Training can be a place to start...

The general premise of this blog, that artists are not involved in activism, is untrue. Many artists are involved in social causes. The International Alliance for Women in Music, and the International Women’s Brass Conference both work for the rights of women in music. Together they have about a thousand members. There are many well-known organizations that offer poor children music lessons and youth orchestras. There are artists who work and lobby to strengthen public arts funding. There are artists who offer free concerts to the homeless. There is an entire genre of new music referred to as acoustic ecology that is deeply involved in environmental activism. There are many such examples. And especially in the USA, the very act of trying to be a creative artist at all is close to being a form of activism, if not subversion, because it often challenges our nation’s narrowly defined orthodoxy concerning the primacy of the marketplace.

The blog’s second, and more specific premise, is that artists are not actively involved in the debates surrounding net neutrality, even though these policy decisions will strongly affect them. This second part of the statement is untrue. Most classical musicians are so far outside the marketplace that systems of licensing would not have much effect on their incomes (or the use or abuse of their work) regardless of what policies are effected.

A classical CD can become a Billboard Bestseller with as little as 300 sold units. According to recent stats, the official total sales of the top 25 titles amounted to 5,000 copies, an average of 200 units a recording – including downloads. In financial terms, we’re talking chicken feed for many of even the most successful classical recordings. See:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR2010012904193.html

Even famous orchestras seldom make money with recordings of even popular works. See:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat/2010/07/the_future_of_the_recording_in.html

In other words, only the most infinitesimal fraction of musicians make significant amounts of money from recordings, so many of the licensing decisions are fairly irrelevant for most of them. It can be little wonder that they are not interested in the policy “debates.”

There are a few areas where some genuine conflicts evolve, such as licensing agreements that can shut down small Internet sites that play new music, but these groups are so marginal they would have little say even if they tried to become more politically active.

On the other hand, I really like the ideas presented in Bill Ivey’s comment above. Our arts schools could do a much better job of training the people we need to lead us to better public policy for the arts. These people need to study the systemic failurs of our system, and especially by comparing it to the more effective public funding systems that exist in almost all other developed countries.