Porn Perspectives

Mainstream Music Playing Catch-Up to Porn

Does the porn industry always have to show the mainstream world how to cater to consumers?

According to an article in last week’s Wall Street Journal, the music industry is finally starting to ally with peer-to-peer (P2P) sites. The rapper Jay-Z, “at the request of Coca-Cola Co., agreed to allow distribution of [an 8-minute concert clip] on P2P sites, using technology usually used to thwart music pirates.”

The article continues,

"now there’s a growing recognition among some record executives and performers that the people who are downloading illegally are frequently huge music fans and that marketing to them may be more desirable in the long run than suing or otherwise harassing them."

No shit.

As I reported earlier this year, the porn industry started taking rapid measures years ago to respond to online piracy in a relatively fluid way, turning piracy around to work to the industry’s advantage.

As the president of Playboy.com Randy Nicolau remarked in 2004, P2P networks provide “direct marketing at its finest.” Playboy started giving pictures away to other sites that in turn directed visitors back to Playboy.com. In order to reinforce this pattern, Playboy has started paying Webmasters $25 for every subscription they funnel to Playboy.com; as support, Playboy offers tools to help make the free Web sites more effective.

Ever since the advent of P2P networks, the media, musicians, the music industry, and the business world have decried the end of entertainment as we know it. With the only means of making money for studios/artists effectively undermined, there could be no other future for entertainment than anarchy and ruin.

Obviously, that didn’t happen. Porn provides the proverbial canary in the coal mine proof that P2P doesn’t have to destroy an industry—it does, however, require vast change.

In a statement nearly parallel to Nicolau's, Jay Z's attorney Michael Guido explains the revelation:

"The concept here is making the P2P network work for us. While P2P users are stealing the intellectual property, they are also the active music audience, and this technology allows us to market back to them."

Perhaps the porn industry is more evolved in its response because it was hit early with the issue of piracy via P2P networks. But based on the industry’s history of leading the pack in terms of technology (wit VHS tapes, the Internet, Web cams, cell phone cameras, etc), I would attribute the porn industry’s adept response to market changes to an innate flexibility built into the industry that mainstream industries seem to lack. Any theories as to why this is?

Triumph of the Playboy Club

Here’s a risky business plan—predicate the complete success or failure of your enterprise on convincing a state to rewrite a gambling law. An absurd strategy, right?

Yet, Playboy did just that and is enjoying the rewards of taking a chance. The Playboy Club in Las Vegas, a joint venture between Palms Casino Resort and a company called N9NE Group, is the first gambling establishment in Vegas to legally impose a cover charge. Previous to the Playboy club, no gambling was allowed in nightclubs.

I suppose the combination is natural…gambling, drinking, schmoozing, and sex. I’m sure many have tried, but it took the power of the Playboy name to overturn laws in order to allow people to indulge in all pursuits simultaneously.

Perhaps I’ll check out the club this winter when I’m in town for the AVN Expo.

I’ll be sure to bring my “spike-heel Rochas pumps, Miguelina cleavage-baring satin slip-dress” and take care that my date is wearing a solid color shirt…

Oh the Glory of Investigative TV “Journalism”

Glenn Beck from CNN is in the middle a laughingly amateur 4-part series called “Porn: America’s Addiction.” (Those who visit the series’ website are subject to Glenn Beck’s knowing gaze and prominent finger pointed accusingly at the visitor. Note the wedding ring and air of condescension—who does this guy think he is?)

Three installments have aired so far, and the next airs tonight. The first three installments cover tired territory: porn is a big industry and some people get addicted to porn. Yawn. Why is it that every news story or feature about porn is identical? The CNN reports fall right in step with just about every other mainstream media coverage of porn for the last 5 years:

First Glenn Beck bemoans the success of the industry: “Unfortunately, business is good.” Yeah, it sure is a shame that an industry catering to the high demands of American consumers is able to sustain itself and turn a profit.

The same old statistics are tossed in: “Porn is a $57 billion industry worldwide; in the US, it grosses $12 billion.” To give a sense of scope the writer/reporter notes that in the US, porn profits dwarf those of pro football, baseball, and basketball—combined! (This statistic always irked me; in it, I sense an implied judgment that somehow pro sports are a wholesome, more preferable pastime for Americans when in fact only a limited—and male—demographic tends to be interested in sports, and furthermore sports figures have been known to commit violent and sexual crimes worse than anything found in your average, consensual porn movie.)

Then the technological dimension is noted—porn drives technological innovation. Would the Internet exist without porn? Who knows?

There is always a cautionary tale about children finding porn online. The Glenn Beck story posts that the “average” (how could anyone know?) age kids these days first see porn online is 11 years old. The horror! This seems awfully old to me. Furthermore, it’s not like the kids were immune to porn before the Internet came along—most of my friends (pretty much the last generations to remember a time before the internet) came across a porn magazine or image at a young age, even without the Internet. True, the Internet makes it easy to find porn, but so many parents and school personnel are frenzied in their vigilant monitoring of kids’ use of the Internet that I think the risk is largely mitigated. (What’s more, I’m not even convinced it’s a bad thing for a kid to stumble across a little online porn, but that’s a whole other debate.)

Something I found interesting was that Beck interviewed the current male operator of Danni’s Hard Drive, without mentioning the site’s illustrious roots.

As some of you may know, Danni’s Hard Drive was one of the pioneering porn sites of the newly-created Internet in the eraly-mid '90s. Most interestingly, its founder is a woman, Danni Ashe, who taught herself HTML and launched a site out of the early-Internet newsgroups she’d been frequenting. Needless to say, her site was a huge success and it has become legendary as the archetypal example of women-driven porn in the Digital Age.

But Glenn Beck didn’t seem to find any of this worth mentioning. He apparently prefers to offer viewers the same tired porn run-around.