As long as I can remember, being a musician has been synonymous with being broke. Hence, the old joke, "What do you call a musician without a girlfriend?" "Homeless."
But, it's not a joke. Artists of all types have been the lowest form of life on the entertainment food chain since Louie B. Mayer first took an extraordinarily talented 16-year-old Judy Garland under his wing and ruined her.
As a songwriter in the late '90s/early '00s, I became the inadvertent spokesperson for giving your music away for free, as my band, The Rosenbergs, partnered with the now infamous Napster and were the first, and I believe, only band, crazy enough to give away a free, full-length copy of our album along with the purchased one.
The reasons behind our decision to part with our music free of charge were two-fold:
1. We were being blacklisted by the labels, so radio play was pretty much out of the question. Not to mention, any chance we had required more grease money than we'd every see.
2. Since radio was not an option, why not try for twice as many fans at our shows as those who bought the record?
Back in the day, we would routinely get calls from music supervisors asking to use one of our tracks in an upcoming episode of some random teeny bopper show and the call would always go the same way:
"Our music budget is next to nothing, so we can only offer you $500 for the track, in perpetuity."
That meant, outside of the few pennies you'd get if you were lucky enough to have ASCAP's or BMI's haplessly porous fishnet miraculously catch your performance on an obscure station in Belgium, you'd get nothing further with regard to compensation, each and every time the show aired. Forever. If you said no, they simply moved on to the next broke artist desperate for exposure.
Meanwhile, the show's producers would earn millions if the show was picked up for syndication. But, outside of a measly performance royalty, the artists would never see another dime.
After the episode aired, it would usually surface that the reason they had no budget was because they chose to pay U2 $75k for the use of just 10 seconds of one of their mega-hits, while the rest of us "peasants," who made up the other 99 percent of the soundtrack wound up fighting over the spare change that fell between the cushions.
This same kind of thinking permeates the industry to this day and is why, when a band or singer finally makes it, they charge a fortune for their wares, thereby forcing everyone else around them to raise their prices, promoters, venues, labels, etc.
As Buddy Ackerman (played brilliantly by Kevin Spacey) so eloquently put it in Swimming with Sharks, the classic film about a studio intern who goes crazy and takes his boss hostage, "It's MY turn!"
However, being paid $500 or, dare I say, $1k for your work seems like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow compared to the plight of the freelance writer. The disgraceful way us writers/bloggers are treated these days makes the barely existing, bottom-dwelling musicians look like tycoons.
If you want proof, just visit one of the major job hunting sites like, say, Indeed, or Craigslist, and search for "Writer." There, you will find the guaranteed largest selection of start-ups, as well as a few known entities, looking to fully capitalize on the writer's time and effort, while attempting to justify the little-to-no-pay offered in return.
I'm sure the same goes for photographers and other artists, whose creative works literally litter the cyber walls of Google's Images archives, yet who, while making billions for Google by way of views, see virtually nothing in return. In fact, one of the unspoken reasons famed photog, Annie Leibovitz, reportedly almost went bankruptwas supposedly due to this very issue.
If you go to Google and search for her, you get about 1.8 million results. This, and similar searches, help generate approx. $72 billion in annual revenue for Google based on Annie's (and other's) content that it holds no license to, yet obviously uses for commercial gain. The real world (offline) would compensate her for the commercial use of her photos to create a business. If she was the loss leader, she would be compensated. If she was the main attraction, she would be compensated. The online world doesn't work like that though - but shouldn't it?
Beyond that, many artists are forced to send out hand-written letters to those they feel are infringing on their copyrights on a case by case basis. You'd have better luck herding cats.
In response to the widespread "cyber-looting" of their works, organized movements such as Protect Our Futures, a group started by musicians against copyright violations which has seen it's hashtag receive over 40 million impressions in just six months, and I Respect Music, a group fighting to change FM radio's decades-long "free-pass" related to performance royalties, seem to be sprouting up with more frequency than ever before.
Wil Wheaton's Twitter rant calling out this very publication for not paying its contributors has started the ball rolling. (And, I have to say, I give credit to the editors at The Huff for publishing a piece like this that draws more attention to the subject.) But, if Mr. Wheaton really wants to start nailing the big bad bully in the sky for taking user content and not paying for it in any way, why not start with the biggest offender of them all? Facebook.
Facebook's entire business model is/was based on taking everything that EVERYONEcreates -- not just artists and writers, but housewives, plumbers, tax attorneys, cake makers, chefs, etc., everyone -- and profiting from the content without ever giving a dime back to the user. Rather, Zuck and Co. have taken it a step further and used the individuals' collective content to attract fans and followers to their respective pages, and, now that they've shown you the thousands of fans you have of your work, they've decided to make you pay through the nose to reach them by forcing you to "boost" your posts. If this isn't virtual extortion, I don't know what is.
I liken what Facebook is doing to The Matrix; i.e., Facebook is making billions sucking each of us dry, like a battery, and moving on to the next at will. The only difference, is we are rechargeable.
The above is exactly why my last piece on Tsu, the burgeoning social media site that seeks to change the way the content game is played by financially compensating users for doing exactly what they do on Facebook, received over 35K Likes and 10K shares in just a few days, and, more importantly, sent tens of thousands of frustrated Facebookers migrating to the platform from all over the globe. It's also why Facebook is now arbitrarily blocking any mention of the site, has removed millions of user posts linking to the site, and is falsely calling the site the dreaded "spam."
Amazing to see how many people from all over the world love the Facebook platform but despise its business model. Yet, at the same time Facebook already has most of us completely brainwashed. I got a particularly good chuckle at the irony of some of the comments a few misguided souls left regarding the Tsu piece, wherein they accused Tsu of being a "Ponzi scheme," out to bleed the unsuspecting users dry. Meanwhile, they posted all this from their Facebook account.
Down the line a bit, this one, seismic shift of the tectonic plates in the arena of user-generated content could change the way we think about what's acceptable vs. not acceptable regarding compensation to the creator all across the board. From blogging, to photography, to songwriting, to painting, to baking, to simply posting a picture of your dog or newborn baby, these new ideas regarding fair use/fair pay, and the sites willing to embrace them, could, someday soon, ignite an 'Arab Spring' amongst creators of all kinds, worldwide.
However, for now, as it stands, blogging is still probably the most undervalued and thankless job. Yours Truly's, included. Imagine if you went to work every day and came home with nothing in your pocket except a few "Likes"?
Some folks may feel since almost everyone can 'write,' it musn't be that hard. But, I assure you, depending on the subject, writing a piece of only 500-600 words can easily take several days. When finished, this piece will have easily taken me approximately 7-8 hours, the equivalent of a full work day, however, in case you're wondering, I won't see a dime.
The stigma around writing must have something to do with the fact that what we do comes from nothing, thus, it must be worth nothing. However, there's a reason they say the pen is mightier than the sword. For all we know, a few more articles like this one, and Facebook's stock could drop 40 points, overnight. All from a bunch of words.
It would seem the best way to start changing the way we, as creators, are treated as we move forward in this ever-changing space of digital media, is to stop thinking like Buddy Ackermans and start using the buddy system. Movements such as Protect Our Futures and I Respect Music, and social media sites like Tsu that "get it," are a great start to creating a virtual Neighborhood Watch of sorts when it comes to protecting our content.
Then, and only then will we be in a better position to say "No" when asked to "Give it Away. Give it Away, now."