file-sharing services and related web communities currently offer a range of niche culture that beats both library catalogues, as well as the media corporations’ catalogues, as long as the user knows where to look.

But file-sharing is far from trouble-free. It rests on strong self-interest and individualism, where the user is king and scoffs at any attempt to request a price on cultural content that the user does not personally find appealing. File-sharing – based on the ubiquitous search prompt – could thus contribute to a destructive spiral that actually resembles the cynical big policies of big corporations: Only that which is already known will be downloaded. This is particularly clear in the record industry, where reduced revenue streams from reproduction, together with the industry’s infamously hesitant attitude towards file-sharing and alternative forms of distribution, has led the industry to become more reluctant – according to industry representatives themselves, unable – to actively market more left-of-field artists. That challenge is left for the artists themselves to deal with.

Given the emerging media landscape, what we need are services that are better designed to highlight all that obscure, lesser known material that thrives along one of the extremes in the “long tail”. We need cultural policies that take these new circumstances into consideration, and more clearly serve to highlight what is created in the periphery, rather than just idly benefitting existing oligopolistic formations.

Obviously, in 346 pages, there is a LOT more to draw on from it. The subject of p2p-based file-sharing is a complex one, and one challenge was to concentrate all this complexity into a comprehensive – yet not overly simplifying – account.

Please email me if you want a copy of the thesis. See my personal webpage or this blog for contact details.

My thesis is about Swedish file-sharers’ own arguments and motives. I analyze how they justify their habits, and what they refer to. I interviewed Swedish file sharers and analyzed blogs, newspapers, debates and web comments. I placed great emphasis on connecting the arguments to various sociological theories of representation, agency, justification and morality, as well as to the actual technical, economic, historical, demographic and geographical conditions. As the actual p2p protocols (especially BitTorrent protocol) are so central to the drama, the sociologist’s role is to determine: What is BitTorrent? How shall we understand the “nature” of a network, and the way the users themselves constantly invoke this “nature”? Ontology – how reality is described and defined – becomes the crux of the debate.

The thesis is a monograph, but its different chapters address different elements of the phenomenon. In my literature review I describe how the “copyfight” – the alleged clash between “pirates” and “industry” – has been established through the years, and how it has, in part, been reinforced by a strong activist bias among the contemporary critics of copyright. I also describe how copyright critique has tended to equate file sharing with gift economy, which I argue is a somewhat unfortunate metaphor. I suggest some better metaphors in its place, arguing for example that file-sharing is better characterised by a de-personalised exchange rather than a dyadic friend-to-friend exchange.

My historical and technical overview of file-sharing explains how the p2p architectures work, and provides a historical overview of the various networks, protocols and applications that have become popular. I discuss the lack of transparency and the lack of demographic overview and describing the phenomenon in simple metaphors. I place great emphasis on comfort and acquisition as driving factors, and I note how the network architecture precludes regulation in its entirety, allowing only for local crackdowns, something which explains the file-sharers’ own arguments about the phenomenon being “unstoppable”.

One of the chapters that my examiners appreciated the most was my discussion of a typical Swedish late modernity, and the social contract that file-sharing world in fact share with the Swedish Social Democratic model of society: The fact that one’s own personal freedom is directly dependent upon and made possible by a universally over-arching collective. The “blind” file-sharing network as well as the state’s supposedly “blind” functionality as a system is what allows the individual, molecular actors their flexibility and choice. I also provide several historically based explanations as for why file-sharing has been such a popular force in Sweden, and what we can social trends we can discern in file-sharing, as it allows for strong self-interest, expediency and personal independence (something which the innovative system design “harnesses” in order to benefit the overall collective).

My overall conclusion is that the file-sharers’ own justificatory arguments are based on ontological assumptions about the “nature” of the network. As far as I can see and duly confirm in my technical and historical overview above, several of these assumptions are well-founded, given the observed network architecture. Interestingly, this also means that the question of “blame” becomes distributed to fall on not only one, but a range of numerous actors involved: the thousands of human users who participate, as well as the non-human actors that the machinery, computer programs and protocols comprise. This was also clear in Pirate Bay trial, in which the blame could never be entirely attributed to the accused persons. Their involvement could only be defined in terms of varying degrees of “complicity”.

The difficulty of regulation “from above” leads me to conclude the thesis with an argument for self-regulation among file-sharers. This increases rather than decreases the need to further explore the norms and standards that are emerging, and the personal moral considerations of Internet users.

Many of the arguments found in the thesis are found in a more brief form in my and Pelle Snickars’s introduction to our recent Swedish anthology, Efter The Pirate Bay. In the reader, I contribute with a chapter on network architecture (“The stupid net”) which is based in part on my technical and historical background chapter in the thesis. Further, much of what Lars Ilshammar describes in his chapter in the same reader are confirmed in my thesis chapter on Swedish late modernity.

See this link for more info. Unfortunately, Efter The Pirate Bay is only available in Swedish, and no English translation is planned. However, the national public interest in Sweden has been considerable, and I believe that many of the insights that I draw on in my currently finalized Ph.D. thesis and in the book are of interest to the English-language reading public as well.

In addition to writing the Efter The Pirate Bay introduction together with Pelle, I contributed with an article, called “Det dumma nätet” (“The stupid net”) where I outline the structural foundation for the web as we know it, and sketch out some likely future developments too. Some interesting considerations underpin that article; it is inspired by David G. Post’s In Search Of Jefferson’s Moose, Alexander Galloway’s Protocol, Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future Of The Internet, and Jaron Lanier’s recent book I’m Not A Gadget, which means that I define the Internet primarily in terms of the underlying protocols that enable communication. Defining the Net as “layers of complexity” helps us understand how there in fact are two networking logics at play – the distributed structure of TCP/IP and equally important, the more centralised structure of DNS. I do not want to put these in opposition to each other; the challenge is to see how different networking logics interlock, and how protocols like BitTorrent suit the Internet so perfectly, as the P2P protocols in many ways are re-mediations of the already radically distributed Net underlying them.

I also try to outline some future developments; I am quite sure we can expect to see more of a twofold situation in the next decade. On the one hand, locked, convenient, sleek and “safe” machines like iPhones, iPads and streaming media applications like Spotify – and on the other hand, a continued growth of open networks, tunnelling, encryption, and unrestricted file-sharing. Ironically, much of the “new” development in today’s media environment belongs to the former category (making magazines like Wired to announce “the death of the Web”, witnessing the birth of an app-based informational landscape) while many of the services that appear centralised, stream- or cloud-based to the user actually operates by using P2P “under the hood”.

So, expect to see more “walled gardens” in the media ecology, like Facebook (especially as more and more sites register with Facebook Connect), where the user constantly surfs under the guise of his or her actual self. At the same time, more technically driven users will be vigilant regarding their personal integrity and “surveillance footprint” and drive the development of more unrestricted, non-overseeable services.

Yes, in some ways the “pirate” debate in Sweden has folded – caved in on itself – but the actual file-sharing out there is more momentous than ever. Internationally, The Pirate Bay is even more popular now than ever before, in terms of actual user figures. This, while the activism in Sweden and elsewhere has widened its focus and found other topics to centre around – something that Rasmus Fleischer (ex Piratbyrån) writes about in his contribution to the abovementioned reader. ACTA, the EU Telecoms package, net neutrality – those are the issues of the moment. Not necessarily The Pirate Bay per se.

As with the historiography that I’m a warm supporter of – seeing how phases of development run parallel to one another, not succeeding each other, but running alongside one another – we have to see the surface movements as well as the ocean below, at the same time. That’s the real challenge for the decade ahead of us.

These are but a few of the many, many insights offered in the book. In it, me and Pelle summarize the historical legacy of file-sharing and The Pirate Bay in Sweden, while authors like Nicklas Lundblad, Daniel Johansson, Stefan Larsson and Lars Ilshammar discuss the role of copyright law, music licensing, the legal metaphors used, and how the file-sharing debate is symptomatic of contemporary modernity.

A few other book projects are in the works, email me for more info.

And, more importantly: In June 2010 I went back to London in order to get through my viva voce for finally getting that Ph.D. degree. My two examiners were Don Slater (LSE) and Jon Dovey (UWE). And I’m happy to announce that I passed my viva, with no modifications!

During the summer and early autumn, the academic formalities have moved forward, very slowly, and I’m now about to register my thesis with University of London, and their Senate House academic archive. More publications are in the works. Please do not hesitate to email me if you are interested in a pdf copy.

This is a new type of license, a digital transmission license to replace all other rights on the Internet. In his proposal, anyone who wants to transfer copyrighted material digitally would have to buy such a transmission license: websites that broadcast music, namely Internet radio or other types of streaming media, but also individual file sharers who know that they share large amounts of copyrighted music.

The digital transmission right subsumes and replaces the reproduction, distribution and public performance rights (and the making available and communication to the public rights in jurisdictions where those exist); and it authorizes all transmissions including all forms of streaming, downloading, uploading, and sharing.

See this pdf for the long version of his proposal, see this memo for a shorter version. In what follows, here are my personal reflections on his formal proposal. The blockquote above is Lincoff’s. Any use of “journalistic” or florid language below is my own.

Unlike the recent proposals by Peter Jenner in the UK, Roger Wallis in Sweden, and others (Gerd Leonhard, William Fisher), Lincoff is not proposing a general “broadband tax”. The fundamental difference is that he is adamant that licenses must be voluntary and industry-specific. A mandatory flat fee on top of all Internet connections would become too cumbersome, he maintains. There would be significant risks that the end-user subscription fees would inflate, and the pile of money to be re-distributed would be subjected to a proverbial catfight, when music companies, film studios, the gaming industry, the software industry, publishing houses, the porn industry and public service institutions in each country will want to share the money. Besides being distributed internally, within each industry, the money in such a general scheme would have to be split up among different countries and jurisdictions as well. Moreover, how should this re-distribution be calculated? According to number of megabytes or number of minutes spent by users on the respective medium? No, such a broadband tax would be a bureaucratic nightmare, and most likely a fatal blow for the music industry, as their final share of the pie would be extremely small.

Lincoff holds that the transmission license must be voluntary. If we focus only on the different institutional actors who want to broadcast music online (radio stations, streaming services etc.), his proposal is, in my eyes, mainly an amendment – an upgrade if you wish – to procedures for licensing and payment that in fact already exist. Hence, such already-existing institutional sites will probably be open to paying a license. But in the case of private individuals, people who file-share large amounts of music? Isn’t it naive to think that people would voluntarily pay to continue doing what they already do, more or less for free?

The challenge here, according to my view, is to “sell” the idea, with appeal to people’s hearts as well as wallets. The whole mentality towards the music industry must be reformed for people to agree to pay a license to continue to exchange music freely. It requires transparency, which would show how the transmission license actually would go to the songwriters and artists and not to excessive management and intermediaries. It would require campaigns that provide insight into the fact that the money actually means something for cultural creators – in the sense that I, for one, could never afford to make the necessary sacrifices in my life in order to take a hobby to a professional level, without expecting some form of monetary compensation for this.

Lincoff says that one of the main arguments for making the license voluntary is that the music industry would then actually have more legitimacy in their litigation campaigns against file-sharers. Under the proposed scheme, any file-sharer that they sue could be said to have made an active choice when refusing to pay a license. This is different from the current climate where people have been sued, despite legal file-sharing alternatives not actually existing.

I am convinced that gray areas will always exist. Most file-sharers tend to share certain types of material more than others, and the exchange of file-sharing networks is known to be a varied mix of high and low, narrow and wide. Therefore, Lincoff’s proposed license would ultimately target only that kind of sharing that users associate themselves with, in general terms. The system will never cover all users – many people already encrypt their communications, BitTorrent is already virtually impossible to monitor, and the sheer amount of file-sharing is so vast that people literally disappear in the crowd. The system will only cover the few who see themselves as major (co)distributors and feel compelled to pay a license, either because they actively want to support authors, or because they are afraid of being caught and fined. The former option is obviously preferable! The system will only include those authors who are members of the collecting societies; only they will be able to receive the license money collected. On the other hand, the proposal could thus be a reformation of an otherwise dying revenue model, and be an incentive for songwriters and performers to join the existing collecting societies.

I asked him about Spotify. Doesn’t their business model already entail a movement from free, unbridled, non-sanctioned music exchange to an arena – a “walled garden” – managed by licensed, sanctioned flows? Here, the market has, in practice, already started to maintain a form of licensed radio-on-demand, with a redistribution of money based on advertising and subscription revenues.

He countered this argument by noting that the “radio” parable is only from the consumer point of view. Since the redistribution of money in Spotify is based on the number of times an individual song is played, within a strictly DRM-locked application, Spotify is still based on the idea of selling copies, he argues. His proposal is different in that it allows for a sweeping blanket license, which allows money to be distributed independently of the exact number of downloads of a song, and instead being awarded in accordance with the quotas that the collecting societies themselves use. The allocation should be based on the music people actually listen to, not necessarily on what people are already paying for. In this way, p2p is in fact more like radio and Spotify more like a record store. Artists that are heavily file-shared but not contracted to Spotify would benefit more from a transmission license.

What Spotify perhaps most of all shows, however, is the small monetary value of each song played! Reportedly, songwriters and artists can collect only around $325 per million plays of the respective track. Although that remuneration is better than that of radio airplay, it still shows how difficult it is to price a playback of an mp3 file. Illegal downloads do not compare with streamed music, however, since the streamed music entails a file transfer each time the song is played, while a non-DRM protected mp3 of course can be played a limitless number of times after having been downloaded. From a purely resource-efficient point of view, the latter would be preferable. But the commercial development right now seems to go in the direction of greater Spotification, more “walled gardens”.

Lincoff believes that his idea has better chances for response in Europe and Canada than in the United States. He argues that American policy tends to be so manipulated by lobbyists so that a proposal like this would have small chances for positive feedback and even less chance of being implemented – despite the fact that the entire business model he criticizes is in decline, perhaps even risking complete meltdown.

Personally, I assume that we in Europe and Canada also have a political culture that permits the idea of (corporative, state-sanctioned) licenses of the kind he is advocating. We already have TV licensing schemes based on the British model in many European countries; a license which now risks being expanded to include computers as well as TV sets, argues Swedish centre-right MP Karl Sigfrid, who was sceptical against this during our conversation with Lincoff. The idea of a general broadband tax has been drummed up among parts of the Swedish left as a kind of panacea, despite the idea having been rightly criticized for being both naïve, clumsy and, in fact conservative.

In that view, Lincoff’s proposal of a transmission license is more realistic. It would especially be good if it was designed so that the redistribution of the money was targeted directly to the songwriters and performers, rather than through record companies. Ideally, it could also give money to those artists who are not tied to any record company while still having a major hits online, via those channels that are still seen as “alternative” today (YouTube, file-sharing, MySpace, Last.FM).

Sure, Lincoff’s ideas require a bureaucratic framework administered by collecting societies and legal agreements – much like already existing licensing schemes, which can be criticised for always being somewhat arbitrary and general – and certainly it still transforms culture into a form that divides the multitude of actors into formally defined transmitters, receivers, consumers and producers. But it is a radical departure from the idea of selling copies, and it seems like a more sensible way of organizing business than we see today. This type of structural shift is something that almost always happens in media history, albeit with completely different outcomes depending on the respective materiality of each medium, and the surrounding historical facts. But that is another story.

This is a translated version of my original Swedish posting, here.

No pun intended. I love Rustie’s music, I love dubstep when it’s made with heart and soul and not being moody, adolescent, asexual stoner music. But it cracks me up that for anyone outside of this scene, the difference between Noel Fielding’s character in Nathan Barley and characters on the scene today like Joker, Rustie and Zomby is a fine one.

Nathan Barley, 2003:

Rustie, 2008:

They are building two new stadiums in my city.

105,000 new seats. This is entirely in line with what The Economist noted recently: For the media industry, the future has got two things in store. Primarily, the extremely popular. Blockbusters and monumental-scale events. Stadium rock is to be even bigger, sky’s the limit. Secondly, the segmented, the niched and obscure. The Internet has a positive effect on markets for those kind of things. But the economic risk that is involved in betting on new acts, the corporations prefer to see being made elsewhere.

Who is supposed to play these monster arenas? Swedish journalist Erika Hallhagen notes that,

obviously concert organizers choose the arena where they can get the most money or sell the most tickets. But there are not many artists or groups who can sell 40,000 tickets a year [in Stockholm]. You can basically count them on the fingers of your hand. Even fewer can attract 65,000. Madonna, Iron Maiden, U2, Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Metallica – maybe Robbie Williams and Justin Timberlake.

The gap between the enormously popular and the extremely narrow – the “Death Valley Problem” – makes for a real-term absence regarding the actual regeneration of the very artists who will perform on these stages!

Quick count. New world-class artists during the 00s: Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas and Rihanna.

No, neither Jay-Z, Justin, Britney nor Coldplay count. They broke through before the new digital landscape for music consumption was here. Another Swedish journalist, Isabelle Ståhl, recently summarized the 00s:

The anxiety-inducing glut of music and film that the Internet is, alongside with TV’s mass production of C-list celebrities, has prevented a new Michael Jackson or a new Depeche Mode. The era of really big stars is over and instead we see a myriad of subcultures that are impossible to track.

Personally, I am often called a “file-sharing researcher” and in that role I am sometimes misunderstood as someone who would defend the media situation before us. But no one can say that file-sharing is truly “good” or “bad”: Like everything, it has positive and negative effects, and is one of many components of a complex media landscape. I have also been active in music production for years, and I know people with close ties to the record industry – and often with hefty doses of distrust towards it. I sympathize with artists who have dreams and ambitions, but who will now have a greatly reduced chance to be promoted by a record company.

One band that exemplifies the very ambivalent stance that many bands are forced to today, at least if you have a social approach to music-making, is the Los Angeles-based group J*Davey, who have combined an extremely uncompromising attitude and high musical ambition with an intense, provoking, yes even lecherous stage presence. On the very last day of the 00s, they released their new EP Boudoir Synema for free on the Net, in connection with their reportedly long-winded negotiations with a major record label. J*Davey are literally on the border between underground and mainstream, they are balancing over that gap. And they have repeatedly spoken out about their ambivalence, their double roles in the music biz, for example in various YouTube videos. They have as much sex appeal as Lady Gaga, and as much underground cred as J Dilla. They are a perfect example.

I emphasize the social attitude towards creating music here, since the anemic laptop music that many Internet activists seem to highlight as “interesting” music is, by means of its production, based on both megalomania and nihilism when compared to music that includes several musicians, singers, studio technicians and so on. Megalomania, since it is based on the illusion that one person alone can master the entire process of music-making. Not even Timbaland or Pharrell are working in that way, they often have lots of people with them in the studio. Nihilism, because it is based on the stale idea that everyone should best remain in their own little niche scene, a stance that is content with the status quo and the accepted way of doing things. Laptoptronica is equally symptomatic of the current situation as Pop Idol or the new multi-capacity arenas ever were.

In 2008, J*Davey released their double CD The Beauty In Distortion/Land of the Lost, an unclassifiable soul-hip-hop electronic new wave-hybrid that threw the rulebook out the window. Here was a band with real musical talent whose sound was still diverse and experimental, and who had lyrics and ideas which connected with real life instead of the art-for-art’s-own-sake that characterizes much other underground hip-hop. The band’s songstress Jack Davey’s voice was challenging; more growling and gruff than the typical female voice, and she rapped as much as she was singing. And not least: Here were two young black Americans who are talking about David Bowie and Devo rather than about bling and street culture. The album was released on an indie label and created some opportunities to tour, which also went hand in hand with a small but devoted fan base. They gave away copies of TBID/LOTL as a mixtape and CDR, they sold it via their MySpace page. Typical underground, typical long tail, typical 00s.

As J*Davey had real talent and loads of crossover appeal, there was always interest from the major record labels. For obvious reasons, they have not been able to express themselves directly in interviews and clips, but the band’s second half Brooke D’Leau has afforded to be pretty cocky in his statements about the industry as a whole:

More people put out stuff now, anyone can put it up there on the net. There’s more shit on the Net, which means the dope shit stands out more.

But the landscape is so flat, and the expectation that you will market yourself is so strong, that no one wants to invest in an artist anymore. Least of all the major companies which have gone on the defensive when they are seeing their sales revenues shrink.

More than anything, Brooke seems to have an almost perverse hate towards A&R executives, as that whole business is based on opinion – and opinion is what everyone has nowadays. The notion of what is good is less autonomous; hipster mags such as Vice Magazine provide an aesthetic that becomes the standard for indie culture in general. Few genuinely different subcultures have time to grow before the spotlight is cast on them. A&R people are, after all, desperate. They are looking for miracles – those unique flashes of creativity that are rare enough to stand out, but familiar enough to sell. Had they been able to create these flashes themselves, they would have done so. But they are forced to rummage around in the dark. The fact that so few people can expect to get a record contract these days allows A&R people to be extremely defensive. Not least since they are probably extremely concerned about their own jobs.

J*Davey have even been associated with a mysterious, anonymous manifesto which scoffs at the record industry of the late 00s:

Record labels are nothing but banks, that give artists high-price loans in exchange for artistic control.
Labels only sign bands nowadays because of their existing fanbase and record sales.
They don’t want to develop the art, they don’t want the artists to express themselves entirely.

What made me want to blog about them was when a friend who’s a long-term fan of them e-mailed me, since Brooke on New Year’s Eve 2009 twittered like a madman, spreading links. The new EP, Boudoir Synema, was up there on Bandcamp and the mp3s were available for free for anyone. Their sound had changed too – it was a lot more conventional. Was this the run-up to their larger, Warner Bros-led deployment?

Funnily enough, it seems like the business model remains the same – regardless if you’re on Warner Bros or Interdependent Media. Give the shit away for free first, then maybe people will like it! My friend was resigned:

It just seems so futile that you have to make an amazing sounding major label-backed album, expend emotional energy, make a few creative sacrifices to please a wider audience… and then give it away for free! Add to that the ‘crazy’ Internet viral stunts you have to deploy to try and draw attention to it. It’s hard to reconcile that with groundbreaking/visionary/progressive art of any kind.

To be able to use the Internet for spreading your stuff is fantastic. But it comes at a price. A lot more of your time will be spent on marketing, less time will be left for making music. It is frightening how much time today’s unestablished artists are spending twittering instead of making music. As an artist, you are the victim of violence; the violence of the market. Formerly, a record deal was in some sense a protection from that violence; you capitalized on your potential future sales success and received, in return, literally a sheltered workshop.

Today, that workshop is exposed; the production process is more transparent when Logic and ProTools are said to make the creative process more democratic (only partially true for us who are familiar with the importance of professional mixing and mastering to the music we’re used to hearing) and we are all aware of the inexorable importance of marketing yourself, the novel dream that anyone can succeed by promoting his/her brand in a clever enough way. This dream has been, mildly put, enhanced by Pop Idol and an impressive range of other talent shows.

Still, there has of course always been a “crisis” of some sort in the record industry.

The 80s saw a similar cynical mainstream climate, where Stock-Aitken-Waterman’s conservative bubblegum pop and the contemporary studio technicians’ normative ideas about drum reverb became almost comically obvious symbols of where the music world was at. At the same time the underground flourished, however with an in-built slowness that does not exist today. Indie grew out of punk, and “alternative rock” became an economically interesting formation largely thanks to the extremely favourable climate for record sales that the 90s saw, when people not only bought new music on CD, but re-purchased their old analog recordings with digitally remastered sound.

Material shifts in technology constantly contribute to the general conditions for music, just like today. Perhaps we will see a similar stabilization in the 2010s, maybe we’ll see a more financially sustainable position for new artists. However, those general conditions will be likely to be based on a wide range of factors, much wider than before. Much harder to overlook and fully control than the traditional idea of selling plastic discs. It will vary regionally, as well as between different age groups and between different styles and genres.

The sad thing would be if this would benefit artists who are better entrepreneurs than musicians. If the prosaic laptop guys would benefit more from the situation than the real visionaries. As Isabelle Ståhl continues:

Media and popular culture has been fragmented and TV is no longer the consoling and safe compensation for a lost community that we once had. We do no longer make friends based on the bands we sympathize with. Instead, an individualistic desire to be unique and make a personal impression has started to grow. When you no longer clearly define yourself according to a taste in music it becomes necessary to resort to other cultural markers.

In other words, music is in many ways no longer as important as a marker of identity. Less important in your life. Should we expect then, that the musicians themselves will have an approach to it that is literally as serious as life and death? How far are you willing to go, as a musician? How big are your dreams? Or are you busy twittering about it?