With all this borrowing and using of other people’s material, it was important to keep things straight. A finished song may have a lot of people that were ultimately responsible for it coming to life. There may have been a number of iterations on it. And, furthermore, there was the star factor to consider. Who ultimately was the singer for the song? What if a cover of a song that was created by the Gravers was getting more attention than the original song? What if it was a cover of a cover?
In addition to the music, Victor and Gloriana also had their Gravers try making music videos, for those that had an interest in learning about making film. And the singer of that version of the song may not have been located in an area where the aspiring videographers were, so they had local talent just lip sync the song for the purpose of the video.
And who got the most credit? The performer? The composer? A beat maker? The videographer? All of these things could make or break a piece of music. Also, who would be getting the money for those music and videos that turned out to be truly successful? Making sure people got the right amount of credit for the work they put in was of paramount importance.
It was true that all the music and videos the Gravers made for the project were owned wholesale by Victor himself, but he knew he couldn’t just expect Gravers to work for free and in silence forever. That wouldn’t do. He wanted talent to be rewarded, and he wanted it to be fair. He had the Gravers participating in this musical project keep track of everything they did, hoping that one day he’d be able to design or have something designed that would be able to organize the data and figure out who gets what credit.
“I want all of you to feel like you received justice for the work you put into the Graver Music Project. And not just because I’m a nice guy, it just makes good business sense for talented people to be rewarded for their contributions to a project. I’m not trying to deny you your credit. But understand that things will be missed in this project. Egos may be bruised, injustice may happen. Think of it in terms of the Conquest. Some have to be on the front lines, some get killed early on in the battle. It’s all up to fortune. Just know that your sacrifice in this won’t be in vain, though. Imagine what we can accomplish if we work together. Imagine we can create. We’ll have a bona fide artistic movement on our hands, a moment in history together.”
Star power was also something that was of paramount importance. Victor and Gloriana wanted to create a new generation of pop stars to control the music industry with, and, importantly, they wanted them to be under their thumb.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Was this right? A star needs quite a bit of infrastructure to be born, that’s the truth. They need a legion of people all working in the background in order to shine. Those were the Gravers themselves. Yes, the Graver pop stars would be under V&G’s thumb. Everything they produced would be owned by V&G wholesale. This all wasn’t done for 100% greed, though, or at least that’s what Victor put effort into trying to explain. He wanted to create a whole new system for doing things. He wanted to create an institution with its own bylaws and rules and practices. He didn’t want to have to rely on existing laws to settle disputes. He wanted to make his own methods, based on his own philosophies and ideologies.
One such philosophy was the idea of Post-Trust. Trust was on the way out in society. The internet had seen to that. Never before had there been such an eroding of trust and public good will. Conspiracies theories abounded, the political divisions in the country were wide and severe. People lacked trust in scientific institutions, financial institutions, governmental institutions, entertainment institutions, scientists, CEOs, politicians, and celebrities. They even started to, for some, distrust basic truths of reality, turning towards strange sounding conspiracy theories. The internet had exposed the truth that we were all human, all fallible, all imperfect.
And so Victor and Gloriana decided to do away with trust in its entirety. What was trust, anyway? It was an assumption of a person about behavior they’ll engage in in the future. You trust someone to always do the right thing and then get mad when they fail to live up to the expectation you have of them. You have an idealized version of them in your head that they can fail to meet. Victor and Gloriana came up with the idea of post-trust. Don’t assume the person you’re working with is going to do the right thing, focus only on the present, what they are currently doing. Think like a business. A business doesn’t trust someone, they make predictions about behavior, to be sure, but they don’t get mad if those predictions turn out to be inaccurate, they simply have to update their models, the onus is on themselves. That and they protect themselves from the pitfalls of trusting someone. They lock their doors at night, not because they think they’re going to be robbed that particular night, but simply because it’s a best practice to engage in. It’s the Proper Way of Things.
We saw this in action with the movie theaters. Victor and Gloriana assumes they aren’t going to make any money from the movie theaters themselves, giving away their product for free, but in the instances where they do, they mark those theaters down as having a good track record, of paying dues. They do this with the Gravers, back when they came and picked up the physical copies of the movies, they had them pay for their collector’s edition item in advance, rather than trusting they’d be able to sell physical collector’s edition items in advance.
