GnuMusiq/design

Document History 2004-11-11 Last save of original document (MS Word) 2009-02-09 Transcribed to wiki, without text formatting (to be done) 2009-02-10 Text formatting done 2013-09-08 Almost completely rewritten (old version here); split some pieces off into separate pages

Goals

• to make it easier for musicians to make a living from creating music
• to make it easier for fans to find music they like
• to make copyright enforcement unnecessary and irrelevant
• to level the playing field so that talent can find its audience and be appreciated and supported (financially and otherwise)

The average reasonably-good artist should be able to earn a living, or at least a steady supplemental income, pursuing their art; listeners should be able to find music that they like without depending on advertising and volume-dependent mass-media channels.

Here are the basic obstacles to meeting these goals, and the solutions GnuMusiq proposes.

Problems

Taste

There is currently an immeasurable quantity of music in the world. Any given listener will only enjoy a small percentage of it.

The canonical way of dealing with this is to distill the music into a more manageable quantity of titles across a handful of "popular" categories which are then promoted through various channels friendly to those categories. The music industry invests heavily in a few titles which fit well into these categories, mostly neglecting everything else.

This means a few titles (and artists) do extremely well, and the rest can't quit their day jobs.

Payment

In the recent past, recordings were much more difficult to copy and distribute, and so it made perfect sense to charge for each copy – plus a little extra to pay back the artist (including the cost of producing the original recording, which further should include wages for the artist and everyone else involved).

This was always a bit of a kluge because nobody knew how many copies would sell, so there was no way of knowing how much to charge (or how much to spend on the recording) so as to break even. It was also paradoxically seen as a good thing because "good" artists would make a lot of money, and "bad" artists would go broke or go into a different business -- a crude meritocracy.

Another problem with this solution is that a lot of really good music didn't receive enough "exposure" to reach the "breakthrough" point, and a lot of really bad music made huge amounts of money for any number of arbitrary reasons usually having more to do with business concerns than artistic ones.

A new problem with this solution is that copying music now costs next to nothing, and doesn't even require a physical medium for transport. The standard business model has become an overwhelming hindrance, and music lovers (even those who gladly paid for their music when that was the only option) are ignoring it in increasing numbers.

Solutions

GnuMusiq consists of a system with several key components.

Many entertainment retail sites already have features whereby users may recommend items to other users-at-large. This type of feature should be part of a rich palette of what I'll call media vector tools. A "media vector" is basically any process by which people hear music that is new to them.

So what we want to do is provide a venue (a forum, a structure, an ecosystem) whereby those cross-fertilizations of musical interest can more easily take place.

I see this system as consisting of the following primary elements:

• topic subscriptions
• alternative payment methodologies
• crowdsourced listening streams
• rich, hyperlinked content about each artist and release - basically a wiki with some data-driven content

Outside of the web site, there should also be:

• internet-enabled jukeboxes

Other Artforms

There are a couple of other artforms which face many of the same conundrums currently faced by musicians. These include:

• webcomics -- note that quite a few artists are able to make a living doing this, despite giving away their primary content for free, without DRM:
  • Sluggy Freelance provides a living for its artist by offering various bonuses to those who pay to join its official fan club, known as "Defenders of the Nifty"
  • The Oatmeal made $500k of revenue in 2012, of which 75% was from merchandising (e.g. poster-size prints of popular strips, printed books of strips) and 25% was from advertising
• game software:
  • The pay-what-you-like (with no DRM) model has worked well for game distributor Humble Bundle.
  • On the other end of the openness spectrum, the Steam software package counteracts many of the disadvantages of DRM by letting you play purchased games anywhere. This probably would not work as well for music, but it might be appropriate for certain niche applications such as broadcasting, in-store music, jukeboxes, special events, etc.