AMOUR
& DISCIPLINE - SHORT, REDUCTIVE AND INCOMPLETE MANIFESTO
FOR THOSE IN A HURRY
How much does
a band earn when you’re sharing their music with a friend, or
when you're using P2P or direct download services to get it?
Well, ok, zero.
But how much does a band earn when you buy a 10$ CD in a store
?
1.2 dollar.
How much does a band earn when you buy a 0.99 song on Itunes ?
15 cents.
How much does a band earn when you listen to a song one hundred
times on Spotify ?
0.5$.
How much would
a band earn if you sent them a free donation ?
The exact amount you chose to give (well, minus bank fees).
Most of the
time, no matter how you listen to music, the artist gets very
little financial support. Of course, these are average figures
regarding both indie and major label artists ; some manage to
get better deals, others get worse (if you’re signed on a major
label, you’ll probably get zero from sales: majors give an
advance to record the album, and you won’t earn anything until
it is repaid. Very few artists recoup this advance)
.In recent
years, technology has made music shift from scarce goods to
infinite goods : once the original is made, it takes zero
marginal cost to make a digital copy and distribute it. All the
music in the world is available for (almost) nothing, and less
and less people are buying physical records. Global
Non-Commercial Culture Sharing is now a reality – which, don't
get us wrong, is simply great -, but the problem of decently
funding artistic creation remains. But Why?
- a lot of people want to maintain
old centralized models of distribution in the digital world,
creating artificial scarcity on infinite goods, and pretending
global culture sharing never happened
- big entertainment corporations
keep laying down the law
- many middlemen are still
involved. Some of them are valuable (independent labels), some
have to be questioned
So, why not
directly support those who create music and those who really
help to produce it?
Amour & Discipline is a non-profit DIY organization
establishing a donation platform where people can donate to
ANY independent band or label in the universe (to cover our
costs, we decided that those using A&D will simply choose
if and how much they want to give us). A&D
project is not about charity, but Gift Economy. It is not about
guilt, but common decency.
Of course, good
ways to support bands/labels already exist (buying stuff
directly from them still is the best one) and crucial ideas
still have to be tested, but we think A&D can be a useful
step to promote two fundamental and inseparable points :
- Non-Commercial Culture Sharing is
essential and legitimate
- We can and we must find new ways
to support independent authors and producers, so the
aforementioned fact won’t cast them in the sewers where they
will starve alone
We want
A&D's initiative to rest on the very people it intends to
support. Thus A&D also includes a collective
ad-free webzine written by all kinds of people
contributing to the shiny world of underground/indie cultures
(bands, labels and activists such as DIY promoters, venues,
webzines...). A&D is NOT a place dedicated to music
download, but a place to support artists/labels. The only
music available will be found in the webzine, willingly shared
by the artists themselves.
Finally, we
don't want to promote Gift Economy only on our website, so we
hope to be linked on a lot of other webzines/blogs to remind
people they can support music this way.
We think the
combination of coercive (i.e. governments) and mercantile (i.e.
corporations) tactics should certainly not be the only ones
driving the legislation, distribution, and financing of culture.
On the contrary, we believe the present situation urges us to
invent new alternative strategies.
FULL MANIFESTO,
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