Using New Technology To Succeed In the Music Biz: Part II

SG: Now are you referring to the fact that recording is, with home studios and digital programs, cheaper to make than before and you can do it without a record company?

DS: Well, you can do it without a record company.

The record company is really about distribution; it’s about getting your CD into stores; it’s about getting ads taken out.

It’s about having a structure behind your art. The problem is that the structure becomes more important than the actual product, and that becomes a real issue.

The ownership becomes a real issue. The idea of anyone being told that someone owns the work that you’ve done, not for a limited time, but in perpetuity is absolutely ridiculous.

SG: And, not only do they own it, but they also own it in any form that now exists, or any form yet to be invented.

They can do whatever they want: they can chop it up, they can do whatever they want to it. The proposition is absurd.

One of the problems is, at least in the jazz world, artists never get to the level of commercial success where they can renegotiate their contracts and get more say about how the music is put out.

Basically, the companies have had their way with jazz musicians. But, now it’s a different world in that they’re dismantling their jazz departments.

I think Sony Music no longer has Columbia Jazz, and it kind of means that you have to do it on your own.

But, the Internet has created the possibility of worldwide distribution, in a very cheap way without CDs. So that raises the question: do you still need a record company at all?

DS: That’s a valuable question; I don’t know if there is an answer for that yet. My feeling is as we said at the beginning of this interview: for me, the point of creating the music that I am involved in is for the moment, for people to hear it live.

The recording part is really ancillary; it’s not the focus. So, the fact that the record companies have had this change and people are now wanting to take the commercial element out of owning CDs and having these arbitrary prices as to what things cost, etc., etc., has really put the focus in the music that I play back on live performance.

That’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

SG: Talking about new ways of distribution, I understand that you’re working with a new business model with a guy named Norm Levy and a project called Beyond FM. Can you tell us something about the project and what’s involved?

DS: Well, Norm is an incredible entrepreneur who has developed a lot of new media devices for listening to music and looking at photographs and DVDs, and part of his idea is to get musicians to be able to own their own products—that is to say both in terms of recording music, in terms videos—and to offer that to the public in a very easy, unrestricted, upfront, and quantifiable way, so that even if you buy a DVD or you buy a CD, there’s a kind of a watermark attached to it which makes sure that it can be traced back to that individual.

So, it really does, in principal, protect the rights of the person. You can’t just go and Xerox stuff and then Xerox it again and Xerox it again and Xerox it again and not be acknowledging where it comes from.

Right, and for the purposes of full disclosure, I’m also working with Norm to put some of my content, including this interview, up on the Web, and I know from my dealings with Norm that he doesn’t ask for the copyright and he gives a very healthy percentage of the royalties back to the creators. I think that’s a good thing.