Taylor Swift made the blog rounds the other day when she pulled her music off the streaming site Spotify, because, as she put it, streaming services undervalue artists. You can read about it on the website Acculterated. It breaks down the the math to show that streaming a million songs is the financial equivalent of selling 500 albums. I guess I can see why she's miffed.
I love Acculterated and I almost always agree with their bloggers. But this one has me struggling to care.
I call myself an aspiring author, which is code for: an undiscovered writer who's not getting paid. You'd think I would stand up and cheer for Taylor, to defend my own craft and the hallowed royalties that might be mine one day. But I just can't.
I'm a student of history and a lover of perspective and even though I'm an amateur at best, I can see without too much straining or effort how shallow and shortsighted is her position on art. She predicts that individual artists will determine the worth of their art and hopes they don't undervalue it, as if art and its worth is a new thing, yet to be determined.
As long as there have been human beings, there has been art. Cave walls, stories around the campfire, folk songs, stained glass windows, poetry. Being paid for what artists create is a very recent phenomenon.
Let's just go back, say, four hundred years. Only a handful of artists in a given generation were noticed by their king or their pope and commissioned for their work. That's it. Don't you think there must have been thousands of sensitive souls, crooning, writing, thinking, dancing, and creating whom no one knew about? No one paid them for their art. No one outside their immediate circle even cared.
Had they no value? (I'm going to borrow a quote that I found on Pinterest, a site so full of free art it has profit-driven artist quaking in their shoes and stealing hours from their craft to devote to fighting inadvertent copyright infringement and insisting on sourcelinks and other things enjoyers of their work don't think about when they notice a pretty picture and pin it to a board to show their enjoyment of it.)
"And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see -- or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read."This was written by Alice Walker, a successful author, whose work has been recognized, celebrated, read widely, and bought and paid for. She deserves every cent, but read that quote again. She is describing generations of creative souls whose art, or "spark," never made it into the public sphere. Their beautiful thoughts and words and creations were never noticed, certainly never paid for, but were simply passed down. Perhaps Ms. Walker sees herself as the benefactor of all those thankless years that came before her.
Thank God that creative spark was passed on even though no one paid our ancestors for it.
The centuries that have passed have been kinder to artists. Gradually, the super wealthy began to pay for art and to preserve it, though the art itself was still almost entirely inaccessible to the lower classes. Books were unaffordable, traveling to see great architecture or installations was difficult, theater was rare and infrequent, music was limited to what they created in their homes.
When radios came about and public libraries popped up in every city, art was no longer limited to the super wealthy. A common person could read a brilliant work like Robinson Crusoe (the author died penniless in 1731, by the way) or listen to any type of music. FOR FREE. Anyone could take a work of art into their home and love it, be edified by it, read it or listen to it again and again and again. And they didn't have to pay for it.
The world has changed again in the last half century. People on the bottom rung of society have money to spare on cheap music, books, netflix, and other places to enjoy art. So many of us have internet, which makes virtually anything free and accessible. We have more artists creating more art than we can possibly absorb in one lifetime. The best ones achieve god-like celebrity status. Even the mediocre ones are growing fat and rich off the populace who love them. It's a great world in which to be an artist.
Except for one teency thing. You know what, Taylor? Your music is not my thing, but my girls enjoy you and since you pass the mom test, I let them watch your music videos on youtube. They sing along and hum the tune you created for the rest of the day. But I've never paid a dime--not one single dime--on your art.
Sorry to disappoint. Sorry if this means I'm cheating you out of income that you have earned. I really am. (I am staunchly against pirating. Simply put, that's theft.) I don't dislike the notion of artists getting paid but I happen to be a non-employed starving artist. I have the luxury of choosing not to work so that I can use my time honing my craft instead of pushing papers around for a boss who will pay me money that I can, in turn, spend on your craft. I've chosen to forsake disposable income. It's not been an easy choice. We give up a lot for it. But I can still be exposed to the art I love because so much of it is out there legitimately for free.
Does this make the world better or worse? As an enjoyer of art, I assure you, it's better. I've never spent a dime on Alice Walker's art either but I've read her writing and watched the film adaptation of it, and I see the world differently--better--because of it.
But what does this mean for me, an aspiring author? Shouldn't I be more protective of other artist's work?
Not really.
Confession time: I write and I write and I write. No one knows how much of my time, mental energy, and prayers are poured out for my craft. I will continue to write until I have the confidence to hold it out, hesitantly, apologetically, to another human being. Maybe one day I'll receive a royalty check. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll die penniless and unnoticed.
I don't really care.
That's not why I write. That's not how I validate my art or my worth. A true artist creates for his or herself, for God, and, yes, for that ethereal "someone" out there who will one day say, "I enjoyed that. I 'got' that. Thanks for making it."
Art is beautiful. Art is a gift. Art is a way we honor our Creator who is also an artist. I am in awe that we live in such an affluent world that talented artists can become as wealthy as their patrons, even surpassing them in wealth a hundred times, a thousand times, a million times over. It's all good. And so is the accessibility that we poor, we low, we struggling masses, can take advantage of. The world is better because artists have released their work, their sweat, their tears, their creativity, into it for people like me to enjoy at little or no cost.
To artists, big and small, successful and unknown, famous and obscure, please don't hoard your gift and keep it hidden away until someone offers you some money for it.
Get over yourselves.
