fair music weblog

This evening the first fair music awards have been given to Harald Quendler of Extraplatte, the VJane-network female:pressure, represented by Andrea Mayr, Mark Chung of Freibank music publishing and last but not least Peter Kuthan of the music project tonga.online within the context of the Ars Electronica in Linz, the international festival for art, science and technology. Around the award a discussion about the fair music initiative and the situation of the music business and cultural diversity took place.

fair music is the first global initiative for fairness and justice in the music business. fair music wants to establish fair rules and regulations in the music world: protection of artistic freedom, well-balanced contracts for musicians, fair remuneration for composers and musicians, as well as a fair distribution of opportunities for small producers worldwide and especially for musicians of the Global South. fair music adopts the idea and empirical knowledge of the Fair Trade Organisations and takes it to the world of cultural goods and services. It is committed to the development of standards of fairness for the music industry.

“What a quality label is has to be negotiated in a democratic way”, Peter Rantasa said. And he added: “We are happy that Fair Trade is consulting us in this.”

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Gerfried Stocker, director of the Ars Electronica Festival, said he is happy that the fair music launch and award ceremony are taking place in the context of the Ars Electronica because music business is going through a revolution because of digital media.

Peter Rantasa, director of mica - music austria and initiator of fair music, then shed light on the current situation of music production and music marketing: the hands that are involved in the music production, i.e. producer, record label, recording studio, manufacturer, get 22% of the money, distribution gets 78%. The question is: is the consumer interested in the store or in the music and musicians? Next is, the world’s 4 largest record companies, the so called “Majors”, together control more than 3/4 of the world music market but provide only 20% of the existing world repertoire of music. With the independent record companies, the so called “Indies”, it’s the other way round: they earn 25% of the market share and represent 80% of the global music repertoire.

Danny O’Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation said at the fair music presentation in Linz that he feels uncomfortable with the idea that music lovers are reduced to consumers. He is well said that people who buy music would need simple signals about which part of the industry they can support.

Chris Gelbmann, “microproducer” with his label Buntspecht said:”There is good music all around the world and now via the internet the consumers get the chance to get to know this music. But it doesn’t make sense for artists to give away music for free all their life.” Gelbmann has been working for majors and is a musician himself, so he knows all sides of the coin.

Volker Grassmuck, media researcher from Berlin, said: “We cannot turn back the time, we will not get rid of filesharing. So we will have to take this opportunity to start a new relationship between musicians and the audience. We need a new kind of social contract.

Margit Niederhuber, consultant in women’s and culture projects in Africa, stressed upon the need for more diversity in the music market and the opportunity a fair music label could give to small producers to get access to the market.

Ronaldo Lemos, law professor in Rio de Janeiro and director of Creative Commons Brazil described how music marketing is working in Brazil. The Tecno Brega movement is producing about 400 new albums every year and distributing them via street vendors and at their live acts. Sony music for example only produced 13 new CDs with brazilian music in a year. Thanks to the new technologies disadvantaged artists have new chances to bring their music to the audience.

Joichi Ito, IT-entrepreneur, member of the board of ICANN and chairman of Creative Commons added that the internet makes it possible to establish a relationship between the artists and the fans. With growing bandwidth the problem of the future will not be how to deliver music but how to discover it or be discovered.