Decoder with Nilay Patel
00:04:23 · Nilay Patel, Mitch Glazier
[00:04:23] S3: for credit. You had... You were giving like, you were like giving presentations? [00:04:26] S4: Yes. It was horrible. So, you know, everybody had like these anti RIAA t shirts on and I remember one time I... They... I followed Chuck D who was like on there promoting peer to peer. And I didn't know what to do and I knew I was gonna get booed. So I took a garbage bag and I just like put it over my head and I walked out onto the stage with a garbage bag on me, you know, thinking if they're going to throw tomatoes at me I might as well just sort of make light of it. But I have to say even though it was a very tough time some of the conversations that we had with students at that time were some of the best conversations I've ever had, even now with AI, about sort of the change in technologies, things being fan driven, you know, the disconnect that can occur sometimes between, you know, an industry and the the people who, you know, are out there driving change in the industry. So it it was actually a good experience in the end, but it certainly did not feel like it at the time.
00:05:32 · Nilay Patel
[00:05:32] S3: It didn't feel like it at the time for me. Thank you for saying the butterfly effect is real, but it was it was heated. It was hot. And one of the things that has really occurred to me is I get older and AI exists and I see the platforms taking so much of the economic value out of art, particularly in the age of AI, is that my opinions about intellectual property enforcement have have changed. It feels like I'm just giving up all of the ideals that I had when I was a kid about the internet. That open access to information was good that you know, there was that meme ages ago, everything is a remix and that we should all build on each other's art as much as we want because that will push the culture forward. I am still very idealistic about that. I I... And I and I definitely did not think the recording industry suing kids was the appropriate way to protect the intellectual property of artists back then. But here we are in the age of AI and it feels like no one is making enough money for making art except the world's biggest artists who are all also tech investors now in some way and the tech platforms who collect fractions of pennies from everything and are doing data center build outs or whatever it is. And that just existential dynamic for me is where I wanted to start. I want to talk about how the RIAA works and all the decoder questions but I was just thinking about what I really wanted to ask you and it comes down to that is we have to protect the work but there's some balance in overprotecting the work that makes it harder for people to make new things. In my own journey with the RIAA is a reconsideration of that as more and more things get taken. Where have you landed? You've been there for twenty years. How are you feeling about that balance?
00:07:19 · Mitch Glazier
[00:07:19] S4: The word balance is the right one and it's not an easy one. You know, you've... It's one of those things where over time, you you you know, a barrier pops up here and then you kind of pivot and then a barrier pops up here and you kind of pivot and you you sort of land in a zone that feels right because the responses that you're getting both from the creative community and from fans, they do start to line up. And I think in AI, they are lining up much more closely than they did during previous years of disruption. Some of it has been because of the democratization of the industry where the gatekeeping roles have changed, where the partnerships between those who partner and invest with artists and the artists themselves have changed. In a world where artist and label services, know like a la carte services are a bigger part of revenue, in an area where catalog and forever exploitation and new investors in the industry have come in, the landscape is much wider now And it's not like there are just two types of big actors kind of controlling or sharing in all of the money. Right? Now there's like dozens of different types of folks meeting artists in different places where they are and meeting fans in different places where they are. And so it feels to me like this disruption which is huge and I hope we talk about it. The good news is unlike Napster, I don't feel like we are facing it at odds at which is kind of what it felt like back then. Now it feels like we're not in the same place, but we're kind of rowing in the same general direction, which is that everybody understands that art and commerce have always had tension and there's always gonna have to be a balance. But authenticity and that connection between a human being artist and a fan, the the preservation of that seems to be paramount in everything that we're doing. Whether you're investing or whether or not you're listening or whether you're performing. And and to me, it's that sort of... We're not fighting in this, like, space anymore between just a business model or an investment. We are now fighting to keep the art as human art and the connection between an artist and a fan sort of preserved and alive. And that to me just seems like a much larger purpose, I guess. So it feels very different to me. I... It feels like a good bookend like you.
00:10:03 · Mitch Glazier, Nilay Patel
I started my career with Napster, but on the other side, learned a ton as a young lawyer. And now on the other side, we had AI and comparing the two is so wild. I mean, the polls during Napster were like, you know, fans over here and creators kind of hiding a little bit and the company's over here. And now it's like AI's over here and we're all together on the other side. [00:10:30] S3: Yeah. I mean, like, I was... Again, I I cannot emphasize this enough. I was a bad lawyer and I should not have been doing that job. [00:10:35] S4: I doubt that.
00:10:35 · Mitch Glazier, Nilay Patel, Mitch Glazier
[00:10:35] S4: I doubt that. [00:10:36] S3: I was not good at it. I I I really wasn't. And what I remember from that time was, you know, we we... It was college kids and they... You know, their universities would turn over their IP addresses and they would get their little lawsuit and we would tell them, we're gonna go to the district court in Chicago, you're gonna settle for $5,000 because that's what the RIAA is running this program at. It's $5,000 settlements to break even on the cost and to deter you and then you're gonna go work the pizza place for a semester, pay your bill and move on. And I thought this can't be accomplishing a goal. Right? Like the thing I'm doing right now is is nothing. Like, I... And and maybe that's why I felt like I was a horrible lawyer. Maybe that's why I got out of it. But what you're describing is the polls there where there was no pushback on, well these kids just love music. Right? The thing they love is just music and they now they can get it and they have it. They weren't thinking about the business model of CDs. Right? Because that's what fun maps are fundamentally disrupted was [00:11:32] S6: That's right.
00:11:33 · Nilay Patel
[00:11:33] S3: There was there was a scarce physical object that you could go pay $15 for and if Metallica sold enough of those, their plane would get bigger and everyone can kind of see that. And I'm listening to a lot of this music and it should make you rich was nowhere close to reality. We've built those models now. We have built Spotify and Apple Music and all the subscription models. I want to talk about YouTube quite a bit actually, where you can listen to a lot of music and some people will get rich but a middle class of artists may just be totally hollowed out. And now the AI companies are like, and we're going to stand up a competitor where you can just ask for music and no one except us will get paid. And that is probably built on a bunch of artists that we used to make money by having a lot of attention. That swirl to me is the, it's just the one that I can't decide where my ideals fit into that. Right? Like as a person who is open Suno and had a good time just making some music. I'm like, well, I understand how this is great for one kind of person with an artistic bent. I understand why this is fun as somebody who likes music. I do not understand the economics that follow from this. The same way I had no idea how the economics of disrupting the CD would shake out. And I think we can, I'll give you actually one example just to make this question even longer. We had the CEO of Cloudflare on the show. And they're trying to stand up a system where instead of websites running advertising on traffic, everyone gets paid a fraction of a cent to make content on the web. And he was like, you know, like Spotify. And I was like, dude, Spotify changed the entire music industry. Like artists have different jobs now because of that economic model. And he was like, no, I think the big ones are really happy. And you can argue with him or not argue with him. But it felt to me like the tech industry did not understand what that disruption actually did to music in that moment. And now we're standing on a precipice of it again. So again, I just want to start there. I'm feeling this like existential tension. You described it as art and commerce where the commerce is going to change and so the art has to change as well. How are you thinking about that?