Getting Paid

Brett Bonfield, Director, Collingswood (N.J.) Public Library; PhD student, LIS,Rutgers University; Adjunct Professor, iSchool, Drexel University;info@boycottharpercollins.com

On September 15, 1996, the musicians from the Philadelphia Orchestra wenton strike. This was a big deal in Philadelphia: our orchestra meant somethingto us. For many years, the orchestra gave away a large portion of the ticketsto its open-air summer concerts, allowing the not-sowealthy to attendperformances. We took pride in its excellence and world renown, with thefact that a word associated with “Philadelphia” could be more prestigiousthan “cream cheese” or “cheese steaks” or “soft pretzels.” Our orchestrareflected well on us.In the early days of the strike, “How about that orchestra?” becamealmost as common a greeting as “yo” or “how ya doin’?” And we all sidedwith the musicians. The narrative was easy to follow. Management wasgreedy and incompetent. It had chosen the wrong pieces to perform, wastedmoney, and mishandled marketing. Worst of all, it somehow managed to loseits recording contract with EMI. Now management wanted the musicians todig it out of the hole it had created for itself by agreeing to smaller annualraises and bonuses. The musicians’ strike vote was unanimous, 100–0.Soon after, I ran into a friend of mine, one of the best musicians I know. Jonathan had started out as a drummer, focusing mostly on jazz, but hadgone on to teach himself dozens of other instruments and styles of music. Healso became one of the area’s experts in piano tuning and repair.“I’m not happy about the strike,” he told me. “These are greatmusicians, and some of them are good customers, too. But I know a lot of great musicians and I’m not quite sure why these hundred folks get all thismoney and job security and no one else I know does. Philly Joe Jones neverhad tenure anywhere. He played music because that’s what musicians do, nomatter what we get paid. Maybe this strike will give other musicians more of a chance. Maybe more folks will come out to see the rest of us play.”I still think of Jonathan every time I try to understand how culturalactivities and artifacts relate to money. As I see it, the relationship can bereduced to three (or four) basic questions:1.Who gets paid?2.For what?3.Under what terms?4.For public librarians: How do we fit in?How you answer one question affects how you answer the others. Forinstance, for two or three decades rock musicians made most of their moneythrough album sales. For the last decade or so, they have made most of their

money through sales of tickets to live performances. Now online sales of digital music files offer the possibility of a new dominant financial model. These changes in the economics of rock music have changed the answers towho gets paid, for what, and under what terms, and even changed howlibraries fit in. The financial arrangements around art are accidents, the result (asAdam Ferguson and Friedrich Hayek might point out)

of human action, butnot the execution of any human design. We pay movie actors, directors,production crews, and studios, in part, by buying tickets. We pay theirtelevision counterparts by watching commercials.Because this is how it is, it’s easy to believe that it must be so, butthere is no compelling reason to believe that any of the current economicmodels for movies or television will last forever. Just the opposite: it seemsoverwhelmingly likely that these models will change dramatically, that it willhappen fairly soon, and the changes will occur in a way that is not yet easilypredictable but will seem, after the fact, to have been inevitable. Somethings will be gained from this change and some things will be lost. Cabletelevision has given us

Mad Men

The Daily Show

, and

Dog the Bounty Hunter

and a profusion of other choices, and the very existence of thosechoices has taken away the communal power of Walter Cronkite,

The Beverly Hillbillies

, and

Roots

. The dynamics of the market, along with its increasing size, have helpedcreate a financial polarization for the companies that produce our popularmedia—not just television and movies, but also music and books—as well asthe people most responsible for their creation. What is not clear is whetherthe audience experience of these activities is getting better or worse. Whenthe most gifted athletes can afford to train full time, they get bigger, faster,and more talented, but it’s possible that some art, perhaps all art, is subjectto different algorithms. Perhaps writers have plenty of time to write as wellas they’re capable of writing even if they can’t afford to do it full time orchoose not to try.As Jonathan mentioned in reference to the Philadelphia Orchestrastrike, artists are going to practice their art. Musicians make music. Painterspaint. Writers write. This is what they do. Dickinson wrote poetry. Kafka wroteprose. Maybe making famous writers wealthier than they have ever beenbefore doesn’t result in better work, either individually or in aggregate. Thisis not to suggest that the people involved in our current publishing processadd no value. The talented people working as agents, editors, and publicistsmake the system more efficient by identifying noteworthy writers, by helpingthem make good pieces better, and by packaging and promoting the betterworks so they draw more attention. We, as public librarians, play asupporting role in this system: the potential information needs and interestsof our communities far exceed our shelf space and budgets so, like agentsand publishers, we vet material, selecting the most appropriate works for thecollections we steward.As with many labor-intensive tasks, technology has begun replacing

human expertise, removing the need for gatekeepers by enabling writers tomake their work available directly to potential readers, and helping readersto share opinions with each other with less apparent mediation. What we’rebeginning to discover is something that’s probably been obvious all along. Think of it this way: I went to college with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist JunotDiaz. He was a good writer even then; everyone on campus who cared aboutsuch things knew he was the best undergraduate writer at RutgersUniversity. At the time he was just another undergraduate at a state schoolwriting aggressive, precocious stories. But he was already better than a largeportion of the writers who had contracts with major publishing houses. Evenwriting an eighth as well as he does now, pretending for the moment that wecan accurately measure such things, he was already at the far tail of the bellcurve. He just didn’t yet have a contract or even an agent. He wasn’t gettingpaid to write, he was paying faculty members to help him improve hiswriting. Today’s teenaged Junot Diazes can go directly to the public with theirwork (as can all the other writers whose work is closer to the center of thebell curve). As Jamie LaRue, director of Douglas County (Colo.) Libraries,pointed out during a panel discussion at ALA Annual Conference this past June, hundreds of thousands of writers each year are doing just that,circumventing the entrenched publishers and making their work availabledirectly to the public. The annual volume of their cumulative output now farexceeds the number of traditionally published manuscripts.In the June 25, 2007 issue of

The New Yorker

, classical music critic AlexRoss wrote about his visits to orchestras in Indianapolis, Nashville, andBirmingham:“I learned what touring musicians have been saying for years: thatlesser-known orchestras can deliver sure-footed, commandingperformances, and that the notion of a stratospheric orchestral élite issomething of an illusion.”

Ross’s observation expands to the orchestral level what MalcolmGladwell describes at the level of the individual musician in

Blink

: “Sincescreens became commonplace” in auditions, preventing orchestra hiringcommittees from knowing anything about the identity of the musicianapplying for a position in the orchestra, “the number of women in the topU.S. orchestras has increased fivefold.”

Cultural merit is up for grabs. Labels like Philadelphia Orchestra,concertmaster, “Big Six” publisher, and even “library edition” no longer bearthe imprimatur they once did. Which means that who deserves to get paid,for what, and under what terms are more open and compelling questionsthan they have been in a very long time, and perhaps more confusing thanever. It isn’t just confusing to publishers like HarperCollins, Macmillan, orSimon & Schuster, but also to librarians and our associations andpublications, including ALA, PLA, and

Public Libraries