Contrary to first impressions, we’re not talking about two cute Swedish milk maidens.

You may have heard grumbling around the Internet about the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA.  It’s an important piece of legislation making its way through the House of Representatives, and you need to be aware of it, understand what the impact of it could be, and be clear about what you can do to help stop it. Oh, and the Senate is scheduled to vote on a related bill, the PROTECT IP ACT, or PIPA, on Tuesday, January 24.  Like it’s sibling, PIPA is rife with civil liberties issues and business and innovation issues.

Simply put, SOPA makes it easier for US law enforcement to fight online piracy and the trafficking of copyrighted material over the Internet.  Sounds innocuous enough?  Here’s what the Wikipedia entry says about all this:

The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who requests the court orders, the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for 10 such infringements within six months. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.

The Wikipedia listing also provide a list of reasons why proponents of the bill think it’s a good idea, which include

• Protecting Revenues of Content Creators
• Protection against counterfeit drugs

The list of arguments against is significantly longer, and include

• Threat to online freedom of speech
• Negative impact on sites that host user-generated content
• General threats to web-related businesses
• It’s ineffective against piracy
• Negative impact on internet security

. . .as well as several others.

But let’s break it down even further: If you’re a creator or curator, here’s what Outside The Music Box wrote about what SOPA will mean to the creative community:

The inherent danger SOPA presents is that in the process of “protecting” corporate interests, the distribution, access & discovery platforms the Internet provides for independent artists, musicians and songwriters will be crippled or obliterated.

It also means that if you’ve got copyrighted music playing in the background of a video you shot of your kid, you could get sued, even though you’re not selling that video.  See any problems here?  There’s actually a provision that gives the government the power to put ordinary people in jail for up to five years if you post any copyrighted work.

At the end of the day, this is another attempt by corporations and other middlemen to control the internet.  And it flies in the face of our desperate need for innovation, all in the name of protecting copyrights.  I’m all for copyright protection, so don’t get me wrong.  However, when those protections are so one-sided and they stifle creativity, that’s a problem.  You can even make the argument that, at this critical juncture in our economy, we need all the innovation we can get in order to create businesses and jobs.

So, what can you do?

• First, go to Stop American Censorship. There you can learn how you can contact your Congressmen and Congresswomen to urge them not to support either of these bills.  Remember, the deadline for the vote is Tuesday, January 24, so your taking action is critical.
• Check out Fight For The Future, and learn how you can fight back against the corporate and legal assault on our basic freedoms.
• If you’re on Twitter, go to BlackoutSOPA, and show your support by changing your Twitter icon.  Then encourage your friends and followers to do the same.  Getting a badge on an icon may seems like a little thing, but it helps raise awareness.  I did.  And don’t forget to tweet that you’re supporting from the BlackoutSOPA site.

I’ve also come across some great articles as I was putting this together

• Copyblogger’s The Problem With SOPA (And How To Stop It)
• WordPress.org’s Help Stop SOPA/PIPA
• ArtistDATA founder Brendan Mulligan wrote a link-filled post on Hypebot
• Outside The Music Box’s Artist’s Guide to SOPA (referenced above and in Brendan’s Hypebot post)
• The Wikipedia entry on SOPA

Get involved. Even Hitler is opposed to SOPA, and that’s saying something:

The upcoming installment of CNN’s Black In America series is one to watch.  In it, anchor and host Soledad O’Brien looks at the scarcity of minority-owned companies that are actually thriving in Silicon Valley.  No small thing, right?  After all, the Valley is where tech fortunes are made, and the fortune- and market-making machine has largely been unreachable by entrepreneurs of color.

Hopefully, that’s changing.  As we’ll see when the newest installment airs on Sunday at 8PM EDT, there are concerted efforts to level the playing field and make entrepreneurs of color more competitive out in the valley.  One of those efforts centers around New Media Accelerator, an incubator started by Angela Benton of Black Web 2.0 and technology consultant Wayne Sutton, who made a surprise appearance as a speaker at the Festival of the New Black Imagination.  What they’ve did was take 8 startups and embed them in Silicon Valley for 6 or so weeks.  During that time, the entrepreneurs were given pitch classes, got to meet venture capitalists, and got an important, first hand look at what it takes to build a successful tech company.  Hopefully, such an experience will pay off for them.

According to Wayne:

The promo picture (above) features the eight founders who lived in the house which includes Anthony Frasier of Playd, Hank Williams of KloudCo, Angela Benton of Cued/NewMe Accelerator, Hajj E. Flemings of gokit, Crisson Jno-Charles of Fetchmob, Tiffani Ashley Bell of Pencil You In, Pius Uzamere of becouply and myself(Vouch/NewMe Accelerator) with Soledad O’Brien in the middle.

However, he also notes:

CNN only covered the eight startup founders in the house and not all of the startups founders in the NewMe Accelerator. That was their choice not ours. The other startup founders were Chris Bennett of Central.ly, Curtiss Pope of aislefinder and David Adewum of OneSchool.

Wayne Sutton (l) and Hajj Flemings of GoKit.me (photo credit: Mark Hill/CNN)

Of course, the coverage of this effort has generated a lot of conversation, both positive and negative.  On the negative side, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington said he didn’t know of any black entrepreneurs and would take any black entrepreneur, regardless of merit, into his TechCrunch Disrupt conference.  No matter what his intentions, this is a clearly offensive statement, since black entrepreneurs, like everyone else, want to compete and succeed based on strength of their ideas and business plan, not on some affirmative action pass.

Anyway, lots of more conversation will come out of this.  In the meantime, our hats off to Angela and Wayne for getting this off the ground.  To tide you over til Sunday’s premiere, take a look at the trailer:

@umairh

You’re probably wondering what a book on capitalism has to do with a music and culture blog. Perhaps nothing.  Maybe everything.

The world of progressive black culture is exciting precisely because of the unexplored possibilities it represents. But it doesn’t exist in some Utopian vacuum.  Pull back and you see that, like everything else, it is impacted and shaped by the larger system of capitalism.

Paraphrasing Dr. Cornell West: I don’t expect there to be a major critique of capitalism in my lifetime. That said, the question is how do we turn capitalism to serve progressive agenda, especially as relates to culture?  The answer isn’t fully clear.  However, what is clear is that it’s time to take that first step and figure out what capitalism looks and acts like in the 21st century.  Fortunately, economist and business advisor Umair Haque (pronounced hock) provides plenty of food for thought.

In his new book, The New Capitalist Manifesto, Haque convincingly puts forth the idea that 20th century capitalism is no longer sustainable in our 21st century world.  And it’s not that capitalism is dead, it’s that the way it’s done has to change. While reading the book, my mind was racing with ways that his theories could be applied to influence the direction and tenor of 21st century black cultural production.  But before I make that leap, let’s look at some of the concepts in the book.

Essentially, Haque proposes a framework for what he calls constructive capitalism and, no, it’s not some oxymoron like “compassionate conservatism.”

He starts off by illustrating the difference between where we are today and the world we lived in during the 20th century.  20th century capitalism ran on the idea that the world was one big game reserve, a place of seemingly stable and limitless resources.  So, as he notes, if you ran out of fish in one pond, that was okay because you could simply go to another one nearby.  Or you could take food and supplies from that other tribe because, hey, you don’t trade with them anyway.

But this new century’s world is more like an ark (or for the New Yorkers, a subway train): “tiny, crowded and fragile”.  So if a fight breaks out or there’s a food shortage or disease, it affects everyone.  Sound familiar?

The problem lies, he suggests, with 20th century capitalism’s cornerstones or underlying ideas: production efficiencies; positioning based on product differences; strategy framed as a zero-sum, “I win, you lose” mode of competition; the idea that the only way to really gain advantage is to keep competitors out of your market; and mass producing goods or products to drive consumption.

Especially important: 20th century capitalism doesn’t take into consideration the full economic cost to people, communities and society of producing those goods and services.  He writes:

Twentieth-century capitalism’s cornerstones shift costs to and borrow benefits from people, communities, society, the natural world or future generations.  Both cost shifting and benefit borrowing are forms of economic harm that are unfair, nonconsensual, and often irreversible.

For example, take the fast food hamburger:

How much does a burger really cost? You pay perhaps $3, but. . .the authentic economic cost may be closer to $30. Environmental and health-care costs are shifted to society and future generations.  And benefits are borrowed from people, communities and society: the beef, water, land, and even jobs that go into burgers are subsidized by as much as $20.  If, for example, water were no longer subsidized in the Great Plains states, a pound of ground beef would cost $35, estimates James E. McWilliams, a fellow in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. . .the $27 gap between the $3 or less the average American pays and the $30 or so a burger actually costs is economic harm that is done by industrial era food producers to people, communities, the natural world and future generations.

In their stead, he proposes five new cornerstones of 21st century businesses. Consider these:

What he offers throughout the remainder of the book are examples of companies that are moving aggressively on this path.  It’s not that they are operating in all five areas, but they’ve taken meaningful steps in at least one, and that is enabling them to leave similar companies in the dust.  He cites companies such as Walmart (vs. Target), Nike (vs. Adidas and Puma), Google (vs. Yahoo), Indian carmaker Tata (vs. General Motors), Threadless (vs. The Gap), Apple (vs. Sony) and many others.  Simply put, these companies are able to prosper—do well—by doing good.

For example, Walmart and Nike have made sustainability a key piece of their business going forward.  Summed up thus, their philosophy is “waste nothing, replenish everything”.  Nike, for example, recycles the rubber from its shoes to make playground, tracks and basketball courts.  Apple has simplified the complex, i.e., the single button on the iPod.  The Nintendo Wii’s motion control system opened up video games to consumers beyond teenage boys and men.  Threadless thrives because it is responsive (via community-sourced designs) to it constituents in a way that The Gap can’t be.

Caveat: Still hard to be all ra-ra about big corporations. Walmart has ongoing issues around its labor practices, including the controversial recent dismissal by the Supreme Court of class action sex discrimination suit.  As well, their superstores tend to put small, mom-and-pop operations out of business.  When small businesses leave an area, the tax base erodes, which means you end up with less public services. And there are still concerns about the extent to which Nike uses sweatshops to produce its shoes and clothing. And, while I write this on a Mac, Apple has mastered the pricing game so that we feel like we’re getting deals when, in fact, we’re not. I wouldn’t call it dishonest, but is a sleight of hand.

However, to be fair to Haque, his book is dealing with business at a macro level, i.e., overall approaches and philosophies that guide the way 21st century companies engage people, communities and society. I also believe that one of our mandates as Americans and global citizens is to take the best ideas and put them towards improving the lives of not only black people, but the world as a whole.  The task before us all is sustainability across the board: art, culture, business, etc.  It’s about value that not only makes people feel like they paid a fair price, but in some significant way makes their lives better. This book provides important guidelines:  A means and a language through which to change capitalism’s current frame. In doing so, we are opened up to a new set of possibilities.  If capitalism itself can be changed, then perhaps there’s hope for the kind of culture that flourish within it, too.

In subsequent posts, I’ll look at the pillars of Haque’s new capitalism and explore their implications for progressive black culture.

Additional links:

• Check out Umair Haque’s posts on The Harvard Business Review blog
• Buy the book from Amazon (affiliate link)

This is hardly a new discussion. In fact, the slides below echo the talking points that I referenced here.  However, I think it’s still important to underscore the new rules of the road.  If black rock artists want an even chance to make, then you’ll have to be prepared for the game as it is, not as it was back in the 20th century.

Here are the slides:

Thanks to Hypebot for the headsup

Poking around the MIDEM site, I came across a whitepaper that really blew my head—Brainstorming Session on New Business Models for the Music Industry Report: From Theory to Action–and I think it’s something that everyone involved in indie music, especially black rock artists, should read and read again.  A lot of this stuff I was aware of, but reading this paper really made me rethink the advice I’ve been giving artists.

Now it’s true that, aside from Taylor Swift, the time for selling shiny discs is ending or over, depending on who you talk to.  However, the fact is that there’s more music being made today than ever.  Even more important is this: The amount of music being in paid to support music—merch, shows, etc.—is at an all time high.

Bottom line: There’s money to be made.  We just have to think differently, especially if you’re indie and don’t have a major label behind you.

So, what’s it about?

Connecting with fans

What this means is really making an effort to connect.  Not just getting names into a database.  Not just doing great music.  That’s hard enough, I know.  But, it’s about going above and beyond.  And artists who aren’t willing to do this will get left behind. Sorry.

The new models basically break down like so:

Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = The Business Model

It’s simple, right?  The authors of this paper give a bunch of examples, all the way from well know artists like Trent Reznor, Amanda Palmer and Jill Sobule to artists who are not nationally known but who, nevertheless, have profited from this approach.

Basically, the idea is to provide tiered offerings that make each more special than the previous.  The music might be free in digital format, but you could buy a 2-disc CD for a modest price.  Then, maybe there’s something even more premium that includes concert video.

Good thing, too, is that the authors provide a number of examples of ways to connect.

Reasons fans might buy what you’re selling

The paper also offers ten (10) reason that fans might buy what you’re selling.  What’s great is that it’s just a starting point.  For example, some reasons might include:

• Access (as in giving folks time with their favorite artist, and it might be a nice thank you to top fans)
• Exclusivity (giving value because not everyone will have whatever it is)
• Belonging (helping people feel like they’re part of a tribe)
• Time (saving or making)

There are others.  Again, these are just a starting point.

Finally, the paper ends by framing up how you can begin thinking about your offerings by taking you through a process that helps artists brainstorm about what’s unique about themselves.

The paper is free, but you’ll have to give MIDEM some contact info.  But it’s well worth it.

Download the paper here.

Do you guys have any stories about how you’re making it happen?  Leave a comment. I’d love to hear ‘em.

. . .and making music in, and trying to reach fans in, and trying to grow audiences in.  What does it all mean for what you do? I think the deepest bullet point is at the end:

The ROI of social media is your company will still exist in 5 years.

Additional link:

• Eric Qualman's blog

These just dropped last week.  I'd go for the hi-tops, although I wonder how they'd really look in 13's.  If you want to see the tees, click on the link in the press release and then search for "Bad Brains tees".

Vans also sponsors Killswitch Engage, Murs, and Ben Harper.

Additional link:

• Bad Brains site

For those of you who have an interest in the business of music and, if you don’t read him already, you really should check out Bob Lefsetz.  His is definitely an opinionated view of what’s ailing the music industry.  Many of his post sound like rants.  But, for the most part, he’s on point.

Take this recent post where he looks at the cons of signing to a major record label at this point in time:

If you’re looking for easy answers, maybe you’re tempted by the major
label deal. But really, it’s like joining a cult. Giving up all control
to an out of touch entity who tells you how to act. It’s scarier to
forge your own way. But it’s the only true way out of the wilderness.

Of course, major labels have long been inhospitable to Black artists who didn’t follow convention.  So, this isn’t really any new news.  But, as a reminder for both artists and those interested in progressive culture, this serves to reinforce the fact that, power is in the hands of consumers and creators.  And, in trying to determine who has more "power," it’s important to remember that the term is, now more than ever, relative.

So, do your thing.

To read Bob’s full post, click here.