Compromise & Entitlement
Newpapers and the recording industry have a few things in common: they’re both “old media”, their business models are currently failing, they both seem to attract a fair amount of online schadenfreude over this fact. But something else too: they’re both businesses built on compromise - or more specifically, the acceptance of the idea of compromise among their audience.
A newspaper, for instance, asks its reader for two kinds of compromise: you have to take delivery of the sections you’re not interested in to read the ones you are, and you have to accept that professional journalists get the chance to select the news that sees print, while you don’t.
The music industry asks for similar compromises - if you listen to the radio or watch MTV, you have to deal with the stuff you don’t like as well as the stuff you do. And you have to accept that music you don’t like is going to get recorded, perhaps at the expense of some music you do.
Why do you have to accept these compromises? Because you don’t have much of a choice, but also because the newspaper and music industries, for all their faults, do quite a good job of providing you with an option that’s satisfactory enough to make the compromises relatively painless. In an area with a few competing papers, you can probably find one that you agree with and that covers the stuff you care about pretty well. In a thriving recording industry, you grin and bear the music you hate which sells well because you’ve found a few small labels which put out the music you love. (And also, sometimes the compromise throws out a surprise or two - things you weren’t expecting to catch your attention but still do.)
Now both these industries are corrupt and broken and shit often rises to the top. But they give you close enough to what you want for you to deal with it, as we all used to deal with it.
And then the Internet comes along, and suddenly you do have a choice and you can get a much closer fit to what you want: “pretty well” doesn’t cut it any more. And that’s a good thing! But the thing is, the compromise that worked pretty well for you also worked pretty well for everyone else.
And suddenly it doesn’t. You can get the exact news you want, free: but for the people who aren’t online, or not skilled enough to set up RSS feeds, or don’t like reading on a screen, getting news becomes more inconvenient when papers disappear. And you happen to like indie rock bands who tour a lot and sell a bunch of shirts, but fans of music that happens not to transfer well live, or artists who love making music but don’t enjoy tourning, find their options lessening.
Well, tough titties, old dudes who can’t work RSS and fags who like studio music. You can’t stop technology. And it’s true, you can’t. And the newspapers and music execs who are stamping their feet demanding revenue are indeed displaying a certain amount of undignified entitlement.
But entitlement cuts both ways. “I should have everything I want the way I want it” is entitlement: it’s a kind of entitlement that newspapers (and pop music!) have done their bit to make us feel is natural, our birthright as young, savvy, individualistic consumers even. But nonetheless, entitlement. It may be that as the net evolves and “business models” change everyone will be able to get what they want, and surprises too! But in the transition phase that won’t be the case: it isn’t right now. And it seems to me that moving from a system that delivers an OK solution for everyone to one that delivers an optimum solution to some is a classic Tragedy of the Commons. It doesn’t feel like a Tragedy, because the people who used to police these particular commons were dickheads. But it’s not just journalists and label execs who are going to find the new bargain less satisfactory than the old compromise.
