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Ghost Beach Band Debates Piracy on Times Square Billboard

March 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

For the last week a mysterious ad has flashed on the LED billboard above the American Eagle Outfitters store at Broadway and 46th Street, just over the bronze shoulder of George M. Cohan. Variably positing piracy as “criminal,” “progress” and “the future,” it asks the observer to “pick a side” on Twitter, as #artistsforpiracy or #artistsagainstpiracy.

The display runs for just 30 seconds, four times an hour, alternating with images of tourists and scantily clad models. But the discussion it has stirred shows that unauthorized file sharing still touches a nerve in the music industry. The campaign asks artists to make what can be a torturous choice: Is it better to charge for music and probably limit your audience, or embrace all the ways music can spread online, without permission or remuneration?

The party behind the billboard and its related Web site, ArtistsVsArtists.com, is Ghost Beach, a two-man Brooklyn band whose profile is low even by indie Brooklyn standards: about 8,800 Facebook likes and zero Pitchfork hits. Ghost Beach was approached by American Eagle, which wanted to license the band’s song “Miracle” for an online ad. As it has done with a few other bands the retailer offered a fee as well as access to the billboard.

The ArtistsVsArtists billboard has been booked for two weeks, ending on Sunday. The group’s use of the billboard is worth $50,000, an American Eagle spokeswoman said.

“When we were offered the space on the billboard, we were perplexed about what to do with it,” said Josh Ocean, 27, the band’s lead singer. “Since we started we’ve given away all our music for free, so just telling people to purchase our music somewhere didn’t seem natural for us. So we said, ‘What if we take advantage of this and open up a discussion about the new music industry?’ ”

The band’s manager, Will Suter, has a background in advertising, and approached some agencies. “I said, ‘Our budget is zero, but we have this wonderful canvas,’ ” he recalled.

TBWAChiatDay New York, one of the world’s leading advertising agencies, took the account as a pro bono project and devised a stark, text-heavy design in black, red and white.

So far the #artistsforpiracy hashtag has been used far more than #artistsagainstpiracy: 2,802 versus 93 on Tuesday afternoon. But comments by artists (and others) show it is not so easy for them simply to pick a team. One blog writer, identified as a guitar student in Milwaukee, struggled with the idea and concluded, “So, if anyone wants to support me as a musician, come to my shows, listen to what I have to say, or let me crash on your couch.”

The effect of piracy continues to be intensely debated in the entertainment industry. Many studies have shown that it negatively affects sales, but they have not been unanimous. Last week a European Commission report found that piracy did not hurt digital sales, but music industry groups immediately blasted it as flawed.

The ArtistsVsArtists site offers another choice, ostensibly about piracy: pay $5 to download a Ghost Beach EP from iTunes, or get it free from the band.

David Lowery of the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, who has been an outspoken advocate for artists’ rights in the digital age, said the site misrepresented piracy. (He was quick to add, though, that he could not blame a struggling band for some clever self-promotion.)

“This conflates piracy and giving music away for free,” Mr. Lowery said. “Piracy is eliminating your rights as artists, whereas if you are for copyright, you have the choice to sell your work or give it away.”

Some music industry bloggers were alarmed at the involvement of TBWAChiatDay, which is part of the TBWA Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group. The agency’s other clients include the Grammy Awards, and the recording industry’s official stance on piracy has always been strongly negative. A Grammy spokeswoman had no comment on Tuesday.

Ghost Beach’s own position is absent from the campaign. In an interview Mr. Ocean and his band mate, Eric Mendelsohn, 26, said they opposed piracy. But they also expressed a pragmatic view of piracy that is widely shared by musicians of their generation: If you can’t fight it, at least try to use it.

“We are against piracy in the sense that we are for new technologies and using the Internet in a way that wins over it by us giving away our music directly to fans,” Mr. Ocean said. “That way we know where the music is going and can establish that connection directly with fans.”

“We never want to promote blatantly going out and stealing music,” he added. “What we do want to do is offer choices that we think are right.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/arts/music/ghost-beach-band-debates-piracy-on-times-square-billboard.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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The Media Equation: The Danger of an Attack on Piracy Online

January 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Stay with me here.

SOPA deals with technical digital issues that may seem to be a sideshow but could become crucial to American media and technology businesses and the people who consume their products. The legislation is the rare broadly bipartisan piece of apple pie. The House Judiciary Committee is expected to resume hearings on it this month and all indications are that it will approve the measure, setting up a vote in the full chamber. The Senate is also expected to vote on its own version of the bill when it returns from the holiday break.

Virtually every traditional media company in the United States loudly and enthusiastically supports SOPA, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for the rest of us. The open consumer Web has been a motor of American innovation and the attempt to curtail some of its excesses could throw sand in the works of a big machine on which we have all come to rely.

Rather than launch into a long-winded argument about why the legislation is a bad idea — it is, as currently written — I thought it might be worthwhile to boil SOPA down into a series of questions.

A NONEXISTENT PROBLEM? Hardly. Regardless of what Web evangelists tell you, SOPA is an effort to get at the very real problem of rogue Web sites — most operating from overseas — offering illicit downloads of movies, music and more. The Motion Picture Association of America cites figures saying that piracy costs the United States $58 billion annually.

Mark Elliot, an executive from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a letter to The New York Times that such piracy threatened 19 million American jobs. Those figures surely include some politically motivated hyperbole, but anybody who has spent time around a twentysomething consumer knows that piracy is a thorny fact of life for content companies.

In an effort to stanch the flow, on Oct. 26 Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, introduced the legislation that has come to be known as SOPA. The Senate version, called the Protect IP Act, is seen by tech companies as less onerous because it targets domain name providers and ad networks and not Internet service providers. Both bills seek to create remedies to pirated content because most of the foreign-based sites operate outside of the United States’ legal system.

WOULD IT FIX THE PROBLEM? Probably not, and even if it made some progress toward reining in rogue sites, the collateral damage would be significant. Under the terms of each proposed bill, the federal Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, could seek a court order against a Web site that illegally hosts copyrighted content and then wall off the site permanently.

Under the House version, private companies would be allowed to sue Internet service providers for hosting content that they say infringes on copyright. That represents a very big change in the current law as codified in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants immunity to Web sites as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content upon notification.

WHY ALL THE ALARM? The bill has exposed a growing fracture between technology and entertainment companies. Digitally oriented companies see SOPA as dangerous and potentially destructive to the open Web and a step toward the kind of intrusive Internet regulation that has made China a global villain to citizens of the Web.

Entertainment companies think that technology companies are aiding and abetting thieves on a broad scale, but the legislation is alarming in its reach, potentially creating a blacklist of sites and taking aim at others for unknowingly hosting a small fraction of copyrighted material. In a joint letter to Congress, Google, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Yahoo, eBay and many other companies made it clear that they perceived a broader threat in the effort to thwart pirate sites.

“We support the bills’ stated goals — providing additional enforcement tools to combat foreign ‘rogue’ Web sites that are dedicated to copyright infringement or counterfeiting,” the letter read, which was published in a full page ad in The Times.

“Unfortunately, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities, private rights of action and technology mandates that would require monitoring of Web sites.”

Laurence H. Tribe, the noted First Amendment lawyer, said in an open letter on the Web that SOPA would “undermine the openness and free exchange of information at the heart of the Internet. And it would violate the First Amendment.”

You can see why big Internet guys are upset by SOPA. Maybe you and I should be, too.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter.com/carr2n

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The Media Equation: Steve Jobs Reigned in a Kingdom of Altered Landscapes

August 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

At the time, publishers were profoundly unhappy. Apple was not only proposing to take a third of the revenues, but was also requiring that the transaction go through Apple, meaning publishers would get none of the consumer data that had such high value to advertisers.

Mr. Jobs was friendly enough — I can recall a less pleasant conversation about the criminal case involving a stolen iPhone prototype — but he thought it was silly for publishers to whine about sales sans data. After all, he said, they already did a tremendous business on the physical newsstand that didn’t provide a lick of data about their buyers.

The exchange we had was more of an example of Mr. Jobs as micromanager than as technological visionary. But the perspective it showed is indicative of a pattern for Apple and Mr. Jobs. Again and again, he would step up to entrenched players in the media with calcified business models and explain their business to them in ways they didn’t recognize from the inside.

Apple is a technology company, but as someone who writes about the insular kingdom of media, I can’t think of a bigger player on the board in the last 10 years. In music, in movies, in publishing — television has been another story, so far, though there are rumors that the company is turning its guns on television in a big way — Apple has upended long-standing paradigms and altered the media landscape.

So what secret tunnel did he use to bypass and overcome traditional media businesses? One carved by consumers. By placing sexy, irresistible devices in the hands of the public, he reverse-engineered the business model of the industries that produce the content for Apple’s gorgeous hardware.

When the iPod and iTunes were unveiled in 2001, the music industry was under siege from piracy, with sites like Napster thriving on the free use of its content. Mr. Jobs’s take-it-or-leave it deal gave Apple control over pricing, data, distribution and platform, a proposal of towering hubris. But the industry, kicking and screaming all the way, eventually went along, and 10 billion song downloads later, digital revenue is a fundamental part of the business.

In the process, Apple brought a practical end to the album format — allowing people to buy individual songs and create their own playlists.

ITunes not only supplied a legitimate, easy-to-use alternative to piracy, it created a runway for services like Pandora and Spotify.

“He took a locked system, one that was controlled by the record companies, and cracked it open,” said Jim Guerinot, the longtime manager of The Offspring, Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, and Gwen Stefani. “That disruption created opportunities for everything that has happened since.”

Mr. Jobs didn’t so much see around corners; he saw things in plain sight that others did not. “It’s not the consumer’s job to know what they want,” he explained. In the case of music, many of us wanted the ease and portability of MP3 files, but didn’t want to become mouse-enabled criminals taking the music we wanted. From that perspective, 99 cents seemed like a small price to pay.

“I think far from destroying the music business, he put it on a path to redemption,” said Tom Freston, former head of Viacom and MTV. “With the iPod and iTunes, Steve not only created his own ecosystem, it turned out to be one that was contagious and created opportunities not only for his computer business, but for all the Apple products that came behind it.”

Mr. Jobs was initially pegged as a technologist who didn’t understand the media and entertainment businesses, but his track record as an operator is pretty enviable. In 1986, he bought the company which would become Pixar from George Lucas for $5 million and invested $5 million more.

Mr. Jobs understood that all that technological processing power could be used in service of narrative in unforeseen ways: After two decades and many computer-generated blockbusters, he sold the company to Disney in a deal valued at $7.4 billion.

Mr. Jobs has walked quickly and surely past conventional wisdom. He had no interest in market research. He did things his own way and expected the rest of the world to fall into line. He both brought the mouse into our homes and more or less killed it off, eliminated the floppy disc with the first iMac, and did away with the DVDs on the MacBook Air, decisions that foretold the obsolescence of physical media. He shrunk Web-enabled devices by piggy-backing on the phone business, profoundly changing the way in which people consume media.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 27, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the inventor of the computer mouse. It was invented by Douglas Engelbart, not Steve Jobs.

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