open-access music

Alex sent a message about his foray into open-access music:

http://recordsonribs.com

I’m unable to paste his message here without severe formatting problems, but his general point (if I understood correctly) is that musicians benefit more from long-term exposure to listening audiences than from concrete earnings on one or two projects. He also says they receive plenty of voluntary donations from their website (which surprises me, I must admit).

He closes with the following remark:

“The music ‘industry’ post-MP3 is supposed to be democractised, but still, to get a record on the tables of anyone in the mainstream press to review it relies on a clandestine network of people who have built up huge contact databases over the years and who can through this network make sure something is listened to. This is something that is very difficult to overcome.”

This will surely be a problem with books as well. No matter how easy it becomes to publish them, you’ll need to find a way to make sure people know they exist. One possible way that this might play out is that the recent importance of impersonal institutions will undergo a McLuhanian “reversal” into patronage networks. Here’s what I mean…

Current system: you’re an unknown author. After 12 or 13 tries, a good press finally agrees to publish your book. Well, sit back and relax. They’re going to do a lot of the promotion and distribution for you. You’re inside the gate, while many others are not.

Possible future system: Everyone starts out inside the gate, because maybe you’ll just be posting a homemade PDF book to a Kindle database somewhere. You and 20,000 other people. So, how do you start being read from amidst the mass of 20,000 PDF’s? Obviously there will still be information filtering of sorts. There will be certain websites you check that promote certain books. The future Zizeks will mention the titles of their favorite PDF’s during lectures. And this is what will tend to make or break intellectual careers: the endorsement of respected and discerning individuals, not (like now) the mere fact that you got inside the gate at a major publisher.

There are other possibilities as well, but this one strikes me as the most likely of them. And like everything else that happens, it has possible upsides and downsides.

Downside: possible cronyism and cliquishness. (That already happens, of course, but the impersonal character of many intellectual institutions under the current system helps minimize it somewhat. There are more semi-anonymous licensing procedures you need to go through now… For instance, only a rara avis like Kripke has a prayer of being taken seriously as a philosophical player without a Ph.D.)

Upside: greater speed of publication and word-of-mouth readership. End of the stagnant seniority system where you have to spend years working your way through an institutionalized academic hierarchy. All it takes is a few good posts to become a key philosophy blogger, and no one cares much about your credentials or even necessarily knows who on earth you are. That will be true of books very shortly as well, whereas now you still have to send a c.v. with a book proposal at standard publishers, and your proposal is probably going into the ashcan unless you already have a bona fide academic pedigree– I’m talking about philosophy books here; obviously this is not the case for fiction.

There will be an intermediate period where even many “new” publishers have to check your credentials, because they will be afraid of the mainstream publishers pigeonholing them as crackpot organizations otherwise. But this interim period shouldn’t last for more than a few years, I would think. The game will need to be played for a little while, however.