My dear old friend and confidant Mlle Jenny linked me to this very interesting John Peel lecture by….. Iggy pop.

You should watch it, it’s pretty good.

Predictably, Iggy begins by talking about how he wants music to be free, and then whines about being broke. Perfomers tend not to have a good grasp of economics and Iggy is no different.

On the other hand, he goes on to have a pretty thoughtful discussion of the issues of the music industry. A little amazing, actually, for a guy who rolled in broken glass on stage and taunted bikers till they beat the crap out of him.

Anyway, this is worthy of dicussion because of the nature of creativity. Musicians- some of them, anyway- are creative people, and creativity is a not- commonly-observed skill among humans. And it deserves to be rewarded, but only if it results in value to other people.

The way the music industry operated has traditionally been horrid, and the real reason for that is the intervention of people who wanted a commission. It takes a good deal of cash to run a recording studio, to produce recordings, to promote them, etc. Artists don’t have the skills necesary to do this, and don’t do it well when they try. People who do have those skills- which are in themseves valuable- usually don’t have the capitol to exercise them. Those who do, at least in the music industry, have traditionally treated the artists and the production people and frankly all the people in the industry with talent or skill as raw materials- resources from which they create their fortunes. It wasn’t a perfect system but it was what we had, and it evolved into something that made very little of the actual talent but made much of promotion. To quote Pratchett, it was all sizzle, and precious little sausage. While it may have begun as amarket driven enterprise, it evolved into a bunch of boardroom hustlers picking who would succeed and who would fail.

There seems to be the misconception that men smoking cigars in backrooms picking winners- be it in the record business, or publishing, or manufacturing, or whatever- that this is the meaning of Capitalism- that this is the ‘Free market”. Nothing could be further from the truth. The market picks winners by popularity, and anyone who messes with that process is not a capitalist, but a socialist approaching tyrant.

We may be screwed as far as ever seeing a “real” free market, but the internet is showing some hopeful signs in that direction, as are manufacturing techniques that were unheard of just a few years back.

Anyway, Iggy at his most thoughtful, at least from my perspective, is worth a look.