0. i have been seeing a lot of takes like this ( https://interlude.hk/the-future-is-livestreaming/) and this ( https://medium.com/@AubreyBergauer/why-i-dont-like-free-concerts-8ac7948c80c4 ) recently, and i want to write a thread about them, because they make me mad as hell

buckle up, this is gonna be a long one, and a scorcher

1. the defining feature of this take, its beating heart, is the argument that free streams are Bad because they teach The Public that music is Worthless. (sometimes they expand this argument to include free irl concerts too)

in fuller form, the argument goes something like this:

2.
i) things available for free have little inherent value and can be produced essentially spontaneously (otherwise they would Cost $$ for materials and/or labor)
ii) regularly giving away music for free—online or irl—trains ppl to expect that they will always get music for free

3.
iii) another way of saying this is that giving away music for free trains listeners (a category that we're going to come back to...) to think of music as something that will always exist for free for their consumption

4.
iv) from (i), this makes listeners think that music is easy and cheap to produce and has little inherent value
v) if music is easy and cheap to produce and has little inherent value, and if it is abundantly available for free, why should listeners pay money to listen to it,...

5. ...either in recorded form or live (is a livestream of a Met Opera performance *really* that different from seeing it live from the back of the fourth balcony? insofar as it's different, is the irl version *better*?)

6.
vi) therefore, the fact that everyone is livestreaming for free right now is contributing to the general economic crisis in the arts and is going to make it *incredibly* hard to get people to pay money for concerts again once we can even have live concerts again;...

7. ...to forestall these consequences, we should, at the very least, be putting our livestreams behind paywalls of some sort

there are a lot of things to say about this

8. i want to start with the listeners. because so so so so so many of these Takes assume, tacitly, a sharp division between people who make music on the one hand and people who listen to music on the other. and this is . . . wrong

9. now, from a strictly numeric perspective, it may well be true that *most* people who are tuning in to classical music livestreams right now are not themselves classical musicians and have never so much as touched a musical instrument. that's quite likely! but...

10. ...it's also *certain* that the *vast* majority of classical musicians i know are *super stoked* about all these livestreams — i don't think i know a classical music person who hasn't posted about watching at least one

and that's important, because...

11. ...it's the first chink in (iv) above. i don't think you can seriously maintain that a professional musician doesn't know how much time and effort it takes to put on a concert, nor that they will ~magically forget~ just because they're watching an opera or a symphony for free

12. and in fact, i think (iv) is pretty much entirely bullshit. i think people, generally, value things not strictly by their monetary price, but also by a host of other complex, contradictory, difficult-to-quantify factors including what emotional experience people have of them

13. the view out my bedroom window is not fantastic, but when the moon is a few days after new, she rises perfectly between the rooftops and the curtain rod, and sometimes, when i am very lucky, the brilliant pinprick of Venus rests as a diadem above her horns

14. sometimes i go, when the evening is clear, and i look at this view, and it refreshes my heart. it restores my soul. just to spend a few minutes in silence and peace with the silvery light of these heavenly bodies. i don't pay anything for it. (i mean i pay rent, g-d knows,...

15. ...but the rent doesn't decrease on months with a lot of cloudy evenings.) and yet the suggestion that i must therefore think this view is worthless couldn't be more asinine. this little sliver of the cosmos is infinitely precious to me, is far past-speaking dear

16. if you put me in a bunker and made me pay $20/hr to see the sky, would i cough that up? maybe, on a rare occasion, depending on the decay of my spirit. but certainly not with any regularity. not because i don't value it, but simply because it's something i can't afford

17. how many of your most precious memories are precious to you because of what you paid to get them? how many of the things you value most in life do you value because of what they cost? if you were deciding what to put in paradise, would economics be your prime criterion?

18. "now wait, brin", you might object, "the moon does not have to eat! you can look at the moon for free because it costs the moon nothing to shine, that's just something that happens because of physics; not so with musicians and concerts!"

good! now we're getting somewhere!

19. because yes! musicians need to eat! musicians need housing, and health insurance, and money for their instruments, and all the other things that people need money for. this is very true! how do we provide for musicians' material needs such that they can continue making music?

20. this is a good question. it is also not a question that these takes are asking, tho they may *think* they are. instead, these takes are asking "how can we get 'average listeners' to pay enough to provide for musicians' material needs?" this is a critical slippage!

21. this latter question cedes vast tracts of rhetorical and political ground to the prevailing dystopian order. it tacitly accepts that the limits imposed by neoliberal capitalism are the only limits that are conceivable, and tries to solve the problem...

22. ...of feeding artists with the only tools that system provides: seducing donations from individual ghouls who hoard gold in their empty nth homes while people starve in the streets, and extracting more from the end consumer of the widget you make (the widget you make is art)

23. and so yes, in that system, you want to extract as much as you possibly can from your listeners, you want to lock everything you can behind a paywall, you want — as Bergauer urges — to track and surveil, no matter the concerns you or your listeners may have...

24. ...with surveillance capitalism or the surveillance state (it's not like we, as a society, are currently rounding people up and putting them in concentration camps where a fatal disease is running unchecked! it's not like we live in an age of doxxing and stalking where...

25. ...your info is only as safe as the *least* secure place it's stored! i am 100% certain that my deadname is casually floating around in at least one Major Orchestra database out there and i know there is nothing i can do about it and i *hate* it. but no,...

26. ...g-d forbid you take any of that into account, g-d forbid you treat your audience members like *people* instead of like little pots of money you can unlock access to if only you use the right cheat code. up up down down left right left right BA, am i right?)

27. if it sounds like i'm Quite Angry about this, it's because i am. i think this is a deeply toxic, dehumanizing ideology, and that you can see it right there in these pieces. "what was the impetus", Lloyd asks, for all this livestreaming?

28. "At best, we sensed an opportunity to recuperate lost earnings through a donation system that relies on the general populace valuing our ability to offer respite through challenging times." this is not me putting words in Lloyd's mouth — this is a direct quote!

29. the best reason he can come up with — the *best*! — is that people are livestreaming for free in the hopes that it will get people to donate back some of the lost revenue

30. now look. people are heterogenous. this is probably why some people are doing livestreams! and some are probably doing it for pure publicity. heck, someone somewhere has probably livestreamed a concert from their living room because they're an exhibitionist...

31. ...and they think it's hot to imagine people all over the world watching them via the internet. like just statistically that's probably happened at least once. (sorry.) but the best reason that i have seen? is that *musicians see people hurting around them and want to help*

32. this pandemic is a global crisis, and in this moment of crisis, there has been an overwhelming outpouring of one of the noblest sentiments humanity has: the desire to help. it is, i think, one of the most unadornedly beautiful things that people do:

33. we see suffering around us and we respond by saying "what can i do to make this suffering less?". for some ppl, that has meant volunteering as emergency medical personnel or stepping up to sew makeshift fabric masks. for some, it's meant doing errands for elderly neighbors.

34. and for some it has meant making music for anyone who wants it, has meant saying "this is an uncertain, terrifying time; here is a thing of beauty that might hold the terror, the numbness, the grief at bay for a minute, for just one minute, even, and let you feel alive and...

35. ...safe and loved and hopeful again, or maybe not even that, maybe just let you feel anything at all, maybe just let you actually feel your despair and your sadness and your rage and your fear in a way that is safe, or at least cathartic.

36. art can't stop the plague, or make the old younger, or lower the price of bread—it can't fix your material needs in this moment, but maybe it can be a balm for your emotional needs, your psychological needs, your spiritual needs. take it, free of charge. i hope it helps"

37. how do you look at that, at that impulse to help, however you can in a moment of crisis without stopping to think about how to turn a profit in the process, and say "this impulse is bad, we have to crush it"? what a noxious, poisonous way of looking at the world!

38. this is a worldview that seeks to destroy all that is best in us, to cut out the noblest aspirations of our beings and reduce us down to cogs in the dystopian machine. it is vile, utterly vile

39. (Bergauer's take on why people offer live concerts for free is only a little better — she suggests that it's mostly to ~raise brand awareness~, which in the contexts she's talking about it probably often is! but also the free concerts i have given...

40. ...have been driven overwhelmingly by love, by wanting to offer the gift of art to people i care about, by wanting to build a community by offering a place to come together for a shared experience of deep feeling, ends that seem wholly alien to her way of thinking)

41. it would be one thing if these takes were couched as emergency stopgap measures, along the lines of "i know we live in a nightmare dystopia; hopefully we can build something better soon, but we need to do X so we can survive until then", but they're not

42. the stuff before the "but" in that sentence isn't rhetorical throat-clearing; it's pulling at the Overton window, getting people used to seeing the present circumstances as contingent — as *changeable and constructed* instead of natural and inevitable

43. because in truth, this moment is full of radical possibility. i think there is a general impression in US culture at large that classical music is an art form for the well-to-do, that all classical musicians are well-heeled, and that the funding for classical music...

44. ...institutions is essentially a trust-fund-kid fun-time slush fund. and obviously, none of that is the case! and i think there is a tremendous amount to be gained — in both directions — in building working-class solidarity between classical musicians and exploited workers...

45. ...in other industries. and i think this moment, when not only are free livestreams proliferating, but also *more people are tuning in to these livestreams than came to concerts in person*, present a golden opportunity to start laying the groundwork for building...

46. ...that solidarity. at a time when more people are listening to us than usually do, what are we saying? are we listening to them in turn? is there potential here for a conversation instead of a lecture? what would the takes look like if they took *this* as their focus...

47. ...instead of fretting about how to lock this art away behind paywalls instead? can we expand our imaginations beyond the confines of the current nightmare, envision a world we actually want to live in, and start taking the steps necessary to build that world?

48. we live in a time of profound abundance. there is more than enough food for everyone. there are more empty homes than there are homeless ppl. we have the money to care for all who are ill. we do not lack resources, we only lack the political will to distribute them equitably

49. Bergauer, in her article, uses the example of food as something that you can't just get for free in the contemporary United States. there's more to that analogy than she makes of it. because yeah, right now, in this country, despite our material abundance, if you're poor,...

50. ...we say "fuck you, die", and people...do. people literally die in this country because they can't afford food. that is ghastly and appalling, and the only moral response is to ask "how do we remove that barrier, how do we make it so that no one starves for want of money?"

51. now, obviously, no one will physically die if they don't get a steady stream of Puccini. we don't eat music. and it's perfectly possible to have a 100% fulfilling emotional/spiritual/artistic/w/e life without classical music

52. but i think it is emphatically, empirically clear that in times of crisis people turn to art. maybe not *literally every single human no exceptions*, but a large majority. even *not* in times of crisis, people want art. it's a deeply human thing: to doodle little patterns...

53. ...on the wall of a cave, to make up a song as your scything flax in the field, to dance in the evening under the stars. there is a profound need there. we can see it in the flip side, too, in the worst moments of humanity,...

54. ...in book burnings, instrument-smashings, statue demolitions — if you want to really *hurt* a group of people, destroying their art (or their access to it) is a powerfully awful way to do it

55. people may not need art in exactly the same way that they need food, water, and shelter, but that doesn't mean the need isn't real, and isn't powerful. it doesn't mean that nothing bad will happen if that need is ignored

56. if people are seeking out classical music livestreams in record numbers right now, i submit to you that it is because *they really want to listen to this music*, not because it's free and they think it's worthless

57. and the Lloyds and Bergauers of the world look at this and, instead of saying, "how can we remove these barriers so that no one lacks this art for want of money?", they're saying "how can we make sure poor people can't have this, or at least, can't have the good stuff?"

58. and this is why it's so important that we ask not "how do we get listeners to meet musicians' material needs?" but instead "how do we structure society to provide for musicians' (and everyone's) material needs?". the problem isn't scarcity, the problem is distribution

59. imagine a society where we work together, as a society, to ensure that everyone's basic needs are met. you will not go hungry, you will not go thirsty, you will not become homeless. imagine the possibilities that opens up for making art, for sharing art

60. we have the food for it, we have the money for it, we have the houses for it. it is a matter of distribution. it is a matter of political organization. that world is possible. we can build it

61. i'm not saying it'll be easy. i'm not saying it'll happen tomorrow. but it also won't happen if we don't strive for it, organize for it, if we resign ourselves to the present reality, align with the status quo, treat the current system as natural, just, immutable, inevitable

62. let us turn our attentions to that better world. let us turn our energies to building it. let us plan for how to get there. and in the meantime, let us nurture kindness, generosity, and gentleness instead of quashing the few wan balms we have for succor in this awful time

~end of thread~

if you would like a consolidated version (with a few edits because i changed things to fit better into tweets), head on over to Mastodon here: https://imaginair.es/@brinsolomon/103946670885514691