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| Monday July 28th 2003 |
File sharing... | |||
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Over the past few decades the major labels (Universal, Warner, EMI, BMG, Sony) have had to deal with one demon after another, which they claimed was interested in nothing more than bringing down the house. Long ago they cried the introduction of the radio, the cassette tape and then the VCR, would lead to the downfall of the industry because re-recording became easier. The cries against the radio weren't substantiated by what actually happened. In fact it was the radio that spawned the monster that is now the recording industry. The cries against cassettes were unwarranted as the industry boomed, and there weren't any noticeable downsides in introducing the CD. VCRs? People are buying DVDs by the truckfull! Recording Industry big wigs have asserted the cause of declining sales on the massive increase in mp3 file sharing. Let's ignore the glaring fact that sales are declining in almost all areas of the consumer market. Now, though, two Democrats in the US congress, John Conyers Jr and Howard Berman, have introduced a bill that would impose a fine of a quarter of a million US dollars and a five-year stay in jail for uploading a single file to a peer-to-peer network. The Author, Consumer, and Computer Owner Protection and Security (ACCOPS) Act of 2003 targets the 60 million Americans (and the rest of the world) engaged in sharing music and movies over the internet for criminal prosecution. It's prohibition time again folks! The bill pretentiously claims to "encourage the development and distribution of creative works by enhancing domestic and international enforcement of the copyright laws, and for other purposes." The Electronic Frontier Foundation has criticised the measure as an overbroad and misguided attack on P2P file sharing technology. No shit! Another aspect of this... Kids doing it at school. Students should know better than to be using music file-sharing programs on university networks. After the drawn-out Napster saga and the recent lawsuits filed against students at Princeton University and two other schools, it is clear the Record Industry Association of America is watching. The record industry has been very slow on the uptake as to how best to use Internet technology for music distribution, and prices for new CDs are a fucking nightmare. Major labels haven't figured out how to sell music via the Internet. Record labels can sell music at a lower price online with lower overheads and make a bigger pile of cash. The music giants, however, are slow to change. These neanderthal buffoons are being stymied by the avarice of lawyers and a Luddite pig-headed stubbonness to acknowledge the future. File sharing is the only reasonable choice for most web surfers. Users of such programs as Kazaa already know that unauthorized use of recordings is a violation not only of label rights, but also of artist rights. Fair enough: artists deserve royalties for their creations, and file sharing deprives them of some of that earned income. But how many friggin' versions of Pink Floyds 'Dark Side of the Moon' have you bought? I've lost count! The RIAA has every right to sue students it catches using college computer networks for piracy. A maximum of $250,000 per song, however, seems... a trifle excessive, at least to me. Piracy and lawsuits are not the ways to go about enjoying and distributing music, sure, but the industry has made no effort to come up with something better, legal, or even usable. So how did all this come about in the first place? The CD Burner! This toy of the devil made it possible to make CDs that I wanted to listen to, instead of the purile crap released by the 'big labels.' Trumped up as a more durable, cheaper-to-make alternative, the record companies could foresee no problems with employing the CD as the music carrier of the future, and a substitute for vinyl and cassettes. Within a few years, Sony introduced the CD burner, and shortly thereafter file-sharing programs for the Internet popped up left and right. These latest demons left the labels crying that copying CDs would lead to the downfall of the industry. Sound familiar? Five years later the industry is crumbling. CD sales dropped 9 percent in 2002 and, of course, record companies are placing the blame square on music piracy. Could this really be the cause? Well, maybe. More than a billion blank CDs were sold in the United States last year. It could also be that there is nothing worth buying on the shelves! Moreover and more pertinent it can be argued that file sharing does as much to help as to hurt. And there are other problems the industry needs to face up to. Musicians understand the labels run a business where the almighty dollar is the bottom line. This does not calculate to investing in a band's longevity. Any band (Paul McCartney! ) with financial sense will listen to its producer, make the sound he wants, take the money and run. Back to the morality of downloading pirated music. I agree that it's not in the artist's best interests for us to download an entire album, burn multiple copies and hand them out to our friends. At the same time we only have so many sources to provide us with music that is new and fresh. And even fewer resources for the music that is old and crappy, which I happen to prefer! (Pearl Jam bassist Mike McCready said earlier this year that Rolling Stone magazine is no longer cutting edge, a charge in line with the thoughts of many fans today. If our friends don't share our taste in music, they can't give a very informed opinion on what we should check out.) And the radio? Some of us realize it doesn't matter if a song is good or bad in order for it to make it into regular rotation; it's the payola that matters. I grew up thinking the radio stations had to pay the record companies for the right to play music by their artists. Now that I can use a knife and fork, I get to learn about reality. If the radio stations get paid to play whatever the record companies want them to, then the popular vote is worthless. So what are the upsides to hopping online? I've found many songs I could never buy on a CD. For example remixes, older songs that are simply not available in my local Big 'C' or Carre-Four! Also, I'm a poor person. I don't have the money to go out and buy a new CD every week just because someone has been paid to tell me it's good. (And I don't care how sexy the video is!) Another important upside, at least for me... I have to admit that before the influx of file-sharing clients I didn't know a thing about a load of singers and groups. I just downloaded a butt load of Van Morrison for a friend a while back, and I got hooked. Sure I'd heard of him, but they don't play this old timer on the radio, (at least here in Thailand), and it's not available for purchase anywhere in the whole damn kingdom! Everything considered, downloading music has its pros and cons for everyone. Ahem... granted the possible downside is much greater for a billion-dollar industry than for the casual fan, so I find myself wondering if the labels brought this upon themselves. They did just lose a lawsuit for price-gouging. And I'm not lost on the fact they don't do much to support the growth of their artists. A CD costs about 50 cents to process package and sell, and it goes for about $10! What the fuck is that about? Changes have to be made, but the lawsuits against the consumer and the file-sharing agents aren't the fix. The changes need to happen within the system. Radio stations need to be put back into the power of the listener, CD prices need to be more in tune with the cost of making one and the consumer needs motivation to buy the CDs off the rack. The industry is faced with a grave decision to make. As I see it, the industry can do one of two things. First: (the one that it appears to be favoring) Attempt to kill all the heads of this beast that is online mp3 swapping. This entails long and expensive legal battles and lobbying for Internet copyright protection legislation. Or second: (the one I like) The music industry starts making a quality product. As long as there is still radio and music television, there will always be a lean towards downloading 'single' songs. But if an entire album is worth buying, people will naturally start to buy them again. Stogie Bear | ||||
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