Recently, we spoke to Matt Mason, London’s pirate radio god-daddy and the host of Vice/Palladium’s new documentary about that daredevil, building-scaling underground music culture. (Watch it above.)
Getting into jungle, drum n’ bass, garage and grime music growing up in London during the hardcore acid house era, Matt Mason became a pirate DJ running record labels and club nights. He then started writing about it in magazines like Vice [Grimewatch] and founded UK’s largest urban music magazine RWD. Today he’s leading the discussion on piracy with his critically acclaimed book The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism, proving the point that, in this new Darwinist market economy, creativity is by far our most important currency. To him, piracy is just part of a new business model that can be used to improve and add value—like when Bathing Ape appropriated Nike’s Air Dunks to their own devices, which eventually led to Nike themselves ripping off BAPE.
How did you first get into street culture?
I guess through pirate radio. You could call in and they’d do shout outs to your friends, which was alluring when I was 10. Then I got more and more into the music and eventually started DJing. I think pirate radio kind of indoctrinates everybody that listens to it—you can start something, you can make a record or start a station or a clothing label. Many people I know who grew up being part of the pirate radio scene went on to start their own businesses. So it definitely encouraged the kids involved to be entrepreneurs. It’s been a huge inspiration for what I’ve done later on.
What was the most exciting thing about writing The Pirates Dilemma?
I interviewed Dave Mancuso who founded the legendary New York club The Loft in the 60s. He talked about growing up in an orphanage where this one nun dealt with the kids by throwing, basically this non-stop birthday party. So he grew up always thinking about this birthday party and wanting to recreate that vibe. I thought that, “This is crazy, what this guy is basically saying is that a nun unadvisedly brought about disco,” so I asked him if I could meet her. I remember waking up that morning to go and do the interview and I’ve never felt as nervous. I knew that her story was going to be an important chapter in the history of dance music. She still doesn’t have any idea of what disco is or the monster she unleashed, haha.
You’ve been voted ‘Best Pirate’ by BusinessWeek. Would you call yourself a pirate?
We’re all in a situation now where anybody can pirate anything but I don’t feel that I’m a pirate like I did when I was a pirate radio DJ. I pirate stuff a lot less and it’s not because I feel guilty about it, but because all the legitimate channels for getting digital have become so much better. For me it was never really about the money, but about what’s easiest and most convenient. Which is kind of the point of the book. If you want to beat the pirates, just do what they’re doing better than they are. Provide a better service. There’s always a root cause of piracy, it’s a symptom of a problem, of a system like a market or a government not working properly. As long as there’s this unworkable situation where the pirates are delivering stuff in the most efficient way, no industry is going to be able to beat them.
Would you call piracy a youth culture?
Digital piracy has absolutely become a form of youth culture. I find it really weird that the record labels missed this because the music industry is the best industry in the world at monetizing and corrupting youth cultures. They ruined punk, they ruined disco and hip hop. They’re experts at taking a youth movement and turning it into a commercial corporate carcass of its former self. Had they recognized digital piracy as a youth movement—instead of a technological problem—they would’ve been the people running itunes now. They should have treated Napster like the Sex Pistols. I think that this idea that we’re rebelling against old things is just our outdated system going away and being replaced by something new. This is just how things are—if something doesn’t work it becomes irrelevant.
Don’t you think it’s sad that musicians for example, walk around feeling that they can’t live on their art, when people listen to music on a daily basis?
Yes, that’s definitely something that doesn’t work and it’s been true always in the creative industries, especially music. Most artists that make it big aren’t the most talented but the ones with the right combination of talent and hustle. The people that figure out how to use piracy to their advantage are going to be the ones who are successful.
How can artists or independent small businesses use piracy to their benefit?
They need to be creative in terms of how to use all these new channels to sell things. It’s a new form of creativity, which was previously not a part of the creative process.
To me that’s what’s interesting about digital music or digital anything, that how you package it can be whatever you want it to be. One of the biggest complaints about digital music is that artwork is dead as the record sleeve’s gone away—No, the record sleeve can now be anything that you want it to be. You’ve got more places to express yourself and more chances and ways to be creative. The most creative people are still going to make money because they’re going to do cool stuff and that’s going to earn them fans and money.
You let people download your book for free on your site. Do you still sell a lot of books or how do you make your money?
Releasing the e-book for free didn’t hurt physical sales of the book, but the amount of press we got for doing it initially spiked it. Most people who write business books or non-fictional books don’t make their money from actual book sales. A book is like a big business card that allows you to go and do all this other stuff. I make my money from what I do because of the book—consulting or going to do a speech somewhere. It’s the same situation as for musicians—you earn your money on the road. Piracy has definitely not hindered me at all.
We have a pirate party here in Sweden and they recently won enough votes to make it into the European Parliament, next year they’re running for general election. Do you think this is the first sign of major political change?
It’s definitely the start of something that we’re going to see become more and more important in the politics, but right now it’s not priority number one. Peter Sunde—one of the founders of Pirate Bay—is not a member of the pirate party, he votes for the green party. I’m passionate about piracy, but come on, it’s not more important than global warming. It’s still a fringe issue—it’s not a big problem, it’s not terrorism or global warming or the economic crisis. It’s taken the backseat and will do for some time to come. But I think things will change and it doesn’t really bother me where politicians are on this debate right now because the pirates are always so far ahead of them.
Do you believe that something other than money will make the world go round in the future?
What we need to look at here is what money represents and it represents value—the value of the things we do and in some ways it signifies reputation. It’s a measure of something. We’re always going to confer value on people or products in different ways and I think that in some point in the future, the way that we do that won’t be with money anymore because it just won’t be the most efficient way to do it. We’re getting smaller in the way we do things.
This whole punk ideal of doing it yourself with almost next to nothing and doing it really efficiently with very little money is something that is becoming more and more pervasive in every single industry. Not just the things that we’ve always done with small amounts of money, like record or fashion labels, but things like gene sequencing, like 3D printing and building space rockets. All of that is becoming stuff you can do in your garage. It’s pretty crazy. The need for massive amounts of capital is not going away anytime soon but it’s certainly decreasing in value for every year.
Yeah, when kids will be able to print out sneakers with 3D printers, companies will have to embrace this whole thing with piracy in order to survive.
Yes, selling things in a physical format is a dead idea. But like everything else, the debate of piracy has been really affected by this economic crisis.
Historically, people with new revolutionizing new ideas have experienced trouble with authorities, have you experienced anything of the sort with your book?
I’ve worked with some of the big Hollywood studios and talked to their anti-piracy teams and they’re all fans of the book. I didn’t see that coming at all. The biggest negative response I’ve had is from pirates on file sharing sites. Because the message of the book is essentially that piracy is a form of youth culture that’s going to be commercialized and become normal (the way punk was, as piracy is the new kind of anarchic thing to do) and that that’s good. It’s like saying to a punk in the 70s, “We need to work out how we can sell Ramones T-shirts in every mall in America.” For lot of people involved in the piracy movement it’s the last thing they want to hear. A lot of them think that piracy is going to take down capitalism, copyright, society and smash the system. That’s fine because those slogans do change things, punk did change things even if it became commercial, and piracy has changed things and it will continue to do that.
If we want things to keep changing we have to keep commercializing these new movements, we have to keep killing them to make way for new things, make way for even more radical ideas. The history of media, piracy, youth culture and all the situations that have been similar to this, shows that these things kind of go away in the end. They become absorbed into society, and that’s good, it’s not a bad thing at all. It’s good for youth culture, it’s good for society and I want to see that keep happening.
For more information or to download Matt’s book, go to his site.
-Interview by Milène Larsson (VICE Sweden)
