Here I propose a system shockingly similar to what Patreon would do 12 years later.
An old post of mine from Kuro5hin.Org, dated “Sat Jan 27th, 2001 at 12:38:44 PM EST”.
Much is made of the Net’s alleged ability to naturally remove the middleman in publishing. With the Web, it is in fact possible for a writer, artist or musician to publish their work for all the world to enjoy. The Net owes its very existence to programmers following this very model of direct, free, publication. Where this begins to fall apart, of course, is when these producers discover that you can’t make a living by giving your work away. This is the central problem of the Open Source movement, which artists and musicians are now facing as well as programmers, and which dictates that they must either find a patron for their work or publish only as a hobby.
The Open Source world provides many examples of this, from O’Reilly Publishing (who make much money from selling books about Perl) paying Larry Wall to continue developing Perl, to the unnumbered Open Source projects written and maintained by programmers who still have to keep their day jobs.
With the rise of Napster and other music distribution systems, as well as general file sharing systems being used to distribute music, musicians are now encountering this paradox of freedom as well: they now have access to a free distribution channel for their work but, as with anything that’s free, they can’t make a living doing it. And just as it is with programming, musicians can’t do their best work when they must divide their attention between their art and a job.
This paradox diminishes us all by diminishing the strength of our shared culture, and prevents the much vaunted renaissance in direct publishing from achieving fruition.
To solve this problem, we need to look back to the first Renaissance to examine how it was financed. The blooming of the arts and music by which the Renaissance acquired its name was made possible through the investment of the wealthy in the production of public art. This system of patronage allowed artists to focus entirely on their work without the need to finance themselves.
Naturally, we would not wish to replicate a system which makes cultural production dependant on the whims of the rich, whose tastes are notoriously fickle. Fortunately, the past few hundred years have seen the rise of another concept which, when merged with a system of patronage, may provide a solution.
In 1752, Benjamin Franklin established a fire insurance cooperative in what would later become the United States; the first modern cooperative was founded in Rochdale, England, by a group of factory workers. Today, cooperatives are a large, if mostly unrecognized, component of modern life. To take only one small and timely example, almost half of the electric power lines in the United States are owned and operated by cooperatives.
A system of collective patronage could well solve the problems faced by independent producers in a free-publishing environment. There are two ways such a model could be applied to modern musicians, which could be thought of as the philanthropic and the capitalist modes. As you might well expect from these terms, the first patronizes a musician without any specific expectation of a return which the second is more in the nature of a transaction.
In the philanthropic mode, consider an organization of concerned individuals which offers its patronage to artists. Each member would contribute a set amount of money and then, once the fund had reached sufficient size, the group would commission works from writers, musicians or other artists.
To give a concrete example, an organization of one thousand people, each contributing $25/year, would have an operating fund of $25,000 per year. Though I have no personal experience in producing an album, I should think this would be sufficient to allow the patrons the production costs of at least one independently produced album per year, even including a stipend to the musician to allow them to work only on the project during production. Depending on which of the production costs the group wanted to cover, it might be possible to support two or even three albums at this level.
While this style of patronage would naturally attract concerned individuals of the sort who actually give money to PBS, the second has the potential for a much broader attraction.
In the more capitalist mode, the individual becomes patron of a specific artist, either directly or through a service run for this purpose. The individual contributes, to stay with the number used in the previous example, $25/year as a patron, for which they receive some discount on all merchandise or public appearances by that musician; say 50%.
To look more closely at some hypothetical details, take the example of a patron of a small local band. Such a band could, in my experience, be expected to produce one album per year and perform from 20 to 50 times. A fan who purchases the album ($15), a t-shirt ($15) and attends five of these performances (usually in the $5 to $10 range, so say $35 total) would have given the band $65 in that year. A patron who purchases the same merchandise and attends the same shows, but who has paid $25 for a 50% discount, will have spent $57.50 instead.
From this, the incentive for the fan should be fairly obvious. So what is the incentive for the musician who, in this example, is theoretically losing $7.50 by taking this fan as a patron? There are two major incentives: stability and capital.
First, the musician who, to return to the numbers used in the earlier example, has one thousand patrons at $25/year each has a guaranteed income of $25,000 for that year. While this is by no means a wealthy income, it is more than many school teachers make in the U.S. and puts the hypothetical musician above the federal poverty line. This figure, of course, does not include income from merchandise or ticket sales, to patrons or non-patrons. This gives the musician a guaranteed minimum income, with a high probability of greater income through the traditional means of merchandising.
The second incentive to the artist is raw capital. Instruments, rehearsal spaces and recording facilities can be quite costly and difficult to obtain (or maintain) without a large reserve of capital. Consider the rehearsal space lease with its first and last month’s deposit; it’s like renting two apartments. A musician with a sufficiently large patronage base, or a starting musician with a smaller patronage and a day job, can dramatically improve their performance with a fund of $25,000 for good facilities and quality instruments. Such a fund also allows the musician to invest in equipment or facilities which can be much more expensive, or impossible, to obtain on payment plans or loans.
Either of these modes, of course, do require a commitment on the part of the artist to produce, and continue producing. But consider, they both allow the artist the freedom to produce without the distractions of financing from other sources and should dramatically reduce the call for copy protection measures on artistic content. Unpaid copying of music, to the extent that it certainly does exist, is only a minor concern for the artist, as the recording company and distributors are the ones who make money from the actual music. Many musicians have come forth in the past year to explain that their income is derived from touring and merchandise alone.
Speaking for myself, I can think of four local San Francisco-area bands, and one each in Minneapolis and New York, to whom I would happily give $25/year to support their music; particularly on the second plan. At $150/year, that’s not a significant burden on my personal finances. I strongly suspect that, if it were possible to keep the Borg jokes to a minimum (always a difficult thing when you use the word “collective” these days), and allay the usual cries of “Communist!”, a large number of you would find it attractive as well.
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