Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed

by Alexis Ohanian

  What’s the alternative? It’s Zach. It’s connecting directly with fans via content you can post online, whether it’s a webcomic, a YouTube video, or whatever awesome new thing someone’s launching right now. After building an audience, monetize it responsibly, either through traditional means, such as advertising and merchandising, or through platforms that exist solely to fund creative projects. We’re witnessing the Internet systematically deconstruct the old apparatus: YouTube for distribution, Kickstarter for financing, scores of options for online advertising. And these are all just a small sample of what’s out there and what’s to come. In short, there are lots of ways for artists to bypass the old gatekeepers, and more are emerging every day. In light of this, it’s also vital to be sure these new media giants don’t become new gatekeepers.

  Although it’s possible for some tastemakers to recognize talent where others don’t, the heart of the problem is their inconsistency. It’s a bad deal for everyone involved. Back in 1979, a cruelty investigator for a local humane society got the chance to illustrate a weekly comic strip called Nature’s Way for The Seattle Times. He greatly preferred drawing comics to his full-time job, so he got the idea to syndicate his comic. Fortunately, he went on vacation. While in San Francisco, he submitted his comic to the San Francisco Chronicle and, luckily, came away with an offer for syndication in some thirty newspapers nationwide. I say “luckily” because when he returned home, The Seattle Times canceled his strip—it seemed that some readers found it offensive. Without that offer from the Chronicle, he would have “given up cartooning then,”9 and the world would have never had a chance to meet Gary Larson or The Far Side.

  Instead of toiling in obscurity at the humane society, Larson created one of the most popular comics of the twentieth century (and a personal favorite of mine). Sometimes things work out. And no success is devoid of some good fortune. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum—the open and connected Internet allows unprecedented opportunities for that good luck. I don’t want to think of all the Gary Larsons we’ve missed out on because they never took that fortuitous vacation and were canceled by a gatekeeper before they could share their genius with the world.

  Zach Weinersmith

  Now I’d like to introduce you to another Zach. Zach Weinersmith10 has a rich voice, with the gravitas of a man years older than he, and a beautiful, flowing mane of red hair. He’s the writer and artist behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (www.smbc-comics.com), one of the most popular webcomics in the world. Hundreds of thousands of people read it every day—he publishes literally every single day (take that, Sunday newspaper comics section). Also, unlike the Sunday comics standard The Family Circus, Zach’s series is actually funny.

  Zach’s work is often compared to Gary Larson’s—they’re both a smart combination of nerdy and edgy (nerd-gy?). Fortunately for Zach, however, he didn’t have to rely on the whims of editors to get his work seen. For the cost of a web domain, Zach was able to get his art up and running. He began publishing in high school, just for fun, but decided after a year of “hating life” in the entertainment industry he wanted comics to be his full-time job. He worked as a closed-captioner to keep paying the bills while he built up his comic, but after two years he had enough revenue from advertising and merchandise to make a living (which he describes as “enough to pay rent and eat some rice”). A year after that, his comic brought in enough to make him “somewhat comfortable,” which we can only imagine afforded him many bags of rice. Four years after that, he has one of the most popular webcomics in the world and will no longer disclose just how many truckloads of rice he makes per year.

  I first learned about Zach’s work when his webcomics started appearing regularly on subreddits like /r/funny and /r/comics, long before he spent his days swimming in mountains of rice. It wasn’t long thereafter that I offered to be his publisher, as I had with Randall Munroe, author of xkcd (another top-tier webcomic with a strange name and loads of readers). In 2011, Breadpig published the first SMBC collection, Save Yourself, Mammal!

  Courtesy of Zach Weiner

  One of the things that really set Zach’s books apart was the little doodles he included in the footer on every page. Taken together, they formed a miniature Choose Your Own Adventure–style11 comic series. It was a thing of genius: he conveyed the intricate decision-making process with just an icon and a bit of text. After the successful run of the second SMBC collection, The Most Dangerous Game, which continued Zach’s idiosyncratic, footer-based adventure, I pitched Zach a crazy idea: an entire Choose Your Own Adventure–type novel.

  Like the Choose Your Own Adventure series, it would hinge on Zach’s wit and a vast array of magnificent, arbitrary death scenes. When Zach emerged from whatever dark cave he works in, he had Trial of the Clone—a futuristic journey starring you, a clone raised by space monks, trying to find your destiny as a hero of the galaxy. As the back cover promises, however, it won’t be easy: “Make the wrong decisions and you’ll be dead. Really dead. It’s hard to emphasize just how dead you will be. So here’s a pro tip for you: try to make the right decisions.”

  Normally, in our role as publisher, Breadpig would front the printing costs, which generally reach the tens of thousands of dollars for a run of ten thousand books. Once we start getting enough revenue to cover our expenses, then we start cutting checks to Zach. That’s how it’s worked for the last couple of years, anyway. But this is an innovation industry, of course, so that’s all changed now.

  I’d seen firsthand the power of Kickstarter while running the social side of the Pebble watch campaign, that ten-million-dollar project I referenced in chapter 5. I pitched Zach on doing a Kickstarter campaign for Trial of the Clone. Everything was already done: we just needed a compelling video and interesting perks for the various funding levels. We came up with a few straightforward but still worthwhile awards, and Zach recorded a bare-bones pitch video that looks like it was shot in one take with his laptop camera (don’t worry, I doubt Zach’s reading this). In the video, while Zach reads two books at once, he explains that it’s always been his dream to create an adventure-of-your-own-choosing novel. It was simple, and it worked. As an extra incentive for his audience, he added that the money he makes from this book will be given to his wife, Kelly, to fund her research on fish parasites and to advance the study of science. Zach’s video didn’t require any production team or marketing research (hell, I doubt it took him twenty minutes on his laptop), but he used it to make a connection with hundreds of thousands of strangers.

  We knew we’d need about $15,000 for our first production run, so that’s where we set the fund-raising goal. Within a few hours we had a good feeling we’d hit our goal, and by day’s end, we had. That’s when Zach updated backers of the campaign, announcing new rewards if we hit different fund-raising tiers. These included some well-designed surprise perks that would kick in once the crowd had funded the campaign to the fifty-thousand-dollar level. If we hit one hundred thousand dollars, then Zach promised to do a sequel. Gone are the days of “If you build it, hope they’ll come.”12 The Internet lets us see if people will come before we build it. When they put their hard-earned money down, it’s not only getting us closer to paying the balance due, it’s also adding more evangelists (think comfy T-shirts).

  Zach used all the obvious channels for promoting the book at launch, but most important, he used them afterward to cheer on his backers and even the people who cared enough to spread the word but didn’t have any money to spend. He started releasing teaser sections, which became their own “Choosable Path” adventure when he let commenters decide what decisions to make—as a crowd, of course.

  This generated more content, which spurred even more discussion about the campaign, and the virtuous cycle of excitement continued to grow as more people learned about this unique novel from Zach Weinersmith. When the campaign ended, Zach had earned $130,132, had sold more than four thousand books directly to his fans, and had promised a sequel. Not too shabby. Six month
s later, we launched his next book on Kickstarter, a collection of science-related comics called Science: Ruining Everything Since 1543, which raised more than one hundred thousand dollars in the first two days. Grow audience; make things they want; sell those things to your audience; repeat.

  Lester’s Time Has Come Today

  This (see photo next page) was the sign Lester Chambers (of the famed 1960s soul group the Chambers Brothers) attached to the gold record that he held in front of his face in a photo seen by millions online. His son, Dylan, first uploaded it to Facebook, and before long it leaped to the top of the /r/music subreddit, where it took off across the web.

  One member of the /r/music community, Larakius, had a highly voted comment that sums up how most people felt: “This is why it sickens me when all these record companies say ‘we need to stop piracy to help the artists. They can barely make a living because of the sheer amount of illegal downloads in today’s world.’ Greedy fucking bastards.”

  Courtesy of Dylan Chambers

  Another person, astrodust, chimed in with a correction: “By ‘help the artists’ they mean ‘help the company representing the artists get paid.’ ”

  Like many who saw the photo, I was pissed off. There was nothing new about labels taking advantage of artists, but this photo let millions of people online connect with one particular artist’s plight. It put a real face on the issue (well, not literally, because Lester’s was covered).

  Meanwhile, the entertainment industry continues to trumpet its own “important” role in discovering talent and championing the rights of artists (presumably, artists like Lester). If only they spent less time talking about how much they want to help artists and actually did it. Instead, they blame the Internet. I had a chance to debate this matter with Jonathan Taplin, a former manager of the Band and a current professor at the University of Southern California. According to Taplin, the good old days were pretty good; when asked by an audience member about the bad deals bands put together with their labels, Taplin had this to say: “When we had record royalties that were flowing, everybody was making a decent bunch off the master…. When that disappeared [because of music piracy], then the royalties from the records disappeared. And that’s the problem.”

  We were debating at the Innovation Uncensored conference in New York, just months after SOPA’s and PIPA’s defeat at the hands of millions of Americans who insisted on an open Internet (more about this in chapter 8). Thus I was surprised that anyone from the entertainment industry would come out so soon after the smackdown. It was my first debate. I was nervous, but in a flash that all washed away; that random audience member’s question not only reminded me of Lester Chambers, it also suggested a solution that I suddenly felt ballsy enough to propose right on the spot.

  Taplin had framed his argument around the tragic circumstances of his good friend Levon Helm, the Band’s drummer, who until a decade ago earned what Taplin called a “decent living” of a “hundred and fifty, two hundred thousand dollars a year” in royalties. For years, Helm had suffered from throat cancer, but now, according to Taplin, Helm could no longer afford his medical bills because of online piracy. Mind you, the US median household income after inflation was $50,05413 at the time, and Helm was making three times that—paid long after he’d ceased working. A pretty “decent living,” indeed. But Taplin claimed this all stopped because of piracy. This is perhaps a better commentary on the national health-care situation than on the entertainment industry, but in any case here was an artist—regardless of whether he was a former millionaire—who was gravely ill. In that split second, I made a genuine offer there onstage to help promote any creative project the remaining members of the Band or Helm’s family and friends wanted to do together. I followed the debate with a more formal open letter, which Fast Company published:

  I’m hopeful that innovations like the ones I discussed tonight and the others that are being worked on by entrepreneurs right now will continue to do right by artists and cut out those who’d mistreat them. Please take a look around Kickstarter and reddit and you’ll quickly find that the former is already crowdfunding projects in the millions and the latter does not in fact hurt artists in any way (quite the opposite, it’s full of communities of music makers sharing tips and comedians making oodles by treating their fans respectfully and directly selling them DRM-free content).

  Like I said on stage, it would be an honor to gather members of the Band together to produce one more album with unreleased content or something to honor Levon Helm—really any kind of creative project they’d like to produce—(this time funded on Kickstarter) and we’ll gladly launch it on the IAmA section of reddit.

  I’ll have my credit card ready, as I’m sure many other redditors (and music fans) will.14

  Tragically, Levon Helm died the very next day. As I’d written, I wanted to support some kind of creative project to honor him and at the very least get some funds to his next of kin. No one responded to my offer, but Professor Taplin did reply with an open letter of his own:

  “You want to give every great artist a virtual begging bowl with Kickstarter…. Take your charity and shove it. Just let us get paid for our work and stop deciding that you can unilaterally make it free.”15

  The problem with Taplin’s argument, of course, is that helping artists get paid for their work, directly by their fans, is precisely what the Internet makes possible. I wish I had the power Professor Taplin implies I have, but I don’t. The digital revolution changed the game, and most of us—from artists to fans to entrepreneurs—understand the shift and are adapting. Kickstarter happens to be one example of a great new innovation, but, as I’ve said, it’s only one of many and just the beginning of what will, I hope, be decades of improvement.

  Months went by as we got caught up launching Trial of the Clone, the adventure-of-your-own-choosing novel by Zach Weinersmith I mentioned earlier. But I kept returning to this idea of a fund-raiser for Lester. Talking about a solution isn’t nearly as compelling as doing it, after all. And I love doing things.

  Fortunately, in 2012 Lester and I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to produce a new album wholly owned by Lester Chambers himself. Breadpig would help him produce it, but our corporate aim wouldn’t be to make any money for ourselves—it would be to make the world suck less. Lester, the artist doing most of the work, would control the project and the profits. Our only request was that he pay it forward, which he happily agreed to. A percentage of the profits from his Kickstarter account would go to help other artists like him through the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, a nonprofit agency. Before we get into that, though, I want to share a little more of Lester’s story with you.

  “We Trusted People Too Much”

  John Hammond Jr., carrying only a guitar and a sack of clothes, had been traveling the country when he wandered into Santa Monica and met the Chambers Brothers, who took him in. Turned out his father, John Hammond Sr., was a Columbia Records producer (note again the serendipity business model in full swing).

  Bob Dylan had asked the Chambers Brothers to do background vocals on “Tombstone Blues,” a song on the album Highway 61 Revisited, which they were thrilled to do. But it turned out they were too good—they outshone Bob’s voice—so they were asked to come by Hammond Sr.’s office after the recording was complete. He offered them a contract with Columbia Records. For a moment, it seemed like fame and fortune were just a step away for the four young brothers from Mississippi. Hammond was on his way out of the company, but he told the brothers he wanted them to sign a contract anyway.

  But they never got a producer. They were shelved. The reasons weren’t very good—apparently Columbia Records had another group, Paul Revere and the Raiders, that they wanted to promote instead. At least that’s what they told Lester and his brothers.

  Fortunately, another producer, David Rubinson, stepped in and told the band they were too good to be ignored. He wanted to see their album get made and talked the brothers into getting it made with
out a producer. “We did the album for less than twelve thousand dollars,” says Lester. Thankfully, Lester had arranged a trip to Boston, where a gig led to their album finally hitting the shelves.

  “We had developed such an audience that they heard about this record being out and we told the guy who owned the record store in Cambridge that we had the record out.” He had no idea they even had an album and ordered fifty thousand records. They sold out in a few hours.

  “Gone. Completely sold out. He was the first guy to sell the record.”

  Sold-out shows. Despite a total lack of interest from their record company, fans found a way to connect with the Chambers Brothers. But how’d that record store owner in Massachusetts hear about them? Alas, I know the answer to this question isn’t /r/music, which would be as awesome as it’d be anachronistic.

  The owner had seen the group selling out night after night and had seen lines of devoted fans braving rainstorms for a chance to hear the Chambers Brothers play. It all starts coming into focus. The same way the Internet displays fan demand, live concerts allowed this one record store owner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see consumer demand right in front of his eyes.