SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE BEAR
Sunday, September 6, 2009 by karan
In this post, I will comment on silly initiatives such as Friend of Active Copyright Education (FACE) and creative artist compensation as it pertains to musicians. Marjid Yar muses on the prevailing logic of hypodermic criminal mythology associated with deleterious (dubious) effects on the copyright industries of music, motion picture and computer software due to harvesting of streaming metadata and peer to peer (p2p) aggregators such as Google, Face book, YouTube, Limewire, Pirate Bay, iPhone et al. Myth is a historically, culturally and politically contingent phenomenon and Yar exposes current outmoded capitalist essentialism and quite rightly so. It is morally squalid for FACE and their ilk to coerce parents into criminalizing their own flesh and blood. Ideas should be free as the air that you breathe. Megalithic media companies cry foul - inflating statistics to dichotomize and convulse public awareness and then crocodile tears.
Copying in the internet age is a public good and should be venerated as such. Kids need unfettered engagement with ideas, information and knowledge; the more copying the better. All content is zeros and ones and as a venerable mash up hacker knows too well, preventing slippage is akin to putting a band aid on a leaking sieve. Leading media commentator and author Gerd Leonhard (The Future of Music 2005 Berklee Press) suggests that creativity is inter-subjective. The only way to protect your ideas is to improve on the bloody things yourself; you have to be first to exploit your ideas for commercial gain if that is your goal. The Media 2.0 generation are fast realising that exhibiting emergent behaviour at all times epitomizes web smart/savvy. If you continually miss opportunities, you are simply “not creative enough”.
Today the web is flooded with high quality artistic content and the bar is being constantly raised. The product is the marketing and the marketing is the message and one must continually innovate to maintain any audience (Leonhard, 2009). The real power is the way you acknowledge and respect the attention span of the public. Why should it be any other way? This precious commodity becomes new business model formation in the link economy of Web 2.0 (hypertext linked). Energizing a fan base construes taking helm of your artistic career, thinking of yourself as a brand and upselling! Conflate the web, exploit the mobile phone. For example: premium items of merchandise, embedded objects and special apps should all be folded into a multimedia goodie bag and disseminated through your own radio station and then syndicate this. Ultimately fans adore added value, linking others virally to your website.
If the Google juggernaut does eventually dominate the world advertising sector as envisaged then maybe direct to artist micropayments for musicians could work? On second thoughts, I don’t think so. Monetizing the web in this way is counter intuitive. Musicians, artists etc should just set up credit card and shopping cart functions on their website and take responsibility for their own paper trail (if that is what they desire). To sum up, emergent behaviour alluded to above is ‘best practise’ for any smart individual, off or online.
For more on Gerd Leonhard: www.mediafuturist.com
Copying in the internet age is a public good and should be venerated as such. Kids need unfettered engagement with ideas, information and knowledge; the more copying the better. All content is zeros and ones and as a venerable mash up hacker knows too well, preventing slippage is akin to putting a band aid on a leaking sieve. Leading media commentator and author Gerd Leonhard (The Future of Music 2005 Berklee Press) suggests that creativity is inter-subjective. The only way to protect your ideas is to improve on the bloody things yourself; you have to be first to exploit your ideas for commercial gain if that is your goal. The Media 2.0 generation are fast realising that exhibiting emergent behaviour at all times epitomizes web smart/savvy. If you continually miss opportunities, you are simply “not creative enough”.
Today the web is flooded with high quality artistic content and the bar is being constantly raised. The product is the marketing and the marketing is the message and one must continually innovate to maintain any audience (Leonhard, 2009). The real power is the way you acknowledge and respect the attention span of the public. Why should it be any other way? This precious commodity becomes new business model formation in the link economy of Web 2.0 (hypertext linked). Energizing a fan base construes taking helm of your artistic career, thinking of yourself as a brand and upselling! Conflate the web, exploit the mobile phone. For example: premium items of merchandise, embedded objects and special apps should all be folded into a multimedia goodie bag and disseminated through your own radio station and then syndicate this. Ultimately fans adore added value, linking others virally to your website.
If the Google juggernaut does eventually dominate the world advertising sector as envisaged then maybe direct to artist micropayments for musicians could work? On second thoughts, I don’t think so. Monetizing the web in this way is counter intuitive. Musicians, artists etc should just set up credit card and shopping cart functions on their website and take responsibility for their own paper trail (if that is what they desire). To sum up, emergent behaviour alluded to above is ‘best practise’ for any smart individual, off or online.
For more on Gerd Leonhard: www.mediafuturist.com