A year or two, back when Myspace was still the place hip young trendsetters went to look at grainy webcam pictures of girls in bikinis, Get Set Go had a pretty sizeable presence on that quintessence of social networking. More than “pretty sizeable,” actually–it was huge for an indie rock band without the backing of empty business suits stuffed with money and cocaine (I guess the technical term is “A&R people). We had fifty thousand friends (only about 25% of whom were robots made of spam and pictures of boobs) and well over a million plays on our little embedded jukebox thingy. Hell, if we’d lived in Myspace instead of the real world, we’d've been hand-fed bitmapped pictures of grapes by callipygian spambots all day, and slept on .gifs of posturepedic adjustable mattresses lined with paypal account numbers.
But guess what all those fancy statistics got us in real-world terms. Go on, guess! If your guess was “precisely dick,” then you’re just about right. And one of the reasons for this was highlighted pretty damn starkly by one of our Myspace friends, who posted a comment to the effect of “Why don’t you guys put your stuff on Torrent so I can have it for free?” Actually, this was Myspace, so it was probably more like “Why ur guyz songsjhg putt on Torrent I wanna sdghlueyt freeeeeeee myooozik lulz FTW.”
However the question was framed, the message was crystal clear: “Why isn’t your music free? Entertainment should be free!” The quick answer, of course, is “Good lord, that is insulting!” The long answer, naturally, would be “Because we spent years learning how to play our instruments and sing, and months writing and recording the album, and spent vast amounts of time and effort making it, and none of that is free! Now somebody bring me my goddamn naked girl grapes! And adjust my memory foam mattress; I still have to move my neck to see the TV!”
Irrespective of anyone’s views on the subject, we live, broadly speaking, in a country with a vaguely capitalist economy. The way you show that you appreciate and value something in that type of economy is to BUY IT. If the prevailing sentiment becomes one wherein anything creative should be available for free, it follows that anything creative is inherently valueless. That worries me. A lot.
Let me explain that I’m inherently sort of a capitalist. I’d like to believe that ideally, when goods and services and art are traded for money, the best things should make the most money. The cream should rise to the top, if I may be permitted a stultifying and vomit-inducing cliche. At the same time, I have no faith whatsoever in the style of capitalism practiced in America, for one simple reason: it’s way too easy to cheat. The cream is not often allowed to rise, and a handful of people are able to make feces crowd the cream right out of whatever the hell metaphorical liquid things rise to the top of. To wit: new band’s album isn’t selling? Buy up a few hundred thousand copies of your own product to create a fake buzz. Trouble getting a single on the radio? Throw barrels of cash at some half-bright radio promoter, and he’ll play the HELL out of that single for you. Probably even let you share his coke and fellate you a little bit for your trouble. In the abundance-driven marketplace of entertainment, there’s always a way to throw money at something until it’s forced out in front of the consumer’s face. Too many unscrupulous bags of douche have the cheat codes.
I suspect this tactic is largely effective (if brutally unfair) because people DON’T, as a whole, really value music and art. They like that it’s there, sure. But they don’t really care what they’re getting as long as it’s SOMETHING to fill the sucking, numbing void between double-shifts at Pizza Hut. People have so many options for entertainment thrust at them constantly, they don’t have to be discriminating. It takes time and effort to be discriminating. So they’ll take whatever’s easy and obvious. And that usually means the stuff with the most money and the slickest, shiniest ad campaign behind it. I’m not saying that lower-budget art can’t succed financially; it sometimes does. But it’s forced to operate at a tremendous disadvantage.
So what’s the solution? I really have no idea. If I did, I’d be eating the hand-fed grapes of wealth and decadence, and adjusting the bed of indulgence, and watching the plasma-screen TV of eternal cleavage, right now. I’m working on it, but for now I don’t know. So I should probably end the column right here, right? WRONG. I am not quite out of blather yet this week.
I am happy to report that when our Myspace comment-poster posted her comment about wanting everything for free, a bunch of our OTHER fans jumped all over her and told her in no uncertain terms why what she said was insulting. I don’t even blame her for her lack of tact; she didn’t know any better. She got used to a valueless-art environment and was acting within the parameters of what she knew. And then other people told her she was mistaken, and she understood. So SOME people get it. And those people can help OTHER people get it. In fact, after this column goes public, I expect a completely equitable artistic utopia to take hold within, say, three weeks.
I guess none of this is particularly new or revelatory (I’m not even sure why they pay me for this…oh, wait…). But one of the main questions of the 21st century, as far as I’m concerned, is the one about what’s going to happen to artistic endeavor with the rise of the internet and the decline of the big studios and record labels (the REAL main question of the 21st century, obviously, is “Where are my goddamn jetpacks and sex robots?”). It’s a pet topic of mine, and maybe if I continue to fill websites with wordspew, a thousand words at a time, I’ll figure everything out. Until then, toss some money around on good things and we’ll see if I’m right.
photo originally published here
