Transparency and pumpkins

Providence, Rhode Island is one of my favorite places in the world. I spent some of the best years of my life there. I made friends there. I met my wife there. I knew every secret it had. I rode a bike 50mph down the bus tunnel at midnight. I climbed through Fort Thunder’s roof into a costume party. One Halloween visiting the RISD dorms, I threw pumpkins from the window of David Byrne’s old room. At least someone claimed it was his. He spent some good years there too. It’s the kind of place where art leaves a mark, and every RISD kid claimed their dorm used to be his.

One pumpkin made it almost the whole way down College Hill.

This was all summoned up thinking about this great op-ed Mr. Byrne just wrote in the New York Times. If you haven’t read it yet, go now.

I’ll wait.

“Perhaps the biggest problem artists face today is [the] lack of transparency.”

In his op-ed, David uses a perfect metaphor, talking about royalty accounting as the music industry’s black box. It acts as sanitizer, taking streaming revenue and lumping all the fractions of pennies together into large payouts that even larger labels can then carve back into pennies to dole out. All of it stays hidden behind non-disclosure agreements. Musicians, the ones whose work all of this relies on, are kept in the dark. There’s no data to help them build audience, there’s no sharing of information, nothing besides a check in the mail — if they’re lucky.

Everything in the op-ed is spot-on. The argument for transparency is one for equity, and one that will lead to better outcomes for all. David urges major labels and streaming services to view artists as partners, a lesson both could learn by looking at the success of independent labels where musicians are already treated as partners more often than not.

Those big businesses spend a great deal of time talking about their relationships with musicians, but at the end of the day music itself is treated more like a commodity in a supply chain. So it’s unsurprising that musicians are dismissed as partners and treated as suppliers. This is a labor issue. Byrne is absolutely right that artists are entrepreneurs, and they need the right tools if they’re going to fight for transparency.

This is my bias. At CASH Music we do open source — transparent code — for musicians. Tools that are made with and for musicians, free and in public, with the goal of creating sustainable models that anyone can look at, build on, and understand. If you’re handed a bunch of numbers from a black box it’s only transparent as far as you can trust what you’re seeing. Until you know how the black box works it’s murky at best.

David Byrne eloquently points to the goal. Transparency is desperately needed in this industry. The way I think we get there is through open tools that empower musicians to embrace their entrepreneurial ways. I’m not expecting streaming services to open source their code any time soon, but as more musicians control their work they can also control how they bring it to their audience. When they control the release they control the data, and with enough data artists gain leverage.

That leverage leads to new relationships, new standards for data and interoperability, and open models that bring true transparency to the industry.

So yes. We need transparency — in both data and code. It is the end and the means to reach it.

I wonder what kind of path forward David Byrne has in mind. I wonder if he ever dropped a pumpkin out his dorm window. So many “what if” scenarios are thrown around about streaming but this one is important and realistic. This is something we can make happen. How do we get there?

Without some force behind it the pumpkin will never make it all the way down College Hill. Open tools that aren’t controlled by labels or startups swing power back to artists. That’s one path forward. Maybe there are others. All of us working together can find ways to ensure artists have a say in their own future.

I don’t know if I’m still using a metaphor or just living in a happy memory, but it felt great to see that pumpkin start whipping down the hill.