I thought this was an excellent if one-sided critique of the stranglehold big business has on the income of independent artists and creators in a wide spectrum of the creative industries.

To take one example, it had always been my assumption that copyright law worked in favour of music creators and performers.

Giblin and Doctorow show how copyright benefits routinely flow to the record labels and their corporate overlords for many years, sometimes generations, while the artists themselves spend themselves into penury paying off the debts of music production and “development.”

Do talent agents always seek the best deal for their clients? Well, not necessarily, especially when the talent agency possesses equity in the production studio.

Or when music labels have equity in Spotify.

In the creative industries as in many others the logic of private equity forces down the wages of labour. Luck favours the rich.

The authors favour corrective measures to level the playing field including reverting copyright to creatives after a reasonable period, fairer reporting of residual benefits, accessible accounting, and mandatory disclosure of financial conflict of interests.

Measures the EU have enacted contrary to public perception likely entrench the interests of the tech oligopolies and oligopsonies (read: “all powerful buyers like amazon”) by making the barriers to entry increasingly filled with endless read tape only the rich can navigate.

So the field is complex, littered with good intentions, and a minefield of conflicts of interest. ( )

I'm not so optimistic about the positive part of Giblin and Doctorow's analysis--policy tweaks are not going to realign this kind of market failure. Yet their analysis of what led to creators and their exploiters systematically surrendering rights and income to corporate rent-seekers is an excellent history of the the class warfare underpinning market evolution at this late stage of capitalism. ( )

Invigorating stuff. Starts slow, and gathers pace until by the last chapter there's a flurry of suggestions about what to do about toxic big capitalism. Especially worth it to discover the Rebecca Giblin papers on copyright and public domain books. ( )

Focuses on monopolization in the creative industries and how not just antitrust but other broken laws, including intellectual property laws, need to be fixed to fight it. Among other things, pithily notes that “giving more copyright to creators who are struggling against powerful buyers is like giving more lunch money to your bullied kid.” Any benefit is just going to be extracted from them, in the absence of bargaining power. One reason to consider creative industries as keystones, aside from their cultural power, is that they starkly show the problems with monopsonies (buyer-side monopolies): “One important and under-recognized characteristic of monopsony power is that it can arise at much lower concentrations than monopoly does: a buyer responsible for just 10 or 20 percent of a producer’s sales can have substantial power.” Since most creators face monopsony intermediaries like record labels or movie studios, this is highly relevant. “Amazon shakes down publishers, and, in turn, publishers shake down their workers and authors [and libraries],” and creative workers are especially vulnerable to this because there are so many noneconomic incentives to create, so artists will often feel pressure to accept—and if they don’t, there are others waiting in the wings to do so.

The book also explains why newspapers are dying (predatory takeovers left them vulnerable to being destroyed when the internet came in, and advertising intermediaries are taking up to 70% of the remaining ad revenue) and the various shenanigans music labels use to avoid paying artists (including by getting streaming platforms to give them revenue streams that they don’t have to share with artists, unlike “royalties”).

The second half explores not just antitrust, but mandatory financial transparency for creators, copyright, contract, and labor law solutions that might make things better. There’s some difficulties—at one point they both suggest lowering royalty rates for music streaming to make it easier for competition to enter the market and increasing rates paid to creators—but a lot of what they offer is worth thinking about. (Even that might be managed; they optimistically suggest that better databases could cut out a lot of overhead, though we would also likely need to figure out how to pay labels less.) ( )