Two Things About Past Stories

I found a couple of pieces online related to past posts, and thought they were worth sharing.

First, I continue to noodle around the idea that the vast majority of creative people aren't making (enough) money and that's been true for a very long time. Then up pops an item from NPR's Planet Money blog that shows how the 1% in performing entertainment are hoovering up an ever-increasing share of the concert dollar.

Pitched as a piece about income inequality, it takes off from a talk by Princeton economist Alan Krueger in which he argues that “The music industry is a microcosm of what is happening in the U.S. economy at large." More depressingly, it appears that the technology that ought to be democratizing and spreading wealth is instead contributing to this distortion. That, and simple luck.

Technology plays its part by spreading the most popular (and most produced and most solidly funded) material the most widely. You're simply more likely to be exposed to the already popular stuff because money buys the tech that gets it out there. As it always has, I think.

Luck comes in because of network effects. People will (despite their protestations to the contrary) tend to gravitate to things that appear popular. If you have the good fortune to get early downloads, early thumbs-up, and appear to break from the pack first you are going to gather more attention, more downloads, more likes and the spiral is going to build. Technology factors into that by making the entire system of downloading and rating more visible, which drives more herd behavior and so on.

Second, you may recall that last month I noted that the fashion industry tends to build on copying, and does so successfully. A friend linked (for other reasons) a long post by comedian Patton Oswalt in which the first topic is "Thievery."

Like in fashion there's no IP protection for comedy. You can't copyright a joke, and it's certainly true that many performers use each others' material. Sometimes that's conscious, sometimes it's accidental. The public may even hear about or know people who make a living writing comedy material for well-known humorists like David Letterman or Jon Stewart. However, this has led to what Oswalt identifies as a massive public misperception - that all comedians "steal" and that "nobody" writes their own material.

In fact, the majority of working comedians write, or try to write, their own humor. A comedian's value is a combination of the material and the delivery. Some people are good writers but lousy performers; some people can really hold an audience, but produce poor original material. But as in any other career the people who are bad at one thing either get better at it or they get out of the business. Maybe they hire writers, or pay for stage coaching, but either way the goal is for them to produce more and better original acts.

Along the way, though, they have to deal with the people Oswalt identifies as the thieves. People who scoop up another comedian's jokes wholesale, sometimes even to the point of copying entire segments of someone else's act and then passing it off as their own. Without the ability (or money) to protect their work, comedians often have no choice but to wait until the thieves flame out. If you're stealing someone else's material to help you move up eventually you're going to reach a level where you're expected to produce. If you don't have original material then you can't produce, and you flame out, much like any other person who has cheated their way through life.

It's an interesting way to think about illegal (or at least unwanted) copying: can we create situations in other areas where unwanted copying isn't policed by restrictive technologies (DRM) or by restrictive laws (CISPA/TPP), but contains within itself the seeds of its own demise?