Copyright and a Culture of Monoliths

Though it was originally instituted for the protection of the distributors of media, copyright has come to be regarded in popular mindset as protection for the incentive of artists and innovators to create. The distribution industries know that the function of protecting the distributors as such has been made unnecessary by the advent of the internet, so they no longer try to justify copyright laws that way. They would have us believe instead that without copyright laws, actors, musicians, and writers could not make a decent living.

No doubt this is true for a few artists in the case of music, but copyright is hardly a windfall for artists in the current regime. Royalties from media sales account for a very miniscule portion of the average artists’ income.

So whose interests do copyrights serve? Certainly not those of the average artist signed to a major label, who in most cases does not even own the copyright to his work. Given recording and production costs, only the most successful artists will ever see any profit from media sales: the money for everyone else is in concerts and merchandise – naturally saleable items.

Why then do record labels exist, if artists usually can’t reap profit from their intellectual property that way? They are middlemen, lubricating a market in the absence of suitable technology. They collected and fronted the large amounts of capital necessary to make a recording, press it, distribute it, and market it. They negotiated for scarce shelf space in retail stores and for playtime on the radio. They were the artist’s voice to the world.

But that was a world without the infrastructure and technology we have now. Where before you had to invest large amounts of money before you could even think about producing music, the returns to investment diminish much more quickly now: anyone with a computer and a microphone can self-produce music of a reasonable quality. This simply was not possible in the world where record labels thrived. The barriers to entry in media production are practically nonexistent now that we can record, mix, and master all on an affordable computer. Not only that, but the advent of the internet allows artists to self-distribute on their own terms. With no limited shelf space for which to negotiate, nothing is required but a website (and even that is becoming unnecessary with services like myspace and last.fm).

As the amount of capital necessary to make good quality media declines, a multitude of smaller, more competitive record labels are able to spring up (and indeed have sprung up), allowing the artist to outsource things which he may not have expertise in, such as production or album art. At the same time, as internet broadcasting has obviated the need for vast investments in broadcast towers, a multitude of smaller, online radio stations have sprung up, negotiating directly with smaller artists and labels and filling niche markets which could never have been filled by airwave radio.As storefront distribution becomes more irrelevant, so does that advantage of a major label. In fact, the only irreplaceable service of the major record labels is sheer marketing muscle.

This is the business model of the labels: their business was built on investing in a few big acts simply because the cost was so prohibitive. So when costs came down, rather than downsizing and investing in vast numbers of new artists, they expanded their artist repertoire a bit, and shoveled the savings into marketing. Modern pop acts are, and have always been, nothing more than marketing dollars behind a pretty face.

Perhaps this was acceptable twenty years ago when it would have been infeasible for artists to self-publish. But there is no excuse for its continuance through the advent of the digital age. Yet it persists. The question must then be asked: why do major record labels still exist at their size? The answer is simple: copyrights.

Copyrights and intellectual property protections, as discussed earlier, are a windfall primarily for the record labels. This secures for them vast streams of capital, which are then funneled right back into marketing more pop culture monoliths. Indeed, the niche markets served by new radio stations are a threat to the dominance of the monoliths. The major record labels have been trying to stifle smaller radio stations by mandating exorbitant royalty payments for radio play, in order to secure the market for a cartel of monolithic radio stations, which would no doubt play only the monolithic acts.

Exactly the same problem exists in the movie and television industries. The major studios build their business on investing huge amounts of capital in monolithic blockbusters. As the barriers to entry continue to fall, the money is invested into marketing. This gives us, like in the music industry, a small number of actors with exorbitant salaries and near universal recognition.

This is not what culture should be: it is neither good nor natural. Where government fiat normally does no worse than to make the market inefficient or place financial burdens on one party or another, copyright laws have become a blight upon culture itself. By enforcing distributors’ claims on culture, we do not incentivize the creation of culture – we stifle it, and homogenize it. Consumers have fewer choices in a world where copyrights are owned by a company whose only irreplaceable service is raw marketing muscle.