Free Enterprise & Piracy in the Music Industry

               In Six Faces of Piracy, Ramon Lobato addresses the issue of piracy by breaking it down into a variety of forms.  One of these six types of piracy is ‘piracy as free enterprise’.  In contrast to the common ‘piracy as theft’ perspective, this free enterprise point of view suggests that piracy caters to market needs and may actually be economically beneficial in some ways.  Although pirated content itself does not generate a direct profit, Lobato suggests that piracy might still be monetized in some form.  As an example, Lobato discusses product placement in movies.  In this case, piracy may be beneficial to a showcased product, as increased circulation of a movie may lead to an increase in the highlighted brand’s value.  While users may not be paying for their pirated content, this pirated content may lead them to purchase other goods at a later time.

                This 2012 BBC News article, A Glimpse at Piracy in the UK and Beyond, seems to be somewhat inclusive of this view on piracy.  While the story includes the harshly negative perspective of a BPI chief executive (“We are losing hundreds of millions of pounds a year that should be getting invested into new music”), it also presents the opinions of the artist.  Ed Sheeran, the most illegally downloaded artist in the UK last year, appears to have a view on piracy that agrees much more with the ‘piracy as free enterprise’ concept.  While 8 million copies of the album have been pirated and only 1.2 million have been legally purchased, Sheeran states that he feels good that 9 million people in the UK have his album, despite the majority being pirated.  He believes that this gives people that wouldn’t necessarily buy the album a chance to listen to his songs, which can create new fans that might come to his performances.  While he may not be profiting from the actual pirated albums, the illegal downloads help build Sheeran’s fan base, eventually leading to an increase in profits from tickets to his performances.

                I can definitely see the logic behind Lobato’s ‘piracy as free enterprise’ discussion.  It does seem as though piracy can lead to economic success in some ways, and I find it encouraging seeing that today’s artists are open to the idea of a changing music industry.  The BBC article states that an emerging business model for the industry “sees the album in a similar way to how it sees the music video: as a promotional tool for the artist, a mechanism to sell live performance tickets.”  This new perspective seems to be aligned with Lobato’s free enterprise concept, as unauthorized circulation of music albums can be used as advertising for concerts in the same way that pirated movies may increase the effects of product placement. 

YouTube Marketing Effectiveness: Oprah vs. Pop Music

In The Entrepreneurial Vlogger: Participatory Culture Beyond the Professional-Amateur Divide, Jean Burgess and Joshua Green explore the characteristics of YouTube culture.  Burgess and Green write that the “real” YouTube had no market-related motivation driving users’ video production, and they argue that the site is most ideal for amateurs and ordinary individuals who seek personal expression.  Burgess and Green further support this concept by including a segment related to Oprah Winfrey’s creation of a YouTube channel.  In contrast to the average user’s personal expression video blogs, Oprah’s YouTube channel was created as a type of promotional strategy, with the intent of presenting the brand to the community in a controlled way.  Due to the channel’s lack of compatibility with many elements of participatory media, Oprah’s channel has ultimately been somewhat of a failure with the YouTube audience.

While the Oprah brand, even with its large level of media power, failed to impress users, some channels seem to have been more successful in marketing their brand via YouTube.  I am particularly interested in how this applies to today’s music industry, as an increasing number of bands seem to be successfully using YouTube as a means to expand their fan base.  In high school, my best friend went to a concert and saw the band We The Kings perform.  She told me all about her experience, stating that the band was somewhat decent, but she probably wouldn’t see them again.  However, at some point after that, she stumbled across the We The Kings YouTube channel.  After seeing the band’s regularly-posted vlogs, she became more appreciative of their music, and she still watches their YouTube videos and goes to their concerts today, five years after her initial concert experience.  She also shares videos from the channel often, bringing more new fans to the band’s YouTube page.   For this and other bands, YouTube appears to be a much more effective marketing tool than it has been for Oprah.

As of today, the Oprah Winfrey Network channel has 82,533 subscribers, while the We The Kings band channel has 86,694.  The Oprah brand, as widely known and powerful as it is, is has achieved less success that this relatively small band has found while marketing themselves to a niche audience on YouTube.  According to the writing of Burgess and Green, this variability in brand success happens for assorted reasons.  In this particular case, I would hypothesize that this is due mainly to the brand’s knowledge of how YouTube operates and the resulting difference in how the audience is addressed.  As the article mentions, Oprah’s channel did not allow unmoderated comments and did not directly address YouTube users.  The videos found on the We The Kings YouTube channel differ significantly because they are of amateur quality and often feature clips of the band’s daily life, as well as members of the band talking directly to the camera.  Also, rather than controlling user comments completely, the band often asks for audience input, encouraging their fans to interact with them.  By marketing themselves in this way, a band can appeal to music fans by giving them an in-depth look at the band members’ personalities and their life on tour, which is ultimately much more effective than professionally produced videos that don’t connect with YouTube users. 

The Cult of the Amateur & Commercial Photography

               In Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur, Keen accuses the Web 2.0 of enabling hobbyists to triumph over individuals with experience.  Keen discusses this celebration of amateurism specifically as it relates to Wikipedia.  This online encyclopedia allows absolutely anyone to add and edit entries, making it equally simple for both amateurs and professionals to share information publicly.  Keen emphasizes his concerns about this prominent position of the hobbyist, claiming that “by empowering the amateur, we are undermining the authority of the experts”.  In addition, Keen addresses the issue of content pricing, as free amateur content is more appealing than expensive professional content in many cases.  While I don’t feel that these ideas can easily be generalized across every discipline, I would definitely agree that these arguments presented by Andrew Keen in The Cult of the Amateur apply to the current state of the commercial photography industry.

                When the switch was made from film to digital cameras, photography became accessible to more of the general public, as images were visible without being developed by a lab and pictures could now be stored on one’s computer.  As digital cameras shrink in size and in price, this medium becomes increasingly more available, and there are also an increasing number of websites that enable users to publicly share their digital images online.  Being a creative person myself, I do understand the appeal of sharing work online, but I also believe that there are problems that arise due to this.  The specific issue that I would like to address is the creation of “professional” photography pages on Facebook.  Facebook allows any of its users to create their own page, and this has resulted in legions of untrained people with cameras setting up photography pages through which they offer services that are typically covered by trained professionals, such as senior portraits and wedding shoots.  While the difference in image quality is typically visible at a glance, the reality is that many customers are still choosing to hire these amateur photographers.  Some customers may be comforted by the fact that some amateurs have the same cameras and editing software as a professional, but this willingness to hire an amateur is often due mainly to the issue of cost.  Because these amateur photographers are often high school students or working adults using photography as a hobby, they typically have no studio costs to cover and often offer to provide their services either for much less money or for free.  Amateur photographers may also offer a higher quantity of images, often skipping over the proofing process and instead presenting their customers with a disc of every picture taken at the shoot, free of watermarks and with no usage restrictions attached.  

                The impact of social media on the commercial photography industry is similar to the impact of Web 2.0 on the encyclopedia.  The internet provides a space for amateurs to present their knowledge and imagery to the world, and I would argue that, at least in situations dealing with creative media, this most definitely has the potential to undermine the training and expertise of true professionals.  As Andrew Keen asserts while comparing Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica, “fighting against free is hard, if not impossible”.  I have spoken with several professional studio photographers regarding this very issue, and each individual has discussed their increasing struggle to attract customers while maintaining prices that will allow them to make a living.  As is the case with Wikipedia, amateur photography promises to provide a higher quantity of services for a lower cost, and professional institutions have difficulty competing because of this price difference.  

Recently, however, I have noticed an additional trend relating to this online battle of amateur vs. professional photographers.  Professionals have begun to use the very same social media that threatens their businesses to fight back against the influx of amateurs into the realm of commercial photography.  By creating informational images and sharing them with the public, professional studio photographers are working to educate the general public on the differences between amateur and expert work.  These images clearly lay out differences in work, even in cases when an amateur has the same equipment as the professional.  They also work to educate Facebook users about how the cost of their work is calculated and where the money goes.  Personally, I am sympathetic to these efforts, but the ultimate reaction of the public remains to be seen.  The number of amateur photographers offering cheap services is increasing daily, and like Keen, I fear that this empowerment of the amateur will continue to threaten the institutions constructed by trained, experienced professionals.

Maintaining Virtual Communities Through Diversity

               In Daily Life in Cyberspace, Howard Rheingold discusses his own personal experiences relating to the growth and success of the WELL virtual community.  In this text, Rheingold emphasizes that WELL is an extremely diverse community, giving the reader examples of assorted users’ biographies, ranging from college students to writers to military captains.  While he acknowledges that a divergent community is inherently prone to conflict, Rheingold also makes a strong case for the value of diversity in terms of gift economies.  With a varied group of individuals comes a greater assortment of knowledge, and the reciprocity of knowledge presentation in a virtual community can lead to both the expansion of one’s personal knowledge base and the development of trusting, altruistic relationships with other users.   I definitely believe that the exchange of information among users strongly contributes to the “simple, corny, all-powerful love” that, according to Rheingold, is what allows a diverse virtual community to survive.

                I have had the good fortune to experience the benefits of diverse online communities in a variety of locations throughout my youth, but the thing has stuck with me the most is my time spent on Zetapets.  In middle school, I joined this small virtual pet website as a means of communicating online with my younger cousin, and I soon became acquainted with a diverse assortment of users, among them a grandmother raising her special needs grandson, a middle-aged gay rights activist, a talented cartoon artist the same age as I was, and a 10-year-old looking for a safe place to talk about friend trouble.  Before long, I was an active participant in their forum conversations, offering advice on topics that I felt knowledgeable about.  I found myself giving training tips to a user with a new puppy, critiquing photographs taken by other budding artists, and eventually even contributing some of my artwork to the site itself.  When I was in need of advice, I would simply post about my issue, and another user would quickly appear to offer their thoughts and support.  Because I had offered my knowledge to members of the community in the past, these same community members were more than happy to help me with minor health issues, coding problems, and other gaps in my own knowledge base.   Over time, this led to the development of trusting, strong relationships between Zetapets users.

                While WELL and Zetapets are obviously quite different in terms of surface goals, I quickly found that the Zetapets community was much more concerned with the exchange of ideas and information than with the virtual pet aspect of the site.  I can easily relate to Rheingold’s experience of getting to know individual users on a deeply personal level, as I have continued to keep in touch with these individuals to this day; several of us communicate regularly on more recent sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.  Much like the users Rheingold encountered on WELL, we continue to offer our varied knowledge to each other, and we continue to receive the knowledge that we’re lacking in return for the help we give others.  I definitely agree that this diversity can cause conflict, and Zetapets has certainly had forum arguments much like any other diverse online community, but ultimately there is a strong sense of trust and respect among users that always leads to a resolution.  At one point, the site had to be shut down due to issues with the owners, and even despite this, the members of the community found each other through a different site and came together to rebuild our site under a different name.  I see my experience with Zetapets as strong support for Rheingold’s assertions.  In order for a diverse virtual community to succeed, information must be exchanged, relationships must be built, and the users involved must have a strong belief in maintaining their community, even in the face of conflict.