Martti Kalliala (OK Do, Renaissance Man) and me met with the musicians Samim Winiger and Miguel Toro to talk about the future of music and copyright. Reflecting on Winiger and Toro’s latest project Crashroots, an online platform for collaborative music production and distribution, we covered issues from process to product – from remixing to international music culture. The article starts Remix, a series of writings on sharing and ownership in creative practices.
J.S.: What is the motivation behind Crashroots – producing music in an open-ended way and giving it out for free?
S.W.: I guess it started as part of the free culture movement. We believe that the time has come to apply the knowledge we have of open software design to music. Being open, we can take advantage of immediate release times and feedback as well as statistic-driven analysis of what people really want and what they don’t want. You get totally new views to music through being open about it in the making – wait five more years and it will be the modus operandi of the whole industry.
J.S.: So, Crashroots is all about sharing ideas?
S.W.: What we’re basically doing is that we’re picking up ideas floating around and repackaging them within an open community of music lovers. So, besides openness Crashroots is all about participation. It’s important to get people not only to listen to music but also to remix it, starting to engage and interact.
“It’s important to get people not only to listen to music but also to remix it, starting to engage and interact.”
J.S.: Like Jean-Luc Godard said, “it’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to”.
S.W.: Sure, and we believe that music gets better when people start putting out ideas at an early stage, getting others involved.
M.K.: This brings me to sampling, which is obviously an important part of the music making taking place on Crashroots. I’m intrigued by the fact that you encourage crediting the original tracks behind the samples even though their use is practically considered illegal. What’s your standpoint on the subject?
S.W.: I’m personally against copyright because I see music as a starting point for exploration.
M.T.: I feel like an archaeologist when I pick up a song. But while an archaeologist would place his discoveries in a museum for people to see them, we’re basically doing the same thing, yet bringing it to another level where people can actually rework the discoveries and give them a new life.
S.W.: If you think back, before recorded music a similar process occurred through songs sung to people in order to exchange them.
M.T.: We need to rethink the concept of owning and, through that, copyright. For example, I have been playing the drums since I was a kid. And how did I learn to play the drums? I just put on a Beatles record and copied Ringo Starr. So, basically I was sampling him. And this is how the millions of drummers the world over learned – by copying. Or think of Bernard Purdie, the drummer for James Brown, whose drum break in the song Funky Drummer has been sampled non-stop for 25 years now. Imagine him trying to claim royalties for these eight seconds. In the end, he didn’t come up with the part himself. What he did was that he went to Africa, heard the local music and translated it into his drumming.
J.S.: Crashroots really blurs the boundaries between production and consumption. Would you say that the main cultural product that Crashroots produces is the social process of making music rather than the pieces of music that come out of it?
S.W.: It’s the conversation first and foremost. Music in the end always carries a message whether you want it or not. And reworking culturally relevant things like that really hits the spot. As an example, if we take a track and do a mix in Berlin but someone in Minsk does another one and someone in Mexico does one, too, in between them there’s a conversation going on concerning the original sample – when it came out and all that. And that for me is the most important part. After that come the dancing people.
M.K.: Going beyond the site itself, who “is” Crashroots? For whom is it a brand or an umbrella to work under, in regard to, for instance, live shows?
S.W.: The thing is Crashroots completely turns around the closed old school record label model by saying that everybody is a member and only evaluating who’s an important member and who’s not over time. We have planned to do Crashroots concerts based on the idea that wherever we’re playing, we will invite all interesting Crashroots contributors from that part of the world to join us. And obviously get paid as well.
M.T.: There’s also another touring concept that we came up with which is something totally opposite: having a seven piece real life band playing the best songs from Crashroots live.
S.W.: We believe that these types of concepts are bound to be successful as the Crashroots fan base is really close to us, consisting mainly of people who make the music.
“Crashroots completely turns around the old school record label model by saying that everybody is a member and only evaluating who’s an important member and who’s not over time.”
J.S.: What if a song becomes a hit, how do you recognize and reward the people who participated in making it?
M.T.: Well, the best case scenario for the contributors would be that a label calls them up and signs them because they like what they’ve heard.
S.W.: And get the attention and publicity this other label can provide as this is what record labels are now – marketing channels. Additionally, on every release we give an opportunity for the artists to link to different kinds of support schemes: their Beatport accounts, online shops that sell their t-shirts etc. So basically, what we’re trying to do is to steer the flow of attention towards the artists who can then make the best out of it. We could obviously build an in-house shop but I think third party services are the way to go on the internet – don’t reinvent, just link it in. That’ll let the artists have their accounts and get the attention through us.
M.T.: And then there are the gigs and all that.
S.W.: We use the Creative Commons license so if one makes a hit from Crashroots taking my beat, Miguel’s bassline and his own melody, and gets signed to a major label, he’s obliged to ask all the parties and find a deal. And that is a human kind of process – not from lawyer to lawyer. I hope we can encourage deals like this to take place and get a community language going on – have records where you have literally ten people involved.
J.S.: Have you developed some kind of a business model for Crashroots?
M.T.: We only started Crashroots a couple of months ago so the business model isn’t quite set yet. However, we have been talking about the freemium model – giving all music files away for free and focusing on selling something physical, not meaning a CD or vinyl but some other means of embodiment.
M.K.: You see the freemium model applicable to musical content?
S.W.: Yes, we strongly believe that. For example, now we’re building up a community of people who take our music and actually use six hours reworking it in Ableton Live. Six hours is a huge time dedication! I mean you don’t even dedicate that much time to your partnership these days. So, that’s a really close relationship that we’re building. And if you give these people something of value, they’re actually very willing to pay for it. Think about a situation where we collaborate and I offer you something physical to put on your bookshelf as a token of the work. It looks amazing and has a purpose, and I think I can make you pay for it even if the price was a bit higher than a normal CD. I think that in order to make these models work, one needs to collaborate with artists and designers who can make physical things valuable and interesting. This model has been proven to work with software and even books but we have to prove it works now with music as well.
J.S.: At the moment, using Crashroots requires software for making music as there are no simple tools on site. So, the participation requires at least some knowledge and interest in music making. Do you see that as a good thing or would you rather like to see the roles of an amateur and a professional blurring or mixing within Crashroots?
M.T.: Some people have come up to say that they’re doing something with music for the first time on Crashroots, and I think that’s really cool. These people approach the subject with no preconceptions and might come up with something very interesting in the end.
S.W.: Apparently it takes a bit of literacy to do music and we would like to have semi-interested people doing it. Crashroots also has an underlying theme of cultural mash-uping. Our dream would be to release a song made by people from all different countries.
“Our dream would be to release a song made by people from all different countries.”
M.K.: How far does your personal influence as founders and “curators” of Crashroots reach regarding the end product, the music itself? What if the musical output of Crashroots turns into something you would consider bad? I mean, maintaining personal quality control must become impossible once the community grows beyond a certain scale.
M.T.: That’s a key question here: who decides what’s good and what’s bad. To be honest, so far 99% of the music has been good – to us and the community. And ‘good’ meaning also the things that were improved through the feedback of the community.
S.W.: The great thing about the platform we are using and building are its community-based voting tools. If you are constantly offering something the community considers bad you will be put on ‘pending’. But at some point, with, for instance, a thousand active users we will probably need to close down registration for a while. On the internet you need to keep your signal-to-noise ratio extremely high.
M.K.: But wouldn’t the closed community start to resemble the ‘closed label’ from the past again?
S.W.: With a thousand artists? That’s a huge difference. The thing is, the material itself is in the public so you can take our songs and start a new Crashroots with another community. But what we are trying to do here is not just about the music itself, but also the conversation. And conversation is small scale. When you go over ten thousand people you will end up in MySpace type of interaction, which is bad – it’s just too big. That’s why Twitter is so good: they manage to get down to those little groups of people. I would be proud to have an active community of ten thousand, not more. If you imagine every record label mutating into an open source music community, there will be thousands of them. Then you can specialize in hip hop, me in whatever type of dance music and so on. We just need to find a way to interact with each other.
M.K.: Compared to software, however, you are dealing with a much more culturally sensitive product.
S.W.: Yes. Even though it shouldn’t be. The thing is, looking twenty years into the future I strongly believe music will be generative. We will all be putting out our stems, all the parts a piece of music is built of, tagged with metadata. You could already build songs using algorithms saying “I need an aggressive bassline, a beat that is this and this tempo and this and this mood etc.” I, as a listener will bring my profile with me and the computer will adjust the music according to my listening habits. We won’t be listening to the same tracks anymore. And this is not that far; it’s already technically possible. It’s more a question of cultural adaptation. Then it will really be goodbye to Michael Jackson – the end of the superstar.