100 years of Big Content fearing technology--in its own words
Chief movie lobbyist Jack Valenti appeared at a Congressional hearing on the VCR and famously went hog-wild. "This is more than a tidal wave. It is more than an avalanche. It is here," he warned after reciting VCR import statistics. "Now, that is where the problem is. You take the high risk, which means we must go by the aftermarkets to recoup our investments. If those aftermarkets are decimated, shrunken, collapsed because of what I am going to be explaining to you in a minute, because of the fact that the VCR is stripping those things clean, those markets clean of our profit potential, you are going to have devastation in this marketplace... We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine..."
"We're in favor of HD radio," said the RIAA's Mitch Bainwol in a 2004 interview. "It offers great benefits for consumers and everyone involved, but we're not blind to several concerns. Someone could cherry-pick songs off a broadcast and fill up a personal library and then post it on Kazaa... We're concerned for ourselves and the artists. If you don't have protection, it undermines the future investment in music."
Big Entertainment's century-long technophobic binge
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You're laughing now Cory, but once we can get BoingBoing transmitted directly into our neural transceivers via the wireless intellicloud you'll be hard-pressed to figure out how to sell those banner ads.
As each new amazing technology came out, instead of the Industry embracing each and finding new ways to expand audiences and using the new technology to their advantage - they cover their ears and cover their eyes and scream "IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD!"
They orchestrate their own demise. Good riddance.
Okay, so the VCR didn't do it, nor did the tape player...what actually would be a technology which would "kill" the entertainment industry?
Anything?
Bow Wow Wow sums it up.
I always thought it was a little cheeky how the industry as a whole has systematically condemned the very same technologies which have allowed them to make so much damn money in the first place.
Tapes are the devil except when they're recording them. CD's will be the death of music, except when being sold by music labels. The internet will drive every artist out of work, except when they're making a killing selling music online.
I think the bottom line is that the Peter Principle is resoundingly true and these executives are just idiots who managed to bluff their way out of the mail room where they belong.
If we had actually given these morons what they want their business would have collapsed from a lack of innovation decades ago. Fancy that. Maybe we should allow them the suicide they so desperately want.
"Someone could cherry-pick songs off a broadcast and fill up a personal library and then post it on Kazaa..."
Wow. Now that's a tinfoil hat argument... As if anyone would need HD radio to host a song on Kazaa. That is plain crazy.
The latest scourge to steal royalties and revenue from content producers: Remakes.
Instead of licensing and re-releasing a popular film, this nascent industry is taking money out of the pockets of the people involved in the originals.
If only somebody had spoken up when sequels started the trend..
So true, so true. So, the next time Hollywood goes and copies its illustrious past, I plan to stay away. In droves. Unless it's "Star Trek". Or something really good and science fictiony. Then I am admittedly weak.
(Let's be honest, though, most of those remakes are/were bilge. What next, a film adaptation of "Love, American Style"?)
if home taping was ever killing music, then really, who is at fault here? If you dont want people to tape stuff off the radio, then don't broadcast it for free on the public airwaves. Oh, what's that, you use radio to inform people of new music and get them to buy said music? Yeah, I thought so.
Still, I gotta admit, that skull-tape logo is an awesome design.
yeah, gee, when "artists" stop making money at making their "art", they'll have to go get real jobs, right?
i look forward to britney spears and martin lawrence asking me "do you want fries with that?"
i don't have any belief that if artists stop making money they will stop making art. i don't think any artist initially started plying their craft as a moneymaker. passion to create comes first.
but, yes, as an artist, i prefer to get some money for my works. however, that doesn't keep me from making.
(sorry in advance if this posted twice - there was a snafu)
No! When you get his content you'll just chuck some Whuffie at him! Don't you READ?
It's funny, in a creepy way, but you know what part of the entertainment industry has always embraced new technology, at least for the last 50 years? Porno.
I always thought it was a little cheeky how the industry as a whole has systematically condemned the very same technologies which have allowed them to make so much damn money in the first place.
Three words: Hollywood Writer's Strike. If there's no value in that there internet, how come wrangling about online residuals shut down Hollywood for months?
Sorry if this double post: the preview mechanism is screwed up.
Isn't the point that Sousa was right? Go to places like Cuba and Brazil, Colombia, parts of Africa and Asia where the recording industry his still bypassed major parts of the ethnographic spectrum to see what the world looked like when everyone sang. The first thing you notice is how many songs people know, and then how well they sing and play them. One of the reasons that people hang on to music in this form is its ability to create cohesion, to act as a cultural rallying point, to resist cultural hegemony. Go to the Reconcavo in Salvador, Brasil, or to Santiago de Cuba and you'll see this every day. And in both cases, in different languages, I heard people consistently refer to people they respected as 'um moço quem conhesci os cançoes antigos' -- in portuguese, 'a man who knows the old songs'. That might not have been Sousa's focus, but he shared an awareness of what was lost, and to reduce someone who was as passionately involved in music as him, to a single venal dimension is unconvincing.
Similarly, the cities of 40 years ago were full of theatres. One of my businesses is a club in an old movie theatre that anchored the community for 60 years, and it was indeed the VCR that killed the original business. On the street my business is on, there were 12 theatres that I can identify between us and the downtown core thirty years ago. Today there are none. Yet the full-screen experience is highly valuable: the Toronto International Film Festival sees people fly in from around the world to get that experience for hundreds of films where it might be the only chance to do so.That's true of virtually every one of the dozens or hundreds of film festivals around the world. So Valenti had a point, asshole though he could be: the second-run and neighbourhood theatre market disappeared, and with it the opportunity to make money off films via rentals, making television sales that much more important. Back forty years ago, you could often see a film that had come out a year ago in a theatre somewhere, in glorious full screen, if not always so big or clean or bright a projection: but miles better than what HD offers today. Isn't that something that someone who cares about film ought to value?
If you never experienced the world before these changes, you make assumptions that the world, and the technologies that shape it is inevitable. But this kind of technological determinism -- that takes the form of, "why don't the record companies just adapt to this technology" -- ignores the fact that they are adapting. They may not be adapting in the way you prefer, but that's the nature of societies that have an historical basis. Worse, by arguing the "technology is here and we need to change because it's here", which is the core of the argument for downloads, you strengthen arguments by, say, the security establishment that wants ever higher levels of montioring of our activities by virtue of the fact that the underlying technology makes them immanent. We moved from analog recording to digital, and somehow the recording industry should acquiesce to the full implications of zero-cost replication, even though the value enhancement it may offer me does not server the original creators of the data in the system. But we moved from analog phone services to digital ones, and somehow people don't agree that we should acquiesce to the full implications of zero-cost replication of our calls, communications and the people we contact into databases for further value-enhancement, even though that value does not serve the original creators of the data.
Technophobia isn't the issue: the recording industry embraced multi-track recording, and saved huge amounts of money at the expense of session musicians: the entire Jamaican music industry is based on the recycling of dub samples, and George Martin, Phil Spector and even Les Paul were music insiders who created fantastic possibilities out of technology. What is the issue is in part a Platonic/Aristotelian debate about the nature of authentic experience, much older than technology, and perfectly legitimate, and not invalidated because there is self-interest involved, which seems to be the 'touché' moment of the original piece.
The buggy whip manufacturers suffered. By the arguments of big content, we should all have buggy whips in our cars.
Hah, I've had this record: http://www.discogs.com/image/R-739311-1153818844.jpeg forever. I hadn't seen the original graphic until now.
omnivore, thanks for some good food for thought, but:
We moved from analog recording to digital, and somehow the recording industry should acquiesce to the full implications of zero-cost replication.....But we moved from analog phone services to digital ones, and somehow people don't agree that we should acquiesce to the full implications of zero-cost replication of our calls
I dont think this parallel holds up. Whilst telecommunication networks may have saved some money from moving to the efficiency of digital transmission, the ammount saved is negligable in comparison to the ammount which can/is being saved by the record industry after moving to digital distribution & CDs.
Furthermore, it should be noted that the record insudtry no longer holds the key to the door of recording (as technologies are becomming cheap enough that artists can make decent recordings with reasonably priced gear) meaning that the record industry is slowly being sidelined to being nothing more than a coke-driven distribution network. This is why they are getting cranky because people are needing them less and less.
either the artist is poor enough that they need exposure (like cory, when I first found him), or they're rich enough that i don't fucking care. and of course the later group is the one that makes all the noise. (well, them and the industry leaches.)
once the technological potential exists, it will happen. evolve or die....
@teapot
I can't claim much expertise, but I have read a very interesting study of the development of telephone systems. Analog lines have quite finite carrying capacity, basically a function of the frequency spectrum of copper wire over long distances divided by the minimum acceptable spectrum for the reproduction of the human voice. My understanding is that digital signals in telecommunications caused bandwidth to explode. So in its initial stages, I think that telecoms saved a huge amount. Digital switching definitely replaced some very expensive, inherently less reliable and slow equipment. This video shows the size and speed of a typical switch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J3Ou6C89VI
And that's only three numbers. So there were, I think, much larger savings in the digital switching area than were realized in the music industry.
But is it a question of money, or is it a question of technology? If we argue that what is suggested by technology is the highest good, if in other words we believe that there is some kind of pure destiny embodied in technology that we have no choice but to follow. then I think we sacrifice our basic decision making ability that free people have. Political systems assume that some group of people guide their own -- and sometimes others' -- destiny. Technocrats assume that the logic of systems determine what we ought to do, and in extreme cases, as with neoconservativism, suggest that we in effect have no choice but to submit to market logic (while maintaining large areas of exceptionalism, like the military). I'm just saying that when people argue that the music companies should follow the logic of technology, they should realize that they are making a general argument, and the example of the ability of networks to act as surveillance on our lives is validated.
Thanks Omnivore.
In over 3 years, yours is the first post on the topic that has actually made me think.
It might even make me revise my ideas somewhat :)
@omnivore Well said. I never thought I'd be agreeing with Sousa, but here it is.
Recording technology has certainly had an impact on performing musicians (like myself) that has been mixed. On one hand, the variety of music I can hear is stunning. On the other, working opportunities (weddings, parties, clubs, etc.) have diminished drastically. Live classical performance has atrophied because artists need to live up to an unreal recorded image. Amateur music culture has declined -- maybe we're all amateurs now.
However, I'm glad to live in my times. I can make a great recording at home, my audio synthesis resources are staggering, and I have more recorded music than I can listen to. I'm not shedding any tears for the "recording industry." Their business model is over and their legacy is fairly sordid.
If I'm not mistaken (which I very well could be) the first time that logo appeared it was on the 2nd side of the Dead Kennedys - In God We Trust Inc. Cassette with the tag line:
"Home taping is killing the music industry, we left this side blank so you could do your part".
I have a feeling Winston Smith came up with that graphic.