Nobody Pays for Art Anymore

This is from my weekly email series, The Weekly Mixtape. I don’t ask for payment (not that my rambling could be mistaken for art), but I would appreciate it if you subscribe to newsletter. Plus you don’t have to wait for these posts until I remember to add them to the site.

We live in weird times. And that was even before the pandemic.

My grandpa took up playing the bagpipes later in life. He was proud of his Scottish heritage, and some of my fondest memories are of him marching around the house in his kilt, with his hearing aids turned down while blaring out that rhythmic chant. I even got the opportunity to play with him at a Robert Burns Night, a Tuba and Bagpipe duet called “Scotch on the Rocks.”

(Sadly, I can’t find a video. This was pre-cell phone days)

When he got better, he would even play at funerals. But he made clear that he would never do that for free: “You always pay the piper.”

That came to mind as I was reading this article on Harper’s talking about how bad it has been in the art community due to the pandemic.

If you want a depressing look into how bad things have gotten, it’s worth a read. But the key point is that the pandemic has just made a bad situation worst.

Again, we live in weird times. If you were to jump into a Way Way Back Machine, all music was live music, and if you wanted to see art, you saw the original copy, because it’s not like they could stick it in the Xerox.

Then we could make copies. Thanks to technology, artists could do something once then sell it multiple times. Not everyone benefited from this, but some people ended up doing very, very well. I mean, why listen to your local bard if you can see Shakespeare himself? Or whatever the 1970’s version of that is.

Finally, in my formative years, people figured out to how easily copy those copies and give them out for free. Which likely wouldn’t be a huge, pervasive problem if the internet didn’t allow it to be given free out to EVERYONE.

As the Harper’s article mentioned, it forced artists (and it seems to be talking mostly about musicians here, though it does try to group in other artists) to do more live shows. Which COVID shut down.

It’s a pretty messed up turn. It brought the income situation for artists back to the dark ages, except people now have way more alternatives for entertainment…including stealing recordings of your work or getting it basically free.

The Harper’s article calls for big changes, for unions and ethical payments to artists and such. It sounds nice, but it’s not going to happen. Not just because people like their free stuff, but because some people have figured out this new situation and done quite well with it, and it would actually be against their interest to make more changes.

So what are we to do? I don’t really know either, but I have a suggestion.

Let me step back and take on another political fight that Harper’s addresses: minimum wage. Whenever I see the fight for a higher minimum wage, those pushing for it always say things like “Of course Walmart can afford to pay people more! Of course McDonald’s can afford to pay more! Make them pay more!”

But what about that local shop on main street of a small town in Mississippi? Raising the minimum wage could be enough to put them out of business. Since I’ve worked with a lot of small businesses, I’m much more sympathetic to their plight than I was when I was younger. But those kinds of arguments make minimum wage more complicated, so the politicians stick with the big, nationwide companies that actually do have enough money to pay more and ignore the rest.

Stealing art often goes down the same argument. I remember in high school the argument was (1) these musicians are rich, so who cares if a bunch of high school students steal an album and (2) they make most of their money from live shows anyway.

The arguments online today haven’t changed much in the last, um, few *cough* years.

I think the best way to help the situation is to humanize those people we’re taking from, making it clear how and when they get money and WHY they need it. We might not feel too bad if Taylor Swift loses out on an album sale or two, but for the local, bourgeoning musician it means the difference between an artistic career and working in accounting.

Of course that kind of awareness takes money…and my guess at who pays for that is as good as yours.

The Links

• Speaking of people who have figured out this new world, Nick Lutsko’s Twitter account has definitely gotten weird over the pandemic. And I can’t look away.
• I don’t get the NFT stuff, but it’s a new way for artists to make money, so it’s seems like an interesting trend. Even Charlie Bit My Finger is going that way.

Service Dog Update

Speaking of weird things that I hadn’t considered as being an issue, it’s Spring, which means people are mowing lawns.

I have no idea why that makes such a huge difference, but Wilson will not leave the freaking mowed lawns alone. I’ve never had such a hard time walking him in my life. I had to go out of my way to walk him far away from any freshly mowed lawns, which was a huge pain.

Adolescence is almost over. I think. I hope. Just a little bit longer.

Photo by some insane guy with a Samsung phone that he didn’t really want (RIP LG phones). I believe Ceres (the cat in the box) was looking for the mythical Runbird that Mizuno goes on about.