Context & purpose
In 2020, the global pandemic forced workers everywhere to adjust to new and harsher realities. For artists, labor conditions had already been shifting rapidly under digital economies when the pandemic forced the canceling of in-person events and performances, delivering a financial blow to millions of cultural workers. In this context, Culture Resource worked on exploring the possibilities for interventions by the Arts & Culture sector for fairer economic models on the web, with the support of the Tech & Society Fellowship from the Mozilla Foundation. As we return to “normal” in 2022 and live performances make a comeback, unfair digital models continue to disadvantage workers in the creative industry. Tech billionaires added to their fortunes and the music/publishing sectors survived, but the musicians, writers, and workers that support them are still in a moment of crisis.
Since 2021, we have continuously researched the challenges and possibilities of digital infrastructures and interviewed key actors to understand the effects of new technologies on the livelihoods and creative wellbeing of artists in the Arab region (please see our sections on Writers & Musicians for more information). Most clear in our findings is that the dominant advertising model of Web 2.0 corporations, which fosters invasive data practices, is in stark contradiction with fair labor compensations for the creative sector. And so, we have designed this pilot grants project to encourage projects of resistance to the unfair models of the gig economy and biased artificial intelligence – including algorithms and automation.
At the heart of this endeavor is our belief that creative freedom teaches us something about ourselves and about that collective identity that forms when people share ideas: our culture. Technology, one forgets, is first and foremost a product of creativity, of imagination. At a time when we are rapidly approaching the singularity, that dramatic moment of machine intelligence that imposes historic challenges for humanity, we need the most dreamful among us, the storytellers, the musicians, the creative rebels, free to express possibilities not hostage to surveillance economies. As such, we embark on building the pilot edition of this new project, starting with pilot grants for the music and literary and publishing sectors.
Project objectives
- To foster confidence among the cultural sector in the Arab region to challenge imposed digital economic models.
- To support fairer income and labor benefits for artists in current digital economies.
- To bring more artists from the region into tech policy, design and debate.
- To encourage collaborations between techies and the cultural sector.
- To imagine, explore and test new models of digital economic organization for artists.
What does Culture 3.0 offer?
- Financial support of up to €14,000 in project funding. The time frame may be between 6 and 12 months.
- The project provides a space for networking and collective learning by convening the grantees and making connections with relevant resource people and organizations.
Project schedule
The call for this program is currently not open, any upcoming rounds will be announced.
Schedule of the current round:
- The deadline for submissions is Tuesday 2 Augustat 16:00 Beirut time
- An info session will be held online beginning of July, 2022 for questions and clarifications.
- The beneficiaries are announced mid-September 2022.
- Two representatives from each beneficiary will take part in the first networking and collective learning workshop in Beirut mid-October 2022.
- After the first workshop, contracts are signed in November 2022 with the beneficiaries on the basis of the first draft of their project plan.
- Support and follow-through activities take place in 2023.
How are the projects selected?
- All applications submitted by the submission deadline are screened based on the applicant’s eligibility, the thorough completion of the application form, and the inclusion of the required supporting documents.
- The eligible applications are submitted to an independent three-member jury of experts in arts and culture, tech, and economy. The jury assesses the applications and selects the grantees on the basis of a set of established assessment criteria that includes: the quality and relevance of the project, practicability of the projected budget and feasibility of completion by deadline, in addition to the following substantive questions:
- Does the project bring immediate and/or long-term economic benefits for workers in the sector?
- Does it challenge existing paradigms or inspire alternative ways of economic organizing for musicians and writers?
- Does it improve or re-imagine the digital infrastructure around artificial intelligence, gig work, streaming, or content monetization?
- After jury members assess all the applications individually, they meet to discuss their results and select the organizations or collectives that will benefit from the Culture 3.0 project.
Who is eligible to apply?
- We encourage applications from existing or emerging organizations or collectives working in the music and literary sectors. These must be founded and directed by artists and/or cultural actors from the Arab region (regardless of ethnic origin or citizenship status). Initiatives in the diaspora may be considered as long as their work serves artistic and cultural production related to the Arab region.
- Individuals or for-profit organizations may apply if they can demonstrate public or community benefit. This includes (but is not limited to) small and independent publishers, bookstores, labels, agents, venues, promoters, or such.
- We welcome a variety of project strategies including research, prototyping, product development or design, capacity building, alliance building, collective bargaining, workshopping, curation, or resource sharing.
- Projects may be local, cross-country, or regional.
- The project must include the three parameters of technology, economy, and arts and culture.
- Technology includes all digital realms of internet, web, mobile, as well as blockchain applications, crypto, Web3 possibilities, and digitalization of offline activities.
- Economy includes income generation, web monetization, and any form of labor benefits or subsidies, as well as organizing artists and cultural workers or audiences to extract fairer compensation from platforms. This also includes labor that is traditionally side jobs for the creative sector and open models of collective organizing such as DAOs or cooperatives.
- Arts and Culture includes artistic and creative expression and experimentation in music and literature, especially emerging, young, and traditionally marginalized forms of expression.
Application instructions
Please follow the following steps in order to create an account and register on the online applications platform:
- Enter the online applications platform and fill in the required registration information.
- After clicking the “register” icon, you will receive a link by email. Click on the link to activate your account.
- Once you have activated your account, you can re-enter the online application platform using your email address and password. You will then find the application form to fill out online.
Application requirements
- You must fill in all the blanks in the form and include all attachments marked with an asterisk (*). (Applications that do not meet the eligibility criteria and do not include the required attachments and supporting documents will be eliminated and not forwarded to the jury.)
- The application form must be completed in Arabic only, apart from the blanks that require English. The documents required in Arabic must be in Arabic. Documents in another language will not be accepted. Attachments sent by WeTransfer will not be accepted.
- Please state the figures for budgetary and funding amounts in Euro.
- Do not forget to save the information you supply in each section before moving on to the next.
- Please remember that the application and all supporting documents must be submitted before the deadline. We advise you not to upload your attachments and application in the last hours to avoid problems due to heavy traffic on the website.
We encourage music initiatives in the region to apply for the Culture 3.0 grants. Here is some context and resources from our research that may be helpful to you as you design your projects.
Context
Historically, music production has always been affected by changes to the recording/playback medium. The highly profitable age of CDs came under threat with the rise of internet access in the mid-90s and the spread of peer-to-peer music sharing. The streaming model was the industry’s response to the piracy problem and today dominates the market with close to half a billion users on Digital Streaming Platforms (DSPs). Few platforms still offer direct sales in the form of digital downloads and labels need the help of digital distribution services to get songs streaming on as wide a selection of platforms as possible.
For many emerging and independent musicians in the region, the internet offered freedom to connect with and build audiences, bypass industry gatekeepers, and experiment with new genres or bold lyrics outside of the mainstream. New and young artists also benefited from improvements in sound quality with self-recording and low cost of publishing music online.
Challenges
Payouts to the labels (and eventually musicians) from digital streams are very low and subject to conditions such as reaching a certain number of streams first or streaming for a certain amount of time. Lack of transparency and uniformity in payouts makes it difficult to pinpoint a fixed amount per stream per DSP, but it sits at a fraction of a cent, for example $0.004 per play of over 30 seconds. Artists have raised several objections to this model in the past years, citing it as exploitative towards creative labor, while lining the pockets of platforms and industry big shots. This also placed pressure on musicians to seek the bulk of their income from live performances, which took a massive hit during the pandemic with venues shutting down. Some initiatives for digital live streaming attempted to fill the gap to varying degrees of success.
Artist discoverability sits with DSP algorithms that are biased towards superstars and big record labels. The streaming model, which rewards popularity and makes high demands on quantity, also poses questions around the quality of the music and how it will affect creativity, experimentation, and listeners’ taste over time. AI-generated music is ‘improving’ at super speed for some genres which raises further labor questions.
We encourage literary and publishing initiatives in the region to apply for the Culture 3.0 grants. Here is some context and resources from our research that may be helpful to you as you design your projects.
Context
Throughout massive digital transformations to the publishing sector, readers globally, as well as in the Arab region, have not sacrificed paper books. E-book sales are significant in that they expand the market of paper book sales, allowing for greater reach, saving on shipping costs, and in some cases, avoiding censorship. The quality improvements to print-on-demand services have also saved on shipping costs for book buyers. The pandemic did not slow down book sales in general. Some genres like travel books suffered while others like children’s books increased. Book fairs, an important source of income for writers, stopped during the pandemic, and digital book fairs did not present a timely alternative, although some writers have made the case for their usefulness still.
There is general consensus around piracy being a problem, though some studies claim a good percentage of book pirates purchase other formats of the books. Interest in audiobooks is on the rise globally and in the region (akin to the rise in podcasts) because millennials and Gen Z prefer to multitask. Online visibility is important to writers and small publishers and bookstores because it opens up opportunities for interest from new audiences, festivals, and languages.
Challenges
Writers have historically struggled to make a livelihood through their own work, seeking income based on their skill set that includes translation, editing, journalism, or writing for other media. Writers and small publishers see great opportunity in digital spaces while citing the additional labor and staffing needed to keep up with transformations. Learning new skills and staying on top of developments is challenging and time consuming. Examples are digital marketing, building online communities, converting books to epub – with challenges for Arabic language standards and formatting, indexing and metadata, and getting the book on all ecommerce platforms to take advantage of multiple avenues.
Search algorithms are biased towards giant corporate platforms and discoverability is biased towards already popular books. Collective publishing efforts such as digital magazines (that may or may not also print) use a multitude of monetization services such as subscription-based memberships or donation buttons or digital/print sales and have their own internal models of income sharing. For most, the revenue doesn’t cover expenses and they have to depend on volunteer work from the community. Subscription companies require maintenance and promotion work and are subject to change fees and percentages with little recourse. Audiences in the Arab region struggle to make payments because of gateway and card limitations in several countries.
Machine writing is developing at super speed for English writing and select translation pairings. Writers’ communities may benefit from watching the space for its impact on jobs and how AI may impact writing in Arabic and other regional languages.
Here is some context and resources from our research on internet economies that may be helpful to you as you design your projects.
Context
The question of how to make money on the internet started with the very early days of the network, when entrepreneurs attempted, in various ways, to tackle the business model of sharing digital goods. Part of the question was how to assign value to electronic content and then how to compensate for the labor it required, whether monetarily or otherwise. Over 30 years, the internet went through different models of monetization: from spam emails and e-commerce to data mining and micro targeting to the blockchain applications like NFTs and cryptocurrencies.
The new companies that emerged as of 2003, after the dot-com bubble crashed, shifted their business models to running on user-generated content. And a lot of it is creative content: storytelling, video, music, photography, art. The social aspect of what became known as Web 2.0 was extremely successful and became a crucial space of expression and engagement for all sectors, including arts & culture.
The economic engine behind this model was built around harvesting, analyzing and selling huge sets of user data to advertisers and politicians for micro-targeted advertising campaigns. This ushered in a significant global shift towards a new era of surveillance capitalism – one that is at stark and irreconcilable odds with the right to privacy and agency and that imposes urgent questions around labor rights.
Challenges
Today, the labor rights of cultural workers are heavily influenced by iterations of the digital economy that also change rapidly while staying fixated on massive profits at the expense of public and shared benefit. In the Arab region, political censorship of artistic expression restricts a lot of payment gateways and transactions. This includes corporate regulation towards expression from our region and government control within it.
The gig economy is growing by 26% every year. These are temporary, unpredictable, paid-by-service jobs mediated by corporate platforms that take significant cuts from workers’ income and offer no benefits or formal employment. Some argue that artists have always been gig workers; the term “gig economy” actually dates back to jazz musicians in the early 1900s. But our interest in art for the cultural value it reflects on our societies has always prompted fairer models of employment and social protection for artists. These attempts must continue in the digital spheres as well.
Platform economies offer different models of gig work for literary and recording artists – including for jobs they traditionally consider side jobs. This comes with a promise of better, more consistent revenue, but fails to deliver on labor rights – and the pandemic exacerbated the urgency of reimagining this model. It is increasingly the case that gig workers are training the artificial intelligence (AI) to automate and eventually take over their own jobs, and this includes creative workers.
Few technology enthusiasts thought that automation and machine learning would develop so rapidly in the arts specifically. There are now dozens of tools that learn music styles and can generate unique songs. AI have also developed advanced ways of learning and outputting visual arts and creative writing. This poses obvious questions around artists’ labor and how artistic societies can or should adjust to these technological developments without suffering the economic consequences. And it also poses more philosophical questions about the art itself and how – a few years down the line – this would have affected the cultural domain.
AI algorithms also come into significant play by biasing discoverability and placing almost impossible burdens of production on the artists to keep uploading new content. The surveillance capitalism model needs an infinite supply of this content, thus giving rise to new “content creation” jobs and incentives for free artistic labor hosted on these platforms: photography, film, writing, artwork, comics, illustrations, etc. Artists are not paid on the most popular sites which make billions of dollars directly off their work, and engagement with their work online contributes to the aggregation and mining of user data.
Opportunities for fairer economic models
In resistance to these challenges, artists around the world are experimenting with alternative models of earning a decent living in the digital sphere. Core to this is the excitement that technology can serve and galvanize communities to work together for the common good. Many see in crypto and blockchain applications a lot of potential when built around community rather than pyramid schemes. More are interested in new ways of organizing around cooperatives and DAOs.
The interledger protocol is building momentum to become fully adopted by web standards and allow web monetization and macro payments to happen openly across the internet. Artists are organizing together, and with their fans, to demand fairer payouts from platform corporations and building their own community-owned platforms. More collectives offer low-cost services to their communities to help them keep up with the trends and developments. The hope is that techies and artists can think together towards moving forward and away from the Web 2.0 model of advertising and try a new imagination that puts cultural value ahead of profits.
We have an existing project and would like to request complementary funding, are we eligible?
Yes.
Does the amount requested have any bearing on the project selection?
No. We have allowed a range of grant sizes to allow for a diversity of projects to apply.
We are a tech project that doesn’t focus on Arts & Culture but may be of use to it. Can we apply?
We encourage you to find an Arts & Culture partner and apply together. If you cannot, please email us with details so we can offer feedback before you apply.
We are an Arts & Culture organization with an idea but no technical expertise. Can we apply?
Yes. We advise you to seek advice on the technical feasibility of your idea and to budget for technical support you might need in its exploration.
Our project experiments with art & tech – but does not include an economic component. Can we apply?
No. We encourage you to look at other available grants. This one is specific to the three components.
We are a non-registered collective/initiative, can we apply?
Yes. If you are awarded a grant, you will need to find an eligible registered organization that can receive the grant on your behalf.
Our idea is to develop an app or a web product. Can we apply?
Yes. Please note that the grant amount range may not allow for the full development and testing of a product but you may use it to research, test, prototype, or build community around the idea. It is unlikely that we will prioritize individual product ideas that do not have enough community support for its usage.
Our project is for the arts but does not focus on music or literature. Can we apply?
The focus of this current opportunity is music and literature, so as long as musicians and writers are included in your project, you are eligible to apply.