p2pnet.net News:- There’s an open letter going around online. It’s from Nashville songwriter Hugh Prestwood and the word is that it’s to appear in Billboard Magazine as an ad.

In it, he describes himself as, ”the award-winning songwriter of 1993 NSAI Song of the Year and 1994 Emmy winner (Outsanding Individual Achievement in Music and Lyrics) The Song Remembers When, 1991 BMI Song of the Year Hard Rock Bottom of Your Heart and other number one country hits including The Moon Is Still Over Her Shoulder and The Sound of Goodbye. The BMG Music Publishing songwriter’s top five singles include On The Verge and the Grammy-nominated Ghost In This House.”

Be that as it may, Hugh is obviously hard up for a few dollars, so we’re reproducing his open letter in full, and at absolutely no charge.

And beneath it is a response from Jim Griffin, ceo of Cherry Lane Digital and a a co-founder of the the Pho group, named after a bowl of Vietnamese soup and which meets for discussion-oriented meals in cities around the world, electronically linked by the Pho mailing list. Before Cherry Lane Digital, Griffin started and for five years ran the technology department at Geffen Records.

Out of fairness, we didn’t charge Jim either.

Now read on >>>>>>>>

Dear File-Sharers
By Hugh Prestwood

What is becoming increasingly clear is that the great majority of you truly feel no guilt about the “sharing” of what I have created and own - my music.

You have lumped together many professions (artists, songwriters, engineers, producers, publishers, etc.) into one big ugly corporate caricature - a rich and corrupt industry that can be stolen from remorselessly. Additionally, in your “yes, Virginia, there is a free lunch” mentality, you have unthinkingly devalued songs to the extent that you perceive them as trifles - something of little value to be partaken and enjoyed at no cost. Moreover, you have unfairly condemned me and my record industry peers for bringing the law to bear against you. In classic “blame the victim” reasoning, you lay the responsibility for my losses at my feet, saying, in essence, that the problem is not your theft, but rather my inability to prevent it.

Well, file-sharers, I righteously say “bull.” I, songwriter/publisher, labored for years to create those songs, and I really do legally own them. I - not you - have the right to control what happens to them, a right your technology does not trump. You are dead wrong to simply give my songs away and undermine my only chance to profit from my creations. Don’t tell me that I should gracefully pardon your hand in my pocket. Don’t insinuate to me that, because your thievery is so facile, perhaps I should find some other way to make a living. Your “hobby” is taking the bread off my table, and I have every right to use any and all legal means possible to discourage your destructive practices.

Let us come together. You often love what I create, and I need to make a living. I have been trying for several years now to find a way for us both to be happy — where you can easily acquire my songs and I can be justly rewarded for my creativity. Try as I might, however, thus far I have been unable to find a way to compete with “free”. You must help me.

First, you must wake up from your fantasy that songs should rightly be free, and that no one is being hurt by your theft. I and all my fellow songwriters (among others) are seeing our futures seriously threatened. Second, you must “raise your consciousness” to where you understand that a career in music is brutally serendipitous and difficult to maintain.

The ability of artists and songwriters to have any kind of dependable, longer-term, income is entirely linked to their ability to control their copyrights. Without copyright protection, aspiring artists and songwriters had best not ever consider quitting their day jobs.

Finally, you must realize that in real life you really do get what you pay for. If you won’t pay for music, you will soon be receiving a product commensurate with your thriftiness. A society that doesn’t value a commodity enough to pay for it will soon see the creation and production of that commodity cease.

=====================================

Dear Hugh:
By Jim Griffin

Dear Hugh:

You want me to pay - I’m happy to pay.

Meet me halfway:

Offer me a license.

A reasonable license, priced appropriately at a level that recognizes its new marginal cost.

A real license, not a fake license that pretends your songs today continue to manifest the economics of physical objects, not a license that continues the fallacy that there should be friction where there is none.

You license the local pub in just that fashion, yet you refuse to extend me that same courtesy. Mel Karmizan and his broadcaster buddies pay on the same basis, but you refuse to bargain with me or my internet service provider with a flat-fee monthly or annual rate that recognizes your need to make a living and my ability to pay. Hugh, every development in technology since electricity - amplified performance, broadcast, cable, webcasting, you name it - pays in just this fashion, but you leave money on the table and walk away from licensing digital networks. I don’t get it.

Hugh, if you want to get paid, I’ll give you a raise, even double your pay or better, if you’ll recognize that we customers are always right, that we deserve the right to move and use our media with the devices of our choice in the format of our choice, rights we’ve always enjoyed but you now wish to condition on locks and keys.

How would two dollars a month per digital connection sound, Hugh? Music to your ears?

If the math doesn’t come immediately to mind after all these years, consider that there are in the United States hundreds of millions of digital connections, with most using one at home, another at work and carrying another in their wireless pocket. The rest of the world is on a similar trajectory, with some sporting numbers bigger and growing faster than ours.

Worldwide there are well over a billion connections, and the numbers you’re imagining need to be multiplied by 12 months in the year and the multiple number of connections for each user.

Consider that the digital network provider, the cable industry, the theme park industry and wireless phone industry - to cite just four examples of our competition for the customer’s wallet - use just this strategy to maximize their income. Many hands make light work of big numbers with flat monthly fees, and don’t you know it since your songwriting societies license performances in just this way.

Hugh, we customers aren’t your problem. And from my experience, neither are your performance societies, who’ve licensed virtually every network use of music that’s presented itself. As usual, your problem is with those who control your sound recordings. Until they wake up and license sound recordings the way song writers have licensed their songs to technology over the past century, your income from mechnicals will continue its decline into obscurity on roughly the same arc as the audience for disks progresses towards the obituary page. A music industry built by independent record retailers on teen-age rebellion and progressive expression now affixes an FBI logo to discs for a 38-year-old average buyer in one of three big box retailers, so what can you expect?

Hugh, spare me the rhetoric on controlling your copyrights. It’s tired and untruthful. Your music is already subject to many government compulsory and statutory uses, in the United States and worldwide, that effectively removed whatever control you didn’t sign away in the many contracts you’ve signed. An audience armed with digital recorders isn’t hurting the video business, and the audio business has grown and not suffered over decades of more liberating technologies that permit virtually friction-free digitization, when appropriate licenses are collected.

Hugh, yours is not, as you put it, a commodity. The good news for you is that like most of the advanced economies of the world, you are involved in a shift from product to service. What once had high marginal cost (the cost of making each copy after the first one) now has virtually none, and that can be good news for you (if you price and provide accordingly) or bad news (if you cling to the notion that you can code, legislate or moralize friction back into an increasingly friction-free world). That means that an Apple iPod that holds 20,000 songs will not cost $20,000 to fill, and if it did then no parent would even consider giving one to a child, let alone give them the ability buy songs at will.

Meet me half way, Hugh. Start me off on a buck a month per digital connection, with a rough equivalent worldwide, and we’ll grow your business dramatically. Enter on-going voluntary negotiations with digital networks to grow that fee over time, just as you do with broadcasters worldwide, and you’ll see sound recordings begin to recover value lost by failure to

compete in licensing with flat-fee phones, internet connections, game services, and cable television, to name just a few.

Fail to do that, Hugh, and you’ll have no one to blame but yourself. The sound recording part of the music business that is pointing the finger and placing blame should take a long look in the mirror.

Your fan,
Jim

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2004 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 3163 times