Why our love affair with “free” is going to leave us all poor
By Andrew Harrison. This first appeared in the October 2009 issue of The Word Magazine.
Free. Free. Free. Free. The word is everywhere and it doesn’t sound as cheerful as it used to. “Free” used to extend the promise of a life-enhancing little extra to brighten your day. Years ago, when I was learning the magazine huckster’s trade, I was told that you could secure an interview with Kurt Cobain or Kylie Minogue or the Risen Christ if you liked, but none of them would be as good on the cover as the word FREE in bright red on a bright yellow background – even if the cassette you were giving away only had Hothouse Flowers and the Paris Angels on it. It didn’t matter. Free was fun. Free was your friend.
Now free has turned nasty. Never mind the burden of encumbering crap you’re faced with in the course of your day (farewell, thelondonpaper, we hardly knew ye). Free is now lapping around all our ankles like a rising flood. It carries not the promise of a nice little something for nothing, but the threat of working for nothing, at least for those of us in what are now called (pretty generously when you think about it) the “culture industries”. What happened to the music business is now happening to everyone else – “they came for the A&R men, and I did nothing…” – and worse, it’s got influential cheerleaders.
A book by the American Wired magazine’s editor argues that Free will become the default price for pretty much everything digital. Somehow things like music, television, software and journalism will just happen, says Chris Anderson, as the hobby products of amateurs who will magically perform better in these disciplines than people who have to meet a certain standard or lose the month’s rent. (Anderson also thinks that “news” and “journalism” themselves are now meaningless concepts, which presumably means he sees no difference between Christopher Hitchens and the guy who runs lolcats.com). Meanwhile Sweden’s odious Pirate Party has set up shop in the UK, bringing its toddler’s manifesto of contradictory demands. Let’s severely diminish copyright and patent law and ensure freedom of speech, they say. On the question of how musicians, writers, developers and dramatists would exercise that right to free speech if their platforms disappeared and they had to work in Netto to survive there is silence, or a lot of waffle about not protecting “failed models”.
Well, yeah, boo hoo and who cares about a load of skint musicians and jobless journo’s? It’s not like any of them are doing real jobs, like bin-men and bank managers and private security consultants. It’s not like anyone would miss them. I can understand the former opinion but not the latter. I freely admit than I and many of my fellow professionals have never done anything like a proper job – meaning one with zero opportunity for independent thought, sloppy dress code or daytime use of Twitter – for more than five minutes and that if we did we would have nervous breakdowns. And compared to the average musician we’re the ones who look like engines of industry. But that is not the point. The point is that art, media and entertainment set the temperature of a society. They are the air that we breathe. Deprofessionalise them, and hand them over solely to zealots and hobbyists, and we all lose out. Your news will become even emptier and less trustworthy than it is now. Your pop culture coverage will become more elitist and obscurantist (see: Pitchfork) because even niche magazines like this one have to keep a keen eye on the cashflow. And anyone expecting a great flowering of music from bands who couldn’t get signed is invited to rummage in the box of CD-R’s under my desk to find out what unsigned bands really sound like. It’s not pretty.
I’m not a Luddite. I love a good blog. I run WORD’s Twitter feed and despised the Phil Space brigade (Janet Street-Porter, Jackie Ashley, the fool Liddle again) attacking this fantastic service without understanding the first thing about it. But you can’t run the world entirely on goodwill. As a nation we love the amateur – Churchill was a watercolour painter who ran the war in his spare time, and all that – but the idea that the best art is produced by the enthusiastic Corinthian was always a myth. The best art is produced by the enthusiastic amateur who want to become a well-rewarded professional as quickly as they can. Good stuff costs money, and the most expensive resources are talent and the space to use it. Kick away the ladder up to that place where you can make a living from doing what you love, and all you’ve got left is people’s private doodles.
In the absence of a solution, I propose we extend the principle of FREE to everyone else’s job, and see how they like it. I’m going to drive the bus to work tomorrow. Who cares if it’s late, it goes the wrong way and the driver loses his job? Fares will come down to zero and anyway, I’m not responsible for his old-world thinking and crowd-hostile vision and failed business model. If that works out, I might try running a pub.
