Tragic Irony

From the early days of the Decade of Dysfunction, the apologists for piracy reliably presented file sharing as an action that hedged, in one way or another, against media corporation profits, corporate musicians, or corporate control over culture. Corporations were succeeding in their efforts to assert their will over the future of creativity, the thinking went, and that sin far exceeded whatever transgressions were inherent to piracy.

In regards to creative industries, we know that this anti-corporatism was misplaced in many regards. Corporate record labels and film studios only existed as a function of individual artists choosing to partner with them and in some cases these corporate entities invested in beloved content and helped artists build serious careers. However, the RIAA lawsuits were forever relevant to public attitudes of the biggest content companies. At the same time, income inequality in the United States was yawning just as the influence of special interests in government grew. Neither public nor private institutions were held in particularly high regard in the 2000s (or since). In the context of the times, piracy felt like a vote of “no confidence” if not an outright protest of the world as it stood.

The problem with a vote of “no confidence” is that it ends up being a vote for the side you oppose, the side happy to pursue its own goals motivated by power or profit. Blame it on the novelty of it all or the confusion spawned through the Decade of Dysfunction, but digital pirates’ misunderstanding of and disregard for copyright led them toward creating a fertile terrain for the very corporatism in art they claimed to abhor.

As discussed in the last chapter, one of the strengths of copyright is the way it efficiently engineers incentives for creative works. But it also provides an answer to the problem of how keep creativity as independent as possible in the midst of private or state power which might have their own interests in mind.

In the 2000s, as people entertained the notion of music and art regressing to the days before copyright, the idea emerged that we might return to a patronage model, like the one that supported the composers and artists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. If consumers were going to stop spending money on creative works, choosing to believe that copyright no longer mattered, this prediction made some sense. Without the incentives secured by copyright, labels and publishers would eventually disappear without consumer support. Artists, desperate for financing, would be gradually drawn by this desperation to those institutions and individuals in society who still had superfluous money to spend. As Jaron Lanier observes, “What free really means is that artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers will have to cloak themselves within stodgy institutions. We forget what a wonder, what a breath of fresh air it has been to have creative people make their way in the world of commerce instead of patronage.”1

In the market-based capitalism most of the world lives under today, the new nobility and monarchs are still found, to some degree, in government grants, but mostly in the forms of the multinational corporation, whose patronage is facilitated through advertising and marketing companies. The acceptance of “free” does not encourage creative independence or cultural democracy; it is effectively a surrender of power on the part of consumers, leaving a vacuum for other more powerful institutions to fill. To decide that creative culture should now be “free” is not a rejection of the commercial market, it is a rejection of one’s own potential influence upon that market: self-disenfranchisement by the dollar.

In the music industry, the shift toward corporate patronage was observed and felt.

In the UK, where the music industry actually experienced growth in the late 2000s, the shift toward methods of patronage was seen in an increase of Business-to-Business revenues (B2B) versus Business-to-Consumer (B2C) ones. In 2008, total UK music industry revenues grew a full 4.7 percent despite the ongoing problem of piracy. In a report written by Will Page for PRS for Music, their chief economist, he found that business-to-consumer (B2C) revenues (consumer spending) had risen slightly, by about 3 percent, over 2007 figures. But B2B revenues, such as corporate sponsorship and the licensing of songs for advertisements, jumped a full 10 percent. Page noted that the B2B went from comprising 20 percent of total revenues in 2007 to 25 percent in 2008. B2B revenues rose again in 2009 and 2010, even as B2C revenues shrank, in signs of an ongoing shift between consumer and corporate patronage. In a separate report by IEG, North American marketing companies planned to spend over $1.09 billion to sponsor music venues, festivals and tours in 2010, a year-on-year increase of 4.2 percent, and then $1.17 billion in 2011, a 7.3 percent increase.

We have discussed various “new models” for creative commerce in the digital age. In 2009, Sean Adams, editor of the UK music blog Drowned In Sound, articulated his view of where the music business was headed in the event that sales disappeared. “I think corporate patronage is the only viable model,” he said. “Something that mashes up Levi’s ads in the ’90s and the Starbucks label.”

“At the end of the rainbow of open culture,” warns Jaron Lanier, “lies an eternal spring of advertisements…. Any other form of expression is to be remashed, anonymized, and decontextualized to the point of meaninglessness. Ads, however, are to be made ever more contextual, and the content of the ad is absolutely sacrosanct. No one—and I mean no one—dares to mash up ads served in the margins of their website by Google.”2

As digital piracy took hold through the 2000s and sales revenues sank, the American independent music scene became ever more branded and used as a sales prop for car companies and banks.

Beloved Pacific Northwest rockers Modest Mouse lent one of their most beautiful songs, “Gravity Rides Everything,” to be used in a minivan commercial in the early 2000s, setting the stage for what was to come. Torchbearers of anti-corporate punk, Sonic Youth, signed on to release an album through the Starbucks’ record label, Hear Music. Chicago post-rock legends The Sea And Cake sold one of their songs to appear in a Citigroup ad in 2009. Neon Indian, far and away one of the most hyped new bands of 2009, followed up their critically acclaimed debut album Psychic Chasms with a highly anticipated single in 2010. The song was released by Green Label Sounds, a “record label” which is in reality a branding vehicle for Mountain Dew. Grizzly Bear, another highly-touted young band from Brooklyn, enjoyed a wildly successful 2009 with their album, Veckatimist, and its lead single, the irresistibly catchy “Two Weeks.” The song found its monetized success as the soundtrack to a Volkswagen ad. Then, Grizzly Bear released a new single in April 2010 as a jingle for a Washington State Lottery commercial. Vampire Weekend did a Honda commercial, Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs recorded a cover for Chipotle burrito, Phoenix broke though to a far wider audience only after lending a lead single to Cadillac, and every week or two another “Indie” band was announced to be partnering with Taco Bell, Bushmills, or Chili’s restaurants. Green Label Sounds, Mountain Dew’s “label” handled by the marketing agency Cornerstone Promotions, was just the first corporate label looking for a foothold in the indie rock demographic. Vice Marketing client Scion announced their own label in 2011 and Converse shoes (another Cornerstone Promotions client) built a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and invited bands in to record for free. The young hip-hop duo The Cool Kids’ own Green Label Sounds release even included a Mountain Dew logo within the album cover art. If The Shins, Death Cab For Cutie, Broken Social Scene, or The Rapture had done anything like the above in the early 2000s, the music scene’s eyebrows would have collectively been raised. After the Decade of Dysfunction, fans barely noticed.

For such a shift to occur in the realm of independent music was noteworthy, because the subculture traced its “independent” lineage back to the stridently anti-authoritarian, pro-community, self-determined movements of punk rock, hardcore, and college rock. Certainly, consumers’ knowledge of piracy’s harmful effects for bands, combined with the identification of the indie rock demographic by marketers, combined with the artists’ desperation for money equated to the paradigm shift in this unlikely corner of music culture.

Ben Sisario of the New York Times noted in a 2010 article that “lifestyle brands are becoming the new record labels.”3 He documented the construction of the recording studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Converse. Josh Rabinowitz, music director at the Grey Agency, told Sisario that “Indie-inflected music serves as a kind of Trojan horse. Consumers feel they are discovering something that they believe to be cool and gaining admittance to a more refined social clique.”

Artists like Neon Indian, Wavves, Best Coast, Bon Iver, Gorillaz, Vampire Weekend, Kid Cudi and many others had signed up to represent the “Trojan horse” for one brand or another. If young music fans felt under a pre-meditated marketing attack after reading Rabinowitz’ quote, Zach Baron of the Village Voice provided a reality check. In the past, he said, consumers could “vote” for the major label machine or the independent music scene with their wallet:4

Fast forward to 2010. How do consumers vote with their dollar? By not spending it at all. Ask Ted Leo—people are no longer buying enough records to support musicians, period. Major, independent, whatever. No wonder then, as Sisario puts it, ‘lifestyle brands are becoming the new record labels.’ Someone has to pay artists, and increasingly, we’re not doing it. So who is the enemy in 2010? We are. Not the majors. Not Converse. Us.

The link between digital piracy and a rise in corporate patronage was also acknowledged by the owners of Cornerstone Promotions, Jon Cohen and Rob Stone. The game of linking corporate brands to edgy young bands was pioneered by Cornerstone, a Manhattan marketing agency. Along with Converse and Mountain Dew, Cornerstone counted Bushmills, Levi’s, Nike, TDK and Fiat among many other clients.

“Cornerstone is benefitting greatly from some of the turmoil in the music industry,” Cohen said on the Fox Business cable channel in April of 2008, above an info banner on the screen that read, “Spinning Radio Jams into Corporate Jingles” and “Cornerstone uses strategies to target 15-34 year olds.”5

Asked by the Fox Business anchor whether Cornerstone was in the business of helping artists to “sell out,” Cohen again alluded to the effects of music piracy in the music business, explaining, “The artists tend to do very well. The record labels do very well. The publishers do very well. And in a very tough environment in the music business this has become a big source of income.”

Cohen also illustrated the major difference between consumer patronage and corporate patronage. For music supported by fans, through the mechanisms of a record label and album sales, the idea for a song can come from anywhere. The artist has the freedom to explore, to change and to challenge themselves along with their audience. As described by Cohen, corporate patronage begins and ends with the “brand,” with a client looking for sales of their product:

The way we put our deal together is it starts with the brand and the idea. They come to us, give us some information, and Cornerstone is very much rooted in music and the culture that surrounds it so our job is to come up with some good creative thinking and then figure out, who is the best fit? Who are the right artists to work with? Do those artists show a passion for that brand? And can we bring everyone together to have one strong common goal, to really expose what the brand is trying to achieve?

We can view corporate patronage through the prism of incentives. Under such a system, artists are given incentives to pander and give corporate brands the kind of music that they want. Music fans become incidental. And we get watered down, cross-genre collaborations like the ones sponsored by Converse, which result in songs about having fun, acting crazy and—more than anything—being an individual! Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast participated in one such corporate patronized collaboration with Kid Cudi and a member of Vampire Weekend. The song was called “All Summer.”

“We just made something that is a fun song,” Cosentino told the Times’ Sisario, “that will hopefully make people dance around in their Converse during the summer.”

Art is a sloppy, unhinged search for the truth—shared with an audience. Corporate patronage hems in that search and controls it, ensuring that artistic expressions fit within certain boundaries that are helpful to sales of soda or cars.

But the reach of the facilitators of corporate patronage, like Cornerstone, is not confined to music. It affects music journalism as well. Everyone knows that bands are desperate for cash for their recordings in the wake of music piracy, but online websites and blogs that depend exclusively on the low advertising rates of the web are just as desperate. The media website Gawker has reported on numerous examples of bloggers who have failed to disclose the fact that they have received advertising money in exchange for their positive coverage.6 The clear label of “sponsored post” used on Gawker or The Awl for content that has been sponsored by an advertiser is a gesture toward the limits of normal advertising revenues in digital media. But are all sponsored posts labeled as such and what happens when the same patron that is funding the band is funding a music blog through advertising?

The music website Pitchfork emerged through the 2000s as the premier tastemaker for young music fans of the era. Over time, the website grew and developed their business, even getting into the business of producing music festivals in Chicago and Paris. Some questioned whether Pitchfork was undermining their journalistic credibility. Wouldn’t they be tempted to promote the bands that played their festivals, in the interest of driving ticket sales, while ignoring those artists who didn’t play ball?

When the site announced “Pitchfork.tv” in 2008 (an online television feature) Jim DeRogatis interviewed Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber for the Chicago Sun-Times and held his feet to the flame on the direction of his increasingly powerful website.7 Schreiber easily dusted off DeRogatis’ insinuations that a conflict of interest was emerging.

“I don’t want to sound over-sincere,” Schreiber said, “but it really is completely about the music we like and the music we’re into and music criticism in general, and so far that’s worked, so it would be not wise to suddenly be insincere… Our advertising department is completely separate from editorial and also from Pitchfork.tv. These things are totally independent of one another. We see where the conflicts of interest could exist, and we try to think about that so that it can become a non-issue.”

Jim DeRegotis cited Bob Pitman, the former head of AOL Time Warner and his strategy of corporate synergy: “The idea was that a band signs to Warner Bros. Records, its song is used in the soundtrack of Warner Bros.-produced movies and TV shows, it’s championed in Time magazine, it plays at Warner Bros.-owned theme parks, and AOL sells the music and the videos. They called him ‘Bob Pitchman’ and it was all about sell, sell, sell.”

“Right. Exactly,” said Schreiber. “That to me is the whole problem. I don’t know… I see where you’re coming from, but it’s not like we’re doing what we’re doing just for corporate expansion or more money or something like that. It’s a new model; we’re just kind of testing it out and seeing how it goes.”

DeRogatis noted that Sound Opinions, his radio show with Greg Kot, would never get in the concert business because they “wouldn’t be journalists or critics anymore.”

“I think there’s more flexibility than that,” Schreiber responded, “provided that you are being true to your ideals.”

And what were the “ideals” of Pitchfork? As a reader of the site since 2000, the attraction of the site was its independence from the traditional music press and music industry. You could trust the site to promote the music that they sincerely believed to be good.

As noted by Todd Patrick in our interview, Cornerstone Promotions had a cozy relationship with FADER Magazine, one of the most stylish and hip chronicles of edgy culture. It turns out that there is barely a line in which Cornerstone stops and FADER starts. In an interview found on YouTube, Cornerstone co-founder Rob Stone described the relationship with The FADER:8

Cornerstone is a standalone company from FADER. Jon, who is my partner on the business, we own both companies outright. But without a doubt the ability to be on the pulse of what is happening on the FADER side with emerging artists and Indie bands and the world that’s around FADER definitely helps us with the work that we do at Cornerstone.

So, The FADER helped to keep Cornerstone “on the pulse” of music trends, which they could then use to convince their real audience—corporate brands—that they were cool enough to market their products. Stone could claim the independence of the two entities all he wanted, but FADER was founded just two years after Cornerstone, held the same two owners and shared the same office space on 23rd Street in Manhattan. And it is apparently taken for granted by employees that FADER belongs to Cornerstone. In two separate interviews found on YouTube, Cornerstone employee Kevin Nicholson respectively describes Cornerstone as “a lifestyle marketing company and we also have a magazine called The FADER which is—we keep it two separate entities but it’s still the same company”9; and “we also own a publication called The FADER Magazine.”10

As much as The FADER employed many talented writers, designers and editors who covered emerging culture with aplomb, Todd Patrick was correct that it didn’t exist “to be a great magazine” as other publications might. The FADER was a crucial tool in Cornerstone’s business of facilitating corporate patronage.

On Wednesday, December 3rd 2008, a press release appeared in the inbox of music journalists:11

PITCHFORK AND FADER MEDIA ANNOUNCE STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP: Leading Voices In Emerging Music And Culture Join Forces To Offer Enhanced Opportunities For Advertisers and Readers

New York, NY: The FADER and Pitchfork, the two leading voices in emerging music and culture, have announced a partnership designed to extend the reach and enhance both brands.

The deal will include integrated advertising and sponsorship opportunities across all properties and platforms, including print, online, festivals, events, and unique content exchanges.

“We are extremely excited to be working with Pitchfork,” said Andy Cohn, Group Publisher and Vice President of FADER Media. “We know that the ability to leverage both properties will offer great value to our readers and advertisers alike.”

“We love The FADER and are continually impressed with their ability to navigate the ever-changing media landscape in a way that always stays true to their unique vision,” said Pitchfork’s Publisher/COO Chris Kaskie. “We believe this partnership will complement both brands and enhance what we can offer our advertising partners, and most importantly, our readers.”

Though the press release made zero mention of Cornerstone, the email was sent by a Cornerstone employee.

As much as Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber was conscientious of his site staying true to its independent ideals, what followed from this “strategic partnership” suggested otherwise, that corporate patronage from Cornerstone meant less freedom for Pitchfork to cover the bands and issues they thought were important and less ability for them to be honest with their readers. Advertising is a reality of nearly all media, of course, and its danger of shaping and influencing editorial content is nothing new. But in their embrace of corporate patronage, Pitchfork crossed a line.

Before and even shortly after the ostensible partnership with Cornerstone, Pitchfork had covered examples of corporate patronage in independent music, sometimes with disdain. When Rolling Stone and Camel cigarettes were implicated in an attempt to pass off a Camel advertisement as an editorial feature on “Indie Rock,” Pitchfork noted that “Rolling Stone has come under fire from bloggers and message board pundits who believe the publication complicit in an alleged scheme to dupe lovers of indie rock.”12 In January 2009, the month after signing the “partnership,” Pitchfork wrote that a Pepsi commercial featuring Bob Dylan and Will.i.am was “pretty gross.”13 When Pitchfork posted news articles on an artist partnering with a shoe company, for example, the brand of the patronizing company was nearly always kept out of the headline and sub-headline.

Days after the FADER deal was announced, Pitchfork posted a flurry of internship openings, on December 11th 2008. The next month a news story appeared about DJ Shadow designing a shoe through Reebok. Reebok, a Cornerstone client, was mentioned in the sub-headline. The same month they posted an interview with Matt & Kim, in which they spoke approvingly of Cornerstone’s Green Label Sounds and the FADER label. The article conspicuously linked to both Converse, whom the band had done a song for, and Green Label Sounds.14 Already, Pitchfork’s integrity was compromised. The article mentioned Cornerstone related Converse, Green Label Sounds and the FADER label—and Pitchfork had just signed the “advertising and content” partnership—but there was zero disclosure of this, nor was there any mention of Cornerstone.

That interview, which appeared in the “news” section of the site, would be just one of dozens of Pitchfork “news” articles on Cornerstone-backed projects like Green Label Sounds, Levi’s Pioneer Sessions, songs commissioned by Nike, Converse’s Three Artists One Song campaign, and the Bushmills Since Way Back ad campaign. These “news” items usually featured the involved brand in the headline, linked to the ad campaign’s homepage, featured embedded videos or songs created by and for the advertising campaign or printed sizeable excepts from press releases. Essentially, that is what corporate patronage turned the Pitchfork news section into, a surreptitious space for Cornerstone to promote its projects while enjoying Pitchfork’s “Indie” stamp of approval among young influencers. Why try to convince an influential music site that they should cover your campaign when you can just as easily pay them to do so?

What’s more, the approving tone of the articles bordered on self-parody. In 2010, Pitchfork wrote of Wavves’ “Mountain Dew-tastic” single released through Green Label Sounds.15 When they announced another Green label Sounds single from Neon Indian that year, the article finished with the aside, “Have you guys tried that Mountain Dew Game Fuel stuff yet? Terrible name, but that shit is really good. Best New Sodas.”16

In 2009, Pitchfork.tv followed Wavves at South-by-Southwest. The video included over six minutes of Wavves hanging out at the Levi’s FADER Fort, playing in front of the Levi’s logo, picking out Levi’s jeans and holding a Levi’s bag. This, on an “Indie Rock” standard-bearing website that was covering the breakout “DIY” star of 2009. Credits at the end of the video went to the Levi’s FADER Fort, The FADER and Cornerstone Promotions.17 The video was inked and embedded on the FADER website under the headline, “FADER Pitchfork TV: Daytripping with Wavves.” A strange post followed:18

Full disclosure: Some of us used to work occasionally for Pitchfork. None of them have ever worked here. Now we are kind of working together but not on anything fun. All of us apparently love Wavves, which is why it’s hilarious that when Pitchfork TV recently filmed an episode of Daytripping with the band while in Texas, most of it ended up being shot at The FADER Fort.

In the case of the Bushmills campaign in 2011, it was common to be reading a “news” item on Pitchfork about Bushmills that included a video produced by Bushmills, while that “news” item was surrounded by ads for the very same Bushmills ad campaign. Bushmills produced a lengthy documentary on Pitchfork’s Paris music festival in 2011 and sponsored the site’s South-by-Southwest coverage in 2012.

After looking through the news archives, going back to 2007, the effect of Cornerstone seemed to be reflected in the number of news stories directed toward Cornerstone clients year by year. In the summer of 2008, the FADER website gave repeated coverage to a Converse campaign featuring Santigold, Julian Casablancas and Pharrell. Pitchfork gave this campaign zero coverage. The first Cornerstone-related story appeared in November 2008—one month before the partnership was announced—a brief mention of Matt & Kim’s forthcoming album on the FADER label. So there was a single Cornerstone-related article in 2008 and none in 2007. I found four such articles in 2009, along with Pitchfork.tv features branded by Cornerstone clients like Levi’s and Southern Comfort. In 2010, the amount of Cornerstone content peaked to twenty-two articles, then the number dropped to ten articles in 2011. Seven such articles appeared in the first two months of 2012.

I found no evidence of the Cornerstone partnership having any influence over reviews of albums that were released through Green Label Sounds or FADER. But the point is that corporate patronage prevented Pitchfork from deciding, for example, that Green Label Sounds was bad for music culture and to boycott their campaigns or albums, as they could have easily done if they were as independently-minded as the Pitchfork “brand” suggested. This association also made it less likely that Pitchfork would explore the interplay between fans not paying for their music and the rise in corporate patronage. Pitchfork had a historic opportunity to remind their readers that the artists covered on Pitchfork needed support from fans, but instead was curiously silent on the issue throughout the Decade of Dysfunction. The FADER Media partnership required a heightened amount of self-censorship and readers suffered as a result. Meanwhile, Pitchfork played a significant role in spreading widespread acceptance for corporate patronage because they were benefitting from the very same system.

In a 2011 interview with SPIN Magazine’s Eric Magnuson, Damian Abraham of the band Fucked Up was forthcoming on the influence of corporate patronage upon music. When Magnuson asked whether the term “selling out” meant anything in rock anymore, Abraham responded19:

It still does. I’ll admit it, I’ve sold out. I’m not saying I’ve sold out to the level of some other people. But as soon as you take money, you are selling out. Like, you have taken what you’ve created and you’re lending it to someone else. That doesn’t mean that you’re a sellout forever and everything you do is now tainted. But you’ve made the decision to take that money… I think that’s the reality. It’s kind of sad that it’s gone this way. But you can’t rewind five years, or ten years, or now twelve years ago. Not that I would want to because I think there’s been a lot of amazing cultural developments. But you can’t go back and get people to buy records again. We love talking about this kind of stuff but it can get a little heavy.

Abraham captured the sense of resignation many music fans and journalists seemed to feel toward corporate patronage or the fact that people no longer were buying the records they loved. But the strong, “heavy” opinions and feelings hiding just behind the surface of this resignation suggested an alternate path. Why couldn’t credible voices like Abraham organize themselves and communicate to fans that there were consequences to piracy, that if they wanted independent music to remain viable, then it was important to support creators’ rights? If resignation and pessimism can build, so can the sense of self-determination, hope and community that created the punk movement in the first place. Why couldn’t passionate music fans lead us out of the doldrums of digital piracy, actively voicing support for the punk ethos that the audience and the performer were part of the same artistic community, one based upon respect and love for creativity and for one another?

It is a tragic irony that so many threw themselves into accepting digital piracy out of a distaste for corporate culture, while engineering the conditions for those same corporations to opaquely influence what bands deserved careers and what bands journalists should cover.

But that is what the lazy acceptance of the illegal exploitation of creators’ rights gets us—a whole lot of disempowerment and cultural decline. Piracy is an act of self-destruction.

Whether you view the independent ethos of punk rock as conviction or contrivance, the erosion of that ethos provides a glimpse of the consequences to art and communication when content becomes unbridled from direct consumer support. Without the support of consumer patronage, advertising and branding are left to dominate the realm of incentives, moving deeper and deeper into our essential human need to communicate.

“Ads seem to work on the very advanced principle that a small pellet or pattern in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition will gradually assert itself,” Marshall McLuhan observed. “Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brain-washing. This depth principle of onslaught on the unconscious may be the reason why.”20

If we take McLuhan’s analysis, then the consequence of corporate patronage in this respect is that rather than supporting and enjoying the art of our favorite musicians, we are tempting them to help unrelated companies subtly brainwash us in the matter of brand impressions. This is nothing new in our lives. We live with such advertising every day. The question is, do we desire spaces in our lives where such branding isn’t welcome, where we have a direct experience with human creativity for its own sake?

The strange thing about True Believers in general is their remarkable blind spot for the loss of real freedom for individuals to influence their surrounding reality in a world of free content. Consumers’ self-disenfranchisement is a logical consequence of delegitimizing the sanctity of creators’ right to sell their work as they so choose.

Cory Doctorow has written in the past that piracy is a “distant second to the gravest, most terrifying problem an artist can face: censorship.”21 Doctorow admitted in a lecture before Google in 2007 that copyright was preferable, at least, to the patronage system of yore for this reason. “For one thing you got very little art that criticized the king or the Pope under that system,” he said. “[Copyright] was a great flowering of expression, because all of a sudden you weren’t dependent upon the whim of some plutocrat but rather on the hard-nosed business sense of syndicates of investors. It wasn’t perfect, but it sure beat the hell out of ‘the king said you can make art so you get to make art.’”22

In other words, patronage by concentrated institutions of power, rather than by wide swaths of individual consumers, raises inherent questions of censorship. So, it is strange that Doctorow isn’t concerned by the consequences of corporate patronage, as was revealed in his answer to a question after a reading of his in 2006. There, Doctorow was making familiar arguments to his listeners, predicting that, “More people will get accustomed to reading off screens in the future. When that happens, we’re going to have to figure out new ways to make a living.” On that subject, an attendee asked whether Doctorow would ever plug Pepsi in one of his books. The author lifted his shoulders in embarrassment, and said, “I probably wouldn’t plug Pepsi. I would plug someone else, though… I’d be totally transparent about it… I don’t mind being a whore. I just don’t want to be a cheap whore.”

But what is the real difference between an artist being a “whore,” either cheap or well compensated, for the Pope or for Citigroup or for the state? In a system in which corporate or government patronage is the only option for creators, overt censorship and self-censorship (or pandering) are inevitable based on realities of power and incentives. In the Renaissance you wouldn’t find much art that was unfriendly to the King or Pope, sure. In the emerging reality of corporate patronage, suggested by the music industry, you won’t find as many voices that seriously question the status quo of concentrated power. John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Neil Young…they would never have found an audience under such a system taken to its logical extreme.

“What [people are] missing from a cultural perspective,” says Life, Inc. author Douglas Rushkoff, “is just because we’re not willing to pay for professional journalists doesn’t mean that corporations have become unwilling to pay for professional public relations departments.”

If we choose to abandon our public or private institutions (as citizens or consumers) in resignation to the self-replicating sign posts of decline, rather than seek to resurrect the health of those institutions, we emerge disempowered and asking to be manipulated.