POLL - Artistic Grant to Alizée

[FanDeAliFee]

Let me thank everyone for offering their frank opinion, even if it is at odds with what I had proposed to accomplish. I don't think the conversation is over, but only starting.I really hope many people will vote in my poll, most especially the Fortunate Fifty who received the kind gift of customization from Alizee.

I am very happy that because of its use of English, the Alizée America community can include so many people who are not US citizens among its numbers - perhaps a majority if a census like <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showpost.php?p=157309&postcount=567">this</a> has any validity. All the same, until we rename ourselves something like Alizée Outre Mer, I will cleave to the principle that the context of America is a touchstone.

In this regard, one has long heard a type of criticism of American society from numerous French people of many persuasions, who opine that it is hypercommercial, and that in America "nothing but the marketplace matters." While there are many types of Americans, and not all of them fill one with pride, I would say the criticism I just outlined in the main more reflects the ignorance of the critic than the character of American culture, at least in the long run of history, a perspective which other Europeans (this probably correctly so) say the average American lacks.

Ironically, it was a famous Frenchman, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville">Alexis de Tocqueville</a>, who first offered an outsider's "anthropological" <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_America">view</a> of the peculiar aspects of American society - not <b>yet</b> totally obsolete after 175 years in my opinion - which features these key passages:<blockquote><i><b>Nothing, in my opinion, is more deserving of our attention than the intellectual and moral associations of America.</b> The political and industrial associations of that country strike us forcibly; but the others elude our observation, or if we discover them, we understand them imperfectly because <b>we have hardly ever seen anything of the kind...</b>

Although private interest directs the greater part of human actions in the United States as well as elsewhere, <b>it does not regulate them all.</b> I must say that I have often seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare; and I have noticed a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to one another...

I met with several kinds of associations in America of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object for the exertions of a great many men and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it.

As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have taken up an opinion or a feeling which they wish to promote in the world, they look out for mutual assistance; and as soon as they have found one another out, they combine. From that moment they are no longer isolated men, but a power seen from afar, <b>whose actions serve for an example and whose language is listened to.</b> The first time I heard in the United States that a hundred thousand men had bound themselves publicly to abstain from spirituous liquors, <b>it appeared to me more like a joke than a serious engagement</b>, and I did not at once perceive why these temperate citizens could not content themselves with drinking water by their own firesides. I at last understood that these hundred thousand Americans, alarmed by the progress of drunkenness around them, had made up their minds to patronize temperance. They acted in just the same way as a man of high rank who should dress very plainly in order to inspire the humbler orders with a contempt of luxury. <b>It is probable that if these hundred thousand men had lived in France, each of them would singly have memorialized the government to watch the public houses all over the kingdom.</b></i></blockquote>One can debate how the long passage of time has modified the character of both France and the United States, but I still think it is true that too many Europeans in particular don't understand that a special aspect of American life remains the <i>civic society</i> of private individuals in voluntary cooperation for non-mercenary ends, and that if something is NOT done by the state, it does NOT mean its only other possible habitat is the marketplace, where private interest alone rules. Surely urbanization and corporatization have eroded this cardinal feature of early America - and maybe so has extensiveness unassimilated immigration from societies which are patriarchal, rather than individualistic. But some remains all the same.

Why have I have offered this detour into putative national character? It's to make the point that there is a reason to <b>support Alizee's work from means other than the sale of her products for consumption by individuals for their personal benefit.</b> This is all the more true when too many people are now even helping themselves to the benefit of consumption without payment of any kind, undermining the traditional economic model of substantial income from sold recordings.

We can certainly "content ourselves with drinking water by our own firesides" as some have suggested and I, for one, have done (by leasing AlizeeRadio.com, for example). But it is an American tradition for us to ALSO stand up as a "hundred thousand men who bind themselves publicly to abstain from spirituous liquors," and yet ALSO NOT "memorialize the government to watch the public houses all over the kingdom."

When you translate the analogy, you get this: we can stand together to support the creation of art for the common good, rather than look to government taxes to support artists, or do nothing more than buy artistic products on the market.

I have news for people who claim it is inherently insulting for a cultural producer to accept unrestricted funds non-quid-pro-quo. Museums, symphonies and historical societies, among other entities, would BARELY EXIST if they depended on attendance income rather than either state funding ("European" mode), private gifts ("American" mode) or even both. The same is of course true for academic science - the subscription price of scientific journals NEVER funded any of the scientific work per se, and now in the cybernetic age, vast troves of articles are largely distributed totally free through venues like arxiv.org .

I have volunteered in two local historical societies for some years, so let me say this from experience as prosaically as I can -
<big><big><big>We love nothing more than being "insulted" with "petty" gifts of $1,000 (or even $10,000) in exchange for ZERO merchandise and services to the donor, other than kind attention and honor we can offer without humiliating ourselves.</big></big></big>
That's not to say we won't charge someone well more than 1% of the capital value of a historical building we maintain for a one-day music-video location shoot if we can, and have done so, as I explained in the post <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showpost.php?p=153040&postcount=21"><i>Making art pay</i></a>. It would seem some here think we should just close up shop if we can't make ends meet from such leases, rather than "demean" our calling with the acceptance of gifts, bequests and grants.

If you've ever watched a film documentary or something on PBS-TV, you might have noticed that the credits at the end of the piece typically acknowledge generous grants from this or that foundation, corporation or even generous couple. Subsidizing or sponsoring art is hardly a novel thing, even in our age, long after royal and ecclesiastical patrons have bitten the dust. Why would it be so outrageous for a YouTube music video to credit such a donation, when one considers that until recently, when distracting ads are run over many videos, the video creator received no payment each time it was seen?

I'm sure Alizée has undying gratitude to Monsieur Cauet for the good luck mistletoe kiss he was kind enough to bestow upon her. But I'm strange, so I think a <i>triple-chai</i>(+) from each of us as <i>Chanukah gelt</i> would be a much better way to tell the <i>shayne maideleh</i> "I love you AND I RESPECT your judgment enough to let YOU determine to what best use our wishes can be put!" (Besides, if you buy her a castle in Spain, it's possible Ferdinand and Isabella will force her sell it for pennies on the dollar - it's happened before.)<blockquote>(+) That's "Viva L'Alizée"=18, three times, in dollars, to most Corsicans!</blockquote>Of course, I respect the fact that some of you think the Nobel Prize should simply consist of just a nice certificate and a handshake, rather than a "mercenary" six-figure cash award. After all, if the laureates can't even make a living doing what they do, shouldn't they just exit their "business"?

The price of something is NOT always a true measure of its value. Water typically retails in civic supplies for about a penny per gallon, but just try drinking your diamond ring when there is no water to sustain your biological functions. (q.v. "marginal economics.")

When Scruffy was working out the details of his generously self-funded Paris trip, I said that should anyone stiff him after requesting an autographed CD, I would make good on his loss and let him send the CD to a radio station of his choosing. Numerous other people followed my example in insuring Scruffy against financial loss.

Well, it seems no one yet is being foolish enough to stiff him. But the very unexpected, elaborately designed, individually phrased decoration with gold-flecked pigment which Alizée had applied to the CDs opened up another possibility.

The personal name dedication of each CD is but a TINY part of the overall custom design. Thus I suggested that among the hundred-plus disappointed CD requesters it would be NO problem finding people only too delighted to pay for an authenticated CD decorated by our princess. Let me go one step further now. If the Fortunate Fifty had been mad enough to back out, for how much might one have auctioned these CDs to the highest bidders among the 100+ on the backup list? $50? Maybe even $100? If so, then auctioning the CDs in this way could have provided several times 50 CDs for donation to radio stations (and even more copies of fee-paid digital downloads). By the way, if you give credence to this hypothetical scenario, you acknowledge that Alizée's time and handiwork resulted in a gift to us worth THOUSANDS of dollars.

Well, I'll stop lobbying for a huge cash grant for the moment and look to alternative collective action we might fund.

Stipulate we wanted to create a "CD-fund" for radio stations. How does industry practice today bear upon the most effective way of going about this?

We have in our midst one self-confessed college student and DJ, one <a href="">djwise</a>, whom we would surely be very wise to consult! He may not know what everyone in his field does these days, but he has a better chance of knowing than any of us. Am I wrong?

Since I am so very old, when someone says "radio studio." one of two images pops up in my mind. Both of them hearken back to 1970s TV and feature DJs with turntables for playing vinyl audio disks. Later, when I began my career as an industrial scientist, an avant-grade audio medium was launched - the CD. But guess what? Even that medium is passé. Recently Alizée told us that when Annily sees an optical disk, she always assumes it holds the recording of a movie, because she has NEVER seen an audio CD!

When CD burners were introduced, they cost US$40,000, kiddies. That is no typo, I do mean FORTY THOUSAND dollars. I did not buy one at that price, but waited until they dropped into the triple digits (rather than wait longer for the low double-digits of fancy double-sided DVD burners in recent years.) When I finally owned a CD burner, our vinyl disks were ripped to CD so we could use modern, reliable, track-programmable six-disk CD changers, rather than simple half-ass vinyl disk changers, which couldn't even reset themselves. And had my late Mom lived longer, her burned CDs would have migrated to hard disk.

While some people still do ride horses, and you can find a garage with an automobile you hand-crank to start, these are rare things. I bet so are radio stations which don't use RAIDed magnetic hard drives to source their music to the air. And of course it's so much easier to make up a hundred playlists with overlapping titles using a keyboard and mouse than by incessantly juggling physical disks which can be damaged when you fail to load them into a drive properly, such as on top of another disk. All serious businesses do off-site backups of electronic records, so even if a DJ had a CD-handling fetish, the CDs would be ripped anyway to provide compact, offsite backups on hard disks.

I expect a typical radio station long ago ripped, first, its vinyl disks, and then its CDs, for safe, convenient, compact access using hard disk storage. New stuff is of course acquired as digital downloads, if only because one can typically save a third the cost of the music over media-based purchasing - and even more when one simply buys tracks, rather than a whole disk half-filled with lousy numbers. (Hint: That's why people like to produce "concept" CDs - in the hope you don't want to miss a piece of the "puzzle" by "breaking up the set.")

As far as I know, the copyright licensing regime for US broadcast radio sets a statutory fee per song played for music in copyright to the appropriate one of three major copyright clearance centers. I wonder how the cost of originally verifying the provenance of a song in this regard compares to the cost of buying a download copy of the song recording? I mean, does giving a radio station a free CD significantly reduce the cost of adding a song title to its play collection, which may be exclusively built with downloads anyway, because that is easier than CD ripping?

And with the corporatization of radio, I bet there are not a few "zombie" radio stations, largely free of on-site humans, save for a technical operator and a visiting engineer, with all the music programming done off-site, and even the voice work and "local" news really produced in another state.

In the 1970s, when Howard Hesseman's character spun vinyl disks at <i>WKRP In Cincinatti</i>, I could see him opening a postal package to reveal a vinyl album from an unknown artist, which he might try out on the old turntable. But what happens were you to send a CD to a robostation? Have you just done nothing more than donate to the CD collection of the operator's kid, who fancies the Way It Used To Be?

The local management does not have any input into what gets stocked at your local Wal-Mart. They continually optimize all of that out in Arkansas using giant banks of computers. Is it possible broadcast radio is not that far behind this model?

In another post, I confessed my ignorance of how things like radio play bear upon what music people buy. I was surprised by a small-sample study which testifies how much radio folks still consume in the United States. When flash memory became cheap, I stopped listening to broadcast radio. I could instead use my free ear-time for a virtually unlimited choice of special-interest podcasts. And if I was a real music fancier, I'd be carrying the dozens of gigabytes of music Alizée does, not listening to radio stations

I do occasionally listen to YouTube playlists, which either I or someone else have created. And I sometimes tune into Internet-based Pandora virtual radio - which we have discussed had lacked any AJ music. But in recent weeks, one now has Alizée's Internet-based Goom radio station - with her ENTIRE portfolio of published music studding her playlist of favorites.

For the same labor and money, could we do more to drive the sale of Alizée products by better promoting her Goom radio station than by working on making headway with broadcast radio? For what it's worth, recall I have encouraged you to call up your local music broadcast radio station and tell them you listen to AlizeeRadio.com instead of them because they play no Alizée music.

I want to keep our discussion open, so consider the following alternative idea. What if instead of funding the purchase and mailing of CDs to US radio stations, we use our collective economic power to lower the threshold for an Alizée performance in New York City, where I suspect she might like to make professional contacts, as I have argued at <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showpost.php?p=161543&postcount=29"><i>Making progress a step at a time</i></a>.

I noted in <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showpost.php?p=156263&postcount=254"><i>After the ball</i></a> that the Florence Gould Hall Theater at the French Institute Alliance Française in Manhattan provides 400 seats which are filled for $50 each these days. That's $20,000 for a full house. If we could raise, say, $4,000, we could pay for 20% of the seats, which could be offered gratis to notables on Broadway and Madison Avenue which Alizée might like to meet, or failing the logistical ability to invite such persons, to French language students in the city. It seems to me it would be easier to get the place to invite and pay Alizée if we could make such a sponsorship investment up front.

The problem with such a plan is its complexity! I know that if you really want to make sure something ends in disaster, make it complicated, LOL! You will note that I had hoped to creep up on an appearance at this place by first "infiltrating" the French language meetup.com groups in the city with our local AAm people for the purpose of "body-snatching" some of their extant membership for the lobbying effort. This would take a LOT of time (maybe a year) and would make things even more complicated! But if you stipulate that we finance some activity in United States, unguided by the Alizée staff, rather than simply honor her with a cash arts grant, this would be the project toward which I would lean.

@BigDan - wouldn't it be a useful PR stunt which shocks the French public if Americans created a "reparations" fund for all the Alizée music they feel guilty about people stealing? That is the sensationalist spin I had proposed we exploit for the <b>US</b> media upon the award of what would otherwise simply be another one of thousands of arts grants, as I explained in the final paragraph at <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showpost.php?p=162154&postcount=42"><i>Artistic Grant to Alizée proposed</i></a>.

Let's see what happens when more people vote in the poll I set and talk again. As I write this, some € 275+ has been pledged from among only 19 voters so far (far less than the 1000+ AAm membership). That's 27.5% of the minium of € 1000 I set to make the amount dignified.