Kultur in Gefahr - ITI

58 Artistic Expression in a Corporate World
Artistic Expression in a Corporate World 59
buy diversely. If this is true, then the question of ownership concentration
of record shops becomes relatively less important.
This would replace the need for regulation to another category of
regulations, namely the field of content regulations (see below). Then,
public and private channels could be obliged to broadcast, for instance,
thousands of different songs a year, even at prime time, that come from
many different and independent sources, and many different countries.
It is interesting that the distribution of music gets another
perspective partly by the rapid development of the peer-to-peer systems
of music exchange. If the continuing trend is that the music industry,
followed by the film industry, is selling less, then this might become an
attack on their dominant positions. But what positions are at stake? In the
field of distribution, certainly, and also their copyrights loose market
value. But what about the production of music and films? Until now, it
seems that most people exchange music and films that have been
produced by the cultural giants and made popular by their marketing
machines.
A real attack on the dominant position of the music and film
industry would be for more and more artists to produce and distribute
themselves using the rapidly developing tools of digitalisation and the
internet and not to contract themselves to the cultural industries.
However, this option is more available for artists in the richer countries
and selected groups in poorer parts of the world. Besides, audiences could
do two things. First, they develop curiosity to this diversity, and change
and adapt the works creatively, no longer being passive exchangers of
what is on the hit lists. And second, of course they should, and will, pay
the small amount of money directly to the artists for the use of their works.
(e) Is there something wrong with foreigners owning important cultural
production and distribution facilities in a specific country? Yes, indeed. It
increases the chance for artistic expression to no longer be related to the
specific circumstances of people living in that country. The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights demands that people should have the right
to participate in the cultural life of their community. In Canada, for
instance, it is proven that domestic producers offer substantially more
domestic content than foreign producers. In the field of books, perhaps
twenty per cent of sales are generated by Canadian publishers, but they
are responsible for 85 to 90 per cent of the Canadian titles published. It is
the same in the music industry. Canadian producers bring the
overwhelming bulk of Canadian artists who are recorded onto the market.
This does not mean that it is sufficient to have foreign ownership
limits. This, in itself, does not guarantee a rich offer of diverse kinds of
artistic expressions. Foreign ownership restrictions should be combined
with other regulatory measures, particularly various content quotas.
Nevertheless, restrictions on foreign ownership give a better chance to
domestic cultural entrepreneurs. They know the cultural field in their own
country, which is likely to result in more domestic content. The least that
can be said of regulations that restrict foreign ownership is that they forge
conditions so that local artistic life can be developed.
On the other hand, if there are foreign owners they can be required
to present more and more local artists in the countries where they trade.
However, this does not mean that they are part and parcel of the cultural
life of such a society, because those foreign cultural conglomerates decide
which local artists will get a chance, and they decide the ambience of
presentation.
Well meant foreign ownership restrictions may become ineffective
when they have been constructed for a world that no longer exists. For
instance, in France the foreign ownership of multimedia companies is
restricted to no more than twenty per cent. (Doyle 2002: 148-150). In the
case of the merger of Vivendi with Universal, however, it became difficult
to make this law effective. Though who knows who the stockholders are,
and tomorrow the stocks may already be in completely different - foreign -
hands. The debate about the raison d’être of this law was avoided;
nothing could stop this merger, and later was too late.
(f) It is easy to forget that the economic clout a specific cultural
conglomerate or enterprise has, might seduce them to an actual market
behaviour that is undesirable. An example may illustrate this. In Great
Britain the bookshop chain of Waterstone has an estimated market share
of 20 per cent. But how do they use this apparently modest position on
the market? Recently Waterstone changed its conditions on returns and
payments that had a catastrophic effect on small publishers, effectively
making many of them insolvent. The way Waterstone behaves is bad for
cultural diversity because it pushes small publishers out of the cultural
market space. It diminishes their chance of economic survival. A
comparable phenomenon we observe with big publishers who buy
window space and favourable displays in bookshops for the books they