Crowdsourcing vs. Piracy
Crowd sourcing is one of the hot buzzwords in media financing right now, and is touted as one of the top solutions to the raging piracy problem that is plaguing the movie and record industries.
The idea behind crowdsourcing is that the an audience puts forth financial contributions to fund a project and in a sense the power of the producer shifts from the hands of the few, to the hands of the many, and so does some of the potential revenue.
In theory this is a great approach, and on a small scale I can see this working on local projects with smaller budgets quite easily. On a much larger scale I want to see it work, but I am skeptical.
However, there are millions of people out there that could potentially put forward a nominal contribution. If that were to happen, you would have a Hollywood sized budget for a movie. Think $20 x 2 million people and you have yourself a $40 million dollar budget.
It all sounds very easy on paper, but when heart-wrenching natural disasters fail to mobilize those kind of monetary figures, you can see why I’m a bit hesitant.
In my opinion an initiative like The Biracy Project, a film crowd funding venture, will succeed if it can instill a sense of ownership and pride onto its potential investors, but this won’t be easy with a generation that feels entitled to free handouts. The lines between piracy and free downloading are now so blurred that there is no clear delineation between right and wrong when it comes to media consumption.
Many people that would never steal a candy from the candy store have no problem stealing a song via LimeWire or BitTorrent. It’s virtual, it’s indirect, it’s harmless. In a nutshell — it’s not really happening and you haven’t done anything wrong. For things like TV it doesn’t feel like you ever really paid for it anyway, even though you did.
Any new media, whether it be music, photography, or film is faced with this challenge. The current meritocracy has ultimately put the power in the hands of the audience, but it’s an audience that can have what they want without paying for it, and worse yet, they even feel entitled to it. They may pay if they feel an added level of connection, but they don’t need to.
It’s a dangerous time for artists and media companies and like, but this is the evolution of media. I still remember watching the Grammy’s as a high school senior and seeing the president of the recording industry association (or whatever he was) whining and pleading with the audience and eventually even accusing them of theft. Metallica were the forerunners of the cause and were terribly unsympathetic.
The fact that nobody cared about Metallica losing money, as they were already millionaires, should have forced the record industry’s hand, but it did not. It should have been fairly obvious that normal people wouldn’t relate to millionaires losing money, but that’s how out of touch the whole media industry was at that time.
It essentially took Apple to come in and start a revolution with iTunes. They saw what was happening and capitalized on it — making it easier to pay a small fee than to download for free. Genius and simple, with no complaining.
A few years later the film industry began airing anti-piracy commercials. They were smart enough to show examples of common folk that were affected, and not the likes of Tom Cruise and the celebrity jet-set, but still it didn’t stop the media sharing cannonball from tearing a whole right through the middle of Hollywood.
The challenge in this media climate is that budgets are shrinking which means a number of things will happen:
1.) We will pay more to continue this level of entertainment
2.) Artists and producer types will be paid less
3.) The quality of entertainment, at least on a technical level, will degrade.
4.) Prime time North American shows will start to look more and more like an episode of Coronation Street and less like CSI
5.) Technological advancements like 3D will temporarily keep the industry from collapsing
6.) YouTube will triumph over everything and we will be watching the modern equivalent of Wayne’s World permanently.
The pressure is on artists to create better content for people so that they will pay for it, but the equal pressure is not on consumers to pay. How do you engage an audience to the point where they are willing to pay more than usual, but for a piece of ownership?
I will sign-up and trial The Biracy Project and post a review once I see how it all works.
