I recently saw a series of posts by Daniel Kibblesmith on bluesky about a kind of Luddite-ism where Napster has caused a bad shift in consumption habits that have made it harder for artists to make a living: the expectation of free, etc. I also recently ran into an article I wanted to read which was successfully paywalled (i.e. sites are getting wiser to archives). These two things made me want to work out my thoughts on free culture and artists making money.
I am a writer with zero success. I have published things but nowhere near enough, or high profile enough, to ever rest laurels on. I say that to make the point that my perspective on this is going to be different than someone who is paying their bills with art, and I get that. I also want to be in a position where I’m doing that, though, so it’s not as though I’m insensitive to the idea that free work can be bad.
It reminds me of one thing I’ve heard from contractors, like plumbers who come by the house. They often say how much free estimates have hurt them. Bigger companies can easily absorb the cost so it’s a benefit they can offer, and that means that smaller outfits have a much harder time just getting in the door with people unless they also offer free estimates, but they cannot absorbe the cost as easily. The mechanics in music and other types of art and journalism and so on are not exactly the same, but in broad strokes, it still holds that offering things free is going to make it harder to then charge for those same things.
At the same time, I cannot help but feel that this attitude from artists comes from “common Ludditism” rather than “considered Ludditism”. What do I mean by this? Well, the common view of Ludditism – what people often seem to mean when they invoke it – is that the Luddites were anti-technology and anti-progress. The truth is, as people who have looked at the Luddites’ specific concerns have pointed out, that the Luddites were looking at how technology was being used to hurt their livelihoods and standing against those uses.
Why do I think Kibblesmith’s view is reflective of a kind of “common-sense” view of Ludditism? Because the concern being expressed is parochial. I can think of a lot of musical acts, especially from the punk arena, who offered shows for cheap or for free, and did the same with their records. By the basic logic of the anti-Napster argument, this would be a bad thing to do; the only thing that justifies it is that the artists themselves decided to do it. But theoretically, if you can get some people’s music for free, then it hurts the value of everyone else’s music.
But the thing is, art should be free. I think a lot of artists would agree that it should be free, and they put art out in ways that is as close to free as they can get. When I say “art should be free” I don’t really mean that it should cost no money all the time, but it should be as accessible to people as possible. I’ve never heard about an artist who retained my respect who also had a view that it was vital that people buy every piece of work from them.
Now, I’m not saying that Kibblesmith would agree with this (and I hope by now it’s clear that I’m just using Kibblesmith here as a cipher, I don’t have a specific problem with him, he’s just the example here). I think there’s a large degree to which what he’s saying was a joke. At the same time, I see the sentiment of “we should stop people from freely getting media” a lot more often than “we should figure out ways for people making media to get properly paid”.
And yes, obviously, I know that people are seeing the first thing as an outgrowth of the second, but my point is, why don’t we think more about the second directly?
Of course, this is not a solution for tomorrow. I’m not saying that we could immediately transform how art is produced and distributed to be more fair. But I do think that, as artists and as people thinking about politics, we should think about how to support art and support broad & cheap distribution.
The thing is, you can’t really be mad at author groups trying to shut down library access etc. but also think that paywalling everything is a good way to go. In an ideal situation, everybody would have access to the library, so everyone would get your things for free anyway. You do have to choose between valuing libraries and hating piracy, it doesn’t make sense to do both. After all, the initial uploader of a file probably bought the file, so you’re getting that library sale anyway. And I would hope that most people would ultimately fall on the side of valuing libraries.
I have read maybe 1 Defector article in the entire time they’ve been around and that’s because they are a paywall only site. I cannot respect people who claim to be breaking news and put a paywall on it. And I get that it’s tough to run a site without doing things like this but that doesn’t change how I feel about it. I’m not privy to Defector’s numbers but I would be very surprised to hear that the paywall was a major driver of subscriptions. I think it’s that they do work that people like, their writers are popular, and therefore they get support.
And yeah, I am pretty sure that Defector is one of those sites that you can have a free subscription for, but I count free subscriptions as paywalls; I’ve never subscribed to a site I liked just to read their articles and I won’t. If I have to subscribe to your site when I just wanted to browse something, like if I just saw an interesting link and you slap me with “you need to subscribe to read this”, we have an adversarial relationship already.
I don’t want to talk about money-making strategies etc. here, in large part because I don’t make money doing this so I don’t have anything to add. But as someone who enjoys art and journalism, it’s frustrating that every time there’s an issue, people think that the answer is to go back to the older model. Yeah, more people made money then, but it was still highly exploitative. Prince didn’t make his money moves when the internet was going. Artists were still getting screwed in their contracts.
We should move forward, not back, right? We should be trying to open up new methods of doing things and new priorities. We should be thinking about what an economy looks like where artists are paid and people can see the art they want as often as possible. It shouldn’t always be this push and pull of who should we fuck over so that we can make our money? And the fact is that people will be fucked over. I know it doesn’t seem like that, but think of who’s going to lose the most by moving back to a model where each item has to be paid for? There were people who didn’t listen to music as much as they would have liked because they couldn’t pay for it. Was that better?
I currently pay for only one paywall, and this is a matter of circumstance more than anything (been broke for ages) but I think the fact that I stick with it is worth noting. This is the Voices of Wrestling patreon. I’ve been paying for this for at least a year, and I think it’s closer to three, in times when I had a job and in times when I didn’t. I keep paying for it not because I get a tremendous value out of their paywall content. I don’t mean to put down the content by saying that, it’s good stuff, but I’ve never thought that I really needed the extra content so much that I had to pay for it. What makes me pay for this content is that their free content, particularly the Flagship podcast, is of such quality that I want to give them money. If I didn’t listen to them for free, I would not pay them any money.
Again, I don’t want to talk about strategies here. I just bring it up to say that I think these ideas about how we need to restrict people’s ability to get art in order for people to make money don’t entirely make sense. I’m not saying that a subscription model is the best. What I’m saying is that I don’t believe there is any value in paying for access as such. The value is in quality of art and quality of the receiver’s experience.
As I was typing this, I started to think about video games, a medium that doesn’t work on the lines other genres of art do: it’s not an easy share like music or graphics. I think it’s almost impossible to deny that video games make substantially more money without piracy. Yet we have to think about this wholistically. Yes, if someone can’t pirate a game, they may instead buy it. But what are they giving up to do that? Because I think the majority of movement when we’re talking about piracy vs. legal buying is going to be from people who have to save up to buy the game. That is to say, imagine a situation where there was media piracy and then piracy is magically eliminated. The gains you make in a post-piracy world are likely going to be from the poorest of your consumers, not from the richest. Piracy is highly inconvenient and I don’t think it will ever become as convenient as using legal channels. People will prefer to buy legally if they can afford it. My point here isn’t to argue that piracy is good, it’s to ask this question: do you want to make more money at the expense of people who otherwise could not experience your art?
It’s easy to talk about people needing to pay up when you just do it in the abstract, or when you assume your customers are all of means. When you really look into it, though, is that who is really being targeted with requests to pay up? Because the people of means are more likely than not going to be able to pay for it anyway, so they’re never being restricted, and they probably already were paying for it.
I don’t have data about this, but I have the anecdotal evidence of Joe Lanza from the Voices of Wrestling Flagship podcast talking about not wanting to bother with all these shady sites when he can just order a pay-per-view, and of myself when I briefly had a decent job and just bought a lot more shit than I had in prior years. My values didn’t change, I didn’t suddenly decide it was suddenly good to pay for things and not good before. I was just able to pay for things now.
So we really have to decide what we want when we talk about things like making people pay for physical media, entitlement because of Napster, and things like that. I fear that we are often imagining that everyone consuming this media is comfortable and just choosing not to pay for your art on a whim. But in reality, when I was younger I heard of a lot of people having to save up for games. I know Matt McMuscles (YouTuber) talks often about being poor when he was younger and being unable to have a lot of games. Are these the people that you want to prevent from having art? Because that’s who is prevented from having art when you put barriers of cost in the way.
I hope it won’t be lost here that I am an artist, I do have a hard time selling things, I am broke, and I am not at all insensitive to the fact that artists need to make money. I know that we live in a capitalist system and that buying-and-selling is a major part of that. But in the way that we talk and think about these problems, we don’t need to limit ourselves to “the way things have always worked”. We can at least not chide people for enjoying free things.