OMG it turns out the very beast I sought to slay actually endorses my plan, and even endorses it in a form that I can fully support:

"Our view has always been if the copyright holder wants to give away their product, it's fine. The key issue is that it's their choice to give it away." Hilary B. Rosen ... while chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America

Gosh, I sure hope so, Hillary, but then, your USA officially sanctions the freedoms of speech, fair-use and free association too ...

But no matter! What we have is at least the reasonable glimmer beyond a doubt that, taken at their word and at the very highest most respected levels, the RIAA endorses my plan to snip their lifeline. The fools.

Nonetheless, count me, in this one historical instance, a Hillary-booster because I agree 100% in the right to choose however wrong-headedly, and I will also benefitedly of my doubts assume her free-will assertion implies that her blanket security machine-level copy-protection schemes will also allow each and every one of us artists to decide without proxy whether or not your PC is going to enable duplication of our sound production ... which seems, well, sort of enormously complex and full of better check with bob P2P webservices for every one of the dozen or so artists involved in, say, a Moby Grape album and gee, if each has to be asked and re-asked every time it's played and if only the mixmaster switchdoctor says "ah, no." What then? --- but no matter, I digress ...

The thing is, we now know the RIAA says we can trade all recordings by bands who (somehow) grant such permission, but not those who don't, and that leaves us with a burning question:

Which bands are which? ...

The Hard Sell

What I may be discovering is that my political opponents in my free file-trade broadcast/distribution scheming may be on the other side of the distributor fence: Hillary supports the plan, the fans support the plan, but do the musicians?

When we were younger, footlooser and pre-schoolerfreer, May and I played several free lunch gigs for the homeless at Toronto's Scott Mission, a gig I think every musician who wants to be called an 'artist' should feel compelled to do. It may have been elsewhere, but I think it was there when a minister told me, "It's hard to talk to someone about Jesus when they are hungry".

I've also found it just as hard or harder when they've stepped beyond satiety. At the Linux conferences up to 2001 (when I stopped going) I'd ask the hot-shot dot-coms why they couldn't spend a few hours doing duty "at the orgs" and I'd ask the conference organizers why the media darlings got centre stage while the roots movements were squeezed out to the edge of the exhibit ghetto.

My Belly Full but I'm Hungry

There's only a narrow region between success and desperation where people can afford to consider good sense, and so it's really without surprise that I find the really hostile quarter to my One-Track idea is not SOCAN (who simply went silent) or the recording studios and promoters (who are still trying to figure out webpages) --- it's the musicians themselves, primarily the 'semi-successful' multi-CD big-label artists, but also from those just make it big someday seekers envious of that illustrious cosmic occupation, which sadly seems to describe a lot of young musicians.

No matter, to each their own and as my new good friend Hillary Rosen would say, like free love, "The key issue is that it's their choice to give it away."

sussing out the good guys

And it's to that end that prompts this post because part of my poking around that fabulous sound archive at Other Minds I encountered something I'd been seeking for years: We all know the famous pop divas who don't want you sharing their work, but who do we know who does?

Impossible to be complete, nonetheless the Internet Archive lead me to the eTreeWiki TradeFriendly List

Every trade-friendly band has their own version of what that term means and how far it extends. Some artists formally allow both taping and trading (e.g., Grateful Dead >1984). Some artists formally or tacitly allow trading of tapes even if they or their management do not openly permit taping (e.g., Grateful Dead <1984). Some bands' policies are formally written up and posted on official websites; others are informal verbal understandings between band and fans that are kept in a sort of "oral tradition".

eTree also has a thoughtful advocacy page outlining both how and why you should want to become TradeFriendly; I had a first-hand encounter with this yesterday as I sought to add site-cloud webwatch links to my Irish music website and discovered to my dismay that not one, not a single one of the several dozen Canadian celtic artist pages I visited allowed me anything more than a 1-minute sample snip of a tune or two. Not one.

Let me get this straight: You rarely score more than gas money for your thrice-a-month local fan-base gigs, your gigs are the only means for anyone to hear if you'd be worth the premium price of your small-batch CD -- a radio-spot sized soundbyte might draw them out to a free festival or a pub they'd go to anyway, but get them to go out of their way and plunk down some very real percent of their paycheck on the chance it was a representative sample? You think so? Wanna buy a piece of Florida? Howabout a nice bridge?

Let's do a reality check, eh? Musician or just a fan, when's the last time you heard a 30-second clip of someone hitherto completely unknown and you shrieked "Eureka! I simply must have more of that stuff! At any cost!" and now compare that zero-frequency to the number of times you bought a CD recommended by a friend who played it for you, and then you discovered you needed your own copy so you could play it for others, or you put $30 into tickets because that album was just so damn amazing.

So ... those few people who do come to your small-venue gig might buy a momento CD, and they might come to your website to read your bio and watch your tourdates. If you're really lucky, local radio or restaurants might play your CD (don't look now, bud, but that's free trading) and you score a new fan or two, but mostly, to know you, they got to come see you.

or maybe they don't. maybe they get into some online cyber-ethnography where someone has ripped your track, attributed it to Marilyn Manson and now you've got fans who walk right by your gig poster because they love your stuff, but they don't know your name.

owning our own shareability

The thing is, it's going to happen anyway, and you can get with it, or you can leave it for others to do, and we all know how well that works.

In the Prohibition 30's and before, bordello and booze-can owners bought and sold bands and band members like bar furniture. Back in the 40's, band leaders realized that to get anywhere in The Biz they had to manage their own finances and gig contracts. In the 50's and 60's they learned the hard way they had to manage their own record deals and artistic values. In the 70's they learned to run their own record companies, and in the 80's run their own studios, and in the 90's take real interest in the business management and self-promotion.

Today's artist needs to extend that to the distribution channel, step beyond the RIAA and the radio stations and the Junos and the Gramma Grammies and go direct to the ears and hearts of their audience by whatever means possible, and one possible means, proved powerful as a viral meme-relay since the days of Alan Lomax, is the audio recording.

That means taking an interest in proper MP3 or SHN or whatever file format you choose, but to name the file intelligently with your name and the tune name and not TD.mp3 --- that goes for the embedded index info for genre, composer, recording date, artist, title and hey, let's put your URL in the comments field. Whatya think, maybe? Either you do it for yourself, or some young fan is going to rip it hastily for you, which is fine if, like early electric Miles Davis, you don't care about attribution, or sound quality ...

And we as artists need to participate in the file-trading phenomenon and we should speak our mind on this Trade-Friendly thing. Having seen the Internet Archive Opt-in/Opt-out list, let me tell you have I have a changed perspective of a lot of people in both directions.

Bootleg Me!

I have an idea: In the tradition of wearing your heart on your sidebar sleeves...

and that being the tradition of the 88×33 Chicklet, here's my small offering for artist sites, the chicklet to be linked to your recording share policy statement, keeping in mind that I am no graphic artist, keeping in mind that it should probably go with some kind of embedded and searchable XML/RDF, and keeping in mind that the image itself is ... er ... well ... a bootleg:

ok ... I'm sure someone can do better. right-click and save if it's useful, or send me a better one and I'll link it in, but whatever you do, do something so we know if you're in on this digital network age, or if you're opting out.

---

Ask and ye shall receive, the reader-contributions ...

• : Paul Beard's smaller and more elegant chicklet