February 5, 2014
[Editor Charlie sez: We are thrilled to welcome Helienne Lindvall
to MTP as a guest writer! Helienne interviewed Jean Michel Jarre, the
newly elected president of CISAC, at MIDEM. A version of this interview
previously appeared in the Guardian.]
by Helienne Lindvall
At this week’s Midem music conference in Cannes, France, I sat down
with electronic music pioneer Jean Michel Jarre, whose career as an
artist and composer is now in its fifth decade, having broken through
internationally with his groundbreaking Oxygene album in 1976. Last
year, he took over the presidency of CISAC, the global body for authors’
societies, after the previous president, Robin Gibb, passed away – and
so his Midem “visionary talk” went under the headline Fair Share for
Creators.
I explained that I’m a professional musician and songwriter myself,
and that I only expanded into journalism back in 2008, adding: “I went
into an industry that has been even more financially screwed by the
internet than the music industry. Perhaps I should be a postman next?”
Jarre shot back, without a pause: “But, yes, being a postman is the
future – cause apparently, these days, it’s much better to carry content
than to create it.”
At the end of the interview I explained Blake Morgan’s
IrespectMusic campaign to Jarre, and he happily posed with his own “selfie”.
I covered parts of the interview in my Guardian article, but for
those interested in the nuggets that didn’t make it into the piece, here
it is in full. Jean Michel Jarre, uncut, if you will…
What is the most urgent issue facing creators today? To stop
whining – and promoting a positive image of creators. We are the
extraordinary. We are the people creating the future – not manufacturers
of computers or cables. It’s our responsibility to be able to send a
clear message to the street, saying that [the lack of protection of]
intellectual property is not just a problem for artists from Europe and
America – it’s a global problem. It’s one of the strongest elements of
what democracy is all about.
Creation and all art forms create the soul and the identity of a
country and a continent. There is no sustainable development if there is
no sustainable economy for creation. We shouldn’t be thinking about if
we need a tax for the creators or getting the consumer paying for
content, or if we need donations… We are not taxmen, we are not a
species in the verge of extinction, we are not the Amazon forest – and
we are not beggars.
What we need to do is to sit with the new actors – the digital
distributors of any kind of art form and the hardware manufacturers –
and create the right business model for creators. I think we send the
wrong message by saying that the consumer should pay – it’s too late.
Music, all content, photography, media, film – it’s all going to be free
on the internet. We have to accept it.
How would that work in practice? Think about when you listen
to a song on the radio. You are not paying for it, yet it’s not illegal
to do it, because the rights have been paid for on top, beforehand, by
the radio station, by the network. We have to find exactly the same kind
of system with the internet.
But what would bring these players to the table? We should
stop thinking that Google, Facebook and those kinds of companies are our
enemies. It’s not true. These people were just kids 15-20 years ago,
geeks creating something great – but they created a monster without even
having the time to think about the collateral damages they were
creating. These guys are music lovers. Very often you can meet with them
at rock concerts, and they have lots of friends in the movie and music
industry. They love us. They are understanding more and more the
situation artists are in.
That’s why I’m quite optimistic. As long as we as artists are able to
send the right message to the right people. The media is in the same
boat. Ten years ago the media was against us. They had this neo-hippy
attitude. Now they’re in dire straits and joining the boat. A bit late,
but now we are all on the same boat. We must know the difference between
freedom and mess.
We should never forget that in the smartphone, the smart part is us
creators. If you get rid of music, images, videos, words and literature
from the smartphone, you just have a simple phone that would be worth
about $50. Let’s accept that there’s a lot of innovation in the
smartphone, so let’s add $100 for this innovation – the remaining
$300-$400 of the price should go to us.
So we should sit down and talk to all the telephone companies and
computer companies selling hardware, the companies carrying the content
on the internet, such as Facebook and Google. We need each other, so at
the end of the day we have to find the right partnership. We are talking
about a business partnership, not a tax, and this shouldn’t affect the
consumer.
What would give them the incentive to do right by artists? I’ll
make an ecological analogy. When I first started my career with
Oxygene, it was not that common to think about environmental issues and
ecology, but step by step people started to become aware that it’s not
that bad to take care of the planet for future generations. And so the
government took action, because it had become a popular concept with the
population.
It should be the same for IP. IP is not only a problem for us as
artists – it’s for every family, because in every family you have a son,
a daughter, a sister a brother dreaming about becoming a journalist,
film-maker, writer, photographer, painter or musician. And today they’d
need to get a job on the side. They can’t dedicate their life to it.
This is not acceptable. The notion of IP should be promoted as one of
the fundamental elements of our societies and democracies for the
future.
It’s not just a matter of finance – it’s a matter of ethics. IP is
linked with human rights. If we start to harm it, we’re harming freedom
and human rights. Instead of thinking that we should suppress or forget
the idea of copyright, that it’s an old idea from Europe for the
Europeans, we should think about an internet copyright. We could
consider that after a certain time the revenue will go into an
international fund to help creation worldwide.
It’s not an issue that only concerns Europeans and Americans – it’s a
worldwide problem, and a north-south issue. There’s something wrong
when the advertising world and fashion world are stealing graphics and
patterns from the Aborigines, from the Fiji Islands, from Africa,
without paying anything – just because they can’t identify the author.
You are weakening the identity of some communities step by step. This
has to change.
The tech community should share the ‘coolness’
It’s far beyond some artists sitting on a pot of gold, trying to keep
their advantages. The cool guys have always been the creators, the
artists – not the manufacturers of cables. That’s not particularly sexy.
And yet they are considered the sexy people of society these days. That
has to change. We should share the coolness.
Sometimes the problem is more due to the politicians. There are lots
of people in Washington and Brussels that have good intentions. But most
of them are so cut off from any sectors in society. It’s not only true
for artists, but also for dentists and plumbers. They don’t know the
day-to-day life of Portugal, of Ireland… they have a vague idea, but
there’s an abstraction between the concept and the real world. It’s our
responsibility as citizens to help the politicians, to tell them to not
decide without us. We are not the Soviet Union.
For us [older creators] it’s more or less okay, because we started
our careers when nothing was really organised. It was a golden age, in a
sense. Now, for a young creator, it’s very difficult. There is no
economy, there is no funding.
‘Today world is watching Europe’
As Europeans we have a responsibility, because we have always had a
visionary approach to organising the economy of creation and to protect
the creative world. And today the world is watching Europe. It’s
interesting to see that at a time when Europe is weakened, when we have
this appalling campaign against abortion in Spain, when we’re
questioning if creation needs to be financed. That question is absurd.
They question if we need authors’ rights – of course we do. An artist
has to live just like any other citizen of the world.
At the same time you have China, one of the biggest markets in the
world, saying that copyright is very important. We just opened a CISAC
office in Beijing, because the Chinese government has realised that it’s
the best way to promote Chinese culture and Chinese artists. The same
thing has happened in Korea.
At a time when people around the world are inspired by Europe’s
approach, Europe is trying to leave the boat. We have a responsibility
to the rest of the world, having been ahead of our time and visionary.
We must maintain this position.
When I was working in the studio in LA recently, I met lots of
artists, musicians and film-makers – and they are all watching Europe.
I sat around the table with people from Google and Facebook and said:
‘Guys, you’ve made billions off our back If you want to continue being
wealthy you have to listen to us and you have to business with us in
order to create a sustainable economy. This is why I accepted the role
of president of CISAC. At the end of the day I wanted to give back for
everything the audience has given me.
Our creators are the identity we are going to leave for future
generations. If we don’t solve this we’ll end up with just white noise.
The life of an artist is filled with uncertainty and doubts. Think
about the mother of two or three children trying to write a book… if she
doesn’t know how to survive doing it, she won’t do it. Maybe she has to
sacrifice two years to write a book, like JK Rowling. If there is no
hope of ever getting paid for it she wouldn’t start with even the first
line of the book, and we wouldn’t have Harry Potter, for example.
I’m quite optimistic, because creators are very strong. We are the
ones shaking the tree – shaking societies. MySpace was the social media
platform 10 years ago – where is MySpace today? Facebook and Google need
to be careful so they’re not the next MySpace. They need us to
reinforce their position. It’s better for them to play with us than
against us, because we were there before electricity – and we will be
there after the internet. We have to be more confident in ourselves, and
send a positive message to Brussels and Washington.
But sometimes artists don’t feel confident enough to speak out.
This is true. This is why our sector is so vulnerable. Cause an artist
is full of doubts and uncertainty. He’s shy when it comes to evaluating
his work. This is the most difficult thing for an artist – [answering
the question] what is the value of my work? If everybody else around
them says it’s worth nothing, the artist will be like an abused child.
It’s very sad. We have to take this into consideration. It takes a lot
of courage to stand up and say stop.
We made lots of mistakes in the music industry. We invented pirate
radio – and 25 years later we want to put pirates in jail. We have been
too focused on putting the responsibility of the financial problem for
music on the consumers. The people that are making the most money from
what we are creating are not the consumers – it’s the people carrying
our content. They are not paying what they have to pay. It’s akin to a
company not paying some of its shareholders. We, the creators, are
shareholders of the internet. So it’s not a tax – it’s what we’re owed.
How would you distribute the revenue correctly? Firstly, through
authors’ societies. We need to work out a business model with the
private sector, but also with governments helping to define the rules of
the game. That’s what we are waiting for from Brussels and Washington.
It’s interesting to see that in emerging markets, the BRIC countries,
they have a much better attitude towards IP than ours. A country such
as China realises it’s part of its identity, so that people don’t just
think they are the country that are manufacturing a large part of the
clothing market in the world – but that it has a soul.
You can’t quantise the value of art. At the moment the European
Commission is listening to a minority that is saying, for their own
reasons, that we should get rid of authors’ rights. But the remaining
98% of Europe is respecting the rights of authors – it’s just that the
minority is screaming louder.
It’s the responsibility of the media to create more space to talk
about all this. I’m quite optimistic, because for their own safety they
have to do it. They are in the same situation as us. We have to solve
this if we are to progress as human beings – we have to take into
consideration the artist. A painting, a piece of music, a film – they
are not like a pot of yoghurt or toothpaste. It has to be approached in a
different way.
But it’s difficult for artists to talk about money – it’s somehow not viewed as honourable to talk about getting paid.
You’re right. This is why society has to take care of the artist, cause
it’s very difficult for an artist to evaluate what he’s doing. So how
can an artist talk about the money and the remuneration he should get.
So many artists are being abused, and when they become recognised they
are abusing the system themselves, as a kind of revenge. It’s better to
not talk about money, but the value of intellectual property.
It’s time for artists to start thinking about not just themselves but
their communities. We are all isolated as creators, but this is our
time to share, to be part of the bigger community.
[Copyright 2014 Helienne Lindvall]
Source:
musictechpolicy.com
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