Music and the "Gift Economy" 6: Problems with Free Art

Previous posts in this series:
Music and the "Gift Economy" 1: An Introduction
Music and the "Gift Economy" 2: Examples
Music and the "Gift Economy" 3: Commons, Copyright, and Radical Politics
Music and the "Gift Economy" 4: Personal Versus Impersonal Transactions
Music and the "Gift Economy" 5: Supporting Artists

Lewis Hyde and others have suggested that art and other forms of creative expression (I'll include music here) should be given away. Justifications include:

1. It's ennobling for giver and receiver.
2. It's impossible to put a true price on creativity.
3. Creativity shouldn't be judged on financial value.
4. More people will be exposed to art if it is free.
5. If it is easily reproducible, why not?
6. The culture should have access to all art.

In my last post, I pointed out that many of the "gift economy" concepts don't address how to create a more equitable society. The system depends on the money makers to support the gift givers in some fashion, so there tends to be a built-in class structure. The rich support the poor.

Whether it's being done in honest ignorance, blind obedience, or cynical exploitation of the market, the result is the same: our ability to envision new solutions to the latest challenges is stunted by a dependence on market-driven and market-compatible answers. ...

Chris Anderson [author of Free] has analyzed where all this is going, and — rather than offering up a vision of a post-scarcity economy — advised companies to simply leverage the abundant to sell whatever they can keep scarce. ...

Higher sales reports and lecture fees serve as positive reinforcement for authors to incorporate the market's bias even more enthusiastically the next time out. Write books that business likes, and you do better business. The cycle is self-perpetuating. But just because it pays the mortgage doesn't make it true. "Economics Is Not Natural Science." Douglas Rushoff. Edge. 8/11/09.

There are people who propose to reduce dependence on market economies, even going so far as to suggest someday we can eliminate monetary transactions altogether. I will get into those ideas in the next post, but for now I want to bring up some of general snags in the free art concept. Consider it food for thought.

If it is free anyway, is it really a gift?
Free culture has gotten a big boost now that we can copy files and distribute them for little or no added expense. But the very fact that they don't cost money to reproduce and pass along may take them out of the gift realm. No sacrifice is involved. Similarly, freely giving away your music/writing/photos/design in order to gain exposure is not gift giving. (We do not, for example, consider broadcast TV a gift, even though viewers don't have to pay for it.)

... gifts are alienable; this means that when you give a gift, you give up ownership of it. Ownership of the gift is transferred to the person to whom you give it. "The Gift of Generalized Exchange." Ira Nayman.*spark-online.com. Version 17.0, February 2001.

A gift costs the giver something real. It might be cash (enough that we feel the pinch) but more likely it involves a sacrifice or a risk or an emotional exposure. A true gift is a heartfelt connection, something that changes both the giver and the recipient....

Free doesn't make something a gift. Free might be a marketing strategy, free might make a generous present, but free doesn't automatically make something a gift. "Gifts, misunderstood." Seth Godin. 6/19/10.

A Christian explanation to differentiate gifts from merely free would be: "Not equal gifts, but equal sacrifice." In other words, you actually have to be giving up something of value -- to you -- for it to be a true gift.

If you give it away, does it have any value?
We have become so conditioned to the idea that money determines how much something (which can be either tangible or intangible) is worth to people that when there isn't a price tag, we are left wondering if it has no value. This experiment, for example, shows that perceptions are affected by price tags.

Twenty people sampled five Cabernet Sauvignons that were distinguished solely by their retail price, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. ... $90 Cabernet seemed to taste better than the $10 Cabernet, even though they were actually the same wine. How We Decide. Jonah Lehrer. 2009.

Here's another case where people perceive something tastes better when they pay for it than when they get the exact same product for free: "Why Does Bottled Water Taste Better?" ADDED 11/18/10.

Not accepting that money equals quality, some artists have made a statement by not charging for what they create.

The Free Biennial began in late January, 2002, with a call to artists offering a few simple parameters: the work should be nonmonetary, meaning that no money changes hands (no admission is charged, nothing is bought or sold), the work should take place in public space (very widely defined as anyplace a stranger can enter, including the broadcast airwaves, telephone system, and the internet), and it should be perceptible to someone in New York City during the month of April, 2002. Any artwork meeting these criteria could be in the Free Biennial. "Free Words to Free Manifesta: Some Experiments in Art as Gift." Sal Randolph. In Ethics & the Environment, August, 2003.

Another "free art" exhibit:

Known as the Artists for Social Justice, several members recently participated in a one-night performance entitled “Free Free Market” in Chinatown focusing on aesthetic exchange and participation as an alternative to the object-driven art market. ...

“Free Free Market” involved dozens of ASJ member projects that focused on gift economies, the exchange of aesthetic and social experiences, encouraging dialogue, and inhabiting spaces that are nontraditional for art (such as public space, strip malls, and classrooms). "Between Art and Anarchism." Sue Bell Yank. Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. Issue 7.

Yet another "free" art experiment is the Fine Art Adoption Network.

FAAN is an online network, which uses a gift economy to connect artists and potential collectors. All of the artworks on view are available for adoption. This means acquiring an artwork without purchasing it, through an arrangement between the artist and collector. Our goal is to help increase and diversify the population of art owners and to offer artists new means for engaging their audience.

Performance art grew out of a desire to challenge the notion of "art."

From Allan Kaprow's first Happening in 1959 and the Fluxus performances in the 1960s to the body-based works by Carolee Scheemann, Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, or Hermann Nitsch and the non-site performances by Dennis Oppenheim or Richard Long, performance was made plot-less and site-less and distanced from theater. The ephemeral was central to the concerns of these many artists who sought to challenge the assumptions and rules of art-making by second-guessing its materiality and permanence. To be here one second and gone the next, they implied, could make art – and our habits around consuming and appreciating it – free from the market and the museum and, ultimately, into something new. They were clear cases of "you shoulda been there." The Legacy of Performance Art Anthony Huberman. Saatchi.online.

Theoretically performance artists could charge for their shows like musicians do for theirs, but America's most famous performance artist, Marina Abramovic, sees her performance in service of a higher calling:

“The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.” ...

Ms Abramovic has never sold her performances. For years she scraped together a living through teaching and commissions. She didn’t acquire gallery representation until 1995, when she was signed to New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery. Nowadays, her income comes mainly from selling photographs, often in editions of seven, made in collaboration with Marco Anelli, a photographer. "Performance art: The artist was here," The Economist, 9/15/10.

Unlike business people who advocate giving away something for free as a way to increase demand for what is scarce, and then to profit from those who have the money to pay for that scarcity, the "free" artists generally are attempting to strip class structures out of art economics. Those with no money are as able to enjoy the art as those who are able to pay. Those who give away their art, but have no means of support for themselves, are essentially martyrs for the cause.

Will people take care of it if they didn't pay for it?
Sal Randolph, in his free art experiments, has uncovered another dynamic with free art.

Giving away something for free makes its value indeterminate — the individual recipient decides its value, rather than the market. ... Is this object precious? How careful should I be with it? The eventual fate of every object without resale value is the trash. The next level up is the thrift store, the junk store, the flea market. And in fact tons of amateur art circulates in those low markets and can be had for prices ranging from $0.50 to $100. I’ve seen free art treated both preciously and casually — framed carefully and preserved, but also thrown in boxes, stacked awkwardly, left in drawers when interest fades. "Beautiful Money (Art as Currency, Art as Experience)." Sal Randolph.

Randolph's observation has relevance to music and other digital art. If you got it for free and it is easily replaceable, does it have any value to you as a possession? Is it now disposable art? Lately there have been discussions of about how copyright is hampering archiving of old books, music, film, and photographs. However, it may turn out that it is the cheap/free items that aren't being saved, rather than the ones deemed valuable from the beginning:

Experimenting at Ebay, I've discovered an interesting law of economics. (Perhaps this is well-known, but I had never heard of it before). The less the intrinsic value of a mass-produced object, the more likely it will become valuable over time as a collectible. (Their lack of intrinsic value means that few people will save these objects, which means that they will become rare. And the fact that they were mass-produced will mean that they are imprinted on the consciousness of many, and thus subject to nostalgia by association, and hence will be in demand.)

As a result, I can get more money selling a fair-condition bottle cap than selling a 100-year-old book that's in fine condition. "The psychology of auctions and collectibles," eBay Guides, 9/10/09.

If it is true that we tend to abandon what we acquire for free or cheaply, and then value it more later on because society didn't bother to preserve any copies, then the destruction of popular culture is necessary to create its future monetary worth.

If we judge purely on the quality of the art, why does it matter who created it?
Another variation on how perceptions affect our appreciation of art:

Why is a set of photos worth millions if they were shot by Ansel Adams, and next to nothing if the photographer depressing the plunger was a nobody? After all, the images remain the same. To the extent that art is about appreciating aesthetic objects for their own sake, is it right to put so much stake in the question of who did the drawing or painting or snapping?

The basic market definition of value is perfectly reasonable: A work is worth what someone will give you for it—an amount usually determined by the intersection of desirability, scarcity and the expectation that there will be someone down the line willing to pay even more. But isn't art supposed to have value that transcends the market—something inherent in the object itself?

... what would happen if Vincent van Gogh had died an utter unknown, without any of his paintings ever having been seen or saved. A hundred years later "The Starry Night" turns up at a yard sale, a grimy orphan. Would it be recognized as a masterpiece?

The answer is, regrettably, probably no. "Ansel Adams, Caravaggio and Other Art Authentication Fights: Does a Famous Name Make Anything More Beautiful?" Wall Street Journal, 8/13/10.

An oft-cited story is this one where a talented classical violinist was ignored while playing for tips in the subway.

Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work.

... In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look. "Pearls Before Breakfast," The Washington Post, 4/4/07.

What if people don't understand reciprocity?
One of the fundamentals of gift giving is the idea that people will return the favor, if not to you, then to someone else. But sharing or giving gifts is not something left to our innate sensibilities. First, as children we are taught about sharing, and then about giving gifts to friends and family. Then, as we grow older, we learn about tipping protocol. And perhaps when we are even older, we learn about hostess gifts and business gifts.

We live in social groups that have rules about gifts and gift giving. These rules and customs serve to assure that things will come out fairly — that when one gives away something, one will get something in return. While this may sound crass and may not be necessary in an affluent society, it is essential for survival in social groups where resources are scarce. "Gift-giving rules vary with the social subgroup." Vivian Friedman. Raising Children. Vol. 2.

If we hope to support artists involved in a gift economy, we need to establish that either we will give them gifts (and hopefully in some form that covers basic survival needs) or that some institution or patron will.

Gift giving is puzzling from an economic perspective because it is inefficient -- givers spend money on gifts differently from the way receivers would -- and it seems to be necessarily so. "Gifts as Economic Signals and Social Symbols." Colin Camerer. The American Journal of Sociology.Vol. 94, 1988.

In other words, by its very nature, gift giving isn't supposed to replace economic transactions, so for it to do so, we'd need to set up some new societal rules (just as we have to done to make sure tips augment a service person's income).

What if people don't want your gifts?
This probably the biggest problem with gift economies. Even if we want to encourage gift giving, and we will somehow support creative people who give away their art, we will still have to deal with an oversupply of gifts. Right now, for example, we have millions of artists/bands uploading their music. They freely give it away, but most of it will not be downloaded and saved.

... if an artist makes an object and no one wants it, I'm sorry to say, I don't know that you can call it (at that time) a bona fide "gift." Of course, if an artist creates something than none of his/her contemporaries value, that doesn't mean future generations won't. And so, whether an object is a "gift" to humanity or not is place/time-determined and subjective. Such views can and do change over history. "Sorting Through the Muddled Politics of the Gift," Edward_ Winkleman, 2/9/10.

Even the most hardened skeptic of the self-expression free-for-all has to admit that plenty of nonprofessional creators, ignoring the wants and needs of the market, have produced priceless gifts for the rest of us to enjoy. On the other hand, even the most ardent enthusiast of giveaway culture has to admit that a lot of what’s on offer is not only free but worthless.

... a product of the gift sphere may be pure, but even a sharing economy depends on somebody’s wanting what’s being offered — or at least not dismissing it ... "Valuing $0." Rob Walker. New York Times, 5/16/10.

For a good look at the problems in receiving gifts, check out this paper: The Shadow Side of Social Gift-Giving: Miscommunication and Failed Gifts

In my last post in this series, I'll cover some proposed ideas on alternative economies which may allow for more creative expression and the support of artists. Music and the "Gift Economy" 7: Alternative Economies

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

Will Your 10,000 Hours Be Obsolete?

Several books have discussed the idea that it takes approximately 10,000 hours to become great at what you do. The message: practice is more important than innate skills. I've been following the subject for a number of years. What triggered my interest in writing a blog post about it was this recent book review:

Whatever you wish to do well, Shenk writes, you must do over and over again, in a manner involving, as Ericsson put it, “repeated attempts to reach beyond one’s current level,” which results in “frequent failures.” This is known as “deliberate practice,” and over time it can actually produce changes in the brain, making new heights of achievement possible. ... “You have to want it, want it so bad you will never give up, so bad that you are ready to sacrifice time, money, sleep, friendships, even your reputation,” he writes. “You will have to adopt a particular lifestyle of ambition, not just for a few weeks or months but for years and years and years. You have to want it so bad that you are not only ready to fail, but you actually want to experience failure: revel in it, learn from it.” "How to Be Brilliant, a Review of 'The Genius in All of Us' by David Shenk," New York Times, 3/21/10.

Like Shenk, the authors of these books reference the work of psychologist K. Anders Ericsson.

Ericcson's scholarly work is considerable (in addition to publishing numerous articles in scholarly journals, Ericcson has edited and contributed to four books on expertise, including the magisterial "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance"). But his recent fame is due to his prominence in several popularizations: Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers: The Story of Success," Daniel Coyle's "The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born, It's Grown: Here's How," Geoff Colvin's "Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else," and I suspect David Shenk's optimistically-titled "The Genius in All of Us" (due to be released in 2010). "Can Anybody Be A Genius? A Combined Book Review," The Buck Stops Here, 11/14/09.

Gladwell's book has gotten the most attention. Here's an excerpt:

"In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, "this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years.... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery." "Extract from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: Is there such a thing as pure genius?" The Guardian, 11/15/08.

In his blog post, "The 10,000 hours rule," Jason Kemp talks about Gladwell and provides links to some related videos. (Actually quite few people have referenced Gladwell and the 10,000 hours concept, but I thought Kemp's post was particularly interesting.)

Of course, it's not just a matter of practice. You need to have the resources to be able to practice, and then you need to have certain opportunities to do the most with that skill.

Ten thousand hours is, of course, an enormous amount of time. It's all but impossible to reach that number, by the time you're a young adult, all by yourself. You have to have parents who are encouraging and supportive. You can't be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won't be enough time left over in the day. In fact, most people can really only reach that number if they get into some kind of special programme - like a hockey all-star squad - or get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in that kind of work. "Extract from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: Is there such a thing as pure genius?" The Guardian, 11/15/08.

But the concept of 10,000 hours raises a lot of questions in my mind:

What if you put in all that time, and then the world has moved on? What if, when you began, everyone thought your sport or your music or your career pursuit was cool, but now it has fallen out of favor? What if you are very good at something now perceived as obsolete?

And how do you train for a career that hasn't been invented yet?

And does training year after year make sense when our world changes so quickly now?

In other words, how do you know, in advance, where to spend your 10,000 hours?

Let me backtrack a bit and say that I got interested in the "10,000 hours" concept when I was writing about sports careers. There is tremendous pressure on young athletes to begin specialization at an early age to rack up those hours. This paper - "To sample or to specialize?" - gives a good overview of what we currently know about grooming elite athletes. Unless an athlete is in a sport where the world's best may be in their teens (e.g., figure skating, gymnastics), early specialized training confers no advantage and in fact may lead to increased dropout.

According to Jason Gulbin, who studied elite Australian athletes, ten years of training isn't necessarily required, particularly among athletes who had been in sports, but not in the ones they ended up in.

The frequency distribution of the number of years required from first ever experience in their scholarship sport to achieving senior national representation (i.e. expertise), revealed that 70% of athletes required less than 10 years to achieve expertise. However, 1 in 4 athletes (28%) had achieved national representation in ≤ 4 years. In comparison with those achieving expertise in 10 years or more, these ‘quick-developers’ were characterised by transferring relatively late into their scholarship sport (17.1 ± 4.5 years), had experienced a greater variety of sports before specialisation, commenced at higher levels of competition, and seldom oscillated between junior and senior competition pathways. Thus, for a large proportion of the Australian high performance sporting system, the 10 year developmental ‘rule of thumb’ does not apply, and furthermore, accelerated development can occur with late specialisation. "Why Deliberate Practice isn’t Enough."

Here are several other resources which suggest experience in a variety of sports, rather than 10,000 hours in one sport, prepares athletes for elite competition.

The Myth of Early Specialization

Early Specialization in Youth Sport: a requirement for adult expertise?

Sport-Specific Practice and the Development
of Expert Decision-Making in Team Ball Sports

Now, moving on to music training, Robert Maddocks writes in "Getting There: 10 Years or 10,000 Hours" that there are variables other than 10,000 hours which factor into success. Classical music takes years of practice, but rock music generally does not. And if you are good at what you do, but the world isn't receptive to it, then you may toil in obscurity. In terms of achievement, he feels focus comes first, because it allows you to put in whatever hours are required.

Seth Godin's theory is that it depends on the field. When you're embarking on something new, you don't have a lot of competition.

For me, though, some of the 10k analysis doesn't hold up. The Doors (or Devo or the Bee Gees) for example, didn't play together for 10,000 hours before they invented a new kind of rock. If the Doors had encountered significantly more competition for their brand of music, it's not clear that they could have gotten away with succeeding as quickly as they did. Hey, Miley Cyrus wasn't even 10,000 hours awake before she became a hit. "10,000 hours," Seth Godin's Blog, 12/29/08.

Bill Wilkie describes his experience around well-trained musicians, a sentiment I've seen expressed about other music schools as well.

I attended the New England Conservatory for a few years. The freshman class was made up of blindingly good kids who wowed everyone back home. ... The problem was that most of the young ones, including me, sounded like skilled typists or impersonators. Few became real artists .... "10,000 Hours to Mastery?!?" Escape From Excellence, 5/9/08.

Moving on to science, in this article, "Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, 'Outliers,' and the 10,000 hour rule," Michael Nielsen gives four examples of significant discoveries (quantum mechanics, the structure of DNA, algorithmic information theory, the cause of extinction of dinosaurs) made by people who didn't have 10,000 hours in these fields.

Similarly Sabrina Mach and James Page - in "Utopians & Idealists: Who Can Handle Innovation?" - raise the possibility that in times of change having those 10,000 hours in an established field might turn out to be a waste. When you need a new way of thinking perhaps being an expert in an older way of thinking may hold you back.

So in at least three fields (sports, music, and science), some people are not accepting the 10,000 hours at face value. Here are two articles that seek to define more carefully what practice can give you.

This author says that 10,000 hours will give you enough experience to know when to break the rules. There's a nice chart that compares levels of training to levels of order and chaos. The musician, for example, who has played for years is less likely to be thrown by unexpected problems at a show.

10, 100, 1000, 10000 hours; a couple of days, a couple of weeks, half a year, five years; trainee, apprentice, journeyman, master. A useful rule-of-thumb to describe four different and distinct layers of skill. "10, 100, 1000, 10000," Thinking side-wise, 7/12/09.

Aubrey C. Daniels points out in "Expert Performance: Apologies to Dr. Ericsson, but it is not 10,000 hours of deliberate practice" the key appears not just to practice the same thing over and over again, but to try enough different options to develop responses to fit whatever circumstances arise.

To be fair, Ericsson said the same thing. Here is a quote from from Philip E. Ross in “The Expert Mind” for Scientific American.

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but “effortful study,” which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time.

Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance–for instance, keeping up with one’s golf buddies or passing a driver’s exam– most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind’s box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields. "Quality, Continuous Improvement, and the Expert Mind," Quality and Innovation, 2/24/09.

Okay, now having injected some shades of grey into what is sometimes portrayed as a black-and-white situation, I'd like look what the 10,000 hours concept means moving forward.

There seem to be at least three points to contemplate.

1. Some of us are putting 10,000 hours into something, not necessarily with any particular goal in mind, but which will turn out to be useful. Take gaming, for example.

So, consider this really interesting statistic. It was recently published by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games, by the age of 21. Now 10,000 hours is a really interesting number for two reasons. First of all, for children in the United States 10,080 hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school from fifth grade to high school graduation if you have perfect attendance.

... And so, now what we're looking at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers. "Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world," TED, February 2010.

McGonigal believes gaming will translate into skills that can be applied to solve the world's problems. Here's a summation of those skills.

Urgent optimisim – a belief that you will ultimately be successful, even if you experience many failures.
Social fabric – a sense of trust that others will help you.
Blissful productivity – a desire to work hard and purposefully.
Epic meaning – an understanding that one is individually capable of changing the world. "10,000 Hours of Gaming," TalentedApps, 2/17/10.

2. We don't necessarily have to put in 10,000 hours while we're young. Daniel Rasmus suggests that lifelong learning will turn out to serve us better.

As the world changes, as technology and ecology shift before our eyes, as political situations and business models, come and go rapidly, we all become amateurs eventually. Our learning, our formal learning, becomes relatively meaningless against what we have taught ourselves and learned from life. ... [the model will be] the person who strives to add value based on their talent despite the lack of interest in formal studies in an area, a lack of aptitude for an approach or technique -- but with a keen insight into problem solving that may in fact, be innovative, too innovative perhaps, and too time consuming to be supported in an academic world driven by the productivity of publication. "Genius At Work," Windows Live, 5/8/07.

He also says that we might be too narrowly defining what expertise/genius is. A person who can discern new ideas via pattern recognition (a skill which may develop from multidisciplinary training rather than from specialized training) may be more important to society than someone who narrowly excels.

Problem solving ... is not the only representation of genius. Collaboration is right. Obsession is right. So are many other attributes, like pattern recognition, building consensus, creating relationships, and incremental and purposeful innovation. Let us not be so narrow in our definition of genius because with change we can not foretell what kind of genius we will need so as we do with learning, pushing toward life long learning, we should be pushing for life long pursuit of insight, because we never know who, or where or what may be needed as the world's values and economics and technologies shift around us.

3. Our concept of expertise may be changing. Charles Leadbeatter believes that much innovation will come from people who aren't perceived as experts, but who have devoted time to their passions.

Longer healthy life spans will allow people in their forties and fifties to start taking up Pro-Am activities as second careers. Rising participation in education will give people skills to pursue those activities. New media and technology enable Pro-Ams to organize. "Amateur Revolution," Fast Company, 10/1/04.

My takeaway from all of this is that if you have focus and are well-trained (either by others or self-taught) you'll have valuable tools to draw upon. But doggedly training in one particular area may result in great skill in that area, but without the flexibility to see the future and to adjust. The 10,000 hours concept, while useful in stressing the importance of hard work to success, seems most applicable in fields where achievements are already well-defined. If you want to be a great golfer, classical musician, or chess player, you're going to start by practicing what others have already learned.

But for future innovations, you might be better served by drawing upon a mixture of skills that you acquired from broad-based learning.

You might invent something new because you pull together ideas and skills in unusual ways rather than practicing what is well-estabished.

Your 10,000 hours may have come from a variety of activities rather than from just one.

You may not know which of your 10,000 hours will be useful to you until you are already in the middle of your expertise.

As Jason Kemp writes:

My first year at university was 1977, when I studied Vietnamese Politics (very current at the time) and eventually law, arts and business – however computer technology changed my life in early ’80’s and that was something I could not have studied even if I had wanted to. Fortunately – being a creative generalist by inclination I was able to leverage a very wide range of experiences into a new emerging sector. "Creativity & Innovation Linked," thinking: relating- celebrating :-), 6/16/07.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE 8/16/10

Beyond the 10,000 Hour Rule

The messiness of Hamming’s speech contrasts with the rational cleanliness of another popular model of becoming excellent: the 10,000 hour rule. ...

This rule reduces achievement to quantity: the secret to becoming great is to do a great amount of work. What Hamming emphasizes, however, is that quantity alone is not sufficient. ... Those 10,000 hours have to be invested in the right things, and as the disjointed nature of Hamming’s talk underscores, the question of what are the right things is slippery and near impossible to nail down with confidence.

In other words, becoming excellent is not the result of a well-behaved tallying of hours, it instead emerges out of a swamp of roiling ambiguity. If you’re not ready for this reality, he implies, you’re unlikely to last long on a path toward greatness. "Beyond the 10,000 Hour Rule: Richard Hamming and the Messy Art of Becoming Great," Study Hacks, 8/9/10.

UPDATE 11/12/10
This article suggests that the very skills that make you an expert may also lock you into a certain type of thinking. The better your brain becomes at perceiving patterns within your field of expertise, the more your brain is taken over by that expertise and the less able you are to process new information. "The Cognitive Cost Of Expertise."

Hypercompetition, Scarcity, and the Economics of Music

I saw this last week and decided to pull together a blog post on several topics I've been thinking about:

About 1 million design students in China, compared to about 40,000 in the U.S. Implication: your competition for jobs is about to expand exponentially. Welcome to the flat world. ...

The supply is currently outstripping demand, so compensation for things like logo design is going to be low. "Crowdsourcing & Disruption Event at Pratt: Realities & Denial," eyecube, 3/11/10.

And also this:

There are too many films out there, there are too many filmmakers. "SxSW: Nobody Wants to Watch Your Film: Realities of Online Film Distribution," Magnet Media, 3/14/10.

Because of the Internet and global competition, we're seeing declining income in a number of creative fields (e.g., design, writing, music, video). People are competing for these jobs even when there is little or no payment.

RU Sirius, former editor of Mondo 2000 summed up the problem at a recent Net 2.0 conference in Amsterdam: “Get people to work for free.” That has essentially become the motto of the post-scarcity economy. "NET 2.0: Post-Scarcity Economics and the problem with Google," Medialternatives, 2/2/08.

One line of thinking is that if you give away your digital content, you'll gain exposure, build an audience, and then sell "scarce" goods and services. Here are two posts on the subject:

The Technium: Better Than Free

The Grand Unified Theory On The Economics Of Free

While I am not going to argue the rightness or wrongness of "free" (it's already a reality, so I don't think there is much to be gained by exploring the concept here), I am skeptical that there are a lot scarcities to sell. At least not in the areas related to creative content and to human labor. Pretty much anything you offer as "scarce" in these areas can and will be duplicated. Once people see there is money to be made, they will begin offering their own versions until the price is driven down. This is what is now commonly referred to as hypercompetition.

You may think your business offers rare and valuable goods and services. But the chances are that, somewhere, a recent entrant or potential competitor is preparing to do something similar, for a lower price. As the author says: "Everything becomes a commodity eventually." "A more virulent form of hypercompetition," FT.com, 12/16/09.

Here's a definition:

Hypercompetition:
A situation in which there is a lot of very strong competition between companies, markets are changing very quickly, and it is easy to enter a new market, so that it is not possible for one company to keep a competitive advantage for a long time.

And two more explorations on the subject:

From our financial models, such as using net present value analysis to value projects, to our investment models, which presume more or less predictable and long life-spans for given business activities, we have built a lot of operating frameworks on the idea that our lines of business will be around for a while. And not only around, but profitable.

All this began to change in the early 1990's, when a number of scholars, such as my colleague Ian MacMillan and his co-author Rich D'Aveni, started talking about a phenomenon they called "Hypercompetition." In hyper-competitive environments, to paraphrase Hobbes, the life of a competitive advantage is nasty, brutish and short. In other words, advantages don't last for very long before competitive entry, imitation and matching erode their edge, or customers move on, or the environment changes in such a way that the advantage becomes irrelevant. "Competitive Advantage Is Fleeting (And It's Okay to Admit It)," Harvard Business Review, June 2009.

"Welcome to Hypercompetition—Competitive Advantage at its Fastest"

Barriers of entry have kept some competitors out, but technology is reducing some of those. For example:

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously. "In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits," Wired, January 2010.

The revolution that is brewing now will get us much closer to another seemingly impossible Star Trek technology: the Replicator. You won't be able (for some time) to press a button and get a whole meal synthesized on the fly, but we are at the stage where a short time after pressing the button you can have a wide variety of objects appear magically. These range from tiny, fully functional gears to large, colorful pieces of art and cover materials as broad as glass, ceramics, metal and plastic. Yes, glass, ceramics and metal! "Communicator: Done. Replicator: Next. The Future of Making Stuff," usv.com, 3/22/10.

The music industry used to have significant barriers of entry, but now that everyone can cheaply record and distribute music, the flood gates have opened. There are still some barriers (e.g., getting on broadcast radio), but artists are being told there are many opportunities for them these days. Sure, they may have to give away their recorded music to get some attention, but to make money they can offer fans goods and services that aren't easily duplicated.

However, I'm saying that just about everything an artist or band can offer can be duplicated:

Develop some interesting merchandise, and it will be copied.

Representatives for the jam-band Phish are due in federal court this afternoon to argue that it should be allowed to stop bootleggers from selling T-shirts, jackets, bumper stickers and other merchandise bearing its trademarked name during its upcoming reunion tour. ...

The issue isn't necessarily about money, the lawsuit says. The band says the unauthorized merchandise sales "threaten" the band's reputation because it relinquishes control over the quality and appearance of the merchandise, according to the suit. "Phish in court this afternoon to block bootleg merchandise," The Virginian-Pilot, 3/5/09.

Create a great live act, and that can be copied as well.

... the sheer number and variety of tribute bands has exploded, branching out to modern-era acts such as Pearl Jam, the Dave Matthews Band, and even the Arctic Monkeys. "Tribute bands are music to fans’ ears, wallets," The Boston Globe, 3/6/10.

Even relationships aren't perceived as scarce. While it's nice to think that artists/bands will hang on to their fans for life, the reality is we're a society where people too often change friends, even spouses, when they see someone better. Toss in commitment phobia and you have a situation where relationships aren't a sure thing.

Given all of the above, I question the usefulness in talking about scarcities as a music business strategy. In addition, much of what we buy has little to do with scarcity anyway. Sometimes it just comes down to being in the right place at the right time. For example, if we want a cup of coffee, and we see coffee vendors on all four sides of the street, the reason we pick one over the other isn't a scarcity issue. Similarly, if every girl on our block is selling Girl Scout cookies, we may end up buying from whomever comes to our door first. Or maybe we'll buy a box from each one of them.

Buying behavior is much more complicated than saying people will pay a premium for scarcity. Here are a few resources that outline the many factors which determine why we buy what we buy:

Factors Which Influence Consumer Choice. If you want the PowerPoint version, go here.

Buyer Behaviour: Stimulus-Response Model.

The Black Box Model of Consumer Behavior.

So I think talking about "selling scarcity" can be the wrong strategy. As I have already mentioned, hypercompetition suggests that as soon as you have an idea, someone else will copy it and drive down the price. For musicians, that means being on an endless treadmill trying to find scarcities to sell. As soon as you come up with something fans will pay for, many other bands and artists will try it too. There will be a glut.

You may make money in music, but I doubt that offering scarce goods and services will be the key. For virtually every option that an artist/band offers, there already is or will be someone else offering something similar. And it won't take much effort for fans and potential fans to find it. All anyone has to say is, "I want ... " and the marketplace will provide it, often in multiple ways. Think of the various "saleables" that artists/bands currently offer (e.g., entertainment, merchandise, community, engagement, celebrity access) and there are equivalents both within and outside of music.

We're running out of scarcity. ...

It seems as though once a category becomes successful, the headlong rush to knock it off is stronger (and quicker) than it ever was before. ...

While there are almost half a million lawyers practicing in the United States today, there are (gasp!) more than 125,000 in school right now. ...

The same thing is true for doctors, Web sites, T-shirt shops, sushi restaurants, thumbtack manufacturers, and brands of blank CD-ROM disks. ...

If it's remotely digital (like music), then it's easy to mimic. And if it's easy to mimic, someone wins if they can knock off the original--the sooner the better. When someone starts to sell exactly what you sell but for half the price, how long does your good-service, first-mover, nice-person advantage last? "The Scarcity Shortage," Seth Godin's Blog, 8/27/07.

And even the fallback argument, that talent is scarce and people will pay for access to it, doesn't really hold water because making money in music and having the most talent do not necessarily go together.

SUCCESS = SOME TALENT + LUCK
GREAT SUCCESS = SOME TALENT + A LOT OF LUCK
Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman quoted in "FORMULAE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY," Edge.org, 10/13/07.

Godin acknowledges there might be a few scarcities, but even those may not confer a lasting advantage.

So what's scarce now? Respect. Honesty. Good judgment. Long-term relationships that lead to trust. None of these things guarantee loyalty in the face of cut-rate competition, though.

Some people are even suggesting that we're surrounded by so much abundance that now we want less. J. Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich Inc., lays it out in an article, and then Mike Heronime, Partner/Strategic Services Director, Numantra, expands upon the idea in a presentation.

Enough of Too Much

Marketing to Consumers in a Post-Abundance Economy

However, these models tend to benefit people and companies that provide filters rather than artists trying to sell their music and music-related products. It would be a bit like having a musician say, "Pay me to go away."

So let's jump ahead and envision a world where there's more stuff than any of us can consume. Imagine a scenario where people are making a ton of music and art, but there are few economic transactions. So how do artists (or anyone for that matter) make a living in the post-scarcity society?

In the post-scarcity world, technological advances will facilitate decreasing costs until conceivably almost everything is “free” to the consumer. Scarcity will no longer exist in this world, and, without scarcity, the concept of charging a price to consumers as a means of generating revenue will be unworkable. The post-scarcity world will put tremendous pressure on current business models, potentially rendering them irrelevant and obsolete in the future. If traditional businesses do not adapt to this emerging “free” world, many of the strong, traditional organizations of the early twenty-first century will cease to exist over the next 50 years. "The Post-Scarcity World of 2050-2075"

If products are no longer scarce, does this mean that the only jobs left will be service positions? Are there enough service positions for everyone? Or do people do the services that they find fulfilling, leaving others to lounge around and/or be non-productively creative?

I'm not a regular Burning Man attendee -- the schedule rarely works out -- but I have gone. My first time wandering the playa, visiting the various camps offering gifts of art, services and/or more physical forms of entertainment, I was struck with a realization: this is one model of what a post-nanotech world might look like. Assume your material needs for food, water, shelter and toys were met, and that you no longer needed to work; what might result is a world where creativity, mutuality, and the gift economy ruled... or a world where sex, drugs and sleeping until 2pm ruled. Or, as with Burning Man, both. "Abundance, Scarcity and Beta-Testing Tomorrow," Open the Future, 9/12/06.

How are we to survive as producers and creators in an age, in which value is no longer determined by scarcity, but rather the accumulation of bits and bytes, the 1s and Os that describe information?

... We figure out a system of revenue sharing, in which the exchange of information is granted value. ...

One day we will awake to find the proverbial Google cheque in the mail. It will be a dividend in which all the clicks on the internet have been divided by the total population of the world and squared with the amount of money earned by the earth’s service providers. The legend will say: You are user # 51 298 123 187 here is you ten-cents (US$) for the 8kb of data we actually siphoned off your site. We know its yours, because the IP number says it’s yours.

The result, I predict, will be a practical and infinitely rewarding utopia in which everybody would have a guaranteed income, courtesy of Google Corporation. This is the kind of error, which could make life worth living. "NET 2.0: Post-Scarcity Economics and the problem with Google," Medialternatives, 2/2/08.

The above scenarios, where EVERYTHING is abundant, are still in the future. But the world where music (and everything associated with it) is abundant is already headed our way. The oft-proposed solutions, based on some sort of scarcity, are going to be hard to sustain. So I suggest we look beyond that.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE 4/4/10
This article says that there are now so many photos online available for licensing that the price paid per photo has gone down significantly.
For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path

UPDATE 7/14/10
This article talks about how museums sometimes pay a great deal of money for something that turns out to be fake. The value isn't in the object itself, but in the perceived artist. Therefore, if you can produce a copy and convince someone it is real, they may pay you the same amount as if it is real.
Testing Art for Authenticity at London’s National Gallery

UPDATE 10/17/10
I mentioned in the post that as a society we will even replace personal relationships if someone better comes along. Here's a recent article on the same subject.

[Writes sociologist Eva Illouz in Cold Intimacies,] "Romantic relations are not only organized within the market, but have themselves become commodities produced on an assembly line, to be consumed fast, efficiently, cheaply, and in great abundance.” In other words, as dating (or ersatz love) has migrated to the internet, it has undergone the same changes as everything else that has moved online: it has been remade by the ethic of convenience into something more solipsistic and disposable. "Love Worth Fighting For," The New Inquiry, 9/30/10.