Occasionally there’s a story on one of the podcasts that I track that kicks off a train of thought that is truly enjoyable. Many times it’s something silly that I find academically amusing and it passes the time on my bike or driving home from work. Yesterday was one of those and it’s something that might have a little more meat than I initially thought.
First, a bit about my podcast habit. I go in cycles with them and if I get interrupted by an audio book it can be months before I get around to the backlog. With that in mind, the podcast in question was a Studio 360 podcast from April 17, 2009 that pulled me in. The story is pretty simple and you’ll get much more by listening to it in its entirety, but here are the important bits as I see it: Sufjan Stevens had a contest. The winner got an unreleased song. Not just a recording of it, but the distribution rights. The whole enchilada. The winner was a guy about my age in Brooklyn and he decided that rather than tossing an mp3 out onto the Internet, he would invite people over for tea to listen to it in person. A little listening party in an intimate setting for this lonely song.
Full disclosure: I’m not a Sufjan Stevens fan. I wouldn’t be able to name one of his songs and probably wouldn’t recognize one if I heard it. But I have tried applying this scenario to artists whom I appreciate deeply and I’m pretty sure I get it.
In the story it is mentioned that many fans are upset by this and much is made of the digital divide and the age of said fans. The implication is that people in their 20s feel entitled to all things that can be copied digitally and people in their 30s don’t. I don’t find much to pick through in that argument. Overgeneralizing about generations is best left to those pathetic baby boomers still listening to Springsteen in their midlife crisis sports cars. What was I saying? Generations. Right!
Where I find something of value is in the push and pull between can and should and must. The implication of the fans who haven’t heard the song (because let’s just say they don’t live in New York) is that because something is so easily duplicated and distributed that it should be made available. But why? When U2 or Sufjan Stevens put a song on the iTunes store, it’s to get paid. They could give away their music a la Nine Inch Nails and so many others, but instead people are happy to click and drop a dollar in the cup for their song. What would the argument be if the winner of the contest sold copies of the song? Would that be seen as a slap in the face to the artist? Would people scream out about it? Owning a recording is such a tricky thing and this scenario is not so simple as to be about turning a buck.
And what of that ownership? Do we chafe at it because it’s an item that requires almost no effort to reproduce and distribute? Is there something inherent in a recording that suggests that can leads to should and on to must? I shrug off the notion that this is a beautiful and unique snowflake of a recording that everyone must hear. Wonderful performances happen every day that are lost to the air. Plenty of brilliant work is lost at the bottom of a library of mp3s never to be heard again by the person who purchased them. I also have to reject the idea that because this format is easier to copy than a painting that it should be copied. These are all fun ideas to chase.
Yet, none of those threads have brought me nearly the entertainment of trying to puzzle out what Mr. Stevens intended. He wrote and recorded a song as he has done many times (I presume). Then he gave it away. But not to the world. He gave the power of distribution to one person. I wonder if he is amused by the outcome. If it causes any small amount of angst on his part, the gnashing of teeth in his forums. It strikes me that the real art here is the performance of the fans as they struggle to get their hands on a artificially scarce piece of art and the acts of those who posess it and dole it out with such intimate delicacy. I can’t imagine that Mr. Stevens would have predicted this particular outcome. Perhaps that is the beauty of it. He didn’t know what was going to happen and something that I would call truly surprising did. It’s out of the best case scenario section of the John Cage handbook.
If I were a real blogger, I would ask my non-existent audience to discuss what they think about the rights of fans in the digital age or some other straw man to improve the ad revenue that I don’t have. Instead, I will offer that Mr. Stevens has started quite a game. He has produced an act of art the point of which will be missed by most of those who play a part in it. There are no implications about ownership here. There’s no new territory about “P2P” or “DRM” or “BuzzAcronymOfTheWeek.” I think it’s more subtle. And perhaps I’m missing it myself, but it’s fun to think about at the very least. I would have to call this creative act a success.
