Musician Billy Bragg wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times on Saturday sparked by the recent $850 million sale of Bebo.com to AOL; in it he argues that musicians who posted their original work on the site are entitled to a cut of that astronomic sum, since their work contributed to the site's high traffic. For those unfamiliar, Bebo.com is a social networking website akin to MySpace whose primary membership is in Great Britain. Bragg is an outspoken British musician and political activist, who in 2006 publicly shamed the creators of MySpace into revising their terms and conditions in order to clarify their previously cloudy policy regarding proprietary rights to the music posted on their site. While I tend to agree with Bragg’s politics, and applaud his efforts on behalf of MySpace musicians, I’m not sure that I can get behind him on this issue. While his ideals are in the right place, he fails to address the important structural changes that would necessarily unfold from the introduction of royalty payments to musicians.
Fundamental to any successful networking site is the symbiotic relationship that exists between member and website. The website provides a space where members can post and view information, and in some cases, media; in return the information that the user makes available to fellow members attracts new members and site visitors. Bragg’s suggestion that the sites should pay their members for their contribution would surely upset this give-and-take in multiple ways. Not only would it inevitably lead to the sites being forced to charge for memberships, it would also necessitate the formulation of a “pay-per-click” system by which those musicians whose pages had the most visitors were paid the most money. But how do you determine what, besides music, is worthy of financial reward? Would those members who poured hours of their time into witty and artfully written personal profiles also demand the same recompense?
Furthermore, Bragg’s suggested revisions to the structure of these sites fails to thoroughly address the fact that musicians, and artists of every medium, have almost always needed the help of an intermediary, whether it be a manager, a gallerist, or a PR firm, to achieve commercial success. In order to access the type of exposure and platform that sites like Bebo and MySpace offer free of charge, musicians have traditionally paid large fees to major record labels. Bragg briefly touches on this argument and denies its veracity:
The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that
recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet too?
Bragg fails to note an important difference between radio stations and networking sites, and that is selectivity. Not every song makes it on the radio. Only the songs that would seem to have the most commercial viability are selected, otherwise radio stations wouldn’t pay for them. If Bebo instated a policy whereby musicians who post their work received compensation, then they would most certainly be forced to become more selective about what music they allowed to be posted. Musicians whose songs were deemed less appealing to the masses would likely be unable to post their music. This quickly eliminates the concept of universal access within these forums, a destruction of the very foundation upon which these sites have prospered.
The internet has turned the music industry on its head, and the major record labels have suffered the most; they failed to see it coming, and they continue to fail to address it in progressive ways. As Bragg notes, most musicians are also still trying to figure out how best to navigate the new possibilities of distribution and marketing that have been opened up by the internet. While I wholeheartedly support Bragg’s efforts to promote an open discourse about these issues, I don’t know that introducing a fee structure to social networking sites is necessarily the best solution.
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