Net audio and netlabels

I’ve just returned from a music-related conference where various speakers spouted orthodox Marxist mantras about capitalism’s evils and baffled most of the audience with long-winded, arcane, clever-speak – but they did touch on some interesting points and did ask some interesting questions in among it all.

One question was whether music was post-capitalist, by which the speaker meant that as no-one is buying music any more, it’s not part of the capitalist economic structure any more. Someone pointed out that, as music is everywhere these days, it still is part of the system but it’s just somewhere else within it and maybe its importance has changed. They then talked about how major music artists are signing to supermarkets and vodka manufacturers’ labels instead of the old record labels and expressed this as being like the old classical composers being patronised by the rich and powerful of their day. The point was made (a fair one, I think) that it didn’t necessarily restrict creativity.

Anyway, it got me thinking.

There’s more music being made than at any time in history. There are still those who make money and make a living out of it. Fewer of these are within the old record industry structures as time goes by. Some of those making money became famous in the old system and now use modern direct marketing methods with their established fan bases. Perhaps they are not models to emulate because they have effectively arrived in the new world with built-in benefits inherited from the old world.

Capitalism isn’t a synonym for buying and selling and making a profit. Those activities existed long before capitalism crawled out of medieval Europe. So, the fact that mainstream capitalism has largely lost its avaricious grip on any significant profits to be made from music (because people don’t buy enough physical or virtual products from their outlets any more) is neither here nor there. There are countless independent artists and small labels releasing music and making enough money to continue making music. The old record industry likes to pretend they don’t exist and blame ‘piracy’ for the drop in its sales – but this is a spurious argument and one we’ve discussed before.

What the conference speakers completely failed to acknowledge, and what the old record industry utterly fails to understand or acknowledge, is the existence of netlabels.

Netlabels are more radical than any Marxist; unlike Marxists they don’t simply react to an unjust system by rebelling against it and trying to replace it with their own version. Netlabels have stepped outside the capitalist/Marxist dialectic altogether by not being built upon arguments over the ownership of the means of production or arguments over who takes the profits.

This is the modern world; anyone with a computer owns the means of production and the ownership always remains with the creator. The labels are run by enthusiasts who like to distribute music and enjoy all the admin and marketing involved. Netlabels have no tricky copyright or legal issues, as they use very flexible Creative Commons licenses. This makes them considerably more ‘fit for purpose’ than such attempts at modernity as Spotify or Last FM.

Everybody wins, nobody loses except, maybe, the old mainstream labels who’ll blame ‘pirates’ anyway.