Jen Jacobsen of the Artist Rights Alliance joins host Bob Sullivan to talk about the decades-long ‘battle’ between artists and tech firms. Will it come to a head with AI music? Can we build incentives into the system that reward creators? This is part 3 of Debugger’s miniseries on the future of music called “Sugar High.”
Jen Jacobsen: [00:00:00] So I started my policy career in this world where it was the beginning of a whole new tech versus art battle, and the battle lines were drawn, and that’s kind of how the dialogue was. I think what we have to do is find a way to ensure that the technology is used responsibly and develops. In a responsible manner.
And so how do you do that? You make it economically. Beneficial to be responsible.
Bob: Welcome back to Debugger and this special four part series on the future of music. We’re calling it “Sugar High.” Debugger is brought to you by the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy. I’m your host, Bob Sullivan. We’re following Grammy nominated folk singer Tiff Merrit as she heads [00:01:00] back into the studio after an eight-year hiatus. And how she’s digesting the dramatic changes in the music industry. We left Tift just as she was about to walk into a studio and record her new album. She’s now churning out two songs a day, I’m told, including the title track of the album, which is called Sugar. So we’ll get back to her soon, but today we’re going to talk to another expert, Jen Jacobson. You were just listening to her voice. She is executive director of the Artist Rights Alliance, which is an artist run nonprofit that fights for the rights of musicians and songwriters, and performers to be treated and paid fairly.
So you have an interesting background because you worked in the, uh, the entertainment industry for a long time. Right? Tell me about your background.
Jen Jacobsen: I did, so I worked for a long time at Sony Music in their. Government relations office. So I got to know the music policy world through that. Before that, I [00:02:00] also worked at Time Warner and uh, a OL before it merged with Time Warner.
So I learned a lot about the digital media world. It was right around the time of the beginning of the commercial internet and the, uh, all the kind of tech versus content battles that erupted around the turn of the 21st century. So it was a fascinating time to. To join the, the policy world.
Bob: What would your time at a OL have in have done to inform you about our time now?
Jen Jacobsen: Oh my goodness, so much. When I was at a OL, the people were just starting to understand the breadth of transformation that the digital world could provide to us and. I remember having this conversation with my mother-in-law when I had started there. She’s like, what is this internet company you’re working for?
I said, oh no. My gosh. It’s transforming everything. She’s like, why would you need to look up [00:03:00] something on the internet? Well, we have library right down the road. And so I’ll never forget. I tease her about that all the time. ’cause now she’s addicted to her, uh, phone, her smartphone. But so when, interestingly, the beginning of when we saw.
Digital service providers start to, um, be able to provide incredible amounts of content that were never before possible to be accessed by consumers. People started to, they were overwhelmed by it. They were excited by it. And of course, the initial dialogue was, oh, this is terrible for the artist community, and musicians saw the downfall of their livelihood.
It was true at first. I mean, there was a lot of theft and piracy that happened as a result of this new technology, which happens as we’ve seen with a lot of new technologies that come to market. And so I started my policy career [00:04:00] in this world where it was the beginning of a whole new tech versus art battle.
And the battle lines were drawn, and that’s kind of how the dialogue was. And interestingly, a OL then merged with Time Warner, a content company. And within our own company we had to, um, understand that these two. Aspects of the marketplace had to coexist like they needed each other. And we had to figure out how to work together to, to make a successful digital economy.
And so a lot of times now when things are phrased as technology is against art or art, slows down the advancement of technology. What I say is that the way to make everybody successful is to work together. So that. Each is respecting the other. So [00:05:00] the artist community can see some benefits and opportunities from technology when they want to.
They don’t need to, but when they want to, they can see the benefits, um, and opportunities. But the technology community needs to respect the creation of art by artists and pay them fairly, treat them fairly, understand that their business is built on. The backs of these artists work. So my kind of, the way I view the entire music ecosystem is sort of as this dialogue between.
Technology and art that seemed to be erupting when I first joined the policy world.
Bob: I love that framing of tech versus art and I feel like, I feel like that just boils the conversation down as sharply as we can. I do wanna go back to, um, that, that crazy time, ’cause right now we see all these technology companies like Netflix makes.
Movies, right? Amazon [00:06:00] sells. Mm-hmm. NFL football. And that for a lot of people, has been an opportunity. Netflix was throwing a lot of money around to smaller production companies. Right. Um, but, but here’s, mm-hmm. Here’s my memory as a journalist of that time. And where I feel hoodwinked by technology, and that’s what I would like to talk about.
Jen Jacobsen: Mm-hmm.
Bob: So the first time I wandered around my apartment reading the New York Times on my laptop computer, I thought to myself, this is the most amazing democratization of an opportunity in the history of humankind. Anyone from anywhere can get information. And by the way, anyone can start a blog. So you who used to be shut out because your editor didn’t like your story.
Now you can go write it on your own. And this is an amazing opportunity. The reality hit very quickly when portals dominated. And in fact, the doorway to news and information, which I thought was suddenly larger, had become much, much smaller. And I think people could argue that. Mm-hmm. About music right [00:07:00] now too. That well, it seems like, yes. Anyone can make an album in their bedroom. The truth is only the top 1% of the 1% are really doing well right now. How do we square that circle?
Jen Jacobsen: Well, I think what the theme that you’re talking about, about being shut out is evident in so many ways in music industry right now.
First of all, when we’re talking about the development of the AI marketplace, which I know we’re gonna talk about in more detail in a minute, but when. There’s a huge difference now between the technology revolution we were seeing 25 years ago, or at any time tech, that technology has been, the battle between technology and content has been about distribution.
Mostly that you need to pay me fairly for the distribution of my music. You can’t steal it. That is evident now here in this. Context as well. But there’s an additional layer, which is that it’s not just about distribution, it’s literally about the [00:08:00] creation of the art. So it’s not only that technology is, is distributing my, my music, potentially without my consent or compensations, that it’s replacing me as an artist.
We’ve never seen that before. So in that sense. The, the window for being an artist is closing, potentially closing in on itself by literally replacing the artists themselves. So that’s one big picture existential way that the, that the opportunities getting smaller for artists.
Bob: I’ve seen this framed as musicians now have to compete against themselves.
Jen Jacobsen: Yes, exactly. And again, and against non-humans. Um, yes, and I’ll talk more about the economics of that in a second, but the other ways, so the opportunities, what you were saying about the only, the 1% making money, that’s true in the streaming world as well. We have so much noise out there, it becomes hard for smaller artists to be able to compete. And the biggest [00:09:00] problem I would say is that. Small, well, not the biggest, one of the biggest problems is that small and independent musicians have no ability to negotiate against these massive players in the marketplace. So whereas you have, you know, major record labels who can, who are making deals with streaming services, with AI developers, with tech companies, some of the deals are helpful to the marketplace. Some may not be, that’s another issue, but they’re able to negotiate ’cause they have market power and leverage. Small independent musicians don’t have that leverage. There’s no, there’s no reason that a Spotify or a or an AI developer would wanna come negotiate with me.
As a small singer songwriter, and if I say, oh, well if you don’t pay me fairly, I’m gonna take my music off your platform. They don’t care. So there’s a piece of legislation we can talk about later in the conversation that would help this problem.[00:10:00]
{Music}
Bob: Can I stop you there at all? Yeah. Because I wanna talk about the word small. Yeah. Because, so this podcast you will appear in between conversations that I have with TIF Merit. Um, and you know, somebody might call her a small musician. TIF Merit is a Grammy nominated musician, not just Grammy nominated, Grammy nominated for Best Country Music album.
So she is, she’s 1% percent. She’s successful. Of the 1%. Wildly successful by any measure. Right?
Jen Jacobsen: Yeah.
Bob: I mean I, in my conversation with her, I compared her to a major league baseball player who has a 10 year career, not, not JohE Ani, but a very successful program. It’s true. She’s able to
Jen Jacobsen: make a living doing, doing music, which is
Bob: Ish, ish.
Jen Jacobsen: Ish. Exactly.
Bob: Yeah. Which is
Jen Jacobsen: ish,
Bob: which is the point of this conversation. Yes. It’s not just that, you know, the kid in his basement who records his first album can’t [00:11:00] negotiate with Spotify. Tiff Merritt can’t negotiate with Spotify.
Jen Jacobsen: Exactly, exactly. Um,
Bob: and as she has described the, to me, I think it’s important to, for people to hear this, who aren’t in the business, she’s recording an album right now.
Jen Jacobsen: Mm-hmm.
Bob: In order to pay for the investment in that album, she needs 10 million streams just to get to zero. That seems completely unsustainable to me.
Jen Jacobsen: It’s, it is unsustainable. The economics of the streaming marketplace are very upside down, and it’s for a whole variety of reasons. You can’t blame it all on the Spotifys of the world.
There is a, there is a huge problem in the, in the way that market is structured so that, um, tiffed merit can’t go knock on Spotify’s door and say. You’re not paying me enough. Um, there the, um, royalties of the music marketplace are very, very complicated [00:12:00] and confusing, but there are streams of revenue that come for being a songwriter and there are streams of revenue that come from being a recorded a recording artist, and some of those involve your partnerships with your music publisher.
And some of those involve your partnership or contract with your record label, and those contracts are negotiated in the free market. So sometimes, sometimes if you are a an up and coming artist, you don’t necessarily have the ability to. Negotiate for a chunk of money from your record label or your publisher that you feel you deserve.
Um, and then as you become more successful, you, you would get more money through those contracts. But also sometimes on, on the other hand, those same labels and publishers are advocating for you when they negotiate, um, [00:13:00] on your behalf with Spotify or with. An AI company. So if you are signed to a major label, you will get the benefit of royalty streams or revenue structures that are negotiated by that major label.
If you’re not signed to a major label, you, like I was saying before, you don’t have that leverage. You can’t, you know, if you’re, if you are signed to a, an indie label that has 20 artists. That independent label can go to Spotify and say, I need a better deal for you to be able to play the music of my artist, but Spotify might not care.
And so there’s a gap in the market in the way the marketplace works in terms of the leverage that different artists have depending on who they’re affiliated with and whether they have corporate quote unquote backing, uh, from someone who can negotiate very [00:14:00] strongly on their behalf.
Bob: So if Tift Merritt has decided that this is unsustainable
Jen Jacobsen: mm-hmm.
Bob: We have an existential level crisis in the music business, don’t we?
Jen Jacobsen: Absolutely. We certainly do. And we are seeing that right now. So when we’re talking about, we’re talking about streaming economics, that’s. That’s one thing when we’re talking that, I mean that’s, that’s a huge problem in the market is not working correctly …
when we’re talking about AI development. That’s an even added, and I would say more existential problem. Another layer that. Is going to threaten, it’s gonna, it’s starting to, but it’s going to threaten our culture in a way that we [00:15:00] haven’t really even contemplated yet, and we’re just starting to see that.
So what you were talking about, musicians having to compete against themselves, I would argue there’s kind of three ways in which we see. The AI transformation potentially hurting or devaluing or even worse, sort of putting out of business, um, musicians. So the first is that, um, a lot of these AI models are, most of them I think are stealing the, scraping the internet to steal work without getting any.
Consent from the artist to train their models. So the work that I create as a musician is being taken from me to train a model. Okay? So that’s the first way. I’m not, I’m not getting compensated fairly. Then my stolen work [00:16:00] is then used to create a product that is put back out into the market to compete against my work.
So you stole my stuff and you created something that’s going to compete against me in the marketplace and devalue my work because it’s, it’s out there for people to listen to and, and be paid instead of them listening to my work. So that’s a second way in which we’re, we as musicians are getting totally clocked by this, this particular new technology, which is existential.
Um, and then the third way is that, and this is what we’re just starting to see and understand is devaluing, um, devaluing human made music on a [00:17:00] societal level. So as AI music begins to kind of. Drown out in some genres. We’re already seeing this drown out. The human made music people that you know are passive listeners, they’re going for a run and they just wanna listen to something like fun exercise music.
They don’t necessarily care if they’re what they’re listening to. They just want it to be fun and peppy. So they’ll put on some playlist and out pops AI generated music. The more that this happens, this kind of automatically generated AI music being crowding out the market, it we’re, we see that the human made music is not only being devalued, it starts to be.
Replaced and what we don’t know yet and what many musicians are afraid of is what that’s gonna do to the appetite [00:18:00] for music. Are people’s tastes gonna change? Are people’s standards gonna go down? Are people not gonna care as much about. Human art, if they don’t have access to it, they won’t even potentially know what they’re missing.
And that’s what’s really terrifying there is, as we all know, when we listen to human made music, we get this soul connection, um, from something that’s been created by another human that experiences the richness of, of the person that created it. The artist is reflected in the music. We don’t have that in AI generated music.
And so if the market starts to be completely dominated by this people, what will happen? Will people just say, oh, this is music now. Music is just, music is just this soulless, fun, light thing that we don’t have the depth of it anymore. We just don’t know how society’s definition [00:19:00] of culture will change in a way that.
Truly, um, threatens what we know as cultural and art, and that’s what a lot of musicians that I talk to are really afraid about.
Bob: That’s a really profound thing to think about, that we, we might lose our taste buds, as it were for music.
Jen Jacobsen: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And going back to your point about shutting out opportunity, we see this already.
It with specific genres, with small, I shouldn’t say small, lesser known genres in this country are, it’s harder for, for those genres to, to get noticed because we’re seeing kind of a, um, the beginnings, and I hope it doesn’t continue, but the potential beginnings of a kind of, um, homogenized. Dumbed down version of [00:20:00] music so that the idiosyncrasies, and the quirks and interesting kind of little takes on music that you wouldn’t necessarily get to see if you weren’t looking for it or if it wasn’t.
Presented to you, those will be gone because it’s gonna be harder for those to bubble up. Now if, if music is kind of, um, homogenized in this way, I think the diversity of genres, the diversity of listening experiences is potentially gonna be greatly diminished. So that’s scary too.
Bob: Now, I think you’re a musician, right?
Jen Jacobsen: Yes. Well, I’m a singer. I’m professionally not, you know, that’s, it’s not my livelihood, but it’s uh, but I do have a background
Bob: in music more than a hobby, if not a life workout. It’s enjoy me. Me too. Yeah. I have lots of music friends and my [00:21:00] younger music friends.
Jen Jacobsen: Yeah.
Yeah.
Bob: Might be giggling a bit at this conversation because they would say, you know what? I still find bands in basement pubs in. Brooklyn that I love and old people have always been saying that this newest thing is gonna, is gonna ruin us when actually we’re, we’ll be just fine. How is this different from say, you know, sampling music with hip hop or, or, or even something like the, you know, what happened with Napster?
How is this different?
Jen Jacobsen: I think it goes back to the thing I was saying about distribution versus creation. So AI. AI can be an amazing tool. I know plenty of musicians who use AI tools in the creation of music to create beats to, in the recording studio, to, I don’t know, can help them master their recordings. Even like plan tours.
I mean there’s, there are a lot of ways that even sort of get started with some aspects of the songwriting process. There are certain ways that AI can jumpstart or add to, or supplement the creative process. That’s great. [00:22:00] What’s different now is in with generative AI, is that it’s replacing the entire creation process and that that hasn’t happened before.
We haven’t seen a technology that literally replaces the artist. Like music can be creative, if you call it music. Music can be created without a human being and, and that, and it’s created by. Having trained itself on human created music without paying those humans. So that’s, but that is the major difference, is that we’re not talking about tools that are used or platforms that are used to get my music out there.
This technology is literally for a potential replacement for human artists. That’s, that’s, that makes it completely different than anything we’ve seen before. And like I said, I was part of the like tech content [00:23:00] debates of the, around the creation of the internet time and, and it was really, it was, it wasn’t about who’s an artist, it was about how much you pay the artist and making sure you don’t steal their stuff.
This is all of that. Plus what makes you actually an artist? Do you have to be human to be an artist?
Bob: So while I’m an amateur musician, I’m a professional business journalist. And I see everything as, as a business [00:25:00] story and mm-hmm. While all of this to me is dressed up in, you know, AI is the phrase of the moment. We’ll call it something else in, in three months, but isn’t this just a race to find the cheapest content that’s the most profitable content for a large company?
And how would we stop that force on a business level?
Jen Jacobsen: I think it, in many ways, it’s always been that, yes, I think the way that. Companies stay in business is by being profitable and you be, you are profitable by getting the most users, listeners, what audience members to subscribe or use your stuff. I mean, that’s just, that’s the way capitalism works.
So, so we can’t, my opinion is that we can’t beat this problem by stamping it out. You can’t stop the development of technology, although sometimes we wish we [00:26:00] could. I think what we have to do is find a way to make the technology to ensure that the technology is used responsibly and develops in a responsible manner.
And so how do you do that? You make it, you make it economically. Beneficial to be responsible and we’re starting to, so, so in my opinion, the way to solve the AI problem is gonna be to have a, um, a licensing regime in, in the marketplace where AI developers are not going to be successful unless they pay content providers fairly unless they stop stealing.
They enter into agreements that are fair, that respect the artist. They give the artist choice [00:27:00] and the ability to consent or not consent to the use of their material. All of those things that are so critical to artists, those have to be built into the economic economic system for this to be able to work.
And so this is the question is how do we make this, how do we make it both profitable and responsible? So that the AI develops in a way that that isn’t gonna, you know, trample on the rights of artists. We saw this to some extent in the way the streaming market developed. So when, you know, in like 1999 or 2000, the music world was being decimated.
By illegal downloading, and we did, there was lawsuits and there was, you know, trying to clamp down on the technology and stop the stealing. [00:28:00] But what solved it ultimately hasn’t solved it, but it stopped the bleeding, was to create this world of streaming services where you, where now people pay money to.
Hear music on the internet. I mean, that wasn’t happening before. And so these streaming companies, which we are not happy with, the, the way the economics is working, at least there’s something, there’s some amount of payment and compensation and, and ostensibly there’s some sort of respect for the. For the content that, for the artist in that the content’s not just being stolen and distributed without artist consent.
That’s what licensing is. So that’s happening not the way we want it to be, to happen. Exactly, but it’s happening in the streaming world. That’s what stopped the total tanking of the music industry, uh, when the, [00:29:00] from the illegal downloading era. We need that to happen in ai. Now we’re starting to see it.
So some of the major labels. Are making licensing deals with AI companies, are these good deals? We don’t know. We, I mean, most people don’t know what’s in them. We don’t know if they’re good deals, but they are a step towards forcing these players to act responsibly. Um, the problem is, A, we don’t know what’s in the deals exactly, but B, they’re only available, like I was saying before, they’re only available to those players with enough leverage to make the deals so Universal Music and Warner Music can make these deals and the artists that are signed onto them can get the benefit of those deals, perhaps. But the rest of the music community is sort of out in the cold.
Bob: How do we make it like, like have you seen. Something that, that has worked, you know, from other industries, like from the, the Writer’s Guild, for example. How do we make Tift Merritt and her business model?
Jen Jacobsen: Thank you for asking, because there is a, a really important piece of legislation that we’re hoping we’ll move forward sometime within this next session of Congress before it ends. It’s a bill called the Protect Working Musicians Act, which would allow small indie artists, small independent publishers, and record labels and songwriters to negotiate collectively together to create some leverage when they try to make a deal with a Spotify or Suno or Udio or any of these AI companies currently.
The way the antitrust law works, you can’t [00:31:00] collectively bargain with other artists. All the artists that are part of Sony or Universal, they, they get the benefit of the deal that the, their corporate record label can negotiate. So they’re kind of unofficially, not unofficially, but they’re in a sense collectively negotiating because their record labels doing it on their, their behalf. These smaller ENT independent entities that don’t have the ability to band together and negotiate are left out in the cold. So this Protect Working Musicians Act would create an exemption in the antitrust law that allows these independent members of the music community to negotiate together and so that as a group, they could go to Spotify where they could go to an AI company and say, ‘We’re all gonna take our music off your platform unless you give us X, Y, Z deal” and maybe have a shot [00:32:00] at getting some fair terms and compensation. So that’s, I think that’s a huge key for getting these artists at the table and giving us a voice in the economy as it in, in this current ecosystem.
Question is whether we can get it enacted, which is hard in these times.
Bob: So that’s the
Jen Jacobsen: protect these political times.
Bob: Yeah, of course. That’s the Protects Working Musicians Act. Um, yep. In Tennessee, the Elvis Act has been passed and signed into law. Yes. Is there anything in that, that you think is worth extending to the rest of the country?
Jen Jacobsen: Oh, yes. That’s a, that’s a, so that … the thing I was talking about is about how we negotiate the, um, there’s a whole other area of AI legislation that’s more about regulating the AI itself to make sure that it’s act, these companies are acting responsibly. [00:33:00] So the Protect Working Citizens Act is really about who gets to participate in the marketplace and negotiate the Elvis Act is a specific legislation which we would like to make that federal. There are efforts to make some of those elements. The Elvis Act become federal law, not just state law. The Elvis Act says that not only can you not steal my composition or my recording, which is already illegal under copyright law, you can also not steal my voice. You can’t fake my voice, my likeness, my persona to create music with it. So it’s, it’s, it’s about deep fakes and voice cloning, um, which hasn’t been specifically part of the law before because we haven’t seen this extent of stealing someone’s voice or their, their [00:34:00] likeness on this level before AI came along.
So the Elvis Act was like really transformational. Applying this. To AI and to, to people, not just about artists. You can’t steal anybody’s voice, um, or likeness.
Bob: And, and let’s tip our cap to the Department of Legislative Acronyms for the Elvis Act.
Jen Jacobsen: I know one of my favorite things to do is come up with bill acronyms. It’s just, it’s so much fun.
Bob: The Ensuring Likeness of Voice and Image Security Act
Jen Jacobsen: Exactly. I wouldn’t have, I probably wouldn’t have been able to even tell you what all the letters stand for anymore. I had to look it up. We just call it all of us all the time, but there is a similar bill. It has some similarities pending in Congress on the federal level called the No Fakes Act. And don’t ask me what that acronym stands for ’cause I do not remember. But some really smart person made it up and it has to do with, let’s see, I’m trying to think of what the letters would be. But anyway, it has to do it. It’s the same notion that you [00:35:00] cannot. Steal someone’s not about, not just about protecting someone’s work that they create, it’s protecting the integrity of the person, your voice, um, and
Bob: The Nurture, Originals, Foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe. Act Comes of trippingly off the tongue.
Jen Jacobsen: Of course. Obviously. We’re hoping that moves forward in Congress.
Bob: We haven’t talked about protecting listeners yet, and I don’t know about you, but I, if someone’s giving me genetically modified food, I want to know. And if someone’s giving me artificially created music, I want to know.
Jen Jacobsen: Yes. Yes. Well, there are some, there are a couple of bills in Congress. Pending that would require, um, at least the disclosure of whether your music, what was used to train your, your model, your AI model. And I don’t think that would go specifically to the, [00:36:00] actually, I don’t know if it would apply to this specific song that is that where you could see it as a, as a consumer, but it would be before you used or interacted with a certain AI model. You would know, you would be allowed to know where that model was trained and whether it was, what content it used to train to train on. Those are impor, those are important pieces of legislation.
But there’s also, in the marketplace, there are companies that are working on developing labeling technology, like, um, like a seal of approval, better business bureau type of seal that would, you know, watermark certain pieces of content so that you, you as the consumer could see, does this contain AI or is this created by a human? I think there is a huge appetite for that. Uh, I agree with you that people are like, “I don’t, I don’t wanna just listen to AI music. I wanna know that this was created by a real artist.” Um, so I think there’s gonna be a growing [00:37:00] market for that kind of technology.
I know some people that are already working on, on it, and we’ll see.
Bob: Organic food has a huge market.
Jen Jacobsen: Yeah, exactly.
Bob: It’s organic music.
Jen Jacobsen: Yeah, real music.
Bob: Um, I, you know, I’ve heard what’s happening right now to musicians as similar to artist ID theft. Um. Mm-hmm. And there have been pretty celebrated cases, or, you know, you can’t just imitate a celebrity and use that fake voice in an ad, right? There are already some protections in place, and I wonder why it’s been hard to extend those into the, the AI music realm.
Jen Jacobsen: I think it’s an interesting question why it’s been so hard. I think, honestly, I think a big part of it is politics We’re seeing right now in this country that there are, um, there’s a lot of power in the tech community and the tech industry and tech companies are able to say like, don’t regulate us or we’re not gonna be competitive [00:38:00] in the global marketplace. And they have success. And that’s how, that’s how our system works, right? There’s like players that have a bigger voice than other players sometimes.
Bob: I believe one of the most poisonous phrases in the English language is stifle innovation.
Jen Jacobsen: Yeah. Right, exactly. Don’t stifle innovation.
Bob: Oh, no.
Jen Jacobsen: Um, and people listen to that and they get spooked by it, and then all of a sudden there’s a, there becomes a, like a level of fear of, of regulating AI because we will be beaten by China. If we regulate our AI, then China will beat us. You know, I, I argue that the way to be successful in our, in the US economy is to have a responsible, functioning marketplace that allows art to flourish.
Like the, the GDP that, um. [00:39:00] The amount of money that the intellectual property community contributes to our GDP is astounding, and I don’t have the numbers to give you, but, but it’s huge and we need to support that. That’s the way we remain competitive, is to have our technology develop in a way, in partnership with the intellectual property community so that we can be more successful than economies that are just allowing technology to develop with any, without any kind of either ethical component or productive die posts.
{Music break}
Bob: if we’re gonna protect the humans, I think we have to humanize this conversation much more than we, we have been willing to. And I, I’m gonna repeat it to as many people as I can because I just think. Vast majority of people have no idea that, and I know the formula is complicated, which is a way of [00:40:00] obfuscating the conversation. So I’m rounding it off. But you need a million streams to get $300.
Jen Jacobsen: It’s incredible. It’s mind boggling. Yeah. People don’t know that at all.
Bob: It’s way worse than a minimum, minimum wage job. Way worse.
Jen Jacobsen: I mean, there’s all kinds of solutions that people try to come up with, like having universal income for artists. Um, lots of different solutions that are talked about in the music community. It’s hard to know what is the right path forward that could actually be successful, but we do know that it’s not working right now. And as we see fewer and fewer musicians be able to make a living making music, we should be worried about that as a society.
I lemme say another existential thing about music and society. So we are as everybody knows in an unbelievably polarized moment in our nation’s political dialogue, music is a place …. art [00:41:00] generally .. but music is a place where people can be together and communicate across party lines, across political divisions, across polarization. It’s a way to get out of our tribalism and be together. If we don’t have that ability to communicate with each other, including like the artists who are human bringing us together, we’re gonna lose a huge, I think, foundational aspect of our democracy. I mean, not to be too dramatic about it, but like we’re just gonna be more and more in silos if we lose the ability to be together in artistic spaces with human artists, and I think that’s really dangerous.
Bob: Let me make one pass at getting, uh, the other point of view in here, the [00:43:00] overregulation point of view, which is mm-hmm. If we make it so strict that you basically can’t use other people’s work to create your work, we might eliminate things like cover bands, for example. Is that, is that a real risk?
Jen Jacobsen: No, because the, that’s what music licensing is for. Of course we should, of course we shouldn’t overregulate to not allow this type of sharing. That’s, that’s what licensing is. It’s the ability to go to someone and say, “Hey, I would like to perform your music,” or “I would like to use a piece of your music in my music,” Or, “I would like to distribute or play your music on my platform.” Everyone should be able to have these discussions and that’s what the, that’s what the music marketplace is for, but it has to the foundation has to be about consent and compensation, and the artist has to be in a position of being able to have choice about how their work is used.[00:44:00]
If they have that choice and the ability to be paid for it, then yeah, let’s keep going. That’s that it, that you are right. That is what makes art exciting, is when people are sharing ideas and sharing their work with each other and sharing it with vast and diverse audiences, but that requires a functioning licensing system so that people can be paid for what they’re creating.
Otherwise, there will be no more art,
Bob: and I gotta
Jen Jacobsen: tell you, at least not paid art.
Bob: Yeah. This to me, is so much more about will than about mechanisms because I’ve been in coffee shops in college towns. Once in a while have a kid play music in the corner for six people and they’ve been shut down from doing covers because, you know, an ASCAP auditor shows up.
So there are plenty of ways to enforce licensing regimes. And we have them already.
Jen Jacobsen: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We have them already and they need to be respected and sometimes
Bob: we need to go after the right people.
Jen Jacobsen: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, there was a, there was a funny thing when we were, when I was [00:45:00] in the, um. In that early internet time, going back to my job when I was at Time Warner and the beginning, the music industry trying to like shut down illegal downloading, which they needed to do, but we didn’t have an alternative
There was no alternative licensing regime for people to go to. Like people need to have an outlet to use these new technologies. We just need to create a licensing structure for them. But we were, we as the music industry, we were. Suing all these people to try to like shut down the illegal downloading because the music industry was tanking.
And, um, there was a joke that like we were suing like by accident, like dead grandmas or mm-hmm. People that, like, we were just, we were going after the wrong people. Um, not on purpose, but it was just like, it was, there was such a desperation. We’re like, let’s just just sue everyone. We gotta shut it down.
We gotta shut it down. And you, and that’s what happens when you don’t have a. A working licensing regime is, you know, it doesn’t work for anybody. People including users. [00:46:00] People.
Bob: Yeah. I think people forget, once you gave somebody a simply way to buy a song for 99 cents, the vast majority of people were happy to do that.
Jen Jacobsen: Exactly. Look at, I mean, look at these streaming services now. They’re hugely successful. Like mm-hmm. Who of us? Nobody’s not, I don’t wanna say nobody, but it’s very few people are buying music anymore. We’re all buying subscriptions to stream it. That that was completely not contemplated. That was like a business model that no one could have predicted, and yet it’s saved the music industry.
So let’s come up with something new to save the music industry from this new technology. You know? Or just say like, it has to all come down to the artist’s ability to have a say in what they’re creating. You know, all these big players talking about how to make the marketplace work. Have the artists at the table in those conversations or, or you’re not gonna get anywhere.
Bob: And somehow I think people miss this point. There is a pile of money that people spend on art. Right. It’s one pile of money. Mm-hmm. And we have these [00:47:00] actors who showed up and vacuumed off about a third of it all of a sudden without adding heck of a lot of value.
Jen Jacobsen: Yeah.
Bob: So, of course everyone else is getting less.
Of course. Like, it’s not like they’ve created a bigger industry somehow.
Jen Jacobsen: Exactly. They’re just taking more of the pie. Yeah, that’s absolutely true. Hopefully the pie will also grow. I mean, the, the idea is that value will be added somehow, but, but it has to be added in a way that respects the rights of artists.
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