The Ramen Music Blog

The Gaiman Principle: “Piracy” is advertising (and why Ramen Music encourages sharing)

In one of my favorite videos from recent weeks, author Neal Gaiman explains how he was initially paranoid and “really grumpy with people” when they put up his poems and stories on the web. After some time, he realized that the “places where I was being pirated, I was selling more and more books, people were discovering me.”

Why should a musician or author allow their work to be copied and shared without freaking out over potential losses? Gaiman explains:

“I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question, which is I say: “Ok, do you have a favorite author?” And they say “Yes.” And I say “Good, what I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands. And anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book, raise your hands.”

The response?

Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it.

The Gaiman Principle

I have started to refer to this phenomenon as “The Gaiman Principle”:

In Gaiman’s words:

Nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free. What you are actually doing is advertising, you are reaching more people.

In other words: Piracy is advertising.

The underlying assumptions:

1) Creative work has value.
2) People want to spend money on art they love and enjoy.
3) People need to find the creative work that they value
4) Trusted recommendations are the best path to discovery.
5) The only thing stronger than a trusted recommendation is a trusted recommendation combined with actually experiencing the creative work. This is the royal flush of recommendations. As a producer of creative work, it’s what you should be dreaming of.

The Ultimate Recommendation

The biggest thing the web has done for creatives is to not only allow personal recommendation to be quickly broadcast, but the actual work that is being recommended can often also be broadcast.

Let’s say you tell a friend you love a song. It is a strong personal recommendation. If you tell them you love it and also give them the song so they can hear it, perhaps they become hooked on it, and celebrate it’s awesomeness with you - that’s the power that sharing (or piracy) provides.

To reject this opportunity and instead focus on what the artist might be losing in this recommendation process is a tangental, fear-based waste of time at best. It completely disregards the fact that by sharing the music/writing/etc, a fan is essentially marketing on the creator’s behalf. The person he or she is marketing to - they probably hadn’t checked you out before. They were not an existing fan, reading to spend money. Now they have heard of you, and tasted your work, and possibly acquired a taste for your work. The fan sharing the creative work should be thanked.

Sharing online (or piracy) is not something for authors or musicians to fear, to blame when they don’t sell well, to use as a scapegoat for not having been profitable, etc. It sure is tempting to think that way if things aren’t going well. But don’t. If you are being pirated, you are doing it right.

Just remember the Gaiman Princible: When people are sharing your work, it is advertising, even though the work itself has monetary value. It’s the highest form of personal recommendation available. Embrace it.

Ramen Music: Built on the Gaiman Principle

Ramen Music was built from the start to encourage sharing. Our issues have value. I work my butt off producing them. The dozen or so artists per issue worked hard on those songs. Ramen Music pays these artists for their hard work. And our paid subscribers are how we survive.

But people want to share things they love. Why would we get in the way of that? Our subscribers bought our music. They are people that value what we do. Should we be telling them not to give the ultimate recommendation to a friend?

What about potential new subscribers? They are human like you and me. They probably want to check something out, listen and play with something before spending money. I do. So lets make that easier to do that. Not slam a gate in front of them and expect them to still be interested.

So, we made Ramen Music issues easily shareable. We even remind our subscribers that they can and should share them. We have daily proof that this works. People on twitter or facebook recommend us to their friends and followers and include a link to a full, non-crippled, high quality issue. Even just a few minutes later, new subscriptions from friends come in. And we lose nothing.

So artists and labels: Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that the world is black and white and filled with evil pirates stealing your wares. It’s more complex and positive and wonderful than that. If your music is being shared and pirated, celebrate! The word is spreading to people who don’t yet know the value of your work. Let it spread. For the love of god, let it spread.

EDIT: Money where my mouth is! My gift to you for putting up with so many words is the latest copy of Ramen Music Issue #03. Feel free to share, of course.

The Record Industry Sob Story

The sky is falling.

This chart was recently picked up and published by Business Insider, Daring Fireball and various other places, often with melodramatic titles such as “The death of the music industry”.

There are some major problems with this graph:

1) The numbers are not adjusted for inflation. This is a very basic tenant of graphing visual data. One must account for inflation when graphing monetary amounts over years. Otherwise the results are simply irrelevant. Tufte would not be happy.

2) These are stats from the RIAA. America only. The chart is for some reason labeled “Global.” In 2009, the ifpi (worldwide riaa) reports sales of 15.8 billion dollars.

3) The type of graph specifically masks and trivializes the growth of digital, enhancing the sob story. The ifpi says that between 2004-2009 digital sales are up 940%. (Ok, ok, that’s kind of cheating because pre-2004 there were virtually no digital sales, but hey, the point is digital has been growing quickly).

I needed to investigate. I said 10 hail marys, voluntarily paid the RIAA $25 (gasp!) to access their data, and dove in.

Here’s the actual situation, properly adjusted for inflation, and using a normal line chart instead of a complicated stacked area chart.

Yup, the industry is certainly losing money compared with 10 years ago. But armed with accurate data, another way we can describe the size of the recording industry is “pre-CD.” We can also reasonably say that each format grows and then dies out. Digital is certainly on a very quick rise.

Let’s zoom in and take a closer look at how formats have been adopted. Let’s look at the first 6 years of data for each format. Adjusted for inflation, of course:

The first few years of digital saw much quicker adoption than CD, and both blew away the lazy adoption of cassette. Digital sales appear to be doing fairly well, though 2010 (not show on graph) supposedly only saw 6% growth. There is fear that the growth is leveling off.

My opinion would be (of course) that we’re are only really seeing the start of digital innovation. Unlike cassettes or CDs, there’s many different kinds of digital formats, many more ways to collect revenue, and a slew of tech companies innovating (on behalf of or in place of the industry itself).

Personally, I find the sob stories from the RIAA just plain insulting, especially as the blame lands on piracy instead of their own failures to kickstart digital distribution. As can be plainly seen, digital music was not really being sold by major labels until 2004. This is very very late to the game. This is 3 years after napster shut down.

Also, chew on this: How would that sales chart look if major labels didn’t bother distributing on CD format until years and years after consumers were demanding it?

And since we apparently all love melodrama, here’s my childish version of the original misguided chart.

EDIT: Wow, Michael DeGusta had almost the exact same critique of the chart and beat me to publishing. He provided many more pretty and accurate visualizations in his followup article on Business Insider. The REAL Death Of The Music Industry

Music for the Signals

I recently did some music for the basecamp mobile video for 37signals. Jamie, who made the video and approached me about helping out, did a blog post about his process. Jamie asked me to write a bit about how the music was put together.

When first approached, I assumed I would be composing something new for the video. Once we actually talked, Jamie told me he wanted a piano arrangement of Dance of the Hours, a waltz from the 1800s. I hemmed and hawed and let him know I’d give it a shot, then panicked about how I would learn, arrange and record this waltz in 2 days. I immediately headed into campfire to explain the situation to a couple buddies of mine.

One of them, Chris, had an ingenious idea; since it’s a well known piece, there would likely be midi online that I could drop into Logic Studio, chop up at will and then play through a nice piano sample library. I did exactly this and after an hour or two, I had a workable (but very robotic) proof of concept.

The next morning, I woke up feeling somewhat rebellious. Never mind this famous waltz or the fact that Jamie knew exactly what he wanted; I wanted to give it my personal best shot from a clean slate, at least for fun. I had been working on this electric guitar track for a couple weeks and thought it might be poppy enough to work. So I sat in front of the video with my guitar for about an hour, figuring out what speed I’d have to play it at and what I would have to cut to have the cadence happen when the the phones all appear. It worked pretty well, so I sent off 2 versions to Jamie just to see what he thought. One had a palm-muted guitar:

I then went back to work on the piano piece, convinced this would be the real music for the video. Jamie had sent over a take of him humming the exact timing of the melody:

I love this, it has humor. It’s creative and loose. And the “looop!” at the end makes it. I immediately sent back an email saying we should roll with the humming, saying “It sounds like we are in the head of some uber-motivated tech lover as they are are waking up and browsing their daily basecamp stuff.”

I figured he’d still want to hear a real version of the piano piece, so I lined up my chords to support his melody, then played the melody until I got a take I liked. In the moment I was more proud of the fact that I had (hopefully) delivered the exact timing of the exact song that Jamie was looking for than I was of the guitar piece:

When the signals decided they wanted to use the guitar track, I was very happy (though feeling slightly guilty that I had derailed the original concept). I spent the next day redoing it for the final video. I forget why. I think the guitar was slightly out of tune in the proof of concept, and we needed a bit more “tail” on the video, so I needed an outro of sorts. This was the final version:

As far as the “full version” of the track: It exists, but is not yet recorded. The working title is “I sold out,” the lyrics are self-mocking and light-hearted.

CFCs Feat. Alicia Wiley & Eric Blair

Late last year, Graham O’Brien released a fantastic video to his track “CFCs Feat. Alicia Wiley & Eric Blair” (Featured in Ramen Music Issue #01). It features some creatively done stop-motion animation by 15 year-old Malone Mischke. My favorite bit is the outro :)

Graham was signed late last year to the indie label NOECHO. His “Live Drums” album is available for purchase as a download on their website or as a physical CD through bandcamp.

There Is No Movement Without Rhythm

Life has a rhythm, it’s constantly moving. The word for rhythm (used by the Malinke tribes) is FOLI. It is a word that encompasses so much more than drumming, dancing or sound. It’s found in every part of daily life. In this film you not only hear and feel rhythm but you see it. It’s an extraordinary blend of image and sound that feeds the senses and reminds us all how essential it is.

via MMI via Boing Boing

The Burning Hell

Phil just introduced me to a guy/band called “The Burning Hell”

The Burning Hell is the alter-ego of ukulele player and all-purpose nerd Mathias Kom. While the band can occasionally bloom into a multi-instrumental monster with many heads and arms, more often than not these days The Burning Hell is a small band with big hearts.

They’ve got a couple of really great videos; my favorite (above) consists of Mathias and a bass player walking casually through a shopping mall playing a tune.

Of course you can grab some free and tasty mp3s on the music section of their website.

Why I Started Ramen Music

This text comes from Ramen Music Issue #01. Check out Issue #01 in full

I’m very proud to present the inaugural issue of Ramen Music.

The idea to start Ramen first came to me 6 years ago. My friends and I had been recording music for years. We made music (and still do) because we needed to. Because it was an essential part of who we are. Because we absolutely loved doing it. It was not just a hobby; yet strangely, most of us felt something between apathy and disgust when it came to the idea of pursuing a ‘career in music.’

Music was, and still is, at the beginnings of a subtle yet revolutionary change. Distribution is effectively now free; music production equipment and software is rapidly evolving and becoming more affordable. Anyone wanting to record music and distribute their music to the world can do so with a minimal budget.

The recording industry has had trouble adapting. Instead of passing on distribution savings to customers or paying artists more fairly, they lobbied governments and filed lawsuits. Instead of tapping the “long tail” of new artists, they grew even more homogenous and safe. Instead of seeing the incredible social and business value of freely sharing music, they fear-mongered and invented protection schemes. In doing all of this, they have lost their allegiance with newer generation of artists, and lost the respect of many of their customers.

Ramen Music was created because 10 years ago, it was what I as a music maker wanted to be a part of. It was created because today, the music industry still desperately needs innovation and alternatives that treat listeners and artists with respect. It was created because my hard-working friends and other musicians like them deserve to be heard; and you, the curious listener, deserve to be able to hear them and be a part of something sustainable, honest, and real.