Music and the "Gift Economy" 4: Personal Versus Impersonal Transactions

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

The relationship aspect of gift economies is, depending on whose viewpoint, either its strength or its weakness. Gift economies are either good because they encourage (or force) people into social relationships, or they are bad (or at least limiting) because they get bogged down by these relationships.

Before I explore the practicality of gift economies and the arts, let me highlight some of the discussions about market economies versus gift economies. There are trade-offs with each. Even if we use a hybrid system, which many people suggest is the only option, it still helps us to understand the strengths and limitations of each to know how to best utilize each.

... gift economies are fundamentally relational. A large part of the purpose of the gift is to establish and further relations between persons and groups. Part of what makes this possible, as Marcel Mauss points out in his wonderful Essai sur le Don (in English, The Gift), is that gifts demand reciprocation. ...

The relational nature of the gift economy is both its strength and its constraint. It both establishes relationship and requires relationship. On the other hand, the market economy works on the principle of even exchange. Every transaction is complete in itself, balanced, leaving the participants free of each other.

The gift economy is free in terms of money, of course, but constrained by the qualities and requirements of human social relationships. The market economy requires a constant flow of goods or money from the individual, a flow which may be difficult or impossible to produce, but it leaves the individual free to engage or not to engage. In this way, the two systems offer contrasting models of “free” and freedom. "Some Experiments in Art as Gift." Sal Randolph. March, 2003.

Gifts can establish a relationship that then switches to a market economy.

Mauss was interested in how we make society where it didn’t exist before. Hence we offer gifts on first dates or on diplomatic missions to foreign powers. How do we push the limits of society outwards? For him money and markets were intrinsic to this process. Hence giving personalized valuables could be considered to be an exchange of money objects if we operate with a broader definition than one based on impersonal currencies and focus rather on the function of their transfer, the extension of society beyond the local level. This helps to explain his claim that “the great economic revolutions are monetary in nature” (Fournier 2006: 212), meaning that they push us into unknown reaches of society and require new money forms and practices to bridge the gap. The combination of neoliberal globalization and the digital revolution has led to a rapid expansion of money, markets and telecommunications, all reinforcing each other in a process that has extended society beyond its national form, making it much more unequal and unstable in the process. "On commoditization: exchange in the human economy." Keith Hart. The Memory Bank. 8/10/08.

Freedom is often cited as a justification for market economies:

Classical liberals promoted markets as a means towards greater individual freedom as a corrective to the arbitrary social inequality of the Old Regime....

According to writers as varied as John Locke and Karl Marx, ours is an age of money, a transitional phase in the history of humanity. Seen in this light, capitalism’s historical mission is to bring cheap commodities to the masses and break down the insularity of traditional communities before being replaced by a more just society. "On commoditization: exchange in the human economy." Keith Hart. The Memory Bank. 8/10/08.

... I like many aspects of capitalism; I like the freedom, the dynamism, the creativity it unleashes. I would never, ever, want to do away with the market as the primary engine of productivity. "Capitalism, the Commons, and Divine Right." Peter Barnes speaking to the E. F. Schumacher Society, October 2003.

The values which shape exchanges in a commodity culture have to do with personal expression, freedom, social mobility, the escape from constraints and limitations, the enabling of new "possibilities". We sometimes refer to such fantasies as escapism or social experimentation; they are closely associated with the patterns of "transformation" and "plentitude" which Grant McCracken has documented. The fantasies which animate the exchange of gifts are often nostalgic, having to do with the reassertion of traditional values, the strengthening of social ties, the acceptance of mutual obligations, and the comfort of operating within familiar social patterns. "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Four): Thinking Through the Gift Economy." Henry Jenkins. Confessions of an Aca/Fan, 2/18/09.

According to the study's author, Jean-Sébastien Marcoux (HEC Montréal), many researchers romanticize gift-giving. "They praise it for humanizing market relationships, for making the market meaningful, and for providing an escape from the commodifying logic of capitalist exchanges," Marcoux writes. ...

"People use the market to free themselves from the straitjacket of social expectations—from the sense of indebtedness and emotional oppression—which constrains them in their reciprocity relations inside the gift economy," Marcoux concludes. "The Dark Side Of Gifts: Feeling Indebted May Drive People To The Marketplace," ScienceDaily, 6/17/09.

Gifts often come with a real or at least perceived sense of obligation and the need to reciprocate.

Thus in the tribal economy, when a clan or tribe (or the members of such) gives away its surplus, the recipient group or individual is forced to eventually give back, say the next year, at least as much, or they will loose relative prestige. What such a gift economy does however is create a community of obligations and reciprocity, unlike the market-based mechanisms, where ‘equal is traded with equal’, and every transaction stands alone. "The intersubjectivity of P2P: the The Gift Economy vs. Communal Shareholding," P2P Foundation, 7/28/10.

[According to Mauss] societies based on the exchange of the gift impose three positive obligations on members:

1. The obligation to give (you can’t not give)

2. The obligation to receive (you cannot refuse to receive)

3. The obligation to return (you must return that which is given)
"The Gift – Mauss, Bataille, Hyde, and Derrida." Erik W. Davis. Freeebay, 6/18/10.

... there is a tendency to romanticize the idea of the gift. It’s easy to imagine that a world based on an exchange of gifts would be better, more humanistic, more intimate, even more beautiful. This notion is not entirely false, but it leaves out the problematics of the gift. Think of receiving a gift that you don’t want. Or the sense of obligation that an excessive gift can engender. Think of wanting or needing something but having to wait to find out if or when it might be given to you. There’s a dependency, and a loss of control inherent in the gift situation. If your relationship with those around you is going well, you may receive everything you need, materially and emotionally—but what if it doesn’t go well? What about the coercion inherent in the need to please others to receive what you need for your survival? "Some Experiments in Art as Gift." Sal Randolph, March 2003.

I don’t mean to demonize "gift economies" by inverting their moral valuation, but I do want to emphasize that people who grew up in gift economies don’t mind getting out of them all that much. It can actually be tremendously rewarding to buy a honkin’ big piece of meat from someone who you will never meet again, take it back to your hotel room, and eat the entire thing by yourself, completely alone. "Gift economies suck (except ours)," Savage Minds, 8/10/10.

Because the exchange of goods within a gift economy brings with it social expectations, not all gifts can be accepted. In that sense, there are goods and services which literally can not be given away, because even in the absence of an explicit value proposition, consumers are wary of hidden obligations, unstated motives, or hidden interests which come smuggled inside the gift, much like the classic myth of the Trojan Horse. "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Four): Thinking Through the Gift Economy." Henry Jenkins. Confessions of an Aca/Fan, 2/18/09.

Lewis Hyde, known for his book The Gift, written in 1983, now acknowledges some shortcomings with the concept.

There is a hidden problem in the gift book: much gift exchange takes place is communities with a strong sense of in-group and out-group. Gift giving may be a wonderful thing, but what if you happen to be in the out-group? What if all the scientists are men and they don’t share their data with the women? "Lewis Hyde, author of Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership," Creative Commons, 8/27/10.

Andrew Swenson, Director of Marketing at Concordia University, offers this solution to the primary problem of the gift economy:

I’m suggesting that in order to have a true “give-win” situation that demands no reciprocation, we must remove all economic considerations from collaboration.

This would mean that after a gift has occurred in a collaborative partnership, both parties must forget the transaction occurred entirely. It must be as if the donee has inherited something: the donor has died and the beneficiaries are free to act as they wish with their new resources.

This is the only way that a gift can escape the moral confines of the gift economy. "The Economy of Collaboration 3.0," wordpost.org, 1/14/10.

Even as they facilitate quicker transactions, market economies are not totally without a human component.

The moral economy describes the set of social norms and mutual understandings which make it possible for two parties to do business with each other. In some cases, the moral economy holds in check the aggressive pursuit of short term self interest in favor of decisions which preserve long term social relations between participants. In a small scale economy, for example, a local dealer is unlikely to "cheat" a customer because they need to count on continued trade with this person over an extended period of time and thus need to build up their reputation within this community.

The measure of a moral economy is the degree to which participants trust each other to hold up their end of these implicit agreements. When there is a sudden and dramatic shift in the economic or technological infrastructure, as has occured with the introduction of digital media, it can create a crisis in the "moral economy," diminishing the level of trust within participating parties, and perhaps even wearing away the mechanisms which insure the legitimacy of economic exchanges. At such times, we can see all involved making bids for legitimation, that is proposing new models or frameworks through which parties may reach a understanding of what should provide the basis for fair and meaningful interactions. "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Three): The Gift Economy and Commodity Culture." Henry Jenkins. Confessions of an Aca/Fan,2/16/09.

In these times of change, we may be looking for alternative economies, but we understand the concept of the market economy and have reasons to continue using it.

It’s hard not to be a consumer. It’s what we are most of the time. There’s work, where we earn the money, and there’s non-work, where we spend the money. Most of our time is spent either servicing others as consumers or being serviced as consumers. In its vectoralist form, commodity culture has evolved a sophisticated way of treating us as its consumers. It’s all about crafting an image and a brand for a commodity that makes it appear as something more than a mere thing. The thing—be it a T-shirt or a carton of orange juice—is the support for an experience, mediated by a brand and an image that makes us feel special, that makes us feel unique. "Copyright, Copyleft, Copygift." McKenzie Wark in Meanland, 7/28/10. First published in Meanjin Vol 69:1 2010.

Market economies also work well when there are distances or complex exchanges to deal with. Money, credit cards, and the like allow you to negotiate with strangers and to individualize your purchases, thus giving you unlimited flexibility. (Some people feel the Internet has erased distance and complexity barriers by setting up networks and commons among people who have never met and live thousands of miles from each other. Therefore, they foresee a time when gift economies can function globally. I will address this in another blog post in this series.) The big problem (which leads to my next blog post) is that the market economy doesn't know what to do with activities that aren't monetizable.

Money is the blood of our economic system; it shouldn’t be the soul. Humans have needs and desires that can’t be met by exchanging dollars. These needs include connection to family and community, closeness to nature, and meaning in life. A twenty-first-century economic system must address these needs, too. Capitalism 3.0 Peter Barnes. 2006.

This brings me to the next blog post, the heart of this series: Music and the "Gift Economy" 5: Supporting Artists.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

Music and the "Gift Economy" 3: Commons, Copyright, and Radical Politics

Previous posts in this series:
Music and the "Gift Economy" 1: An Introduction
Music and the "Gift Economy" 2: Examples

The concept of a gift economy brings up issues concerning property, wealth distribution, and the value of labor. Some theorists have suggested that partial or full implementation of a gift economy may eliminate some of the perceived problems with capitalism and with market economies.

A gift economy does not necessarily eliminate private property ownership; however, advocating that people give away what they own undermines the desirability of ownership. An alternative to private ownership is public ownership. This can come in the form of state or government ownership, but it can also come in the form of commons. Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize in economics for her exploration of commons.

Commons is a general term that refers to a resource shared by a group of people. In a commons, the resource can be small and serve a tiny group (the family refrigerator), it can be community-level (sidewalks, playgrounds, libraries, and so on), or it can extend to international and global levels (deep seas, the atmosphere, the Internet, and scientific knowledge). The commons can be well bounded (a community park or library); transboundary (the Danube River, migrating wildlife, the Internet); or without clear boundaries (knowledge, the ozone layer).

Commons analysts have often found it necessary to differentiate between a commons as a resource or resource system and a commons as a property-rights regime. Shared resource systems — called common-pool resources — are types of economic goods, independent of particular property rights. Common property on the other hand is a legal regime — a jointly owned legal set of rights (Bromley 1986; Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop 1975). ...

The analysis of any type of commons must involve the rules, decisions, and behaviors people make in groups in relation to their shared resource. Economist Mancur Olson’s influential The Logic of Collective Action (1965) is still being read by students today as a basic introduction to the challenges of human organization. Collective action, voluntary groups working to achieve a shared goal, is a key ingredient in understanding commons. Olson laid the groundwork for the study of incentives for people to contribute to a joint endeavor and outlined the basic problem of free riding, where one reaps benefits from the commons without contributing to its maintenance. "Introduction: An Overview of the Knowledge Commons," by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom in Understanding Knowledge as a Commons. 2006.

Here's more on the concept of commons from Yochai Benkler:

The salient characteristic of commons, as opposed to property, is that no single person has exclusive control over the use and disposition of any particular resource in the commons. Instead, resources governed by commons may be used or disposed of by anyone among some (more or less well-defined) number of persons, under rules that may range from “anything goes” to quite crisply articulated formal rules that are effectively enforced.

Commons can be divided into four types based on two parameters. The first parameter is whether they are open to anyone or only to a defined group. ... The second parameter is whether a commons system is regulated or unregulated. Practically all well -studied, limited common property regimes are regulated by more or less elaborate rules — some formal, some social-conventional — governing the use of the resources. Open commons, on the other hand, vary widely. Some commons, called open access, are governed by no rule. Anyone can use resources within these types of commons at will and without payment. ... The most successful and obvious regulated commons [include] sidewalks, streets, roads, and highways ... In all these cases, however, the characteristic of commons is that the constraints, if any, are symmetric among all users, and cannot be unilaterally controlled by any single individual. Wealth of Networks. 2006.

If you would like to know more about commons, here's a resource.

In recent decades the concept of commons has been extended into cyberspace.

In this sense the definition of Free Culture gathers all those subcultures that shaped a quasi-political agenda around the free reproduction of digital file. The kick-off was the slogan “Information wants to be free” launched by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984. Later the hacker underground boosted the Free Software movement and then a chain of new keywords was generated: Open Source, Open Content, Gift Economy, Digital Commons, Free Cooperation, Knowledge Sharing and other do-it-yourself variants like Open Source Architecture, Open Source Art and so on. “Free Culture” is also the title of the book of Lawrence Lessing, founder of Creative Commons. "The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage," by Matteo Pasquinelli in Studies in Network Cultures. 2008.

The move toward information commons has led a number of people to ask for revisions in copyright laws or to eliminate them altogether. One variation is copyleft.

Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has freedom. ...

To copyleft a program, we first state that it is copyrighted; then we add distribution terms, which are a legal instrument that gives everyone the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the program's code, or any program derived from it, but only if the distribution terms are unchanged. "What is Copyleft?," GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF).

The copyright debate has been particularly relevant within music, art, and publishing discussions. We've built up a system of paying people based on copyright, so if we eliminate it, we need to develop or embrace alternative economic systems to provide for artists, musicians, and writers. That's where theis entire series is headed: Are there alternatives and will they work?

In the information age, we are seeing money concentrated in ever fewer hands, overburdening a financially rich minority with decision-making, while the views of the majority are largely ignored. Massive grassroots opposition exists worldwide to the "privatisation of the commons" – the rapacious systematic exploitation of our shared natural, social & cultural heritage. Nevertheless, the current financial system encourages such selfish and shortsighted plunder by rewarding its perpetrators. Many feel powerless in the face of the scale, anonymity and sheer iniquity of modern economic practice. As the unfairness of "free-market capitalism" becomes increasingly palpable, demand for constructive alternatives is on the rise. "Altruistic Economics & The Internet Gift Economy," by Robin Upton, altruists.org/ 7/7/05.

... the majority of workers faces a declassing (déclassement) of life conditions despite skills getting richer and richer in knowledge. It is not a mystery that the New Economy has generated more McJobs. This model can be easily applied to the internet economy and its workforce, where users are in charge of content production and web management but do not share any profit. "The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage," by Matteo Pasquinelli in Studies in Network Cultures. 2008.

There is concern among some groups that by eliminating copyright but not making other changes in the system there will be further exploitation of creatives and workers. One alternative is copyfarleft, proposed by Dmytri Kleiner, an anarchist hacker and a co-founder of Telekommunisten, a worker-owned technology company.

However, there is a problem, art is not, in most cases, a common input to production as software is. Owners of property will support the creation of copyleft software, for the reasons described, however in most cases, they will not support the creation of copyleft art. Why would they? Like all copyable information, it has no direct exchange value, and unlike software it generally has no use value in production either. It’s use value exists only among the fans of this art, and if owners of property can not charge these fans money for the right to copy, what good it is for them? And if owners of property will not support copyleft art, which is freely distributed, who will? The answer is unclear. In some cases institutions such as private and state cultural funds will, but these can only support a very small number of artists, and only by employing a dubious and ultimately somewhat arbitrary selection criteria in deciding who does, and who does not, receive such funding.

Copyleft, as developed by the free software community, is thus not a viable option for most artists. Even for software developers, the iron law of wages applies, they may be able to earn a living, but nothing more, owners of property will still capture the full value of the product of their labour....

For copyleft to have any revolutionary potential it must be Copyfarleft. It must insist upon workers ownership of the means of production.

In order to do this a license cannot have a single set of terms for all users, but rather must have different rules for different classes. Specifically one set of rules for those who are working within the context of workers ownership and commons based production, and another for those who employ private property and wage labour in production.

A copyfarleft license should make it possible for producers to share freely and to retain the value of their labour product, in otherwords it must be possible for workers to make money by applying their own labour to mutual property, but impossible for owners of private property to make money using wage labour.

Thus under a copyfarleft license a worker-owned printing cooperative could be free to reproduce, distribute, and modify the common stock as they like, but a privately owned publishing company would be prevented from having free access. "Copyfarleft and Copyjustright," Mute magazine, 7/18/07.

For more discussion about copyfarleft and additional citations, go here.

Pasquinelli also covers many of the issues regarding free culture, so I recommend that you read his full paper. Here are two excerpts:

Looking at today's media discourse, [Georges] Bataille is enrolled only to justify a sort of digital potlatch — a furious but sterile reproduction of digital copies.

... [Michel] Serres uses the same parasitic model for intellectual labour and the network itself (as Technology is an extension of the deceptive nature of Logos): “this cybernetics gets more and more complicated, makes a chain, then a network. Yet it is founded on the theft of information, quite a simple thing.” Serres’ opportunistic relation between intellectual and material production may sound traditionalist, but even when Lazzarato and Negri started to write in 1991 about the “hegemony of intellectual labour”, the exploitive dimension of capital over mass intellectuality was clear.

Economically digitalism believes that an almost energy-free digital reproduction of data can emulate the energy-expensive material production. For sure the digital can dematerialise any kind of communication but it can not affect biomass production. Politically digitalism believes in a mutual gift economy. Internet is supposed to be virtually free of any exploitation and tends naturally towards a social equilibrium. Here digitalism works as an disembodied politics with no acknowledgement of the offline labour that is sustaining the online world (a class divide that precedes any digital divide). "The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage," by Matteo Pasquinelli in Studies in Network Cultures. 2008.

All of the above establishes that people have been attempting to deal with property, wealth distribution, and the value of labor in the digital age. Other than the copyfarleft idea, I haven't cited any proposed solutions. More on that to come.

Next: Music and the "Gift Economy" 4: Personal Versus Impersonal Transactions

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

Music and the "Gift Economy" 2: Examples

For the first post in this series, go here: Music and the "Gift Economy" 1: An Introduction

In order to determine whether gift economies have any practical application for artists and musicians, let's look at some gift economies.

The first ones to be described were small indigenous communities where money had never been introduced.

Instead of vying to see who could accumulate the most, the winners were the ones who managed to give the most away. In some notorious cases, such as the Kwakiutl of British Columbia, this could lead to dramatic contests of liberality, where ambitious chiefs would try to outdo one another by distributing thousands of silver bracelets, Hudson Bay blankets or Singer sewing machines, and even by destroying wealth - sinking famous heirlooms in the ocean, or setting huge piles of wealth on fire and daring their rivals to do the same. "Give It Away," by David Graeber. In These Times. August 21, 2000.

However, this author suggests that perhaps there has never been a pure gift economy.

The possibility that some cultures organized their economic life around systems of "gifts made and reciprocated" rather than commodities bought and sold originates in the fieldwork of anthropologists such as Malinowksi in the Trobriand Islands, and colonial observers of the so-called "potlatches" of northwest American Indians, observations which were then synthesized in Marcel Mauss's monumental study The Gift. Yet none of these observers, including Mauss himself, were ever able to decide once and for all whether the practices they observed really constitute a distinctly different economy, a system truly based in generosity and self-sacrifice; instead, they always leave open the possibility that members of archaic cultures simply exchanged gifts in the rational expectation of receiving ever-larger gifts later, making the gift economy merely a kind of rudimentary capitalism under a different form. "Response to Barbara Sebek's 'Good Turns and the Art of Merchandising: Conceptualizing Exchange in Early Modern England'," by Scott Cutler Shershow in Early Modern Culture, 2001.

The best example of a gift economy I can find in today's world (other than some communes and family-style compounds) is Burning Man, the week-long festival held every year in the Nevada desert. Here's what Larry Harvey, founder of Burning Man, has to say about it as a gift economy and the reason for doing so.

We've intentionally designed Black Rock City to foster what we call a gift economy. We allow no vending, no advertising, no buying or selling of anything. We discourage bartering because even bartering is a commodity transaction. Instead, we've originated both an ethos and an economic system that is devoted to the giving of gifts. ...

Let me draw a contrast between the market and a gift economy. I will begin with the marketplace. ... A simple act of purchase allows me to command the resources of the world. ... There has never been a better method for the productive allocation of wealth and the distribution of goods and services. ... The market, mated today in our modern system of mass production and mass distribution, has produced more wealth and distributed it more widely than in all other epochs of human history. This has liberated us from toil, but more importantly, it has freed us to independently pursue uniquely personal visions of happiness. ...

But what this transaction does not necessarily produce is connections between people. It does not produce what Robert Putnam and other writers have described as "social capital." Social capital is a very different concept. Social capital represents the sum of human connection that holds a society together, and it is fostered by networks of personal relationship.

... It is in the nature of our modern system of mass marketing to cater to the desires of the individual. "Viva Las Xmas." A speech at the Cooper Union in New York City. 4/25/02.

Burning Man would not exist, however, without the resources people accumulate during their real world existence outside of the event. They bring in what they personally need and what they want to give away. While services and products are sometimes created at Burning Man, all the raw materials are trucked in from elsewhere.

Q. What should I bring?
A. Thank you for asking the million-dollar question. Burning Man is an exercise in radical self-sufficiency. You have to bring all you need to survive, and then some. Some people bring only the basics; others bring everything including the kitchen sink.

Water, food and shelter are imperative — you will be asked to turn around at the gate if gate personnel believe you cannot meet your basic survival needs. Carefully read the Survival Guide, and prepare accordingly.

After you have taken care of your survival, everything else is up to you.

If you are fond of sleep, earplugs are a participant's best friend.

A bicycle (with a bike light) is vital for enjoying our vast and burgeoning metropolis.

For maximum enjoyment of the event, bring toys or costumes with which you can express your creative spirit.

"What is Burning Man?: FAQ"

So Burning Man shows a true gift economy can exist within a moment of time and location, but it doesn't demonstrate that it can exist without a market economy.

My third example is the Internet, expecially the open source community, the development of Wikipedia, and the use of crowdsourcing. Some people have called these gift economies, but in my mind they are not really. Rather, they are examples of collaboration. While people may be uploading items separately or contributing free labor, the final result is something that benefits them all rather than being the transfer of an item from one owner to another.

The history of the Internet, however, has given rise to some interesting discussions, which will be relevant to my exploration of music and gift economies.

During the Sixties, the New Left created a new form of radical politics: anarcho-communism. Above all, the Situationists and similar groups believed that the tribal gift economy proved that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. From May 1968 to the late Nineties, this utopian vision of anarcho-communism has inspired community media and DIY culture activists. Within the universities, the gift economy already was the primary method of socialising labour. From its earliest days, the technical structure and social mores of the Net has ignored intellectual property. Although the system has expanded far beyond the university, the self-interest of Net users perpetuates this hi-tech gift economy. As an everyday activity, users circulate free information as e-mail, on listservs, in newsgroups, within on-line conferences and through Web sites. As shown by the Apache and Linux programs, the hi-tech gift economy is even at the forefront of software development. Contrary to the purist vision of the New Left, anarcho-communism on the Net can only exist in a compromised form. Money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis. The "New Economy" of cyberspace is an advanced form of social democracy. "The Hi-Tech Gift Economy," Imaginary Futures, 4/19/07.

The above paper was written by Richard Barbrook in 1998. In 2005, he was asked how the hi-tech gift economy had evolve since he wrote the paper. You can read his responses here.

Here are quotes from two people who share my opinion that the Internet probably isn't a true gift economy:

Notice that the gifts are exchanged between people who know each other; indeed, the purpose of gift giving is to cement relationships between people. This may have been true of the very early Internet, which was small enough that researchers could know each other and direct their work to specific people. However, it is not sufficient to explain the behaviour of people who, to use one current example, put pages on the World Wide Web, since they may never know (and, therefore, have no relationship with) people who see their work.

Worse, in traditional theory, 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. However, by its very nature, ownership of information is inalienable. When you send a copy of a document to somebody, you can keep a copy for yourself. Alienability is an important aspect of gift culture; we wouldn't think much of somebody who had given us clothing, for example, if they kept asking if they could borrow it! If the Internet is not a gift culture, we have to return to the question: why do so many people work so hard on something for which they receive no financial compensation? "The Gift of Generalized Exchange," by Ira Nayman in Spark-Online, Issue 17, February 2001.

In my opinion, there is a profound misconception regarding peer to peer, expressed by the various authors who call it a gift economy, such as Richard Barbrook (Barbrook, 1995), or Steven Weber (Weber, 2004). But, as Stephan Merten of Oekonux.de has already argued, P2P production methods are not a gift economy based on equal sharing, but a form of communal shareholding based on participation. In a gift economy if you give something, the receiving party has to return if not the gift, then something of at least comparable value (in fact the original tribal gift economy was more about creating relationships and obligations and a means to evacuate excess, since they did not need it for their basic survival needs). In a participative system such as communal shareholding, organized around a common resource, anyone can use or contribute according to his need and inclinations. "The intersubjectivity of P2P: the The Gift Economy vs. Communal Shareholding," by Michel Bauwens, originally written in 2006, and republished in P2P Foundation Blog, 7/28/10.

If you want to explore more about the Internet as a gift economy (multiple citations), go here.

Next: Music and the "Gift Economy" 3: Commons, Copyright, and Radical Politics

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

Music and the "Gift Economy" 1: An Introduction

I have been planning on doing a piece about gift economies for quite awhile. I've already discussed pay-what-you-want models, but didn't get into the concept of a gift economy.

I've decided to tackle it now because I'm noticing a shift in conversations about music business models from "we'll all be small business people" to "I'll make music and give it away and see what happens." And Nancy Baym, who has written about fan communities, recently did a presentation on gift exchanges as the basis for fan involvement in music: "Nancy Baym on Changing Relationships, Changing Industries."

Here are two text summaries of her presentation:

"Nancy Baym: Pop music and social exchange."

"Nancy Baym: Changing Relationships, Changing Industries."

Baym was primarily talking about fans giving an artist or band free labor. But does it work the other way? Can musicians give away what they have to offer and still survive?

Let's start with some definitions of gift economies. In a nutshell, a gift economy is based on the idea that people give stuff away to other people. There's no exchange.

Here are some basic definitions of a gift economy:

In a gift economy people do not work to get money to buy things. What people get in the way of goods and services is either what they make themselves or what is given to them free of charge. So why would people work? People would volunteer their work because they realised that some job needed to be done and they could help to do it. They would work on something because they thought it was enjoyable and interesting work. They would do work to get the social status that goes with giving something to other people. In the gift economy, the economy is not owned by private shareholders or by a government. It is owned by a patchwork of clubs, societies and federated hobby groups. "Options for a Sustainable Future - Four Models of Utopia," The Gift Economy, Anarchism and Strategies for Change.

(I have linked to a cached version of this document. The original was available online when I started my research, but doesn't seem to be available now. Here is the information at the author's website: Leahy, Terry "Four Models of Utopia," TASA conference, University of Western Australia, December 2006.)

Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods.

...In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away. "The Hacker Milieu as Gift Culture," by Eric Steven Raymond in Future Positive.

In the 1920s the maverick French economist, Marcel Mauss, cited anthropologists who found that moneyless societies rarely use a strict barter system. Instead, most goods circulate as gifts. One person in a community gives something to another who needs it, even though there may be no hope of immediate return. This open-ended giving links both people, and points toward a future exchange. The giver is seen by the group as useful, reliable, and generous, and is accepted into the communal flow of goods and labor, while the receiver is indebted to a system that supports him. "Finding a Sense of Surplus," Toby Hemenway in Permaculture Activist No. 46, 2005.

This article defines gift economies and also provides a list of variations: "Gift Economy."

Intertwined in all the explorations about gift economies and the alternatives are these issues: relationships between people, and dividing up resources. The gift economy places far more emphasis on relationships than the two other types of economic exchange models: command hierarchy (where someone at the top makes all the decisions) and exchange economy (a market economy where we pay or trade for what we want). Here's how one person reduces the concept:

In brief, [Chris] Gregory finally concludes that "the exchange of gifts creates 'personal relations between people,' while commodity exchange creates 'objective relations between things.'" "Response to Barbara Sebek's 'Good Turns and the Art of Merchandising: Conceptualizing Exchange in Early Modern England'," by Scott Cutler Shershow in Early Modern Culture, 2001.

Anthropologist Alan Fiske talks about relationship models rather than economic models:

... people use just four fundamental models for organizing most aspects of sociality most of the time in all cultures. These models are Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. Communal Sharing (CS) is a relationship in which people treat some dyad or group as equivalent and undifferentiated ...

CS examples: people who share the use of a common area, people in love, people who believe we all share in each other's burdens, "people who kill any member of an enemy group indiscriminately in retaliation for an attack."

In Authority Ranking (AR) people have asymmetric positions in a linear hierarchy in which subordinates defer, respect, and (perhaps) obey, while superiors take precedence and take pastoral responsibility for subordinates.

AR examples: the military, ancestor worship, religious orders, class or ethnic rankings, sports team rankings. "AR relationships are based on perceptions of legitimate asymmetries, not coercive power; they are not inherently exploitative (although they may involve power or cause harm)."

In Equality Matching relationships people keep track of the balance or difference among participants and know what would be required to restore balance.

EM examples: "turn-taking, one-person one-vote elections, equal share distributions, and vengeance based on an-eye-for-an-eye, a-tooth-for-a-tooth."

Market Pricing relationships are oriented to socially meaningful ratios or rates such as prices, wages, interest, rents, tithes, or cost-benefit analyses. Money need not be the medium, and MP relationships need not be selfish, competitive, maximizing, or materialistic ... "Human Sociality."

Virtually all of us give and receive gifts, so gift-giving is widespread. Whether it is a sustainable model to provide people with the necessities of life is a much more complex discussion, which I plan to explore in regard to artists and musicians.

There are a variety of reasons why people sometimes choose to give a gift or work for free rather than get paid: out of love, the desire for status, to create a sense of debt on the part of the recipient, etc. Sometimes people prefer to accept no payment than too little.

Bringing money into the relationship takes the giver’s work out of “gift” market, and brings it into the “pay-for-effort” market. When it was done for nothing, the protagonist was a “donor.” When small money was on the table, he or she became an underpaid employee. "Why Bankers Would Rather Work for $0.00 Than $500K," Dan Ariely Blog, 4/17/09.

Here's an extensive look at the psychology of gift giving: "Between the gift and the market: the economy of regard."

And if you want to get a dense historical overview of the economics and anthropology of gift giving, go here. It is chapter 2.1 in Wrapped gifts, by Àngels Trias i Valls. I'm not going to attempt to rehash it all.

Music and the "Gift Economy" 2: Examples

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

Can Music Learn from Comic-Con?

As recorded music becomes a promotional tool to sell other music-related stuff, bands are moving into limited edition and collectibles territory. Generally as fans become collectors, they like to communicate and meet up with other collectors.

Although there are groups for vinyl, poster, and music memorabilia collectors, nothing exists on the scale of Comic-Con.

... the term "Comic-Con" doesn't even begin to describe the diversity of SDCCI's [San Diego's Comic-Con International] wall-to-wall programming. Aside from comic books, the convention's schedule includes events devoted to contemporary comic books (and their creators), vintage comic books (and their creators), original artwork (from both categories), science fiction and fantasy literature, animation (both domestic and foreign), genre television shows, pulp magazines, weaponry (both real and faux), genre theatrical (and direct-to-DVD) films, role-playing games, action figures, vintage toys, old time radio shows, video games, glamour art, costumes -- and, oh, I give up (in much the same way I'm now forced to give up my hopes of navigating the con's entire exhibit hall.) Let's just say that, if a topic is considered to be somewhat dispensable and silly in real life, chances are, it's considered to be of primary importance at SDCCI. "The 'Secret Origin' of San Diego's Comic-Con International," Jim Hill Media, 7/7/05.

The original concept behind Comic-Con was to promote comic book art and the professionals who created it rather than to create a merchandising and marketing event.

“I just felt that the cartoonists who entertained the popular masses were not getting their fair share of recognition,” [creator Shel Dorf] said. A convention would celebrate their many contributions.

Dorf, who was 36 then, also remembered what it was like to be a kid burning with a desire to become an artist, and not really knowing how to get there. A convention, he believed, would be a way to let youngsters meet pros, get some advice.

They held a one-day test fair in March of 1970, then the first three-day convention later that summer, in the basement of the U.S. Grant hotel. About 300 people came. "Comic-Con's Dorf watches sadly from the sidelines as T-shirts trump talent," SignOnSanDiego.com, 7/16/06.

The convention has grown into San Diego's largest [attendance capped at about 125,000]. But it was a tough go in the beginning.

The confab itself was so strapped for cash that each year the artists donated work -- which they dutifully sketched out on easels as a small crowd watched -- that were auctioned to help support the gathering. "The early days of Comic-Con," Variety, 7/11/08.

Comic-Con has always appealed to passionate fans, though who they are has expanded considerably.

"We always knew our audience was limited, but I personally felt it was limited not because only those people were interested," [David Glanzer, the organization's director of marketing and public relations] said. "I always felt that our audience was limited because we didn't inform a wider audience about what it was that we had."

He credits the convention's exponential growth through word of mouth buzz, and noted that most people come to the show more than once in their lives....

A 13-member board of directors, most of whom have been long-time fans of the show and were nominated to join the board, officially runs Comic-Con. The convention's office in La Mesa staffs 16-20 full-time and temporary workers, and about 80 volunteers work on various committees that help organize the show. "Charting Comic-Con's Hulk-like growth," San Diego Source, 4/18/08.

In addition to the San Diego event, there are now others around the country.

Gareb Shamus, CEO and founder of Wizard ... tells Marketing Daily that Comic Con started 40 years ago as small events in San Diego and Chicago. Wizard bought the Chicago show 15 years ago, and has been able to grow that from 5,000 to 70,000 attendees in a four-day event. Now, Wizard runs five of the events that bring in some 250,000 people to Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, Anaheim, Calif., and New York.

He says that among 700 vendors, Disney, Lego, Hasbro and Wild Planet will be on hand to show new products. "From the toy perspective, the fourth quarter is especially important," he says. "For companies to display their products to fans -- let them see them in a fun, family, cool environment -- is critical." ...

The fan demographic of Comic Con fans has grown beyond its 18- to-34-year-old core. "Now it's growing because as guys are getting older, they are not giving up enjoying these characters they enjoyed as kids -- whether video games, toys or comics -- and as they age they are getting their kids involved, so we are seeing older guys bringing their kids," he says. "Comic Con Is Coming To N.Y. Next Week," MediaPost, 10/12/2009.

While I am raising the idea that if musicians are now in the "stuff-selling business," they might want to have their own version of Comic-Con, Publishers Weekly has asked the same question about book publishing.

Has the San Diego Comic-Con become a possible model for what a contemporary publishing/media convention should be?

Although focused on comics—a sometimes tenuous connection in a show that could easily be called the San Diego Media-Con—the San Diego Comic-Con has emerged as the perfect example of the convergence of all manner of pop cultural phenomena under one roof. It's a big tent, a four-and-a-half-day carnival of panels, press conferences, business meetings, previews and bare-faced hype that has become so popular that San Diego fire marshals were forced to cap attendance at about 125,000. It's not simply that San Diego Comic-Con is popular—it's wildly popular. "San Diego Media-Con: One Big Size Fits All," Publishers Weekly, 8/3/09.

The idea is also catching on with other industries. While there have been sports collectible conventions for a long time, now more teams are getting into the act.

In Denver, the Broncos held their sixth annual Fan Fair in Invesco Field at Mile High this past June. Tickets for a family of five cost $50 total, or adults could procure a weekend pass for $25. What did fans get for the price? They chatted with coaches, players, cheerleaders and even the team mascot. They got autographs, took photos and purchased memorabilia. "Fan conventions on the rise," msnbc.com, 1/15/09.

Since so many people are suggesting that the future of music business involves selling merchandise and limited edition products, I'll be exploring more on that later. Based on what I have already read about collectors/fans, most of them develop an interest in something first, start collecting objects related to that interest, and THEN seek out groups of collectors. But on the other hand, having a place to buy and trade seems to turn these niche interests into more of a pop culture phenomenon. So it will be worth looking at the value of creating music collectible events to give some significance to the direct-to-fan experiments.

But for now, let me close with a few examples of fan conventions. Reading those articles, I've drawn up a list of common elements that seem to go along with launching fan conventions:

1. Have enough fans (generally willing to spend lot of money in pursuit of their hobby) to justify having a convention.
2. Have fans wanting to seek out others with similar interests.
3. Have fans willing to travel to a convention.
4. Have a person or group of people who will organize a convention and, if necessary, nurture it until it reaches a critical mass to maintain some level of momentum.

The book/movie series, Twilight, has generated a devoted group of fans who now have their own convention.
'Twilight' fans bring 'Trek'-like frenzy to conventions

Here are two music-related conventions.

Fans flock to 24th annual Queen convention

5th Annual International Tropical Music Collector’s Fair

Two articles about the Barbie convention.

Two Words: Barbie. Convention.

Collectors Revel at Barbie's 50th Birthday Convention

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

Why We Love Music

Christmas (er, "The Holidays" -- apologies to my PC friends) came early this year. Five days, to be exact, when the latest issue of The Economist arrived in my mailbox, with a cover feature called Why We Love Music. Imagine my joy! I could not have orchestrated a more timely, thesis-supporting publication -- from such a respected source, no less!!



There have been a number of articles over the last year, most notably in the New York Times and The Sunday Times of London, pointing to the emerging practice of "music branding." But few have delved into the psychological, biological and anthropological drivers behind why music means something to people. Why our brains (and hearts) are hardwired to seek out music from an early age, with the average American teenager spending an eighth of their waking hours listening to it?



Many firms are jumping into the fray, using music as a selling tool -- hell even the Auto Club recently offered me a free iTunes download if I referred a friend. But very few agencies hold their clients' hand and take a step back to analyze, from a 30,000 foot perspective, how a company can authentically incorporate music into its brand. The idea of a "Chevy Music" is interesting, but without context it may come across to the consumer as a mere tactic. More cool stuff to buy, certainly, but very little in terms of a reliable resource. With longevity comes trust. The much-publicized collapse of Starbucks' music initiatives just throws gas on the fire. Consumers shake their head and move on to the next shiny bauble, while longterm questions about Starbucks' brand strategy go unanswered.

Before partnering with music, companies must ask themselves: Who is our customer and is music important to them? What values does our brand project? How does music reinforce those values? Finally, are we prepared to integrate music into our brand roadmap over the long haul?

The Economist article implies that those that do will enjoy a sustainable advantage of Darwinian strength. Companies would do well to read the article, and hopefully take away the insight that music -- and the powerful way it is hardwired to our consciousness -- is not to be applied without discipline and rigor.

The only path to using music to grow the brand asset is to understand first that it is a longterm brand strategy, not an execution to "sell more stuff."