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“In Transformative Vs Incremental Change Steve Lawson produces a good summation of the crisis facing the recording industry, and why this isn’t a crisis for the artist, but an opportunity (one that publishing corporations do not want artists to take),” writes Crosbie Fitch in Digital Productions, going on »»»

When you take an industry that has 4 big costs — recording, manufacture, distribution, promotion — and remove 3 of them, that changes everything.

Costs have been removed from the picture, but this only represents a loss in revenue to the publishing corporations — not to artists. Artists can now take advantage of this all being done for free — instead of signing to a label in order pay them their rates that were inflated in the first place.

Both ends were overcharged. The fan was overcharged for a copy, and the artist was overcharged for for the label to produce, promote, distribute, and retail their art.

Now that the extortionate costs have been removed, what will happen when both ends meet directly?

Advertising is completely broken. Recording tech is better and cheaper than it has ever been, fans are more and more willing to talk about and share your music, and far more happy to buy physical product from you than from a third party. Website merch is easy to do, either in short run, big order or even one-offs.

The record industry before the internet was built on the assumption that to have a chance of making it ‘big’, you needed to have deep pockets to risk the kind of gambling collateral needed to have a shot at being in the 0.1% who ended up rich.

The labels funded their gambling by owning the services they were charging you for, by keeping you in debt so they didn’t have to pay you, by keeping product prices artificially high, and by perpetuating myths about what it was that we all wanted and needed, as both artists and consumers.

Everything has changed. If you look at the current possibilities as an incremental change to the industry – that is, if you see the infrastructure as still being the same, and see MP3s as ‘invisible CDs’, you are truly truly screwed. It’s awful. That’s why the industry says ‘the sky is falling’. They aren’t willing to let go of that old infrastructure.

If you see the real changes, throw all the cards in the air, and realise that instead of hundreds of artists making millions of pounds, we can how have millions of artists making hundreds of pounds (and a straight, shallow line on the curve up from there), we’re all in good shape.”

Crosbie says he’s researching and developing revenue mechanisms and business models for producers of digital art and in the process, ‘has discovered copyright is not only an ineffective anachronism, but is unethical and unconstitutional‘.]

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