“It’s no longer a delivery problem”
Mp3 is just a technology, a method to compress audio. But for some it is devil’s advocate because it actually made the quick and easy sharing of music over the internet possible. But one could as well “think of an mp3 as metadata about the artist”, was Joi Ito, chairman of the board of Creative Commons and member of the board of ICANN, considering at the fair music discussion in Linz in September.
“The internet is about creating relationships between the artist and the user. The problem with labels is: this brand is standing between you and the artist. We know from experience that people actually pay more if it’s going directly to the artist.”, says Ito. For artists it is therefore necessary to experiment and one possibility to find new ways of dealing with their own intellectual property is the alternative licensing scheme Creative Commons. Ito: “We think it is important to let the artist decide under which circumstances they want to give away their work and when they want to be paid.”
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Creative Commons allows artists to pick an individual license for each of their works. They can set creative works free for certain uses, for example allow the free use of a song with attribution for a non-commercial podcast but charge for commercial use for tv shows or advertising. Creative Commons wants to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”
Joi Ito thinks it is about time to try something new because since the year 2001, music promotion monopolists like MTV are loosing their power and “the whole star-thing is going away”. In a time before the wide spread of high bandwidth internet the music biz “used to be a delivery problem so the delivery guys were in charge”, says Ito. “But when we get faster internet it’s no longer a delivery problem. Once you have any song available within seconds it is a discovery problem. How do you find the song you want - and as a musician: how do you get to the people who like your music. That’s where the value is in the future. If you’re sitting around and trying to protect something that nobody knows about you’re not going to make any money anyway.”
So you could as well give away your music for free and at least get attribution, which then helps you to earn money with concerts, merchandising, shows and all sorts of new business models.
