At The Copa...

The occasion was a gathering hosted by the Future of Music Coalition, which makes a point of ensuring artists’ voices actually get heard whenever reporters or telcos or record labels or government apparatchiks (or, to be fair, people who work for online music companies) start debating music and technology. The thing about all those folks is that we’re all tempted to invoke the welfare of artists as we destroy or repair the music business. Artists get talked about a lot, but they don’t usually get talked to. Even worse, the “artist’s position” often gets represented as just that – a singular viewpoint.

FMC recognizes there’s no one artist position. Accordingly, the guest list in Rio was as varied (and impressive) as the scenery. Some of the musicians I already knew, such as multi-instrumentalist Lu Edmonds (he’s played with the Damned, PIL, Billy Bragg, and best-band-in-the-universe, the Mekons) and Australian composer/digital entrepreneur Charlie Chan. Some I simply knew of, like Claudia Gonson from Magnetic Fields and Future Bible Heroes, and highlife pioneer Teddy Osei of Osibisa (that’s him playing sax on “Brown Sugar”). Still others were new to me, like jazz wunderkind (and nuclear physicist!)  Vijay Iyer; intellectual heavyweight Vlidi Jeric from experimental Belgrade rockers Darkwood Dub; and the supremely mellow Portuguese folk musician Baltazar Molina, who plays the Darbuka in a band called Dazkarieh. And that’s not even everybody.

Topics covered included net neutrality, intellectual property rights, ownership of and access to media, and, running through all of this, how the internet is being used by different artists in different countries. Early on, FMC executive director Jenny Toomey had everyone list all the different ways they made money from their music, and rank them based on % of income. It turned out there were over twenty, and some of the most interesting differences of opinions occurred between musicians who profit most from live concert appearances, and artists who spend the bulk of their time in the studio, relying on the ability to sell and license their recorded creations (to labels, advertisers, movies, TV shows, etc.).

For instance, during a discussion of sampling, Baltazar freaked out Stew (who’s moved from the power-pop glories of the Negro Problem to an impending Broadway opening). Stew assumed we all agreed that anyone who took a ten-note melody one of us had written, sampled it, and had a Top 10 hit, owed us some money. But Baltazar dissented, pointing out that if he hadn’t had a hit with the melody originally, the sampling artist must have done something different, and didn’t owe him anything.

Vlidi from Darkwood Dub thought the much ballyhooed “long tail” is b.s., at least as an economic model, since the only entities who stand to see any significant income from it are large companies that aggregate tens of thousands of copyrighted works. I think he’s only half-right: the long tail may or may not make it any easier for the average struggling musician to pay rent, but it still represents a revolutionary change for listeners, as they now have easy access to almost anything that’s ever been recorded, and that completely transforms the types of things average listeners choose to hear.

We did agree that what Vlidi calls the "hyper-inflation of content” makes experiences that can’t be captured digitally – namely, what it’s like to be in a room with other human beings as a bunch of musicians do their thing – more valuable. It sounds obvious, but is worth stressing: nothing can replace seeing musicians play live.

Ideas were shared. Assumptions were challenged. Jokes were made. Arguments were had. More caipirinhas were consumed. Conclusions weren’t reached – but that wasn’t the point. After two days of closed-door conversations, we held a day of public panels, the last of which took place in a bar, where the staff kept bringing panelists more food and topping off our cocktails, which made for a lively and funny, if difficult to recall, conversation.

To honor the occasion, and thank the kind folks at FMC for pulling us all together, here’s a playlist featuring all the participants who have material in Rhapsody.