It’s a strange twist on fate that the Internet has come to defeat the very technology that has made it so popular. Some would say it’s ironic, since it was the coming of sound and video that was predicted to make the Net so lucrative. Well in fact the opposite has happened. This new technology has facilitated the free acquisition of digitally encoded music.
9 years ago at the inception of WWW, music and video were limited at best. Now it's commonplace. But, there is a problem. The problem is not as many people as expected, are paying for these jewels of delight.
Have you ever imagined a world in which, you or I, in fact anybody can communicate in written script, with anyone else? I hadn’t prior to creating a website. In the main, this is what the Net is. But, it is also more. It is a way to get the sounds, pictures, movies, and, an endless variety of sensual pleasures we desire for free. It is also a way to make available these same artifacts for anyone else to acquire. It's free exchange of information. This is what intellectuals have raved about having for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Yet, now when it's really here, these same people are bemoaning the fact that it is occurring. They call it piracy or Internet theft, or damn thieving scoundrels and the like. They go on older technologies like TV and Cable and vow to stop it. Most probably have no more appreciation for music or high art than a corpse does. What's the matter with them? Shouldn't all share in the immense produce of human creativity without having to pay for it? No? While this question sounds sarcastic to those that don't take my point seriously, I mean it! Modern societies have it all upside down. Sensual pleasures shouldn't be expensive and those that make them shouldn't be paid outrageous sums of money. Why a musician should get $12.50 an hour, while the people that provide him with the means of recording or webcasting or digitizing his music should get $100 an hour. Oh, wait they do! Okay here's better comparative example: movie stars shouldn't get millions for acting in films, but the engineers that make the pictures possible should. And we the public shouldn't pay to see, hear and experiences these works of art, but the government should subsides it and make it free for all. If the US government can spend over a billion dollars to build and send an exploratory satellite that is lost on its way to Mars, why can't it give everybody some free music, and pay the artists about $12.50, or okay $14.50 an hour for their creations, huh? Every time I hear about some boxer getting 60 million bucks for a fight! To think a fight no less! Just a fight!Or some jackass in a blockbuster movie making a shameful fortune for playacting! While physicists, mathematicians, engineers (not lawyers, God not them) and others getting only about 250K a year, I think what a modern day Rome this country is. And like Rome, decadence abounds with misplaced values and all. Anyway, that's not what this piece is about. Lets survey what's happening to the market for music on the Net.
You see, those whom control global communications amongst us, have been seriously challenged. Or, I should say the electronic communications industry is challenged? That is the recording companies, movie making firms and yes even the still picture industry are on the defense. Now that would be Polaroid and Kodak, right? Oh, and Fujitsu! Lets not forget Fujit! Remember how having a videocassette recorder allowed you to make tapes of anything on TV or Cable? Well now, this has gone a giant step further. You can now take off of the Net all forms of electronic media for free and make them into your own creations. Upload them to newsgroups, put them on your website or just trade them with friends. This development threatens the sounding recording industry more than any other simply because it depends upon listeners buying cds of their contracted artists. For the film industry it is not yet critical. First time released films are rarely available in a format that can be downloaded and burned to DVD or CD easily. You still must go to theaters to see them. Unless of course, you have a very expensive machine (circa $20,000) and lots of disk space (circa 500 gig) and even more expensive digital video recording software, plus the know-how to find the right spot on the Net to get say, Star Wars 4. Few have these resources or time and money to get free video. If you got that much clout, you don't need to download anything anyway. But, music cds are deeply in trouble. Even with the failure of Napster, it is incredibly easy to find whatever new release in any music gendre you want, via newsgroups. My passion happens to be Brazilian music and I can hardly keep up with the flood of free stuff available. While the record labels scramble to find a way to prevent this, they are being undone faster than they can put up roadblocks. Oh, beautiful Internet I love ya, let'me kiss ya, you big beautiful intangible sweet woman, you!
The industry’s advancement in this technology did not lead to its making the thing it sells freely available. Though you would have thought it so, it was unforeseen. But, it should have been anticipated. The moment digitalization of sound media became practicable, every executive from EMI to Sony should have said: our collective goose’s are cooked now! Cooked and uncontrollably so too. You see, it’s not the digital conversion of sound that makes getting this stuff so easy. It’s the NET itself! You can legislate against it, and raid server farms that make it available here in US, but you can’t stop some guy in Japan, or Korea or Mexico, or Brazil or South Africa or Bosnia or England or Russia, or Indonesia, or Malaysia, or Ethiopia and on and on and on from doing the same thing and making it available on the Net. The only way stop this free trading of MP3s is to shut the whole Net down. And that can’t be done unless somebody has state power all over the world. And won’t be done, because the Net is now at the heart of how business is done on large client-server networks. Stopping this kind of trade is infinitely harder than stopping 200 million VCR owners from taping whatever they want on TV. Why hell, it’s not even easy to catch and prosecute people whom burn CD’s and sell them, let alone those that just make and enjoy them. And the recording companies can’t co-opt us. They say: Okay you guys we like this download a song thing. We think it’s a good thing, really we do. And look uh uh…and we’ll allow you to download all kinds of artists for a subscription fee. Is that okay? Huh? Huh? Wouldja like that, Huh? But, why should we go for that? I mean, you can go to a site that streams audio record it with a sound recording program then burn it to cd for very little expense (the cost of the rewritable cds). So, why pay anything to anybody for the right to get your favorite artists on cd? So, what about the poor struggling artists out there trying to make their first million? My heart bleeds for them. Besides, let us be realistic not EVERYBODY has a computer these days. In fact many more don’t than do. And this state of affairs will be such for some time to come. Well, at least another 10 to 15 years I estimate. And of those that do, not many even know how or have all the components to get their music free. And since people are inconceivably lazy, and don’t really want to get too involved with this computer thing, only a minority of computer buffs will do this kind of thing. So, there is still a large audience out there that will get their music the old-fashioned way, i.e by going to music stores and buying cds. So, why are these recording companies and their senior execs belly-aching? Because they’re greedy for God sakes. They want it all! Just like they used to get. They say in their board rooms and mission critical meetings things like this: Phil, I’ll be damn if these suckers.. I mean consumers are gonna get our monkeys uh ..I mean artists stuff for free!!! Now,I want every one of the cyber boogers in R&D working round the clock to come with some way to stop this download MP3s shit!!!
Last year the recording industry had a combined total of close to a 100 billion in revenue. And they are witch-hunting every little guy that downloads a MP3 and makes a cd of it. But, in the end what they are going to have to do is this: NOTHING. They can’t beat’em, they can’t join’em and they definitely can’t stop’em, so what they must do is forget’em! Let’em do it
Another observation should be noted. The recording industry’s greatest enemy is not MP3 enthusiasts, but their own cousins in the industry. It’s their even greedier partners that make the rewritable cds, cd recorders and streaming audio sites that have lead to the explosion in digital music theft. If anybody needs censure, it’s these guys. They are the ones, that realized a gold mine could made in facilitating this so-called piracy. They are the ones, that said: Hey you guys wanna steal music and we wanna help ya. You wanna have cds that you can rewrite and rewrite, just like an audio cassette, you got it! Why we’ll drain every beach on Earth of sand to make those silicon wafers to burn your MP3s. Reminds one of arms dealers selling land mines, doesn't it? Except these land mines are maiming the recording industry's movers and shakers and not its audience. Try stopping them from making the instruments of this theft? It’d be like stopping VCR manufacturers from selling VCRs so people can’t tape TV programs.
No, friends the only way to put an end to this latest development in the world of computer technology is to develop something better. Something makes it obsolete because the new thing is some much more appealing. I don’t see it out there yet. A holodeck perhaps?
4/11/03 Ken Wais